It’s time to move on from the worn-out advertising practices of the past and look for ways to entertain consumers, rather than annoy them. Zack Slingsby is a leading voice in the growing world of branded content and will fill you in on what you're missing out on. You’ll get the inside track on designing, creating, and deploying evergreen content for your brand. Buckle up for a wild ride into the future of advertising as you explore how to create stories, build connections with consumers, and build out the long-term strategy for your marketing.   Busted Myths:   If you want to sell a product, you can do a lot more than just talk about your product and every single feature of it. “You won’t convince people with adjectives.” The “Mad Men” era is over. You can’t expect success from just running commercials like in the 1960s-90s, you need to put on a show for people. Without adapting, you are burning your ad spend.  Takeaways    Brands can build more loyalty with consumers if they genuinely entertain them through engaging branded content. This bypasses the traditional model of brands needing to interrupt the consumers’ leisure activities with annoying ads.  Traditional ad content has a relatively short shelf life when it can produce ROI, and once it expires, that company has to go through all of the same pains to create new short-term ad content. Longer form branded content possesses much stronger staying power. Creating a story is different than creating an ad. A story is not about a product. A story is fundamentally about people. Your story should be appealing to human beings and should speak to them as such, instead of as customers. The difference between a story and a plot is that a story recounts events that happened, whereas a plot conveys how the consequences of one event lead to another event. While effective in the short term, your brand needs more than product differentiation for its long-term survival. Avoid getting caught in the trap of thinking that your content has to be very short. If it’s compelling enough and speaks to people as people, the audience will enjoy consuming it regardless of length. If you’re trying to jam a narrator speedreading a big script into a 20-second piece of content, you aren’t actually trying to entertain your audience. Good content should be allowed to breathe.     Quote of the Show:   “Now, brands are turning out to be these stages for creativity” - Zack Slingsby     Shout Outs:   JustSo - Content creation team that works with Red Bull Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster Mark & Jay Duplass - Independent filmmakers Links:   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zack-slingsby-702461164/ Email: zack@humanfactormedia.co Company website: https://humanfactormedia.co/ Why Aren't You Famous: Silent Teaser: https://youtu.be/wDHDQC-Tjo0 Company Projects: https://humanfactormedia.co/our-work/ Ways to Tune In:   Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show/id1338838763 Amazon Music/Audible: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/37228621-2f9c-4905-a223-1844effb49dd Spotify:  https://open.spotify.com/show/1vVLpNI1LssMTiL6Kdsamn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-hard-corps-marketing-show Google Podcasts: https://play.google.com/music/m/Im7mytmu2wa2mekhoeixlja5hpe?t=The_Hard_Corps_Marketing_Show YouTube: https://youtu.be/f1ROd5olAV4