CHAPTER
THE NEGLECTED RIGHT HEMISPHERE
Balancing Storytelling with Experience Building
It was an otherwise normal Saturday, save for a few run-of-the-mill branded April Fools’ Day gags. Burger King announced fake Whopper-flavored toothpaste.1 Bush’s baked beans mocked up a fake jelly beans product. Jim Beam pretended to come out with “Jim Beans,” a canned baked beans product. Coffee mate posted about a coffee-flavored coffee creamer. Lots of bean stuff was happening. Are you bored yet?
On that day, something else happened. Something magical that will go down in Internet history. On April Fools’ Day 2017, Reddit unveiled an “experiment” via a community called r/Place.2, 3 When its metaphorical doors opened, r/Place was a simple 1,000-by-1,000-pixel blank canvas. Beneath the canvas was a short set of instructions that read almost like a poem:
There is an empty canvas.
You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another.
Individually you can create something.
Together you can create something more.4
The concept was as simple as it was elegant. Anyone with a Reddit account could visit this community and interact with the shared canvas. Participants could choose 1 of 16 different colored tiles to place in any space on the canvas—regardless of whether or not that particular tile was occupied. After placing a tile, a timer started, which kept that user from placing another tile for about 10 minutes. As the instructions allude, an individual user could create something simple, given some dedication and a few hours. But if participants could rally their communities together, they could create much more. That’s exactly what they did.
Admittedly, the beginning of the r/Place experiment was a little rocky. As you might expect, the first large-scale creation on the canvas was a big red penis.5 But the novelty of the dick joke wore off quickly, and soon, different factions began to form. In the bottom right corner of the canvas, a group that called themselves The Blue Corner started to paint the entire canvas blue. In response, a group called Green Lattice started to create a more sophisticated pattern of green and black tiles starting in the upper right corner of the canvas. Another faction soon formed called Rainbow Road, in reference to a racing map in the video game Mario Kart, which involved an even more sophisticated diagonal rainbow pattern and worked its way across the canvas.
The complexity of Redditors’ creations only increased throughout the experiment. Communities throughout Reddit found creative ways to represent themselves. Using shared spreadsheets and designated latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, communities pushed the boundaries of online coordination on an ever-evolving, chaotic, shared canvas. Location-based communities created flags.6 Video game communities represented pixelated characters from nearly every game imaginable. Some participants even created versions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. He-Man, Dat Boi, Pepe, Club Penguin, that picture of Peyton Manning looking over his shoulder in his black ski mask, and “no step on snek” all made appearances on the final canvas. A Windows 95–inspired taskbar and a Runescape-derived “Connection lost” message attempted to break the canvas’s fourth wall. People, ideologies, countries, memes, and ideas from all corners of Reddit found homes on the r/Place canvas.
Many of the designs were complex beyond belief. Ars Technica writer Sam Machkovech pointed out that creating even something as simple as a single letter required significant coordination among users: “A reasonably perceptible Roman character requires no less than 24 pixels, so more than 24 Reddit users were needed to not only fill in that single letter’s pixels, but also to stand guard for immediate follow-up vandalism.” Somehow, Redditors managed to write not just letters or words but an entire section of dialogue from the Star Wars prequels between Chancellor Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker. Beginning with, “Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise?” the story had become what we Internet dorks refer to as “copypasta,” text that is frequently copied and pasted seemingly at random into usually unrelated conversations. All 732 characters are legible in the final image of r/Place. By Machkovech’s math, that required the ongoing coordination of about 17,500 Redditors.
April 2017 was a particularly contentious time on the Internet. Following the 2016 election and President Trump’s inauguration, tensions were high on both sides of the political divide. But somehow, none of that showed up in r/Place. Politics simply didn’t gain traction. There is no Republican or Democratic flaming to be found on the final r/Place canvas. A handful of attempts to broadcast political messages can be found briefly in timelapses of the evolution of the r/Place canvas, but they were quickly covered by representations of interests, passions, memes, flags, logos, and so on. The beauty of the r/Place experiment was that it made hateful messages much more difficult to broadcast than constructive ones.
Maintaining a spot on the canvas required people to be passionate and coordinated in order to keep their place. As the canvas evolved, some communities’ spaces impeded on others’, and borders had to be negotiated. Where country flags butted up against others, some communities created heart-shaped bridges between the two—reflecting their neighbors’ flags’ colors where the heart shape overlapped with their own. When the German flag “invaded” the French flag, which most Redditors interpreted as a pixelated World War II joke, Redditors extended the French flag and represented the United Nations’ Dove of Peace symbol at the intersection. Even The Blue Corner, Green Lattice, and Rainbow Road groups were allowed to maintain parts of their original real estate, though scaled back to make room for others.
Machkovech analyzed what made r/Place so different from most online discourse, and his conclusion is a lesson for every brand and company participating in social media. The constructive power of coordination exhibited in r/Place is completely antithetical to what we usually read about in headlines regarding people interacting in social media. He explained, “An individual social-network user can devote time to creating multiple accounts and carpet-bombing specific targets with emotional and psychological attacks. An r/place user had to unite an army of persistent voices over long stretches of time to preserve a minuscule bit of pixel real estate.” While in everyday social network interactions it’s very easy to share a hateful message that has outweighed impact on the recipient, the r/Place experiment and Reddit’s community-driven nature empowered constructive messages to drown out the hateful ones.
The r/Place experiment accomplished something at which so many social networks fail: it provided space for people to interact in ways that embraced their commonalities, celebrated their differences, magnified what was constructive, and minimized what wasn’t. Not only did this silly April Fools’ Day experiment achieve all of that, but it did so without the need for censorship. Because the entire experience was made up of individual pixels, “content” couldn’t be easily removed. But it didn’t have to be. The r/Place community did display rules, but those rules were extremely simple: be creative, be civil, follow sitewide rules, and don’t post personal information. The output of the experiment wasn’t manufactured by platform enforcement or policing. It was the organic result of people participating in the structure of the experience, perhaps also influenced by Reddit’s cultural backdrop.
Too often, criticisms leveled against social media fail to recognize its power to unite people. Different social network structures breed vastly different kinds of behaviors and mindsets. How people are connected to one another and how they’re identified yield drastic changes in the ways in which people relate to one another. When we start to understand how these often-overlooked factors of social network structure affect user mindsets, the driving forces behind problematic online behaviors become much more clear. When people are anonymous, organized around their common interests, identify as part of a broader community, and are given license to express creativity at a community-wide scale, it’s natural for them to coordinate in ways that are positive and constructive.
The r/Place experiment, like much of the Reddit community itself, manifested the right brain characteristics of being expressive and explorative. It allowed people to coordinate and create without concern for their public persona. Had r/Place run on a platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, it’s unlikely that the result would have been as coherent and constructive. That’s not because the people are different. It’s because the structure of their interactions is different. When people are in a mode of representing themselves, we can’t expect them to engage as their most candid, vulnerable selves. Likewise, when people are engaged in a mode of exploration and candor, we shouldn’t expect their behaviors and expressions to represent themselves the same ways they might when tied to their offline identities.
The fault line between these two very different modes of engagement is responsible for many of the problematic behaviors we see in social networks. When an anonymous user on Twitter sends a mean message to a person who is representing themselves and their beliefs, we have a conflict between right and left brain modes of experience. The mean message sender is engaged directly with their experience of the recipient’s representation. But because the recipient is in a mode of representing a version of themselves, the message feels particularly harsh. While the sender may be attacking an idea, the recipient feels attacked personally. Superego networks like Twitter and Instagram are particularly fertile ground for these clashes of perspective because they allow for both identity-based and anonymous users to interact in the same space. It’s easier to be candid and honest anonymously, and it’s also easier to be nasty and hateful anonymously. Hate directed toward us is easier to shrug off as anonymous users than when we’re representing public parts of our selves.
Even when things are going smoothly, left brain Ego and Superego networks are often criticized for creating echo chambers. But that’s exactly what we ought to expect from interactions among people’s representations of themselves. It’s natural for us to attract representations that align with our own. Beyond that, most left brain networks are actually designed to create “echo chambers.” Their algorithms are built to find the content with which we as individual users are most likely to engage. And except for content that deeply infuriates us, the content we’re most likely to engage is the content with which we agree.
An echo chamber is only a problem when we believe that it represents a true, holistic picture of the outside world. The social networks themselves aren’t as much a problem as how we relate to them. A feed filled with what we enjoy can be a wonderful thing. But in the same way that we don’t grow and develop by exclusively eating candy, we also need to expose ourselves to content that isn’t aligned with our individual beliefs. Right brain networks like Reddit and other interest-based online communities are in many ways antidotes to the echo chamber problem because they prioritize a community-level perspective over an individual one. Inarguably, social networks have the power to create echo chambers by curating content specifically for us as individuals. But social networks also have the power to expose us to new and different perspectives we wouldn’t likely encounter in our everyday lives.
As brands, we’ve skewed our social media participation and ad spends heavily toward left brain networks. That’s logical given that Facebook/Instagram and Twitter have the most developed social advertising platforms. The importance of presence in these left brain networks is undeniable. They help us build legitimacy, establish “known territory” for our brands, target very specific demographics, and when done right, grow our reach through the endorsement of our fans. However, as we seek to integrate into culture, convert new brand fans, and change broader brand perceptions, we must also find ways to engage people in right brain territory.
Admittedly, brands that have engaged right brain communities have done so with mixed success. Sometimes, outlier brands like UNIQLO become so integral to the community that they’re received like members of the tribe. More often, brands receive negative feedback, are banned for self-promotion, or simply fail to gain traction. The ways in which we’ve learned to approach left brain social networks don’t often translate to success in right brain networks. Rather than representing ourselves as individual brands to groups of other individuals, when we seek to engage right brain networks, we need to understand that we’re participating in and addressing a community.
In previous examples of success in right brain Id networks, we’ve examined experiences like Anki’s Cozmo Lost in Reddit, Audi’s Think Faster, and Charles Schwab’s open-ended prompts. One of the common threads through these experiences is that they’re reliant on the community to be fun and meaningful. It wouldn’t be any fun to navigate Cozmo through the escape rooms alone. The Audi Think Faster Ask Me Anything (AMA) series format works only when lots of people are asking interesting questions. An open-ended prompt is only interesting to engage when others have offered interesting or insightful perspectives.
TO ENGAGE PEOPLE’S RIGHT BRAINS, CREATE SOMETHING EXPLORABLE
Another approach to engaging a community as a brand is to provide tools that the community will find interesting and valuable. In doing so, we can add value for a community in a way that is not only unobtrusive but also enables the community to do more together. The r/Place experiment inspired an Adobe integration with Reddit called r/Layer, which launched in September 2019.7 The r/Layer experience, a play on Adobe’s Photoshop product and its use of “layers” to create images, started similarly as a blank canvas. But rather than users placing individual pixels, Redditors were given a set of simple drawing tools with which they contributed layers to a massive group drawing—kind of like a giant digital graffiti wall.
Over the course of five days, more than 150,000 unique drawings were contributed to r/Layer, and they ranged from professional art to memes to references to r/Place—even The Blue Corner showed up!8, 9 While creations weren’t quite as community reliant on the r/Layer canvas—each layer could be considered its own finished piece—different layers played on one another throughout the course of the experience. When one Redditor started to draw a blacktop road near the top of the canvas, others helped build its infrastructure, briefly creating a highway across the entirety of the canvas.10 Redditors similarly represented interests, memes, and the like—sneakers, video game characters, Wilson from Castaway, Bobby from King of the Hill, Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc., the AOL Running Man logo, and so on.
Not only did the r/Layer experience spark conversations within its designated community, echoes of r/Layer spread far throughout Reddit and beyond. It appeared on KnowYourMeme.com, and it generated organic time-lapse videos on YouTube. Some creators even made tutorials to help new participants learn how to use the tools.11, 12, 13 The experience didn’t just create one story to tell—it created many. Communities throughout Reddit not only participated in the experience but also brought their drawings back to the communities that inspired them. Organic posts reached the top of a wide range of subreddits—video game communities like r/Stellaris, location-based communities like r/Portugal, meme communities like r/EmojiPasta (which is like copypasta but with emojis), music communities like r/Greenday, and even a community for open discussion about sexuality for young people called r/BisexualTeens.14, 15, 16, 17, 18
Adobe’s role in the experience was very different from how it participates in other social networks, and it executed the campaign brilliantly. In the lead-up to the campaign, Adobe promoted gifs it had cocreated with acclaimed gif maker u/hero0fwar, a lead moderator in influential Reddit communities like r/HighQualityGifs and r/reactiongifs.19, 20 Not only did this collaboration net Adobe effective content perfectly suited to the Reddit ecosystem, it also allowed the brand to borrow credibility from his rare influencer-like status among Reddit communities. Adobe used traditional advertising space to surround the experience with relevant ads, but they weren’t intrusive. In doing so, the brand lived up to its positioning as a champion of creativity by enabling a massive community to create something together.
These experiences that succeed in engaging right brain communities are often the antithesis of what we’ve come to accept as “social media best practices.” They aren’t short. They don’t fit into six-second video slots. Often, they aren’t even particularly time sensitive. They’re deep, expressive, and communal. They allow people to infuse the experiences with their own meaning and, as a result, create interesting stories. As brands, we can’t help but be protective of ourselves. These open-ended engagements can make us feel particularly vulnerable. But we must also recognize that regardless of whether or not we acknowledge it, our brand and its meaning are the cocreations of ourselves and the cultures that surround us. When we participate in social media, regardless of whether we’re in right or left brain space, we need to embrace that dynamic rather than fight it. Otherwise, we risk becoming stale, stagnant, and out of touch.
SOCIAL MEDIA PUSHES BRANDS TO BE MORE THAN TRANSPARENT—IT REQUIRES US TO ACT IN ACCORDANCE WITH WHAT WE SAY
Social media is changing our industry at a rapid rate. In many ways, it already has, but we’re only beginning to feel the transformation in store for how brands communicate with their audiences. Social media pushes us to be more self-aware of our brands and their roles in people’s lives. It forces us to confront the reactions and expressions of our audiences in ways that are more tangible and immediate than any marketing channel since knocking on doors. Social media manifests different versions of our audiences, and it requires that we understand the nuances of these different selves to reach our audiences effectively.
From the earliest social media strategies, we understood that the “matching luggage” approach to campaign building felt wrong. We knew that our TV spot wasn’t the optimal asset for engaging people on Facebook or Twitter. But rarely did we articulate the underlying, “Why?” As we continue to evolve our understanding of how best to reach people in different online spaces, it’s more important than ever for us to understand that social media platforms aren’t just websites. They’re not just apps on people’s smartphones. Social networks are real, tangible places where people go. They’re environments in which people express and represent themselves, that inform how people perceive themselves and the world around them, and that evolve their social norms and cultures. We don’t “go on” social media. We enter into it.
As new as social media feels and as fast as its different cultures evolve, many of our core marketing strategies remain relevant. In some ways, social media pushes us back to basics: create something of value, show it to people who will find it valuable, be consistent, and act in accordance with what you say. The era of TV branding, which put us at arm’s length from our audiences, has given way to the return of close proximity to the people with whom our brands seek to connect. As a result, our industry is being forced to trim the proverbial fat—to forgo the preciousness of our brands in vacuums, to be authentic and self-aware, and to find genuine points of connection with people. Social media represents a much-needed reality check for our industry. It won’t necessarily oust legacy brands, but it will continue to reward those with strategies rooted in self (and cultural) awareness.
Advertising and marketing are dirty words on the Internet. While we’ve come to simply accept this antagonistic relationship with our audiences, the reason isn’t simply “because people hate ads.” In a 2016 survey, 83 percent of Internet users agreed that not all ads are bad and that they’d preferably only block obnoxious ones.21 An additional 77 percent agreed that given the option, they’d prefer to filter ads rather than block them completely. Brands—and advertising—have genuine value to add to people’s experiences online.
Unfortunately, we advertisers have engaged in an evolutionary arms race with our audience’s attention. We continue to load more ads per page, and we find ways to make those ads louder, brighter, flashier, and more obtrusive. In the aforementioned survey, 91 percent of respondents agreed that ads were more intrusive compared to those served in 2013 and 2014, and 87 percent reported seeing more ads in general. This relationship between marketers and our audiences is untenable. We can’t build brands by attacking our customers’ attention or by hijacking trends. We build brands by demonstrating our value to the people who will find us valuable.
As I close this book, I’d like to challenge our industry to consider the right brain behaviors that enable our left brain storytelling. Are we behaving in the world in ways that are consistent with our positioning and the value we bring to people? What behaviors can we manifest in the world that add real value for our audiences? Once we’ve answered those questions, the stories we tell become more genuine. When we stop attacking their attention, our audiences can let down their guards. We can rebuild our relationships based on mutually added value.
As marketers, we’re equipped with pools of money intended to express the value of the brands we represent. If our goal is to change people’s minds about us, it’s not enough for us to simply tell a story. We can spend all of the production budget in the world and still create an ad that’s ineffective if the story feels disconnected from our audiences and the cultures in which they participate. If we truly want to maximize our marketing budgets and get people to think differently about us, we need to embody living articulations of what we want our brands to represent. In doing so, we move a step beyond transparency into what really endears us to our audiences in the age of social media—we act in accordance with what we say. That’s what people expect from other people, and it’s the only sustainable way to build trust.
Fortunately for us, the Internet provides a broad canvas for creating experiences and representing ourselves in ways that attract people. We may find our audiences engaged in pure self-expression and in modes of curiosity, in which we can deliver explorable experiences, interact with naturally forming communities, and lean into people’s creative drives. And we may find our audiences in spaces in which they’re representing themselves socially, in which we can aid them in expressing those representations, represent ourselves in ways that are aspirational or genuinely relatable, and facilitate connections between people. The possibilities are limited only by our creativity.
Look for what people value. Try to understand why they value it. Create something they’ll genuinely enjoy. Then, tell stories about it.