The Paris Olympics opening ceremony: how to avoid content that is memorable for the wrong reasons

In today’s crowded world, full of noise, opinions and increasing channels to express them on, content needs to stick in people’s minds, otherwise organisations have no hope of influencing thoughts or behaviour.

It’s fair to say that the Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony was memorable - for all the wrong reasons and here’s why.

Writers and academics Chip and Dan Heath have studied why some things stick in our memories and why other ideas just go in one ear and out the other. In their book “Made to Stick”, they list six ways to make your ideas more memorable with the helpful acronym SUCCESs. So let’s use this as the framework to explore the ill-fated opening ceremony in beautiful Paris.

S is for Simple: Simple ideas are more likely to stick with us than complex ideas – one of the reasons many of us can still recall advertising slogans from our childhood.?

Well let’s be honest, Paris’ opening ceremony was anything but simple. In fact its content was based on so many assumptions that it lost many people who viewed it, and few managed to last the whole performance. It seemed chaotic, didn’t hang together, and worse still those assumptions became gaps in the audience’s minds that they filled with their own interpretations, which didn’t work out well for the organisers. Suddenly the Feast of the Gods became an abomination of the Last Supper and Christians worldwide were up in arms, with one Olympic advertiser immediately publicly cancelling its connection to the Games.

U is for Unexpected: We’re all guilty of having fixed ideas about topics and changing people’s minds is tough. Finding something unexpected about a topic can help people to think again. That’s the power of story-telling.?

The real stories of the Paris Olympics were never going to be an American and a Canadian singing at the French opening ceremony, as odd as that was, or a faceless rider (which many thought looked like a rip-off of Assassin’s Creed, again, a bit odd).?

The sequence with James Bond and the Queen in the London Olympics opening ceremony is a great example of something both highly unexpected and beautifully simple that everyone understood the magnitude of this unique piece of storytelling.?

C is for Concrete: it’s hard to grapple with abstract ideas or figures, particularly when they? are unfamiliar to us. If we can connect them with a familiar visual, it can help people to retain the concept as a mental picture. ‘An area the size of Norfolk’ has been affected by flooding is much more memorable than ‘5000 square kilometres’.?

The Paris Games Organisers simply did not play to their strengths - surely they could have mined the music of Les Mis or the history of French fashion for more concrete evidence of French brilliance. Danny Boyle’s historical storytelling, including the world renowned NHS and the Spice Girls, was epic.?

C is Credible: Using outside endorsement can increase the credibility of your assertions. The French Games organisers had the credibility of the Olympics, and Paris is beloved by many around the world, particularly Americans. It was a bold move to conduct the ceremony along the dirty Seine. And yet it came off as more “cost-saving” than “memory-making” - a complete “own goal” and not the magic that could boost the French tourist industry. It does still have the accolade of being the most watched ceremony since London in 2012, with 28 million people tuning in.

E is for Emotions: Mother Teresa once said, “if I look at the mass I will not act, if I look at? the one I will”. We all find it difficult to connect emotionally to huge problems but if? we reduce it to a single human story, it starts to make sense. Charities often use this? approach, telling compelling stories of a family affected by cancer, or a community? impacted by climate change.?

The athlete stories have now begun to emerge from the Paris Games, like the incredible specialism of the US male pommel horse athlete Stephen Nedoroscik and the quirkiness of Snoop Dogg trying his hand at commentating a Badminton rally. These individuals have captured the public’s imagination in a way that the opening ceremony simply didn’t.

S is for Stories: It seems that we are hard-wired to remember material when it’s presented to us in a story format, as incredible and quirky individuals like Stephen show. The storytelling was all wrong during the opening ceremony. Few of us learned anything about Paris, many were confused, and found themselves questioning what just happened? A lot of work will have gone into planning this event, that ultimately missed its mark, and on a global stage.

Sometimes we might worry about expressing important or serious ideas in a ‘lively’ format, but the more important your idea, the more it deserves to be presented in a memorable and impactful way.

The SUCCESs acronym helps us work through ways to do this and then we always need to pause, step back, and look again at the ‘Big Picture’. We want content to stick in people’s minds for the right reasons - sadly, not like the Paris Olympics Games opening ceremony.