Data storytelling with popular culture moments
Part 2: How to make a PR data story with zero budget
Recap: The alchemy - story gold from base metals
In Part 1, we gave an overview of our three-part formula for PR data-storymaking, with the added alchemy of ‘Creative Force-Fitting’.
This is a focus on the first of these: The Popular Culture Moment
Planning for The Popular Culture Moment
There’s nothing new, in PR agencyland, about an events calendar, we’ve certainly used them in our account teams forever.
But they’re (usually) honed to the immediately-relevant events where the brand has an obvious vigilance and potential voice – like the EV Summit, if we’re working with EV brands. And The Budget, since there’s usually something in the tax announcements that’ll be meaningful.
Now though, we have a big planner for the agency – with everything. Okay, maybe not everything – just everything that we know the news media (in the broadest sense) is going to be talking and writing about – and that they’ll be hungry for more.
We try not to sort this list too much
- we’ll break it into months and quarters, because we plan our stories quarterly for retained clients.
- We might add some columns – but these are less about sorting and segregating, and more about highlighting gaps, so that we’ll keep an eye out for events that we should add. A bit like this:
- And we keep it ‘popular culture’ – mainstream media, broad audience interest events (account teams can still have their specific planners for niche verticals).
‘Exploding’ The Popular Culture Moment
So, at Bottle, our teams – each quarter – will be making at least six stories for a client’s brand. We call it ‘The Mix of Six’. The mix part is to deliberately vary tactics, media targets, and specific objectives (Fame story? Findability story?). We’ll say more about the Mix of Six principle in another post.
At least one will be using this data-story formula.
Choose a popular culture moment and make (force-fit) a connection. (More about the creative force-fitting bit, in Part 5.)
For now, let’s just show the potential connection-points in those – sometimes un-obvious – culture moments.
We practise ‘exploding’ the moment.
Take ‘Wimbledon’. It looks a bit like this, exploded: (tennis and Wimbledon are givens)
Now, if you’re planning for a health and nutrition brand, you’ve got some potential connections:
How much energy is expended in a match?
Which nutrients need replaced the most?
If you’re a waste recycling brand:
How many ‘new balls’ are there?
How are the old balls recycled?
How much fruit in those Pimms glasses gets thrown away?
And so on.
Just by exploding those topics that lie slightly below the surface of the Pop Culture moment, you start to see some possible connections (and some possible data-led ideas).
‘Exploding’ the topics can be a simple five minute team exercise – we’re not necessarily looking for subject expertise, we want topics that most news-reading audiences would recognise. Although it helps that the team have seen Wimbledon, at least.
It takes a bit of practise – but some rapid-fire facilitated sessions, here, help keep everyone’s eye-in.
And of course, there are aids like:
Media analysis tools, eg. Meltwater, Brandwatch, can help reveal media and social topics as ‘word clouds’
ChatGPT / other LLM AI tools can be prompted to suggest the topics
Next steps
Practice choosing un-obvious Pop Culture Moments for a brand-client, and exploding them, for the possible points of connection.
We’ve never, yet, drawn a blank.