Interactive storytelling is a powerful tool for brands, but the rise in interactive storytelling has actually been led by the media, including by some long-standing outlets that may surprise you. There’s no better way to inspire your own content than by taking a look at great examples, so today we’re sharing some of the best unbranded interactive content we have come across. Which examples are your favorites?
In December 2012, The New York Times published Snow Fall, an interactive story involving video and interactive graphics, launching a trend toward more immersive content in news. From this, it became more common for stories to include elements such as parallax scrolling, embedded video and interactive data visualizations. The piece, which covered the February 2012 Tunnel Creek Avalanche in Washington state, set records for The Times in terms of the amount of time digital readers spent engaged with the story. Since then, The Times has published a variety of immersive and interactive pieces, many of which can be seen in their 2013 and 2014 reviews of interactive storytelling.
What can content marketers learn from this? The New York Times has a strategy for their interactive and immersive content. They know that interactive and immersive content creates something that can only be experienced online, a departure from their longstanding print paper. As such, The Times is in fact using interactive content to build their own brand: that of a news organization that remains a global leader, even as the market moves away from their traditional product.
B2B marketers, take note. First of all, choose the type of material that you build into interactive content carefully. Interactive storytelling offers opportunities to engage the reader far beyond a more static type of content, so it’s not worth spending your resources to do so with something that could just as easily be communicated in plain text. The Times creates immersive experiences for major stories where maps, video or other multimedia elements add to the storytelling. They aren’t spending their resources to report on mundane, everyday occurrences in interactive formats.
Interactive data visualizations are a particular favorite of NPR’s Planet Money economy team, which has run them on topics including working hours by industry and how automation will create and destroy jobs. In Planet Money’s visualizations, site visitors can scroll over graphs to explore the data and get more information about specific groups, or choose options from drop-down menus to focus in on particular data segments.
What could you learn from this to enrich your marketing and content strategy? Planet Money’s visualizations successfully combine two of our favorite things at Movéo: interactive content and data. Successful businesses are data-driven, and to win contracts, B2B organizations have to show how they can make a meaningful impact on some aspect of the client’s work. Consider how interactive data visualizations could transform your research reports, turning dry statistics into a powerful call to action.
Next time you read the news, keep an eye out for great examples of interactive storytelling.
For other ideas to help your marketing team keep up with the rapid pace of change in digital, give us a call to discuss the digital solutions that best fit your needs.
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