Storylines Tour London: Talking about the ties that bind and the stories that captivate

We live in a different world to the one we did four years ago. It changed all of us in different ways. Some people moved home, some people changed jobs. All of us started to really focus on our purpose — and we looked for that in the brands we interact with and buy from.

The value of community and connection are two of the central themes we’re exploring with the Storylines Tour and our documentary on “The New Art of Storytelling” — to explore the personal connections that all kinds of businesses have built with their customers, and the dynamic ways they’re connecting with audiences globally.

For the London stop of our tour on June 29, attendees learned how partners and customers like Formula 1, Marks & Spencer, Unmind, Rail Delivery Group, WPP, Wunderman Thompson, Kin + Carta, Valtech, and many more are tackling the challenge of engaging customers through story-driven experiences.

How many of us speak directly to consumers? How many of us want to connect with business clients? The best thing about the conversations we’ve held at Storylines is that no matter who the audience is, we’re all human. And humans are captivated by stories!

Launching a global platform from concept to delivery in six months

I’ve often said that rip-and-replace projects are now few and far between in the realm of digital experiences. Many of our partners are called upon to upgrade and augment an existing marketing technology stack for their clients. 

And then along comes UNRVLD, a digital experience and technology agency, and their work on LIV Golf. Tom Dougherty, Chief Growth Officer, shared how, with composable technology platforms, they took a completely new brand in professional sport from idea to in-market in just six months. 

UNRLVD specializes in the sport and lifestyle sector, with clients including the Football Association, New Era, Formula E, and The Open. It was their outstanding work on this major golf tournament that brought them to the attention of LIV Golf in June 2022, and from that initial conversation came a long list of things the prospective client wanted to achieve in order to launch a new global league in January 2023. 

LIV Golf needed entirely new ways to deliver the golf experience: a fan engagement platform, the ability to live stream games, an ecommerce storefront for merchandise and tickets, and a franchise multi-site framework to support 12 individual teams.

It was like a billion-dollar start-up, Tom explained, in the sense that “we were working with a business that had all the ambition and investment, but were literally starting with an idea.” 

And after experiencing some of the earliest events in person with their festival-like atmosphere, the team at UNRLVD saw that LIV Golf was “a real blend of sport and entertainment, and the size of the challenge was to take it online and bring it to more people.”

Working to such a strict timeline really drove the approach to the project and the decisions they took, according to Tom, and that extended to the selection of technology that would enable them to deliver.

“We went into this process with empty boxes across the whole technology estate,” Tom said, “but we did have experience and we knew things that we could recommend that would be right for this program.”

After breaking down the deliverables into a primary and secondary scope, UNRLVD assembled a tech stack to address the minimum viable product for launch; using MACH architecture with a fully headless solution, with the Contentful Composable Content Platform embedded as a foundation at the very outset.

Customer panel with M&S, F1, and Unmind

What is impactful synergy? According to Dr. Kris Alexander, Professor of Video Games and keynote speaker at Storylines London, it’s about creating an experience that is unique, meaningful, and community focused. One of the brands he cited as an example was F1, with their campaign to raise mental health awareness among gamers in an esports race league during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Storytelling like this is sprouting up across brands and businesses. Ready with a series of probing questions around this fascinating topic, Kris moderated a terrific customer panel with Emma Murray, Senior Product Manager at M&S; Ali Corless, Product Manager at F1; and Elliott King, Director of Content at Unmind.

Content should be "spicy", according to Elliott. It’s the internal mantra at Unmind for combining creativity and impact. “Being a mission-driven company, we’re really focused on mental health and well-being, and we understand that everyone has an ambition around their well-being. So we position ourselves as being a storyteller in that regard, helping everyone achieve our shared ambitions to be well.”

What remains top of mind for M&S, meanwhile, is maintaining the heritage of a storied brand. “Like many other retailers, we’re making this journey from multichannel content to omnichannel content,” Emma explained. “We’re always asking ourselves, how can we keep the brand story we have consistent across all those channels and touchpoints, so our customers maintain their emotional connection to the brand?” 

And how about this for a soundbite? “Digital storytelling is absolutely paramount to everything we do at F1.” How that’s put into practice, according to Ali, is by giving the teams and their drivers the power to grow and tell their stories online. “For the fans watching a race at home,” he said, “in addition to the live feed and the commentary, we want to be telling the stories behind the scenes as well, or sharing the best of our social content on our digital platforms, to really bring that event to life.” 

It’s abundantly clear that shifting to a composable content model has unlocked more innovation for the panel. “We can start that personalization journey really early,” Elliott said. “It’s enabled us to achieve some big things really quickly, despite where we are on the maturity curve, which is really cool.”

For the team at M&S, another type of innovation is how they can now assess different types of content on their site and strike the right balance between them: “There’s functional content that is just helping a customer get from A to B,” Emma said. “How can we shift to more inspirational content like product recommendations, and when is the right time to do that?”

Scaling global digital experiences

Building connections with customers means meeting them where they are. And in their language. But the challenge, according to Irene Nicolau-Requena, Director of Business Development at Translations.com, is that 75% of the world’s population does not speak English. That’s a pretty big audience to consider when building out a digital experience.

And, as if that statistic weren’t impactful enough, recent research shows that 65% of consumers prefer information in their own language, and that 40% won’t buy from a website that isn’t available in their native language. So what’s the best way to reach and engage with your customers globally?

“One of the things we’ve seen is with search,” Irene said. “It’s important to know which engines are used in which country.” While Google reigns supreme in North America and Europe, local entities like Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China, and Naver in South Korea are more widely used in those regions. “How your customers will find you is by optimizing your content for those engines.”

And while Irene was reluctant to resort to generalizations, she began discussing the 80/20 rule, which is that 80% of a company’s revenue is attributed to 20% of the pages on your site. “Which are those pages?” Irene asked. “Having those analytics internally for your organization is really going to help drive the sales and engagement that you’re looking for.”

When it comes to localization, not all content has the same value and shouldn’t be treated the same way. After weighing up factors like visibility, shelf-life, and the risk of not translating a content asset, a business can make an informed decision about where to invest their resources — and adjust the dial between fully human-translated content for the top 20% (e.g., a home page or company blog), and machine translation for the rest.

Where communities meet composability

If there’s one thing I took away from the day, it is that there is a growing composable community, and I was able to see how customers, partners, and Contentful leaders envision the future of brand experiences. And composable is the way to make the vision a reality, melding creativity and innovation.

As Nilufar Fowler, EVP of Strategic Alliances at WPP put it earlier in the day: “Let’s not get too hung up on technology as being the driver of change. The technology is the enabler that allows us to tell and build these powerfully immersive brand stories.”

We’ve heard in London that brands are elevating digital experiences for the people who make them and the people who live them. And, as Nilufar said, “It's incredibly important to us to find the right technology partners to enable that really, really immersive storytelling.” 

Read the press release: WPP and Contentful partner to deliver composable and accessible brand experiences

Contentful empowers more people to compose experiences by inviting developers and creative storytellers alike to do what they do best. By flowing elements they’ve already created into new shapes and spaces, teams can respond in real-time, instantly amplifying across all media and channels. And because our composable content platform grows with you, you can start immediately and build on your wins. 

The greater the scale and complexity, the more we rise to the challenge to help you succeed. And that, if I’m not mistaken, is definitely a good story.

Bookmarks

Did we miss you in NYC, Paris and London? Not to worry, you can still join us for the next leg of the Storylines Tour. Between now and October, the team at Contentful will be visiting Silicon Valley and Berlin to meet with the brightest and the best practitioners in the new art of storytelling. 

Speakers and panelists will share their experiences and strategies on cutting through the static in an increasingly complex, dynamic, and multichannel landscape. Use the links below to explore these details, and save your spot now.

📍Silicon Valley, October 5

📍Berlin, October 19 

And for more inspiration on topics branching out from Storylines, check out these links:

• Storylines Tour NYC: The page-turning event, wrapped

• Storylines Tour Paris: Accelerating the narrative in the City of Light

• There’s something for everyone in the Contentful Spring Launch

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*Editor’s note: statements made by speakers and panelists have been edited for clarity.

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