The Last Dance was ‘made to stick’
The last documentary on the Chicago Bulls ’98 is a true success.
The why can be explained using a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller: ‘Made to Stick’.
In 2007, brothers Chip and Dan Heath started from a simple observation. Urban legends and conspiracy theories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas (politicians, environmentalists, educators, journalists, and others) struggle to make their ideas “stick”.
Their book, ‘Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die’, addressed this question. They deciphered the anatomy of why some ideas ‘stick’ and explained methods for making ideas stickier. The book quickly climbed to the top of both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.
It happened that while I was reading this book, I was also watching the recent popular documentary: ‘The Last Dance’. The documentary has become ESPN most watched documentary of all-time with 6,2 million viewers.
The book teaches that for ideas to become “sticky”, they should follow six principles. They should be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story-driven. Since I found that M.J. documentary was also ‘made to stick’, I wanted to test if these principles can be applied to it.
1# Simple: its core message must be easy to grasp.
From the first episode, ‘The Last Dance’ producer, Mike Tollin, has made it simple for the audience to understand the purpose of the documentary: it was about one season of the Chicago Bulls dynasty, the 1998 season, their last season.
This made things much more easy for the viewer when he or she decided to continue watching the documentary or not. ‘Do I want to know what really happened behind the scene during that ’98 season?’ was the question we all asked ourselves. Having a simple message made it a lot easier when I needed to tell friends that a captivating documentary was now available on Netflix (word-of-mouth). It was very simple for me to summarize it.
The documentary wanted so much to clarify what the serie is about that it even spent the last five minutes of the first episode explaining the origin of the name of the series: ‘Phil always looked for a theme for every season … and given that it was the last year we were going to be together … he had a name for it … The Last Dance’.
This should apply to our daily work, our marketing projects, the speeches we make, or the meetings we host.
Keeping the message simple is essential when communicating with your audience. You make it easy for them to understand what to expect from your product, what to tell friends if they want to refer your product or what they should have in mind when they’re about to purchase the product of your competitors.
The ‘Even the Hulk wears Band-Aids’ print ad, produced by JWT agency, is a great inspiration. It’s so ‘simple’ that it doesn’t need a copy or a call to action.
2# Unexpected: it should evoke enough curiosity to grab someone’s attention and hold it.
The Last Dance was unexpected in many different ways.
First of all, most viewers were questioning the need a serie on Michael Jordan. Everyone knew that Micheal changed basketball forever, that he was a legend. We knew he’s the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time). Such questions led people to watch the first episode. Their goal was not to watch the whole serie, their objective was only to find out what needed to be added to M.J. story. That’s how the producers grabbed our attention.
The second part was about holding the viewers attention and here again the documentary did a great job. A big chunk of the documentary is made all-access videos that were never on TV or Internet before. No one expected these videos ever existed. Viewers could not not watch the next episodes, otherwise they would have missed these precious behind the scenes.
Back to the business world with a concrete example of the ‘unexpected’ principle.
In Apple’s advertising for the Macbook Air, a man unboxes the new flagship out of an envelop. It was simple to demonstrate through this analogy how thin was the laptop. But what made this ad stickier is the fact that ‘no one has ever expected’ a laptop to be put inside an envelop.
If you want your ideas to go viral and to be remembered, they need to have something unexpected in them. Start your meeting with something no expected you to say. A simple ‘Close your laptops. I need your attention!’ can help get the attention you need.
#3 — Concrete: it should be vividly painted in people’s minds
When interviewing all the superstars (Isiah, Bird, Magic), it was all about getting under their skin, understanding their state of mind, the challenges they faced.
There is a huge difference between a documentary that stays high level and that interviews big stars just to fill the gaps between highlight scenes and a documentary that narrates that Dennis Rodman was asking for a two days off to go have fun in Vegas. The latter is so much concrete because everyone can relate to it. As Dennis, we’ve all went through such times.
How can you apply the ‘concrete’ principle to your marketing? Let’s take the example of Dove.
Dove, the soap brand owned by Unilever, has developed one of the most popular marketing campaigns: ‘Real Beauty’. To come up with the campaign, Dove teams discovered that 68% of women agrees that the advertising industry sets unrealistic beauty targets.
Every women can relate to the fact that the beauty depicted by the media is unachievable. Real Beauty campaign was for them more real and the target beauty that Dove promotes ‘concrete’.
Consequence: Dove’s campaign is now one of the most celebrated examples of brand purpose.
#4 — Credible: it should be supported by evidence
On this aspect has the documentary scored the best. The Last Dance was not just a high-quality collection of Michael, Scottie and Dennis basketball highlights. It was not a just compilation of some press conference footage.
Everything the documentary narrates was supported by all-access videos of the team’s locker room, by insider footage from their plane trips, or fresh interviews with the Bulls opponents, journalists and close friends a the time. This made the documentary much more credible.
One common credibility example you encounter daily are testimonials. They’re on most of the web pages you visit.
Customers find a product more ‘credible’ when they know that the service is being used by someone similar to their profile. A company will be more willing to purchase your Software-as-a-Service if it knows that one of their competitors has already purchased it.
#5- Emotional: your craft should have a purpose and relate to people
When watching The Last Dance documentary, there were mainly two emotional connections that the documentary makes with its audience. Both were around Michael Jordan’s character:
- M.J., the Legend: which was linked to M.J.’s aura. Every kid, every men and every women on the planet have heard the name. Seeing a documentary on him speaks of course to ours emotions.
- M.J., the Genuine: which is linked to the way he revealed. He said what he couldn’t say out loud when he was a player. Michael opened up on the murder of his father. He shared what made him so strong, what were his inspiration, his goals and his fears. We even saw him cry in this documentary.
The latter M.J. was I think what contributed the most to the success of the documentary. No one expected Michael Jordan to speak frankly and to open up so much. He showed to the world his mentality, his strengths and weaknesses.
The same principle applies to business and marketing. If you’re not creating an emotional connection with your customers, they won’t bother buying your product or listening to your ad.
Nike has often used emotional marketing in the past. Since Colin Kaepernick is an athlete and therefore eligible to be a spokesperson for their brand, they took asked Colin Kaepernick to be a spokesperson for their brand. Nike did their homework before employing such a controversial individual. They discovered that the majority of their consumers were liberal millenials who would likely be ‘emotionally moved’ by Colin Kaepernick as they were on the same page as him.
#6- Story-driven: it should tell a story that inspires people to act.
Michael Jordan inspired a generation of players. Kobe himself recognized, in no uncertain terms, that everything about his game came from Jordan himself and that there's no Kobe without M.J. They inspired them to act and play harder.
Throughout the documentary, everyone saw another facet of Michael Jordan. His commitment to the game of basketball, his fear of deceiving the fans and not giving his best, or his unconventional manners to push his teammates to improve. After the documentary ends, many of us who are not basketball player will ‘start acting’ better. We will have inspired from Mike.
All the marketing campaigns we cited above were also great because they invited people to act.
Nike invited people to dream crazier and believe in one’s self. Salesforce, through its testimonial section, created a sense of urgency for its web page visitor when they spotted one of their competitors on the testimonial page. Apple probably made a lot. people change their 4 cm thick and heavy laptop Dove convinced women to reveal their through beauty and Band-Aid subtly changed the way we perceive a wound. Cutting one’s self is alright as long as we act like Hulk. They all inspired us somehow to act.
Making a viral video will be one of the hardest things you will try to realize in your marketing career. Just few companies in the world have already achieved it. So, please don’t despair if you follow the six ‘Made to Stick’ principles and fail to achieve it.
However, one sure thing you can expect by following this model is that your story will stick more in people’s minds — and their hearts. Make sure to use this model as a stress-test when challenging agency ideas or when working on new campaign ideas.
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