How To Leverage The Familiar To Convey A New Idea

Approach and an example

You occasionally need to convey a compelling message to educate, inspire, or inform your audience, right?

A simple, fun way to do this is to frame familiar content into your story to lighten up your message and make it more memorable.

This approach is not new and is part of the “Visual Accessory” category of leveraging viral memes and cartoons to enhance business presentations, eBooks, white papers, social media, etc.

Let’s take a look at an example that goes beyond a simple meme-smacking into your content.

Familiar content

I used the above video taken from 1964’s “The Brain Center at Whipple's" episode 153 of the classic Twilight Zone TV series.

The small video is intentional.

Things that look small appear to be located far in the distance. Here of course we’re talking about time distance.

I needed it for a story I did about the explosion of AI to demonstrate the timeless battle between positive vs. alarmist camps.

Framing

My framing approach took into account the target platform.

I used this video at 1:23 minutes in length as part of a textual story, like in this newsletter.

Wait! There's much more...

To see the video in action and the rest of the tactics I used, click here.

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