A Series of Tubes

This is a story about hot dogs, Downton Abbey,
and how we tell each other stories today.

I’ve just returned from a twelve-day voyage to Aspen, Colorado for the annual Aspen Ideas Festival, alongside colleagues from Atlantic Media Strategies and The Atlantic. There are a lot of people milling around the Aspen Institute campus at this time every summer. As you might imagine, those people get hungry talking about policing and income inequality and female entrepreneurship and millennials and the second amendment.

Heavy thinking consumes a lot of calories.

So, they eat hot dogs.

Every morning at 11:30, long queues form around near a series of carts dotting the Institute campus, in rapt anticipation of Let’s Be Frank’s beef, turkey, and veggie dogs. Everyone seemingly garnishes their dog a different way (I prefer a beef dog with onions, topped with brown mustard and relish), but these bundles of protein and carbohydrates are more than just sustenance; they are part of the experience, a tangible touchpoint in a sea of conceptual lectures, tubed meat through which connections are made.

If you’ll allow me to frame this in the lexicon of a digital
content strategist, it’s basically hot dog as platform.

There aren’t many more jarring segues that I could make from writing about collected animal parts we cover with condiments and partially wrap in bread to the drama of Downton Abbey, but here we are.

On Friday, I leapt at the chance to listen to a conversation between Derek Thompson of The Atlantic and Rebecca Eaton, both the executive producer of PBS’ Masterpiece and the woman who is responsible for bringing Downton Abbey to American television. One of Eaton’s many salient points during the conversation was that the key to capturing massive attention is all about storytelling.

“The very nature of [Downton] is that it is perfectly written,” Eaton said. “As a piece of work, it is perfectly done.” But Eaton also noted that digital experiences free us to experience such intricately constructed stories in new ways. “The moment in technology when [Downton] arrived, it could be watched communally. You could also binge on it if you should choose.”

I can’t argue with Downton’s storytelling acumen — who wouldn’t be enamored with the tortured love lives or the class warfare of post-Edwardian England?—but Facebook and Twitter have arguably been responsible for the show’s massive growth. Downton Abbey was once a series that couldn’t find an American network. Now, it is a global cultural phenomenon whose premieres and finales — 28 million people watched this show last season! — are truly appointment tweeting on par with the Oscars and the Super Bowl. That’s a testament to how we consume stories today.

Being able to tell a good story to an audience will always be the thing that makes us interested; it is the gravitational constant in our societal orbit. But the way that storytelling is distributed has fundamentally changed.

Take, for example, TheAtlantic.com: over the past few years, the magazine that has always aggressively pursued and consistently published some of the best long-form journalism in the world has experienced a shift in how people are accessing that brand of storytelling. That is not the shift from print to digital, as you might assume — we’ve long since crossed that bridge, despite the continued relevance of The Atlantic’s monthly cover — but from those who used to access the content directly (by typing www.theatlantic.com into your browser and clicking around) to those who access it in much the same fashion as those who discovered Downton. Today, about 60 percent of The Atlantic’s digital content is accessed via a social referral, be it dark or not.

Right now, the best storytelling on Earth gets into people’s hands and hearts through social media. This means a lot of things for observers of media trends; namely, how this trend affects our work with our clients, to everything from brand strategy to writing good headlines to designing and developing beautiful websites.

When people stand in line and strike up a conversation about something they heard, saw, or read, they’re sharing great stories — socially.

The fact that this sharing occurs face-to-face, and not through Snapchat or LinkedIn or Pinterest, doesn’t change the fact that sharing stories in the digital world might seem like a new thing, but it’s really not. After all, we’re all still just passing the time — literally or metaphorically — while waiting to pick up that hot dog.

Effective storytelling is just one of the many things we think about for clients at Atlantic Media Strategies. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, the Digital Trends Index, and get in touch with us on Twitter.