From Storytelling To VR 'Storyliving': Future Marketing Communications

Google Zoo, Alphabet’s in-house creative think tank that provides value ad for brands and agencies by helping them devise creative ways to use Google products and new tech platforms, recently released a study with Google News Lab about how audiences experience VR. Read the full article

Virtual reality: The shift from storytelling to “storyliving” is real

A new Google News Lab ethnographic study — aimed at trying to better understand how people experience virtual reality in order to help inform the journalists who are building these experiences — finds that, despite the decades of hype surrounding this technology, it is, in fact, a significant shift in storytelling, one unlike any other medium. Read the full article

From Brand Storytelling to “Storyliving” Through VR

Google Zoo, Google’s creative think-tank, recently coined the term storyliving, which describes how the user interacts with a company’s brand or message through the experience they have while immersed in VR. It goes beyond traditional storytelling and captures the idea that engaging audience in VR requires interaction between the content and the user. Read the full article

Anthropological study by Google on our magic relationship with mobile devices

What is the emotional relationship people truly have with the mobile space and how they make meaning there? To answer this, Google conducted an anthropological study to gain a better understanding of how people feel about, relate to and find meaning in the mobile space, and how brands can engage their consumers in more emotionally resonant and impactful ways. Read the full article

Fridge magnets tell your story

Think refrigerator and you think of mayonnaise, leftover meat loaf and the nickname of a very large NFL lineman. Think refrigerator door and, if you are like many people, you think of a few small magnets holding up way too many snapshots…The cultural anthropologist Thomas Maschio sees much more.  Read the full article

The Consumer Anthropologist

Does your company need a staff anthropologist? Social perceptions do play into product preferences, and businesses need to pay attention to the part that ethnic and cultural identities play in the consumer experience. Focus groups, anthropologists argue, set an artificial stage, while ethnographic research reaches much deeper into the social fabric. If companies understand a group's social context, they can better understand and even predict their product needs and attitudes towards products in the future. Read the full article

“VR journalism should focus on storyliving, not storytelling” and other insights from Google’s new VR study

What makes VR compelling for viewers? Participation, embodiment, and “a sense of total freedom.” In the 36 ethnographic interviews that Google conducted for the report, it found that people are attracted to VR in large part because it exposes them to a wide varsity of new experiences and emotions, letting them create their own experiences, and draw their own conclusions about what they see. Read the full article

Mobile and...anthropology?

... as we talked with marketers and agencies, especially creative agency folks, we realized there was another important question to answer: why is the mobile space so powerful at a deeper, more emotional level? And how are people finding and making meaning there? Read the full article

Get to know the new mobile KPIs (Key Phone-love Indicators)

Three desires – quickness, connectedness, and identity — surfaced when Google recently hired an anthropologist to study a group of smartphone users and determine what place the devices hold in their lives. Read the full article

Why Your Mission Matters

Thomas Maschio, a social anthropologist who integrates his classical anthropological training with primary consumer research to solve today's marketing challenges for clients such as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson and Merck, notes that...Read the full article

Ford's Secret Weapon: Anthropology

Tom Maschio cut his academic anthropologic teeth studying tribes in Papua, New Guinea. He's written for scholarly journals and is an expert on cultural behavior in remote areas of the globe. But these days, he's just as likely to be studying the athletic apparel habits of Chicago youths, the refrigerators of suburban housewives or learning the underlying cultural forces that drive people to choose one car or another. Read the full article