Bringing Insights to Life Through Creative Storytelling with Dan Parker-Smith

In this episode of the Greenbook Podcast, Karen Lynch sits down with Future List Honoree Dan Parker-Smith to explore how documentary filmmaking techniques can transform the way insights are communicated. As the co-founder of EXPLNERS, Dan shares how his background in film, music, and creative collaboration shaped his approach to making research findings more human, memorable, and actionable.

The conversation dives into the power of storytelling, audience-first thinking, and creating “rewatchable” insight deliverables that drive stakeholder engagement and activation. Dan also discusses why the insights industry can learn from creators, journalists, and filmmakers — and how stronger storytelling can help research make a bigger impact inside organizations.

Key Discussion Points:

• Why storytelling is essential for making insights memorable and actionable
• How documentary filmmaking techniques enhance insight communication
• The importance of designing research deliverables with the audience in mind
• Creating “wow moments” and rewatchable insight videos for stakeholders
• How collaboration and creative inspiration can elevate research outcomes

Resources & Links:

• EXPLNERS
• Greenbook Future List
• IIEX Europe Event

You can reach out to Dan Parker-Smith on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Dan Parker-Smith for being our guest. Thanks also to our production team and our editor at Big Bad Audio.

Transcript

Karen: Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Greenbook Podcast. I am Karen Lynch. Happy to be hosting today, and today I have the pleasure of interviewing another one of our Future List Honorees. If you’ve been listening to us for some time, you know that these are my favorite interviews to do. I love talking to our Future List Honorees because they just bring me so much joy and so much hope for what the future is bringing to us. These individuals bring a new lens to the work that we do, and Dan Parker-Smith is no exception. He is the creative director and filmmaker, a co-founder and video specialist of a company called EXPLNERS, which we’ll talk about momentarily. But really, what’s interesting is he began his career in insights almost by accident. He was a temp at a research agency before studying film production. He then kind of returned to the research world, but he built an unconventional career because he was in documentary filmmaking, and then he kind of went into research, and now he will tell us more about what he does, how he’s kind of pulled together this passion for video production in the work he’s doing. So, before I go any further because I want to have him unpack his interesting career, but first I want to say, Dan, welcome to the Greenbook Podcast. Congratulations on being a Future List Honorees. It’s so great to have you here. 

Dan: Thanks very much, Karen. Yeah, yeah, really excited to be part of the Future List and speak at IIEX. 

Karen: Oh, I know. So yeah, spoiler alert, everybody, this is coming out before IIEX Europe, and he will be on stage, so it’ll be a pleasure to have you there. And yeah, so this will give everybody a little bit of a kind of a taste of what you can expect, so I’m so glad to have you on the show before you get to take the stage there. So yeah, so let’s just take a pause, tell everybody a little bit more about yourself. That was a very brief introduction, Dan, so tell everybody a little bit more about yourself and the kind of work you’re doing today. 

Dan: Sure. So yeah, so I work, I guess, in insight storytelling specifically. So, the company that I co-founded, EXPLNERS, we make insight films. I guess they’re more of your less conventional kind of insight deliverables there to tell the story of the insights in a really rounded sort of way, pulling on inspiration from documentary and journalism and things like that. Yeah, but sorry, I’ve completely lost my train of thought [laugh]. 

Karen: Well, I think it’s a great time for us to take a pause because the name of your company is EXPLNERS, and before we got on, everybody, I was like, just, you know, just correct me if I’m wrong, but we pronounce your company EXPLNERS because there’s a few vowels missing right in the middle of. It’s E-X-P-L-N-E-R-S. And I’m tripping up on it, but it is EXPLNERS, right? So Dan, explain the vowels that are missing from your company name. It’s confusing me. 

Dan: So, yeah, we’ve had it—people have pronounced it everywhere you could possibly imagine, [laugh] but our intention was very much to, you know, have the pronunciation of EXPLNERS, but to remove the ‘a’ and the ‘i.’ We really wanted to lean into this idea of, like, human truths and stories that were really told in a really candid, personable way. So, although we’re not anti-AI, we certainly feel that there is a lot of space for storytelling without AI, I guess.

Karen: It’s such a timely—if you had seen the aha that I had when that happened in the five minutes before we went on camera—it’s such a timely time for that moment that we had. Like, of course you’re telling human stories at a time when AI is disrupting everything that we’re doing in insights. So, I even think just the naming of your company is brilliant, so I’m glad we’re having this conversation. So, we’ll dig more into that, and kind of some of the importance of the work that you’re doing, but first take me back a little bit about some of these steps along the way in your career journey, milestones that brought you to the founding of the company, for example.

Dan: Yeah, so I think for me, I’ve always been really interested in documentaries. It’s always been, like, a massive influence on me, particularly within the arts, but also just in general. If there’s a good story there, I’m on board. And I really felt like working in research, that there was this really—there’s always, like, a really good story somewhere; it’s just finding it. And usually specifically within video, you know, say you do like an ethnography project, you’ve got lots of really great footage, and it tends to be that the focus is very much on highlighting that method or that idea rather than, oh, here’s the thing that’s going to make someone, you know, nudge their friend in the pub and say, “I’ve seen a really cool thing,” or, “I’ve got a really good insight.” So, I’ve always had that in the back of my head, really like, to pull on those more journalistic styles, specifically thinking about, like, Vox and those, like, online channels. I think they do it really well. I’ve always been obsessed with videos where they say, like, “Why we say ‘OK,’” and things like that. Just really sort of like, oh, intriguing things. And you know, we do these really great insight projects, and I felt like there was a lot of transfer there. So, basically EXPLNERS kind of came around with meeting other people, other independents in the industry who had similar kind of lightbulb moments, but weren’t necessarily looking at it from a video lens. So, I co-founded the business with a copywriter and a strategist, and the idea was that insights are often left in a top drawer. Let’s get them out there, and so I think there’s a lot of pull there and a lot of room to do more cool stuff [laugh].

Karen: And it wasn’t the first time you had done this, so you have an entrepreneurial spirit, right? You’ve, in the past, along the way, you had started a different business. So, what do you think it is about you that, kind of, spurred you on to not just found one business in the past, but then find another—you know, become another co-founder once again. What spurs you on?

Dan: I really like to challenge myself, which sounds like such a cliche answer, but I also am very interested with doing new things. I always like to sort of push myself out there, and I think I just do that in general. I’m just a massive sort of… I’m going to give this a go. I was in a musical, like, last month, and I’d never been in a musical before. And the people in the society basically said to me, “Why have you joined us?” And I just thought, “I just want to do it [laugh]. I just think it will be fun.” So, I think that I’ve always been a little bit like that, and specifically the only reason really EXPLNERS kind of came around was purely because I had the idea of going, “We should make more videos like this. I’m going to go and do it [laugh].”

Karen: Mmm, cool.

Dan: And that was kind of what we did. We made, like, almost like a proof of concept, and then pitched it to clients.

Karen: You know, you mentioned being in a musical, and one of the things that I learned about you when I was reading about you was that music has always been a part of your life. So, it’s interesting. First musical, yet you have been musical, writing songs, playing in bands, collaborating with other musicians, and I’m wondering about that creative aspect of your life. What are some of the, kind of, facets about being a creative individual that you’ve brought into life as an insights professional? Because sometimes those two things don’t go hand-in-hand, right? There’s a lot of insights professionals who are very analytical, spend a lot of time looking at data, who are charged with, you know, OKRs and KPIs, and you know NPR, and you know all of these, you know, kind of hard metrics. So, what do you think the creative side of you has brought to the work that you do?

Dan: I think there’s—I think what really draws me to a lot of those things that you mentioned about music and the arts in general is around connection and around—it’s a bit of a, I guess it’s a bit of a, not an overused word, but it’s used a lot—storytelling. Whether the format is visual or audio or anything, I think that people crave connection, and people crave that emotional pull to what the story is. And I think that, regardless of the project that you’re doing, that it’s in there; it’s up to us to find it. So, I think, again, like I said before, I think I’m just that sort of person that’s very—I like a lot of self-discovery, and I think that then that translates into what I do because it comes for a very internal motivation of, I want to discover here, I want to try this. So, for me, the musical stuff really transfers really easily over to the work that I do because it’s all about connection and collaboration, you know? You know, the theater is a really good example for this. You can’t… that is not a solo project. That is [laugh] not a solo project that creates. There’s so much goes into that to create what it is, and I think that if we can all be a bit more like that, I think that it, it’s not about being precious about this, is my thing, or I did this bit. I think that the whole is important rather than some of the parts, I think.

Karen: Yeah, and that feels very—again, what I’ve learned about you is that feels very much on brand. You’ve talked about, you know, you’re not one to keep knowledge to yourself. You’re one who, kind of, believes in sharing what you’ve learned. You want um… you kind of want to share generously. That again, this is what I’ve learned. And I think that I’d love to know, there are some people that feel like some of what they do is proprietary, of course, findings are proprietary, but you seem to have a different spirit. You seem to have a generous soul when it comes to that. Tell me why that feels important to you. Is it just from your collaborative background working with other musicians, or is it something else? Like, why does it feel important that you share a kind of knowledge and skills and perspective with others?

Dan: There’s a really good book called Show Your Work! By Austin Kleon, and he sort of outlines these ten, sort of, principles, I guess, around this idea of why you can grow as an artist if you show your work, and it’s all about thinking about process over product. And there’s some really great sort of things in the book, but I took a lot from it, in the sense of like… that allows you as an individual to grow as well because you can learn so much from others, in the sense of, like, how they approach things. Again, I think there’s a lot of, particularly like in business, there’s a lot of focus on the end, the end product, or where we’re going, but the journey is, like, massive, and I think that’s even more important within research because there’s so much discovery to be done. And I think if you can show you’re working and be open and not defend the niche and be open to collaboration, it’s amazing how many different viewpoints that you get from people along that way, not just the respondents and the people that we’re actually trying to, you know, understand, but also just each other and our different, you know, approaches.

Karen: It’s such a fit with what we do at IIEX, so I’m really excited to have you in the mix in Europe because, you know, we have that we have the spirit there of, you know, the Insights Innovation Exchange, that’s the acronym that started IIEX, which is let’s come together and collaborate and share information; that’s what drives innovation, that’s what moves us forward into the future of insights, is that you know kind of when synopses are firing and you know we’re all going in the same direction, then which is onwards to the future. So, I’m really excited for you to be there and to be sharing, but then also to be collaborating with all the others there. I think there’s something magical that happens, so we share that mindset and I’m very excited about that. I think you know, I could expand upon it, but… but I’m going to ask you and give you kind of a moment to expand upon it. In your opinion, what do you think happens to the quality of the research when that sort of thinking happens, or when that sort of collaboration happens?

Dan: I think sometimes we can get stuck in a bit of a bubble, and this kind of follows on, I guess, from what we were just saying a minute ago, but I think we sometimes can end up trapping ourselves in how we communicate, and we can almost build a bit of a fence around that mentally, and I think it can be quite hard to break out of. I remember a colleague of mine told me an anecdote once that was like, that he was in a presentation and someone was talking about drinking water. And they felt like they had to, because it was a presentation, and it was a research debrief, they had to—it had to be this—it had to have some status to it. And they’d called drinking water something like ‘hydro consumption.’ And it was like, just say drinking water. It’s so unnecessary. And what I’m saying is, it’s almost, like, laughable that we feel like sometimes we have to almost confuse the way that we communicate, when often a lot of that really candid communication, and almost to the point, but again, I don’t want to oversimplify, is overlooked in this pursuit of… I don’t know, this… a certain way of working.

Karen: Yeah.

Dan: So, I think when… you collaborate more, you can, you know, pop the bubble. I know I used a fence metaphor before, but now we’re using a bubble metaphor [laugh]. But yeah, I think that allows you to be more open. I think the more people you work with the better. I think it allows you to be—it allows you to grow, but I think it allows the work to breathe, and you know, especially with more remote working, and you know, the way the world is going, I guess, I think that’s even more important than ever, trying to really understand the audience as well, and having multiple perspectives gets you to that point.

Karen: Yeah. I love the idea of allowing the work to breathe, and I want to talk about, kind of, again, the output of the work, right, because to me it feels like when you think about living, breathing work, and then you think about kind of the output of that work and how you communicate that work, which is what video does, right? You’re making an insight story watchable. Talk to me a little bit about how, then, how that then lands with the audience, right? And the audience in this case would be stakeholders, would be client teams. What have you seen… what have you seen happen when people are seeing insights delivered in a documentary-style way?

Dan: I think that you know historically we’ve seen a lot of video in research. You know, when I was… before I went and founded a company, ethno is, like, massive. Ethnography. It was like, clients really want to see people, so let’s get people on the screen. And it was all about going and filming, and that was like really a bit of a hot thing because that really elevated the work, that really allowed it to have that connection with people, which is obviously that work is still going on, still really important, and again, now more than ever. But I almost feel like there’s another element of that, which is that there’s a connection there to… knowing the full story. Those deliverables are great, but they’re often part of the package, I guess, of a debrief, or of a conversation or a workshop or something, whereas I think a documentary is almost more self-contained in the sense that if you’re pulling on different elements and they come together, it allows you to bring in cultural references and things like that. I often think that, you know, our work doesn’t happen in a bubble; it happens in the real world, and then we, you know, we bring it in, and we do things with it. So, to kind of make it feel like a bubble is… inauthentic. I feel like we should be more open to this idea of there’s lots of threads here, and we have to tie them together. So, what we do with our videos is very much come at it from that point of view. So, we’ll include external references that I think if you were doing a traditional report, like a PowerPoint or something, you might shy away from because you might think, “Oh well, I didn’t do that bit of it, so I can’t possibly include it.” But actually that’s where so much color and light, and again, to use the breathing sort of work, breathing thing, that’s where that comes in as well. And so, I think it’s the video—yeah, we do make videos—but it’s the explanation, it’s the storytelling. That’s the breath.

Karen: It’s so interesting. So, you know—you may not know this about me—so I had a—many of our listeners do, and I feel like I say this on so many episodes, so I’m sorry to everybody listening that you’ve heard this before, and you’ve probably heard this project before me, explain it—but I had a long career as a qualitative researcher and ethnography was one of my bread-and-butter methodologies. I’ve done a lot of them, and one of my favorites was back-of-the-house at restaurants ethnography. And we were there for an innovation project, and so we were in the back of the house with videographer, kind of, with me, videotaping creative solutions in the back of the house. And so, we were finding how chefs were solving their problems back there. When things would go terribly wrong in the kitchen, how were they, you know, how were they fixing, you know, whether it was packaging or cooking? Anyway, as you can just imagine, the back of the house of a restaurant. And you know, and this was way before The Bear [laugh]. But now I’m watching The Bear, and I’m thinking, oh my gosh. Like, if only, you know, that show had come out when I was doing that work. There was such a great opportunity for the post-production video that we had created to be mixed with, you know, with television genius at the same time. But the post-production effort took almost as long as the ethnography effort itself, which was a very long process because there was so much to it. And I just remembered thinking—and we worked with a post-production editor—it took a lot. It was a lot. It was a huge project, and I just remembered thinking that, thank God we did that. Thank goodness we… kind of, began the project with the end in mind, knowing that we needed an incredible sizzle reel at the very end of this because we had to bring it to life. It was, you know, essential. And I feel bad for the ethnographies I had done before that project, right, because if you don’t have the video to just kind of bring to life the story of what you see when you’re out there, it will never be communicated in the same way. So, I really appreciate what you’re doing because to make it come alive is really something very, very different. Anyway, so I’m curious as to how you find narratives when you’re doing all of that because it is not a small thing. It’s an incredible amount of work, it’s an incredible amount of hours, it is very expensive when you add up all those hours, [laugh] so you know, are there tips, are there lessons learned, are there things that you can say to people who are out there saying, how in the world can we do this, when it just, it seems, like, an impossible feat for researchers who don’t have maybe the skill set you have as a documentary researcher as well?

Dan: Yeah, sure. I always think—and this is literally the first thing that we ask clients—audience is massive. Like, who’s the audience? Who’s watching this video? Because the worst point you can start from is, oh, it’s everyone. It’s everyone that could possibly watch the video. And it’s like, mmm… that’s going to make it really challenging. I think, you know, and it’s the same with it, with any piece of work, really, or any creative work. If you try and make something for everyone, it ends up being for no one because you just don’t refine. You can’t. So, the first thing we, sort of, start with is, who’s this for, and why? And why should they pay attention, and what’s going to make them pay attention? And really sort of understanding that audience, so we can work out how best to communicate with them, I think that’s, like, before you even pick up, you know, any other tools or anything that you could possibly do within whatever niche you’re doing. That would be, like, my advice, [unintelligible 00:22:23].

Karen: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk also a little bit about, you know, finding the story. Because often when you set out to do this work, you don’t know what the story is going to be, right? With all insights work, you don’t really know where you’re going to go. You know what the questions you want to answer, you know what the research objectives are, you know what the business questions are, but you don’t necessarily know what the story is, so how do you go about kind of finding those moments? Do you have any kind of wisdom? Because even as, again, documentary filmmaker, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to—you might be filming for hours and hours until you find it, right? So, how does that often pan out?

Dan: Well, you know, some of the work we do is exploratory, I guess, in that sense, and you know, you might go out and do some filming, but some of it is, you know, we’ll make animation explainers, or it’s a fusing of lots of different things, so it’s like there’s some respondent footage in there, but then there’s also parts from some data tables, or there’s a bit of everything. So, I guess what I’m saying is it’s even more complicated because you’re not just even looking at one thing like, oh, we have to go through ten hours of footage, it’s like, well, there’s a report, and there’s some footage, and there’s this, and Steve in the insight department also wants this in there. So, story is a challenge. But I think again, if audience is part one, part two is story [laugh]. Pin that down before you do anything else. You know, almost like a lot of the work we do is post-debrief, almost sometimes, as well. It’s kind of like, we’ve done the work, and we’ve done all of these things. These are the actions, and this is why we’re doing those actions. So, it allows us to have a bit more of a… I guess, a moment to say… what’s the why, but also why is it going to be helpful to the client for this message to go out there. You know, do they want to say what we found out all of this and this is the decision we’re making and this is why, or is it the message itself? We’ll do things like segmentation pieces, where rather than a piece that just goes, here are our five segments, it’s more like segment one is so important, and this is why. And so, I think it’s kind of flipping it on its head rather than your traditional kind of exploratory story. It doesn’t have to be that I think those are great, but I think also the narrative can be different. We can flip on its head. We can almost have the ‘so what’ right up front. So, yeah.

Karen: In many projects, there’s so much effort spent on, you know, kind of understanding the study, and then on the field work, and then, you know, output is often rushed through, like, let’s get the output, let’s get the output, but I’m sitting here thinking, like, you’re really handling the output with a lot of tender love and care, right? This, the output becomes precious, and I really love that. I kind of appreciate that, whether you’re… I think, again, something I read was you’re building these wow moments. You mentioned animation elements. You’ve talked about putting physical objects or using physical objects or visual metaphors. You’ve talked about, you know, putting Lego figures in, which—you know, another fun fact I used to facilitate Lego series plays, so I have a lot of fun with Lego bricks myself—but you know, I understand kind of using visuals to communicate, but it seems, like, very mindful, deliberate storytelling is built in, which, again, takes some time and deliberate decision-making on the back end, which I think a lot of people will would say, “I don’t have time for that.” How do you manage that tension of—how do you manage that? Because I imagine some people are, like, I don’t know, there’s this whole post-production side of what you do, where I’m sure there’s tension to get it done fast, and yet I imagine there’s a lot of care that you’re putting into a deliverable. Talk to me about that.

Dan: Oh, yeah. Well, there’s a lot there to—

Karen: Yeah. To unpack. I know.

Dan: —speak about and unpack.

Karen: Go right ahead, Dan.

Dan: Just trying to jump straight in, I think. Well, the thing is, it’s not for every project. Having that approach, whether it be me or whoever, having an approach that requires that kind of thinking is just not for every research project. I guess, a second build on that point is expectations. I think it’s just about being clear. I think if you can just say, “This is how we would do it,” or, “This is how long it might take,” I think people can build up for that. The tension comes when you know someone, whether it be someone in the client side or someone in the agency side or someone in the process, goes, “This would be really good for this date, and it’s in two weeks.” There is no way we have the time to do that how we want to do it. That’s when it becomes a challenge because then you either have to say, “Well, it can’t be done,” or, “Oh, that’s going to mean we have to compromise.” And again, that comes back down to expectations. I think, when it is the right fit, and it, and expectations are there, and everyone’s kind of on the same page, I think it’s just about being clear from the beginning about how we—I mean, I can obviously only speak for from personal experience—how we can get involved and how best to get involved. Thinking about activation and how you’re going to land the message—because ultimately that’s what we use video for—from as early a stage as possible, just gives you so much more runway to really think about how then it’s going to land in the business rather than getting halfway through the qual depths and going, “This would be really good if we filmed these.” [laugh]. It’s kind of just almost going, where do I want to be, you know? If a project is a plane and I’m taking off, where am I going? And I think, again, another buzzword, activation, is just part of that, and it’s really trying to be mindful of, you know, sometimes projects are a huge investment for a business. They’re not just, like, quick turnaround stuff, they’re like massive strategic pieces that are going to have a big impact and they’re going to sit around for a long time. You know, it’s not just about making a video that’s watchable, it’s about making a video that’s rewatchable. Like, if someone’s going to spend a lot of money on it, well, let’s make it re-rewatchable [laugh]. That’s what we’re always thinking about, really. So, I think it also—the final, I guess, point to that is value. Yeah, video, or any kind of, like, I guess, creative deliverables can cost a lot of money, but I think it comes back down to value. I think if you get a lot of value out of it, then the money seems relative to what you get. And I think that I would say, all video is not created equally, in the same way that all reports are not created equally, I think. But that is again another challenge that we sometimes face, which is that if clients have had different expectations of a format, um, for us, you know, video is just the box that good stuff goes in; it’s not the thing that you’d necessarily ask for, but you might think about, like, oh, I really want a report, but you wouldn’t pay for a PowerPoint. You’re paying for the work. So—

Karen: Yeah, yeah.

Dan: If that makes sense [laugh].

Karen: No, it does. And… it’s funny. I was like, “Oh, I really want to ask him about activation,” because it is kind of jargony, buzzwordy. And I thought I wanted to ask you more about activation, but then you talked about wanting a video to be re-watchable, and I’m like, “That is what I really want to ask you about.” Because that would be a goal, right? I’d want a stakeholder to rewatch it. And I think… if I’m a director and I’m making a movie, of course I would want my audience to rewatch it. I’d want them to watch it again and again and again. What are some elements of, kind of, an insights video project that makes something rewatchable for a stakeholder? Maybe that’s a really hard answer on the spot. It’s not in our brief at all. Like, you—

Dan: No, it’s all good.

Karen: —didn’t see that one coming, but are they top-of-mind for you, like, something that when you’re working on it, you’re like, I want this to be rewatchable, so therefore it must do these things.

Dan: Well. I guess I could summarize it as some do’s and don’ts from my personal experience [laugh].

Karen: Great, thank you [laugh].

Dan: I think we like to think about wow moments in that video, which I think you mentioned earlier, you know? They might be also—you might characterize them as, like, lightbulb moments, you know, in a debrief, but wow moments of like, oh, that’s cool, is also kind of in there, like, oh, visually that’s really striking. We’ll do things like, you know, you mentioned before that we’ll play with visual metaphors or ideas or we’ll bring out Lego characters, but, like, you know, we did the segmentation video and we used Lego characters to, sort of, represent, like, families. That is almost like a bit of a wow moment, in the sense of, like, the client’s not going to expect that. So, I think there is a little bit of, like, an expectation gap and an element of that. So, I think if you can surprise people, that’s a bit of a wow moment, and a bit of a… there’s also a bit of a, I guess, a visual marker there, where if you can make something that clients will refer to it as that, it’ll stick in their brain. For example, the Lego video that we made, the client has specifically said people refer to it as ‘The Lego Video,’ and therefore the insight is carried within that because they’re watching it because they enjoy it, and they’re getting something from it. I think, as well, there’s something around depth, where—and then maybe this comes into a bit of the don’ts—it’s a bit hard to describe, but we’ll sort of try and think of, we’ll try and plan a video so that it feels rewatchable and that every time that you rewatch it, there’s more depth, or you’re spotting something that you haven’t seen before, which is how you would maybe characterize your favorite movie or a TV show. You might go, “Oh, I missed that time around.” I think a don’t, on the flip side, that maybe I’ve seen some videos do—and also probably myself at one point—is it’s the other way around. It’s overload, it’s like, “Oh, I feel like all of these things have to be in there because I couldn’t possibly—the client isn’t possibly going to be happy unless I talk about everything.” And therefore it goes back to what I said before, if you’re trying to serve everything and everyone, you serve no one because, you know, like, it’s like the vox pop videos that you get where the person speaking on screen, and then there’s a bit of space around the side, so someone inevitably says, “Let’s have their name on there,” and then someone says, “Let’s have their age on there,” and then someone says, “Let’s have their segment name on there.” “Oh, and then we need the country that they’re from.” “Oh, and we also need the [colors 00:34:11] of that segment.” And before you know it, it’s just this: you hit play, and it’s like, “Whoa, so much is happening right now. [laugh]. I can’t even think about what they’re saying.” So, I think there’s a bit of a do’s and don’ts there around visuals specifically within video, but it really just boils down to story as well, and it being interesting, you know? It being something that people think if this wasn’t work related, if this was, like, something that I genuinely found interesting, I would share this with my friend on WhatsApp. I love all of those Vox videos that are, like, again, I mentioned the one before, “Why we say ‘OK.’” That’s just interesting. That’s just, you know, like that’s just, like, “Oh, that’s cool. I’ll share that with my friend.” And I would rewatch that if I hadn’t seen it in six months, and I was like, “Wait, there was something that was good in that video, what was it? I’ll put it back on.” Because the rewatchable element is in the interest, not in the, I guess, the data, and sometimes videos can be a little bit like, again, it’s about the method or it’s about the facts. That stuff will come with a good narrative that’s, like, this unique, that’s, like, the sidecar. Don’t think about the sidecar too much [laugh].

Karen: Yeah, yeah, I love it, Dan. It’s so interesting. And again, like, I, you know, I kind of want to wrap, which you’re doing so brilliantly, leading to this place, is like, you know, what would be the one thing that an insights professional could learn from creators or journalists or filmmakers, people who are—or musicians—you know, people who are in these other spaces, which, you know, you kind of straddle both worlds, right, and I’m thinking, like, directors, or, you know, people who live in these other worlds, what could the majority of insights professionals who don’t, what could they learn from individuals like that, who see things very differently?

Dan: I think, well, to be honest, this is kind of what I want to speak about at IIEX, which is, you know, I won’t spoil it, but basically, one of the takeaways that I want to sort of have from my IIEX talk is that, you know, inspiration for brilliant storytelling is all around us, you just have to look for it. You just have to go and find it. And everyone’s own personal experiences to that, and the ways that they work, and again, going back to what was talking about collaboration at the beginning, that all folds in, and there’s so much potential for that. It’s just about boiling it down and really thinking about how you communicate, how other people communicate. Who’s the audience for the piece? All of these things are just, you know, often not considered as much as they could be. I don’t think it’s necessarily that people are doing things wrong at the moment; I think it’s that there’s so much runway to do this a million times better, and I think that other sectors are leaning in that way, and research is just a little bit behind. You know, we all do really great work, where we go and speak to people, or we look at all of this wealth of data, and we pore over it, that I think that when it comes to talking about it and sharing it with clients, or you know peers, we obsess over the details because we love the details, and we really want to, you know, talk about the method and talk about all of that we forget that there’s really good stories in there, and those stories are what’s going to land with the people that need them to make change. Because ultimately that’s why we’re doing it, isn’t it? You know, we do this work so that we can understand things, so that then we can adapt, and we can change things, and we can do that to essentially just make the world a better place. Not to be all big picture for a second, but yeah. So, getting that message across to the right people is just a bit of a, you know, it’s a loose chain at the moment, at least a loose link in the chain at the moment. If that could be stronger, we’re on to a winner [laugh].

Karen: Oh, my gosh. And that right there is how, you know, we wrap an episode, Dan. That is genius. This is why I love these episodes with Future List Honorees. There’s a reason why you end up at the top of the list of all the applicants, because you truly are representative of what’s great about our industry right now. So, thank you so much.

Dan: Thank you.

Karen: Before we wrap, is there anything you wish we had talked about that we didn’t get to in this episode?

Dan: Ah… I don’t know, maybe we could have talked about Stephen Sondheim for a bit, but—[laugh]—no, nothing specifically about research. [laugh].

Karen: I love that. I’m going to get to meet you in person in Amsterdam in just a few weeks. I’m looking forward to your talk. For those of you who are listening to this in advance of that, we’ll have the registration code in the show notes. Dan, I want to thank you so much for joining us for this episode. I want to thank, you know, all of our listeners because without you, we would, you know, not be able to bring this to everybody week after week. We want to thank Big Bad Audio for cleaning us up as you do. Thank you for making us sound so streamlined week after week. We appreciate you and Brigette for the work that you’re doing producing. We appreciate you, we appreciate you, Dan, and we’ll see you next time on the Greenbook Podcast. Take care, everyone.