Storytelling: a familiar story in an unfamiliar way

Reassessing just how yesterday’s events could be retold for a new, technology savvy audience, We realised that people were ready to experience the events of the Second World War as they would live news events today.

This unique take on storytelling surprised viewers, opening up new ways for people to interact with historical events, and blurring the lines between people’s lives today and those of the characters involved in the D-Day landings

Adaptive innovation

Innovation came through the re-purposing of an existing platform foundation - a new innovation built on top of an existing technology platform being used in a new way, effectively bringing to life heavily researched academic content with a real-time playback mechanic set against a timeline.

It was this timeline facility that allowed the platform to sync seamlessly with historical events, whilst generating and displaying a range of additional data, timelines and GPS mapping of historical archive material delivered in a multi-platform, real-time narrative allowed customers to explore not only the atomic piece of information, but how it related to events both before and after it.

In redefining the role for social media through multi-platform framework design, the storytelling scope of traditional broadcasting is now more expansive than ever before. For Channel 4, and the wider TV broadcasting industry, the possibilities now exist to extend the scope of content in a modern, deeply immersive and socially interactive way.

Given that this was a 24 hour campaign directed at channel 4’s small audience share, the program was hugely successful, attracted 100,000 unique website visitors - equal to 10% of total channel viewership.

And although 42,000 twitter followers within 24 hours was a major feat, the real success came in the platform’s power to evoke personal reactions from historical events as they played out in real time. People were moved to interact directly with social media platforms and begin adding their own experiences of war, their own ‘shoeboxes’, all of which grew timeline content.

These pictures, diaries, drawings and mementoes would connect their experiences of war with that of our characters. One man even felt it necessary to travel to France to put a poppy on the grave of one of the D-Day seven.