Category Archives: Writing

Why Maleficent doesn’t work as a fairy tale

Posted on by under Aprender inglês, art, language, movies, Mythology, Writing

Maleficent, the new Disney movie that tells the story of Sleeping Beauty from the point-of-view of its original Nemesis – the evil fairy godmother – had all the potential to awe audiences, going way beyond its stunning visuals, if they had decided to work on more complex and original levels, paying closer attention to how mythology and its archetypes (typical characters) sustain great storytelling.

One can’t help but think of Wicked, that, first as novel, and then as a successful Broadway musical, also narrated the backstory of an evil character, the Wicked Witch of the West, of The Wizard of Oz fame, from the difficulties she had as a (literally) green child all the way to her adulthood, when she gets to meet Dorothy and her shoes. Although both Maleficent and Wicked chose to tell the story from the point of view of the alleged villain, the latter accomplished a lot more artistically.

Maleficent as a character is carefully construed to represent a strong role model for girls. Angelina Jolie looks stunning in the role, and will visually fascinate girls and boys alike. Boys, however, will surely be more entertained by the great number of superhero-like action scenes and predictable visual effects. It’s unfortunate, however, that the story is too weak to replace the original in children’s imagination, as it’s a lot less dark and scary in its connotations. Fairy tales are not supposed to be watered-down versions of their originals, and it’s a shame that Disney progressively goes in this direction with every new version they produce.

These are some of the problems that weaken Maleficent (Spoiler alert: you may want to watch the movie before reading the following):

Angelina Jolie as Maleficent

Angelina Jolie as Maleficent

1. The hero/heroine archetype of the story keeps shifting (is it Prince Phillip? Aurora? Or Maleficent herself?) Stories need a well-defined hero with a clear objective. The hero can and should be flawed (so there’s nothing wrong with Maleficent’s rage and wish for revenge from a dramatic stance). However, the whole story should be about her journey, and the transformation she goes through along what is commonly called the dramatic arc. Maleficent the movie does not really have any of its characters growing or changing through experience in its almost two hours of storyline. In this version, Maleficent has always been a strong and benevolent fairy, protective or the moor and its creatures. Then she makes one mistake led my revenge or jealousy, and spends the rest of the movie trying to fix it. This does not a good story maketh.

2. I’m sure that, for young moviegoers, the three little “good fairy-godmothers” are visually enchanting and can even be funny at times (especially the one played by Imelda Staunton), and they dutifully fill the role of tricksters, an important kind of archetype, providing the comic relief every story needs. However, adults will miss the irony and wit usually delivered by such characters in more sophisticated versions of kids’ movies.

3. Diaval, the raven, is too weak as a mentor, another essential archetype in effective stories. Maleficent, both as a movie and as a character, would have benefited a lot more if she had a more intriguing, wiser, and possibly older tutor to rely on. It would have given the movie a much stronger structure.

4. King Stefan, who starts off as Maleficent’s first love, does not have a clear archetypal role in the story. He’s too lame as a shadow/nemesis, and not very convincing as a shapeshifter (archetype usually filled by the heroine’s romantic interest). Similarly, young prince Phillip fails to awaken the sleeping princess with his cold teenage kiss: I don’t think we need to say anything more about his role in the story after this flop. Therefore, the movie really relegates male figures to totally secondary and pathetic roles.

5. Aurora’s role also does not fit in within the mythological structure of effective storytelling, being neither a hero nor a shadow, or any other essential archetype. She roams around the moors, beautiful and wide-eyed, without any specific dramatic function. The couple of scenes in which both Aurora and Prince Phillip, at different moments, unconsciously float in the air in the wake of Maleficent clearly indicate that these characters lack what is fundamental in archetypes of more importance: agency. Frankly, these levitation scenes boarder the ridicule.

6. The movie climax, packed with action and pyrotechnics, does not look any different from the last superhero movie you may have watched. The grand finale depicts lots of deus-ex machina solutions ( “Into a dragon”, orders Maleficent, before her loyal raven becomes a fire-spitting monster. Well, that is an easy way out, right? Worse: he fails! Maleficent will need to get her creepy dead wings back to succeed.

Speaking of those wings: at first, the scene in which they are cut off looked like this was going to be one of darkest and best moments of the movie, and could easily stand for all the feminist and environmentalist metaphors the movie repeatedly uses. However, the fact that they fly back and reattach themselves to their owner in a climactic scene at the end spoils all the dark beauty and menacing effect of the former scene. Now the wings are just another deus ex-machina-kind of solution employed by poorly-creative scritpwriters. Besides, one wonders why the wings did not decide to do this years before.

Now it’s your turn. Share with us your opinion on Maleficent.

For more on storytelling I would suggest you read two other posts in this blog:  “The Power of Storytelling – The Mythological  Structure ” (http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-F2) and “More Storytelling Tips for Marketers” (http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-UK).

Au revoir

Jorge Sette.

4 Influential Marketing Books You Should Read

Posted on by under content marketing, E-books, marketing, sales, sales training, Writing

4 Influential Marketing Books You Should Read

Click on the the image to access the full text. We suggest another two books in the text.

Getting started with content marketing

Posted on by under Career advice, content marketing, marketing, sales, sales training, Writing

Getting started with content marketing

For the full text, click on the image.

Using Instagram to Promote your Business (summary)

Posted on by under Career advice, content marketing, marketing, sales, sales training, storytelling, Writing

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Click on the image to read the the full article.

Using Instagram to Promote your Business

Posted on by under Career advice, content marketing, marketing, sales, sales training, Writing

The personal uses of Instagram are quite known to everyone, especially teenagers and young adults: you may use the platform to post as many photos of your cat as you wish. Don’t ever believe it if anyone tells you they bore them to death, it’s not true. We all love to see each other’s cats on Instagram (or on any other social media platform for that matter) – endlessly. We can never get enough of it. Another thing that we love to see is your selfies. Post as many as you can, as we can hardly survive a couple of hours without seeing your crazy looking eyes with a fake grin staring back at us from the iPhone screen. Food you are about to eat, or has just cooked yourself, and numberless shots of your legs and feet dangling over the swimming pool on a sunny day are also big hits. So there’s nothing to teach you there.

But how can you use this powerful platform, which is able to congregate 500 million active users – and growing – to tell the story and consolidate the personality of your brand? Can you use Instagram for marketing purposes even if you are not in the photography business? Of course you can. And this happens to be the objective of this blog post. We want to help you use Instagram as yet another tool of your content marketing arsenal. Here are a few tips:

1. Build a list of followers: the first thing you need to do is, of course,  add as many clients as you can to your Instagram community. You can use your Facebook and Twitter profiles to help you find friends you already have on these platforms. Using relevant and popular hashtags on your posts will also be very useful to help you get found. Don’t overdo it, though: the last thing you need is to look spammy.

2. Backstage peeks: you can use Instagram to show the world how and where you work. Behind-the-scenes views of  your office, your colleagues at work, the cafeteria (if you are lucky to have one) and its wonderful offers, the projects in the pipeline, discreet shots of your happy-hour gatherings at the local bar… Everyone loves to take a peek inside the company they do business with. It breeds familiarity, which makes it easier for the customer to relate to and trust more.

3. Showcase your products: you can use Instagram as an effective virtual shop window for what you sell. Take enticing pictures of your product and refer customers to your website for more information and purchase. Or give the information straightaway as the caption of your post. Be selective in choosing these pictures, as you don’t want to appear amateurish in displaying your product.

4. Set up a picture contest: remember that content marketing should be more about your client than anything else. It must be a way of celebrating the clients and their association with your brand. If they do not see the benefit of looking at your pictures and have a chance to participate in the conversation, it will be hard to build a long-term relationship with them – and that’s what you need. So why don’t you give them an opportunity to appear on your Instagram? Set up a picture contest somehow related to the product or service you sell, and ask them to enter their pictures (if you sell cat food, this will be heaven, as the customers will have yet another chance to show Tiger relishing your product for the whole world to see. Total win-win.). Set clear rules about what can be shown in the photo beforehand and let them know. Then you may portray all the suitable entries, and give the winner something special, like a coupon or a discount on their next purchase.

Tiger can't have enough. Example of Instagram contest picture

Example of Instagram photo contest

5. Post awesome pictures related to your business: if you have a language school, for example, you could post amazing branded pictures of the countries in which they speak that language; some kind of typical food; local festivals; touristic locations; historical places, etc.Try to avoid being corny though.

6. Your personal pictures: people prefer to relate to companies as if they were people. In this case, if you feel comfortable, personalize the relationship with your customers by posting some of your private pictures: vacationing, having fun somewhere nice in the company of your family and friends, etc. Marketing gurus say privacy is no longer an existing concept – I beg to disagree – but I can certainly attest the success of many brave people out there who expose themselves totally on the web (if you decide to do it, you’ll be walking a tightrope, though).

7. Images are not necessarily photos: you can post quotes, memes or whatever inspiring thought you might want to share on Instagram. There are a number of apps which will allow you to build professional looking images on the web using amazing backgrounds with phrases on them. PowerPoint or Canva, for example, can do the job.

As long as you get started, you will find out that many more ideas will pop up in your mind as you think of original ways to entertain, educate or inform your audience about your brand. I wish you all the best in your endeavors as an Instagram content marketer.

Don’t forget to post your comments and share your stories with us.

Jorge Sette

 

Is Marketing Art?

Posted on by under aprenda inglês, art, Arte, marketing, Writing

According to the site http://www.oxforddictionaries.com, Art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power”. Marketing, on the other hand, is responding to people’s needs and desires with a unique offer that will sweep them off their feet. Is it only me or is there a parallel here? How is marketing close to art? Let me give you four reasons.

The KThe King's Sadness, Matisse.1952

The King’s Sadness, Matisse.1952

1. Visual:  today’s promotion relies on images more than anything else. Text is powerful, but images are processed much faster by the human brain. So to grab the client’s attention and really engage with them at the deep level marketers need to do to break through the clutter, only compelling images and the right combination of colors and shapes will do the job. The marketing tools for reaching the client today are basically what can be channeled through social media, and social media is mainly about visual communication: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to name just the most popular. It may not be long before Pinterest Search, for example, beats Google, as sometimes you might not even know how to express in words what you are looking for. SEO and keywords will need to readapt to the new reality.

2. Design: Both the product and its promotion will rely heavily on design. Shape, colors, texture, coordination: products need to look and feel awesome, especially if they are to be worn by clients. Very soon fashion trends will dictate how wearables are supposed to look for the right season, I would imagine. Marketers should be ready for the catwalk. Dazzling is what we are all looking for.

3. Emotions: it’s hard to explain how some paintings and sculptures resonate so deeply with us. They just strike the right chord. Human beings will prioritize and choose based on emotion and then rationalize their choices. Marketers need to work based on this premise. Just like artists, their communication must draw people to them. Marketers need to churn out compelling content that will get customers to come for more again and again.

4. Skill: good art may seem spontaneous and natural, but I’m sure you know the amount of technique that needs to be put into it. You can only break academic norms and achieve effective and revolutionary results in Art after understanding deeply how the traditional rules work. In the same way, marketers need a lot of training to get to the top of their craft. And they need to test and measure the effectiveness of their communication endlessly to be able to keep refining it. Again, all this science is art.

As a marketer, it feels very exciting to know that more art and technique will be expected from me in the near future. Creativity and craft make us even more human, which, in a way, allows us to communicate with customers in a truly genuine voice.

NOTE: If you are into art, you may consider checking out our eBook series TEACHING ENGLISH WITH ART:

Click on the links below to go to AMAZON.COM and buy your ebooks:

1. Teaching English with Art: Matisse  http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1kP

 (30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Henri Matisse)

2. Teaching English with Art: Picasso  http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1lA

(30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Pablo Picasso)

3. Teaching English with Art: Caravaggio  http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1mL

(30 speaking and writing activities based on famous works by Caravaggio)

Au revoir

Jorge Sette

Exciting times to be a marketer: you are in show business!

Posted on by under aprenda inglês, Aprender inglês, Aprender línguas estrangeiras, Aprender português, art, Career advice, marketing, storytelling, Writing

You may have heard this before: everyone is in marketing nowadays. To make a living, you need to promote and sell something: your image as an ideal employee; your qualifications as the perfect fit for an advertised professional position; the product or service the company you already work for specializes in; or your own business. Everything is a brand, from products and ideas to people and causes. Non-profits, as you know, need as much promotion as any other business.

Moreover, marketing has changed radically in the last ten years or so. It has become a lot more exciting. As a marketer, you are not allowed to interrupt your audience with a loud selling message or by yelling a silly slogan at them any longer. You may even try, but it will not be very effective. Now things got a lot more complex, genuine, interactive, and, I dare say, even more artistic. Marketing needs to excel at beauty, creativity, usefulness, and the ability to keep a conversation going with the customer for as long as necessary. After all, we are aiming to keep them for life.

Content marketing

As a consequence, we all need to turn our marketing departments into media companies or publishers to be able to promote effectively in this new landscape: whether your are selling language learning courses,  ebooks or cars. Gone are the days of the proverbial pushy second-hand car salesmen we still see in movies. To turn our marketing team into a media company, we must become content creation machines, spilling out entertainment, compelling stories, clear explanations and timely info about your product or service to build a loyal audience on and off line. Only then are we allowed to sell to this community we worked so hard to attract and shape. Build the community first, gain its trust, give away lots of free and relevant content, and afterwards, you will own the right to offer them your “purple cow” (borrowing the expression from marketing guru Seth Godin): the very compelling product they can’t wait to buy from you.

Take for example the need to create a personality and specify the values your brand stands for. Storytelling is the keyword here. Every time you get in touch with your audience you have an opportunity to add a new piece of your corporate narrative by reinforcing the values and personality of your brand. This must be done through different social media channels, using the right tone of voice. Companies that invest in marketing will assign different people to manage distinct social media channels and the kind of content feeding they require. Besides, they need a marketing coordinator/manager to oversee the whole operation, analyze the metrics,  and make sure the conversation with the client remains consistent.

Marketing in the business of language learning – my speciality

What I find really exciting as a marketer in the language learning line of business is how easy it is to produce content that will captivate your target audience, turning them into leads and then customers. If you sell LANGUAGE, which is a vehicle, you have a lot more elbow room to play with content. Language can be used to talk about anything. So there can be a lot of variety in your communication. And what can be more exhilarating than the possibility of creating blogs, podcasts, videos, PowerPoint presentations, ebooks, webinars, etc. to express your passion for language teaching/learning through a wealth of rich content?  Marketers are given a unique chance to become writers, video makers, newsreaders and designers: we’ve been given the opportunity to be in show business after all! Few people would turn this opportunity down.

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Show business

 

Start now!

Of course, you may not feel excited about every piece of content you will have to create to attract customers, especially because it needs to cater for the community’s needs and interests, not yours. The more you get to know your prospects, the easier it will be to publish the right kind of content for them. But assuming  you like or identify with the product your are selling, there will always be room to express your passion.

Hubspot, the inbound marketing software company, is the benchmark  for content creation, attracting clients to their community by giving tonnes of excellent content away for free. Well, there is obviously no need to get to their level of sophistication and productivity, but if you do not start creating compelling content right now, you will not be in business for very long. Believe me, creating content is key. And it can be a lot of fun.

Au revoir

Jorge Sette

Why We Love Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez) and You Should too

Posted on by under Aprender línguas estrangeiras, art, E-books, filmes, Literatura, Mythology, storytelling, Writing

Of course the first thing I did after “hearing” about the death of Gabriel García Márquez on Facebook (where else?) was to access my Kindle app and download a full collection of his short stories and his biography (Vivir para Contarla). I have the print version of the biography at home, but, as I was away, I felt the need to reread parts of it immediately. The prices were astoundingly low on Amazon.com, and I figured they may not remain so for very long, as the hype brought about by the death of any celebrity is bound to push up prices of anything related to them.

It was very comforting going to bed that night with those two books safely stored on my iPad. It felt like I had somehow beaten and transcended death. I could keep Gabo with me for as long as I wished. And this is something I needed to do.

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez

When I first read ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, I was in college. I had a close group of friends, all taking different majors, who spent most of the free time together. Beaches, bars, weekend trips. At some point, some of us decided to read that book and we all agreed to read it at the same time. We became a kind of informal reading club, without a facilitator or much structure to it. However, it was a lot of fun discussing the most improbable passages, sitting for hours on the beach in Boa Viagem, unafraid of death by shark in those young times.

In those days, we were more interested in how funny and unfamiliar some of the magic realism sounded to us, without really devoting much time to interpreting metaphors or sensing how painfully poetic the whole thing was. Macondo, the imaginary  Caribbean town featured in the the book, with its heat and rain, its underdevelopment and desolation, its ghosts and backwardness was not very different from what we experienced in Recife in the mid-1980s. It was not as if we were trying to figure out Márquez from the coldness of a damp London night, reading by the fireplace, with a cup of tea. We might as well be characters in Gabo’s books, so close our realities were. Nobody would look very surprised if we all started to ascend into the sky like Remedios, the beauty, one of the strangest characters in the book.

Macondo is Latin America, and it’s Recife, Brazil,  more than anywhere else.

Only years later, though, did I come across my favorite Márquez: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA. I liked it even more than “One Hundred Years…”  Less magical realism and more poetry. The story of the determination of a man who waits for a woman for 50 years before finally having her deeply resonated with me. It was a metaphor standing for everything I valued as ideals in life: crystal clear objectives, passion, a steely tenacity, patience and the understanding that the journey  and its pleasures should be as important as the goal: after all, Firmino Ariza, the main character, had led a fully satisfactory life while patiently waiting for the love of his life to become a widow, before finally resuming and strenghtening their relationship during a beautiful boat trip down an infinite river. Meanwhile, the journey, the life of Ariza, is packed with funny and interesting anecdotes, lived to the full, which makes the book a rare delight and a great lesson.

In between these two masterpieces, I read most of the other stories, and remember being deeply impressed by the strange tale of the unfortunate life of Eréndira, who had to work as a prostitute to pay for an unextinguishable debt towards her wicked “abuela” (grandmother). Because of the movie based on the story that came out at the time, I can only picture Eréndira as the dark wild beauty Claudia Ohana, the Brazilian actress who played the leading role. Irena Pappas played the crazy grandma in an unforgettable performance.

Not long ago I read another amazing and disturbing Márquez’s story. It told of a boy who liked to spend the nights on the beach staring at the sea. One night he begins to see a huge ghostly transatlantic ship passing by, which, with all its lights off,  silently crashes against the reefs near the entrance to the harbor. Despite the fact that, from then on  the vision happened once every March, year after year, his mother never believed him, as no traces of the shipwreck could ever be found in the daylight. Until one day when, already as an adult, with a little torch, her son manages to lead the ship past the rocks into the canal towards the beach, only to have it crash magnifically right in front of the local church. They all believed him then.

This is what makes us love Gabo: his Spanish fills the world with a unique combination of magic, colors, rhythms and smells (in one of his stories, for example, a strange smell of roses takes over a little village by the sea, heralding great changes to come), which makes us see reality in a totally new light. And finally get it.

Au revoir

Jorge Sette.

 

 

 

 

Storytelling with Norman Rockwell

Posted on by under aprenda inglês, Aprender inglês, art, Arte, Ensinar com Arte, Escrita, Literatura, Mythology, storytelling, teaching with art, Writing

Storytelling with Norman Rockwell

Click on the picture to access the SlideShare presentation.

Note: you might want to check out our new book TEACHING ENGLISH WITH ART: MATISSE   available  from AMAZON.COM as an ebook.  Click here for more info: 

http://wp.me/p4gEKJ-1kP

10 Marketing Lessons from Mad Men, the TV Show

Posted on by under aprenda inglês, Aprender inglês, Aprender línguas estrangeiras, Career advice, filmes, marketing, TV shows, Writing

This is what it takes to succeed in advertising in Madison Avenue:

IMG_0946

Mad Men

1. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy (this could have come from Kubrick’s The Shining as well).

2. Clients need to be wined and dined to the point of stupor to close a deal.

3. As an employee – especially a secretary – you will get in trouble resisting the sexual advances of superiors or VIP clients. Give in. Homosexual advances must be turned down, however, and the proponent is allowed to be called a pervert.

4. Count on Don Draper to save any campaign presentation at the last minute by changing his tone of voice. It gets lower, and the speed of his delivery slows down. He will also look deeply and meaningfully into the clients’ fascinated eyes. It helps if the musical score rises at the climactic moment.

5. Getting stoned and drunk at the office makes creative work a lot more productive, although most of it turns out crappy in the end.

6. Chain smoking or coping stoically with second-hand smoking is a strong indication that you are on your way to stardom. Wives of marketing executives will not hesitate to reward their thirteen-year-old daughters with a cigarette to celebrate school accomplishments.

7. Get a good-looking wife or husband if you are in the business of advertising and be unfaithful to them. A necessary step to further your career.

8. Take 4-year-olds to watch Planet of the Apes and don’t worry if they start having constant nightmares afterwards and wish to get rid of the family dog because they can’t stand getting near fur any longer. These little family problems should not concern a senior executive any way.

9. Back-stabbing is a very normal and acceptable part of the business. You will have your chance to get back at your ex-best friend eventually.

10. The most important question to ask about an applicant if you have not seen them yet is: is she black or white?

Well, we are in the sixties after all. Jokes apart, the show is brilliantly written and should be watched.

Au revoir

Jorge Sette.