Last year, Stash Media Founding Editor and Creative Director Stephen Price talked about the importance of ensuring that content triggers authentic and meaningful emotions to reach an audience of hyper-curators who have erected a wall against anything that smells like a marketing message.

This year, he explained how to actually create that kind of content by looking back over the past year at the best work published in Stash during the “State of Design” session at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2016.

In going through the top content of 2015, he identified an underlying theme: characters.

We begin compiling our own list of characters from the moment we are born, and they are “your most powerful and flexible marketing tools,” Price said.

Sports celebrities are characters that come prepacked, Price said. All too often brands depend on action montages, but good branding does so much more.

“They frame familiar personalities in fun, surprising way, and they pull it off by generating this complex web of emotions,” Price said.

Many characters are also heroes, Price said. They are judged by the magnitude of the challenges they overcome, but they don’t have to be epic.

“Some of the most heartfelt messages are delivered by much less daunting characters,” he said.

Price also suggests doubling down on the number of heroes in your spot to create buddies, a love triangle, a group, or a full ensemble.

“More characters on screen—more relationships on screen—means more intrinsic emotion that you can generate from that screen,” Price said.

And that creates more options for an audience to find characters they identify with and trust.

“One last strategy of pushing characters to the extreme is an excellent way to screw around with your audience’s sense of shock,” Price said.

“Powerful design triggers emotion,” Price said. “Whether you are aiming for sobs of pity or pee-your-pants hysteria, well-crafted characters will definitely get you there.”

[Photo courtesy of Image Group LA]

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