Essentially, everybody is trying to tell a story these days. Unfortunately, what we’ve been finding is that the stories are getting increasingly prescribed. That’s true for media and brands. There’s a confidence that gets lost when the question of who owns the narrative comes up.
So, when we saw that the Hunger Games series was being made into a film, we decided it was the perfect property to track. Will the movie live up to the codes the book established? Will the die-hard readers find the movie believable? Will it bridge the gap to the movie-only goers? Will the movie-first viewers go back and read the books? What stories might evolve? What stories should evolve? Those answers lie in the surrounding cultures and looking at what real people are putting out there for us to find. That said, we set out on a mission to uncover the grammar and signs surrounding the Hunger Games before the movie released.
We started the process by using DiscoverText to source and analyze related social media. We filtered those findings through our Culture Mapping process.
We’ve found DiscoverText to be an engine that lets us get in and dig. It’s what you’re trained to do as a hunter of information. We don’t like walls. We don’t measure the loudest signals, only the most intriguing ones. Loud squelches the source behind the impact and you miss the kinetics of human nature.
You can read our initial Hunger Games hypothesis here (and below).
