I was locked in a room for an entire day. And it was awesome.
Every Tuesday, a group of USA TODAY NETWORK employees from various departments, with different skill sets, backgrounds, and roles, come together to flex a bit of creative muscle in something called a “jam session.”
The goal of this assembly is to produce a piece of content, review plans for a new technology, an event, strategic initiative, etc.
Last week, three of us huddled in a room (with another team member joining via Google Hangouts) for eight hours raising trending topics that were currently top of mind for each of us. Everything from babies (four weeks to go!) to gun control to El Niño were discussed.
Led by a senior editor from the newsroom, we honed in on a topic that we felt was timely, relevant to a broad audience, and would be fun to get creative with: Awards Season.
With the Golden Globes last weekend and the Oscars right around the corner, we thought it would be fun to showcase some of the year’s best movies to get our audience excited to watch the award shows.
Our task was to brainstorm an innovative way to highlight our perspective on the awards season via an infographic, flowchart, video, animation, poll, quiz, virtual reality or other medium that we currently have in our publishing toolbox.
Here are some of the questions and ideas we kicked around:
- How can we engage our audience by creating a dual screen viewing experience?
- How can we leverage data to connect films with other topics such as viewership, pay gaps in Hollywood, or host sentiment? (Editor’s note: We all love Ricky Gervais and Chris Rock.)
- Can we create a platform that aggregates social and user-generated content to predict award winners?
- Will someone have an affinity for a specific movie based on their individual personality type?
Since the first few ideas would have certainly required more than a day’s work, we turned our focus to the last question and together, decided to map a “buzz-worthy” film from 2015 to one of sixteen personality types from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment.
The MBTI is based on the typological theory proposed by Carl Jung who had speculated that there are four principal psychological functions by which humans experience the world — sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking — and that one of these four functions is dominant for a person most of the time (Wikipedia).
The output of our work was published on USATODAY.com. You can read the article and find your movie match here.
We have some amazing people on our editorial team but it was exciting to see how members of marketing, product development, and design came together around a simple concept to bring a fresh perspective to our audience.
This is just one way the USA TODAY NETWORK continues to redefine how content is created, distributed and experienced, in our goal to become one, integrated media brand.
I am proud to be a part of the team.
