.png?width=100&height=100&name=Untitled%20design%20(61).png "Untitled design (61)")
More climate stories than ever. Record emissions. What's missing?
I have attended at least ten Climate Weeks over seventeen years. This one had more sessions on storytelling than ever before, though the word has changed. The hot term today is "narrative change." Rooms were full. The energy was real.
At this year's Social Innovation Summit, Al Roker moderated a panel from Al Roker Entertainment with a deceptively simple question at its center: why are we telling these stories?
This weekend, as America turned 250 and The New York Times published the six sentences that shaped American history. Wesley Morris chose a line from Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam", a song she wrote in under an hour, in a rush of fury, after the murder of Medgar Evers and the bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four little girls.
François Bazini, former CMO of Suntory Europe, has spent years writing and speaking about one of the defining frustrations of modern marketing: the widening gap between what brands spend and what they can actually prove.
Not impressions. Not reach. Not the kind of "engagement" that lives and dies on a social media dashboard. Business impact.
A new report from Sprout Social landed in my inbox this week with a stat I haven't been able to stop thinking about:
Only 10% of organizations can translate a real-time social signal into tangible business action within hours.
Ten percent. In 2026. After years of investment in social listening tools, data dashboards, and analytics platforms.
The rest? They're sitting on insight they can't act on, watching it age out in a reporting deck while the moment passes.
For the brands and companies Sprout surveyed, that's a missed revenue opportunity. For the impact entertainment sector, it's something even more serious: it's a story told, a viewer moved, and a moment for change that simply disappears.
Diagnosis v. Treatment
The Pitt’s Public Health Students Confirmed Media's Biggest Missed Opportunity
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking to students at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, and I left more energized than when I arrived.
A powerful idea is gaining traction; the minutes immediately after a film ends may be the most psychologically valuable window in the entire storytelling experience.
For years, content creators, marketers and nonprofits have chased precision: the perfect target, the perfect message, the perfect moment. But there’s a downside to precision. Too narrow means…too narrow!
For decades, many mission-driven organizations have invested in raising awareness as the north star of impact. But as theStanford Social Innovation Reviewargued back in 2017, the goalcan’t be awareness for awareness’ sake. Awareness is a starting point—not an outcome.
We’re cooking up something special with1CommunityandNetflix—and it’s all about legacy, love, and the power of food to bring people together.