Services + Methods
California Story Company provides editorial strategy and award-winning visual storytelling for select clients around the world in emerging technology, scientific research, finance, education and health care. We work with companies, organizations and foundations, and also in partnership with fellow creative agencies.
The California in our name signals our base in the San Francisco Bay Area but also our worldview — progressive, inclusive and future-facing. We believe our work demonstrates the ability of thoughtfully calibrated media to advance client objectives by emphasizing the ties and commonalities that bind us across cultures, disciplines and geographies.
The stories we tell are used to attract investment and drive capital campaigns, profile recipients of major awards, open conferences and corporate events, mark milestones, advance brand identity or underwrite editorial exploration of an important issue. Over 70 projects spanning 20 years, our work has excelled at engaging audiences by foregrounding the humanity of thought leaders, founders, inventors, tech pioneers and scientists while explaining fresh ideas with uncommon elegance and captivating grace.
As CEO, I am deeply involved as architect and overseer of all projects, blending years of national and global journalism experience and project leadership with an academic expertise in folklore, audience behavior and cultural connectivity.
We are a research-driven, measurement-powered collaborative that creates exceptional work via rigorous methodologies. California Story Company collaborators are alumni of the world's most recognizable companies and prestigious news organizations, and recipients of our craft's highest honors.
Here are the ways I and my collaborators can help: editorial strategy consulting, authentic storytelling workshops and full video production. I'll gladly detail these services further when we connect.
—John
Editorial strategy consulting: a culturally informed, data-driven approach to success
Character and story choice are fundamental to attracting and holding audiences in our frenetic, distracted world. Yet often, such critical decisions are given inadequate scrutiny, determined instead on hunches and whims, or made from an unwisely shallow pool of options. It results in projects that advance on suboptimal, forgettable premises that defy centuries of culture-spanning wisdom, and yields work plagued by flat narratives, leaden scripts and costly misdirection. Restive audiences move on, with a critical opportunity lost.
Instead, as viewers yearn for authenticity and relatability, the creative choices that power success are formed at the intersection of storytelling fundamentals, brand values and campaign objectives along with an understanding of the broader cultural landscape in which media will be received. I help clients take an analytical view by finding and championing characters who organically embody desired characteristics while meeting demands of the medium. The knowledge we create together is also broadly useful for other external and internal communications goals. And I explain findings and recommendations in ways that make sense in and beyond the C-suite.
If you need to swiftly find the best available story and character for a visual narrative, I can help provide options via a Character Olympiad and, if you lack an in-house team or established vendor, team with my collaborators to tell that story to great effect. My uniquely insightful Story Inventory digs deeper, helping frame the broader cultural or community context in which a target audience resides so that creative ideas are warmly received.
Here are details.
The Character Olympiad: Leverage 20 years of proprietary data to find authentic characters that cause audiences to act
To help find characters who meet immediate, time-critical marketing needs, I deploy a unique scoring matrix developed over 20 years of proprietary data. The process ranks a character's viability for visual storytelling via informal interviews across a series of critically important factors, yielding an overall best-of-10 score that moves story selection from a seemingly subjective exercise to the outcome of a deeply reasoned analysis.
Olympiad scores are derived from initial surveys, remote interviews and, time allowing, a follow-up site visit. The deliverable is an indexed digital report that provides actionable insight into available characters and story arcs that align with brand values and campaign objectives. Newly gathered data is weighed against similar research that has fueled more than 70 successful character-driven projects, allowing clear comparisons and numerical averages to point toward likely storytelling success.
Olympiads can be tailored to address project-specific budget and time constraints as well, pointing to stories that are also practically achievable in short time frames. Olympiads that weigh a limited number of possible characters can be created between two weeks to a month, with longer-term or ongoing consulting also available.
Beyond providing insight for visual narratives such as short films or photo essays, a Character Olympiad also unearths characters and story possibilities that can serve other communication needs, from blog posts to earned-media pitches and beyond. Prepare to be pleasantly surprised.
The Story Inventory: Reveal actionable insights that show how to connect with audiences in authentic ways
True, compelling narratives sit often just beyond our periphery, both within and beyond organizations. What stories exemplify the values of target audience? What resonates with one audience but not another? What opportunities to reflect connection and community are available by taking a broader view, yet might otherwise go overlooked?
A Story Inventory provides invaluable answers, creating a broad editorial roadmap with refreshing possibilities that surface characters and storylines that connect and activate audiences. It takes an anthropological approach to showcase possible connections with audiences in ways most analyses miss. I synthesize community history and demographics, scouting for cultural corollaries that often surface unexpected opportunities. I examine internal narratives, community perceptions and everyday rituals, all driven by the understanding that no two regions are identical and that senses of place powerfully inform how audiences receive information. An on-site visit, or visits to multiple locations, is central to the process.
The Story Inventory arrives as a digital report that helps clients place their unique narrative in a larger context, be it that of a community, a demographic or a targeted growth opportunity. Whether reaching internal or external audiences, be it targeting investors or advancing a reputation, a bounty of insights awaits. The Story Inventory also incorporates a more in-depth Character Olympiad, highlighting characters in alignment with objectives and story arcs that often unfurl over longer periods of time.
While some projects span wide geographies and take longer, a Story Inventory can often provide unique insight within six weeks.
And it makes specific recommendations — along with budget blueprints and timelines — for stories and characters that can turn what we've learned together into actionable campaigns, all within months.
A Story Inventory is especially useful for advance media campaign planning, rebrands, and for companies or institutions new to specific geographies, including international concerns new to the United States market.
Full video production: small teams, a journalistic mindset and uncommon results
Knowledge created by a Character Olympiad or Story Inventory can be put into action leveraging our talented group of collaborators — leading cinematographers, graphic artists, editors and composers whose pacesetting work reflects a reflexive rigor, everyday dedication and genuine empathy. Each project is staffed based on a project's specific editorial needs, dramatically reducing overhead and dedicating resources to create the best possible stories.
Acting on the knowledge we create together via Character Olympiads and Story Inventories, our production teams have created Emmy Award-winning web series and short films averaging 20 times more views than comparable media, opened major global events to rousing applause and spurred funding in investments and initiatives totaling into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Our techniques, derived of extensive experience at leading news organizations where time and resources are often suboptimal, yield tightly focused, expedient productions that create unusually resonant media that holds audiences and drives results. Via honest, thoughtful short films that leave memorable impressions, we turn groundbreaking technical ideas into mini-movies that captivate investors, power campaigns, open conferences and more.
Our work has yielded Emmy, ADDY, Davey, Dotcomm, Telly and other awards, while our collaborators have been honored with awards including Pulitzer Prizes and other pinnacle career honors.
Workshops and on-site coaching impart practical methods to connect with American audiences
I highly enjoy helping groups gain a deeper understanding of the roots of American storytelling — the pragmatic disposition of its audiences, the enduring themes that unite them across differences, and actionable steps to create media drenched in authenticity and truth.
I draw on my foundation as a writer and editor for leading news organizations — and my academic expertise in folklore, cultural anthropology and modern audience behavior — to provide insight that dives far deeper than trends or data sets. In a daylong interactive workshop, I blend a sense of specifically tailored regional history with the development of 20th century modes of communication, highlighting campaigns that succeeded by tapping into broad cultural zeitgeists and the optimism inherent to the American experience. Also, I share practical tips for marketing teams, in-house production groups and company leaders to reshape narratives with real, resonant voices that have long had a home in our national discourse and identity.
I’ve carried my message from North Dakota to New England and many stops in between, each time learning from the insightful groups who’ve invited me. I take joy in coaching in-house teams on specific projects or ways to improve their standard operations and can be placed on retainer to help nurture a campaign to a fantastic outcome.