Higher Ed Storytelling University

00;00;00;09 - 00;00;24;04
John Azoni
My guest today is Tony Sheridan. Tony is an Irishman in the desert, which we'll get more into. And he is the marketing and communications manager working at Khowst in Saudi Arabia for the last four years. He has over 15 years of experience working in higher education. His work has won awards all over the world, and he is a regular keynote and chair of conferences globally.

00;00;24;23 - 00;00;25;26
John Azoni
Tony, welcome to the podcast.

00;00;26;16 - 00;00;42;21
Tony Sheridan
Thanks for having me, John. I am a big, big fan of yours. Love what you do. It's so aligned to the way I think and I learn so much from your newsletter. From this podcast. So fine by saying no and delighted.

00;00;42;21 - 00;00;58;18
John Azoni
Oh. Well, the feeling is mutual. I've seen you around LinkedIn a lot and I feel like I've seen you in chats and conferences too. You know, in the chat section. So it's good to finally get you on here. Tell me something that people would be surprised to know about you.

00;00;59;11 - 00;01;25;16
Tony Sheridan
Well, I think one thing that surprises people, given that I lead like big marketing and communications campaigns, is that my undergraduate degree was in woodwork teaching. So I did a joint bachelor's of technology and education. And even, you know, more surprising is I never wanted to go to a university or how would I put it? I got my offer for university when I was 18 and I threw it in the trash.

00;01;25;29 - 00;01;31;04
Tony Sheridan
Right. And my you know, can I dive into a bit of a story here? Go for.

00;01;31;04 - 00;01;31;07
John Azoni
It.

00;01;31;10 - 00;01;51;16
Tony Sheridan
Yeah, It's like, why not? But, you know, I came from a working class family, rural Ireland. My dad had he's there. Is about to retire, but he's been in the same factory for over 40 years. And my mom is. Of course, she passed away a while ago, but, you know, she didn't even finish high school. Right. And so, like two older sisters, they left school and they went into jobs.

00;01;51;21 - 00;02;12;08
Tony Sheridan
That's what you do. One went into hairdressing, one went into being a chef. Now, I was like, really studious. I was a bit of a nerd, except I couldn't really be in there because I pissed off my teachers, you know, so many questions that I challenged them a bit. But I was super studious. I loved learning. I was still curious and.

00;02;12;18 - 00;02;36;17
Tony Sheridan
But what you did at that time. I had a part time job since I was 12 years old. So from 14, 15, 16, 17 in the summers, I was working in construction, mixing cement to build a traditional Irish stone walls at the front of house. It's really beautiful. But when I graduated high school, I graduated top of my class and I went to be working on a building site.

00;02;37;01 - 00;02;55;09
Tony Sheridan
Right. And so August comes around six September intake in Ireland. And I get a phone call and it draws me back to about a year earlier where my career guidance teacher was like, You have to apply to university. And I was like, But I'm not going. I've got this job lined up in a building site. She goes, Everyone in the class has to do it.

00;02;55;09 - 00;03;19;10
Tony Sheridan
You have to do it. So I put in some schools and I also she said, Take this box. You're eligible for this access program, which helps students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds, from underrepresented groups, get into university. And this call was from a woman from that program. And she was like, Why are you not coming to college? I said, Well, what's going on?

00;03;19;10 - 00;03;33;23
Tony Sheridan
The PRB? And I just said, Look, you know, I want to work, you know, all these different things. But she wouldn't take no for an answer. So she rang my mum like, why doesn't he want to go to college? My mum was like, I don't know, he's got a girlfriend in the home town. He doesn't want to move away.

00;03;34;01 - 00;03;53;06
Tony Sheridan
So she rings me and she's like, You know, this university was about 5 hours drive and she goes, You know, there's so many beautiful girls in Limerick, you're going to love it. I said, But I love my girlfriend. She goes, Yeah, but long distance can work. So it takes 15 phone calls between my mom and me to convince me to come to the University of Limerick.

00;03;53;21 - 00;04;11;28
Tony Sheridan
For two weeks, she's like, Come try it out. And if you don't like it, you can defer your place for a year. And what she hadn't told me was the deferral window had already passed, and so I couldn't do that. She had accepted my course on my behalf. So 15 phone calls to get me to the University of Limerick.

00;04;12;13 - 00;04;34;04
Tony Sheridan
15 years later, I left the University of Limerick to come to Saudi Arabia. I did my undergraduate there. When I graduated, I went into postgraduate studies and then I ended up being the first ever social media and digital content officer of the university, establishing its social presence, its approach to videos and everything. And so education, higher education changed my life.

00;04;34;11 - 00;04;52;03
Tony Sheridan
And it's one of the reasons why I wouldn't want to work in any other industry. I want to like capture that magic, the impact that it had on me. Now, I also said that, you know, my sister's husband went to university, but after nine I have a younger brother and with my success I made sure my younger brother went to university.

00;04;52;22 - 00;05;12;20
Tony Sheridan
But what's more interesting is my two older sisters went back as mature students. They got their bachelor's degrees. One is a single mom. She went online and got her masters. And actually, my brother and both of my sisters got their master's degrees before I got mine. So and my best friend who drove a forklift for seven years, he saw what I was doing and he's like, I'm going to go to university.

00;05;12;20 - 00;05;32;03
Tony Sheridan
And he's the head of the Marine data collection in Ireland. So higher education is just transformative. It's like something that I'm so passionate about. And then what we get to do, which is like tell the story of that magic that's just like, it's amazing. It's something that I'm really, really passionate about.

00;05;32;24 - 00;05;45;20
John Azoni
Yeah, So we had Michelle McMahan on a couple of months ago from University of Limerick. And so you were sort of like the prequel to Michelle, I guess, if we want to put it that way. Is that.

00;05;45;20 - 00;06;08;09
Tony Sheridan
True? Let let's put her in the category of like Godfather Part two and Terminator two, because she's like, better than the original. Like, I developed, you know, a student social media officer program with great support and input from an amazing manager. Sheena Doyle, there. And yeah, we were kind of like two ships passing. And I was leaving for Saudi Arabia.

00;06;08;09 - 00;06;24;00
Tony Sheridan
She was just coming in. I think we got to work together for two weeks, but she's then taken on the mantle of some of the programs and she's just brought it to the stratosphere because she's just incredible. But yeah, that's my old stomping ground. So I was over social and digital there for five years, and before that I worked in student engagement.

00;06;24;00 - 00;06;27;00
Tony Sheridan
And before that I was doing a Ph.D., which I dropped out of.

00;06;27;19 - 00;06;49;22
John Azoni
Yeah. All right. Yeah. So for our listeners, if you have listened to or haven't listened to the episode with Michelle that would be a great one to listen to, to see kind of like what's going on today at University of Limerick. But kind of like going back in time here, Tony, I want to hear like what was some of the foundation cards that you laid at University of Limerick during your time there?

00;06;49;22 - 00;06;57;17
John Azoni
Because I understand like you started the tic TAC and it was like award winning or something. Yeah, you did a bunch of cool stuff.

00;06;58;05 - 00;07;16;14
Tony Sheridan
We did loads of cool stuff, which is so funny. Like, in one way I was a team of one, but you're never any team of one if you have a great manager supporting you. But then also we had this like internships, we had student social media officers, we had freelancers, and I kind of worked with them to deliver.

00;07;16;24 - 00;07;38;25
Tony Sheridan
Yeah. One of the things I'm most proud of, I mean, in fact, coming in with a Woodward teaching degree, jumping into marketing and communications just with like a passion for storytelling and a knowledge of the university. I was enabled by a great director, Mark MacQueen, who was like, you know, go push boundaries. You don't I don't need to know what's cool on Snapchat.

00;07;38;25 - 00;08;09;09
Tony Sheridan
I don't need to know about this. I trust you, you know. And he would just said, What's the goal? What are we trying to achieve here? Like, why are we trying to get good at Snapchat? Why are we trying to have a great Instagram account? And keep that in mind and then work towards that success? Well, with the tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, it's like at a great moment in my career, I remember being at a at a conference in the UK and talented people there who were all running social for universities that I was going to set up a tick tock and you're like, What's tick tock?

00;08;10;02 - 00;08;33;11
Tony Sheridan
Right. They didn't even know. And I had only found out because my 16 year old cousin had become like, Tick tock famous. He had 60,000 names. And I was like, I'm run in social media and I don't even know this platform. And my 16 year old cousin, it's got 60,000 followers, so there's must be something in it. And when I started out on Tick Tock, think my first four tick talks were complete flops.

00;08;33;11 - 00;08;58;25
Tony Sheridan
Right? And I realized I don't really get this platform. I thought, no, this is so funny because I've had to delete tick tock off my phone because it's so addictive. But back at that time, I had to set a time in my calendar, in my outlook calendar, to force myself to go on Tick tock and watch, tick tock to like, start to understand what tick tock was, because I guess now it's broadened out.

00;08;58;25 - 00;09;33;10
Tony Sheridan
But at that time it was more niche, particularly to the market that we were trying to recruit for undergraduate students. And I took a break. I was like, okay, clearly I don't get it. I'm stopping here. And then I came back in the last week of August in 2019 with some we had graduation week and then we had orientation week for all the new students and literally hit like 2 million views on videos, 250,000 views and videos, 1 million views and videos just like his after his after his until I'm like, no, I wouldn't call them flops for like, you know, not viral content.

00;09;33;20 - 00;09;53;29
Tony Sheridan
RUSH really, really loved that short form video switch from that to type that we were doing and just being super creative and working with students and yeah, Tick Tock then reached out at one point on the university's Twitter account weirdly was like DMing us and is like who runs your tick top? And I was like, That's me. The same person who runs all the social.

00;09;54;07 - 00;10;13;14
Tony Sheridan
They're like, You have one of the most engaged tick talks of any university in the world. Wow. I was like, That was like a real moment for me to have made is, you know, like mentally, it's like I come into this field and at that time at zero qualifications in the area since I've got my masters in marketing.

00;10;13;20 - 00;10;40;28
Tony Sheridan
But at that time it was just like self-taught on YouTube. And we can talk about like my formula of how I like, taught myself stuff because I think that's maybe relevant. But yeah, it was really amazing to just go right. I actually know what I'm doing. And then 36, seven months later into that strategy, I got a message on LinkedIn from a university in Saudi Arabia and they're like, Do you want to come have an adventure and tell stories in the desert?

00;10;40;28 - 00;10;43;14
Tony Sheridan
And well, I clearly said, Yes.

00;10;44;02 - 00;11;06;14
John Azoni
That's great. I love that. And I think that some of the best people at their craft are ones that are not formally trained. And I just find that really to be the case is not all the time. But like sometimes these like really, you know, gems of creative people that I've stumbled upon and had the opportunity to like, you know, hire as freelancers or whatever.

00;11;06;22 - 00;11;27;22
John Azoni
You know, like in the video world, they just kind of figured it out. Like they just figure it out video They kind of had a knack for creativity and for storytelling, and then they just figured out the tech stuff and how to light scenes and all this stuff. And those are some of the most talented people because I think they just like, don't have the structure of the rules of like how you're supposed to do things.

00;11;27;23 - 00;11;33;24
John Azoni
They're just coming in, breaking things and figuring out what works. So I love I love that.

00;11;34;08 - 00;11;53;05
Tony Sheridan
2016 when I started running the whole, you know, the central accounts that the university really was the Wild West of social media because there was no degree programs in it at that time. There was no formal study. It really wasn't that respected at the top table in terms of like a medium in the way that it would be now nine years later.

00;11;53;13 - 00;12;12;26
Tony Sheridan
So the way that I approached it and I, you know, I hadn't just landed into central comms. I had been running social media accounts and creating content for student engagement accounts. And that's how I came to the attention of the central marketing team and the way that I did it and the way that other people did it wrong.

00;12;13;06 - 00;12;34;26
Tony Sheridan
I call this the art of inspiration. You can also call it stealing other people's ideas by the change. What's nicer if I call it the art of inspiration? Well, what I realized people were doing wrong was we all know what good storytelling is like. Maybe an Irishman who grew up with a dad is a great storyteller and a grandmother who's a great storyteller.

00;12;35;05 - 00;12;58;08
Tony Sheridan
Maybe I have like a better flair for it, but every single person, like, knows what good storytelling is. But then when it came to applying that to their content, it would just like they'd put up this barrier and they just do really bad storytelling. And I know that surely if they looked at that content themselves before putting it out, they would have known instinctively, it's not good right?

00;12;58;08 - 00;13;29;12
Tony Sheridan
And so I was using my gut and my instincts as an audience to inform my practice as a practitioner. And I think the mistake that people made, particularly if they didn't understand the mediums well, was they'd look at a university in Ireland. We had Trinity College. It was the oldest and the most prestigious, but they'd also look at, you know, Oxford or Cambridge or whatever the big names that they respected, and then they would see what they were doing on social or video and then just copy that.

00;13;29;26 - 00;13;52;14
Tony Sheridan
Right? And so I've just that's okay. But adding a few extra steps. So you look at what they're doing and then you ask, Is it good? Right? Like, that has to be the next question. And if you're like, Yes, it is good. It engaged me. I enjoyed it or I got value out of it. Then you would say, Why is it good?

00;13;53;06 - 00;14;16;08
Tony Sheridan
Right? And this is the question I would ask myself, like, they're really good on Snapchat. We want to be good on Snapchat. What is it that's good about this? Right now I'm like, It's Uber, it's fun. It engage me because it made me laugh or it was really entertaining or is educating. So finding that out. And then the next question I'd ask is would this work for all?

00;14;16;08 - 00;14;39;03
Tony Sheridan
Because some of the way Oxford or M.I.T. or Cambridge would apply brand and engage audiences doesn't work for the youngest university in Ireland. That's kind of a sport skill and it's a really fun place that's not going to work. And then but if it could work, so it's like, what did it do? Is it good? Yes. What's good about it?

00;14;39;11 - 00;15;05;16
Tony Sheridan
Would it work for us? Yes, I would just switch up some stuff and then do it. And that made original content or the best stuff I did was take like one idea from here and one idea from there and mash them together into something like unique and new, particularly what a lot of people weren't doing that give me a bit of an edge was they were exclusively looking for inspiration of other universities and colleges.

00;15;05;26 - 00;15;41;02
Tony Sheridan
So it's kind of like the blind leading the blind, like they were limited to only getting inspired or stealing ideas off within their industry. Whereas I was like social media, native, I was consuming content from naturally going head to day to science storytelling or NFL teams or, you know, US universities, UK universities, Australian universities to just like washing detergent, getting stuff like it's just like if anyone was doing something cool, I could just take this out of the inspiration process, run it through my brain and go, Okay, if I switch this and this and do this, this is going to work for us.

00;15;42;00 - 00;16;02;17
Tony Sheridan
And then you just put the content X and you learn what's ahead, what's a myth. You know, you keep looking at your data, you see what got engagement, what didn't. And over time doing that, that's how I got good at my craft. And if I didn't know a technical thing, I just spent a half an hour on YouTube and then I knew that enough to get the next piece of content out.

00;16;02;29 - 00;16;08;01
Tony Sheridan
And over time that just builds this. This uniquely successful kind of skill set.

00;16;08;15 - 00;16;25;29
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah, that's great. And I love that. You said the blind leading the blind. I think that's so true of higher ed. We just we copy each other, but no one's really taking a second to be like, Well, wait, is that, is that even good? You know, is that a good slogan? You know, we're just copying each other's slogans.

00;16;25;29 - 00;16;38;04
John Azoni
Your journey starts here and your story starts here. Whatever. It's like, Yeah, they're doing. And we got to have one of those, too. And then it's like, but like you just perpetuating the the boringness in your head.

00;16;38;21 - 00;16;59;09
Tony Sheridan
I think, Can I say this on your podcast? I'm not sure. And that's an Irish and it's very normal to swear, which by the way in Saudi Arabia it's not so like in the office here we got like English people and Irish people and we're like, you know, f this, so we have to like, tail our back. But I'm glad I can say it in your podcast.

00;16;59;24 - 00;17;22;29
Tony Sheridan
I don't want to shit on any school in particular, but I think one of the mistakes that people make in the industry is assuming high ranking skill equals best practice on social and digital platforms, and it can often be the inverse because if you've got the brand of X top rank school, you often don't need to work that hard to be creative and good.

00;17;23;08 - 00;17;33;02
Tony Sheridan
Now I will shout out MIT because they're an exception. Generally, fighter happens to be amazing, but Mitt doesn't have to be as amazing as the ad itself, right? They are.

00;17;33;02 - 00;17;33;20
John Azoni
Really good.

00;17;33;20 - 00;17;55;21
Tony Sheridan
And so then people look at these people who are like, okay, they're top schools. But I would recommend looking for inspiration one outside of higher ed. But then to to those fighter skills, is there a skill that jumped from 300 and the ranking to like 170 like whatever? David was amazing. And it might have just been in their in their digital storytelling, right?

00;17;55;21 - 00;18;13;17
Tony Sheridan
But I would go look because I bet you if they're that dynamic and they're moving, they're doing something cool, and so they tend to be the ones that I would have watched that I really got like good inspiration. And then the next thing I would do is like, Who is that? Because it's not just a skill that's like normally a person driving that.

00;18;13;26 - 00;18;31;16
Tony Sheridan
And then I built my network in Europe by going to conferences to speak about what I was doing and finding the guy that like it was Liam that ran Loughborough Dave than he used to be at Warwick. Like all these guys and I go meet them and have a coffee with them and learn from them.

00;18;32;04 - 00;18;50;10
John Azoni
Okay, Yeah, that's great. And I to love looking for inspiration outside of, outside of higher ed because I think there's a lot of cool stuff, there's a lot of cool stuff going on in higher ed, like cool stuff going on outside of higher ed too. So you've interviewed a lot of people and done a lot of storytelling. So I want to know from you like what?

00;18;50;10 - 00;18;54;20
John Azoni
What's your philosophy about? Like what makes a good story? What do you want to see more of in higher?

00;18;54;20 - 00;19;17;15
Tony Sheridan
Ed Yeah, so I think I counted up racing. I've done I've told the story of 125 people here at Cavs in the last four years and about 500 in my career. Just in video alone, I saw I can't even count up the written or like the short social media profiles that we did. So that's a it's a lot of me being the interviewer, right, trying to get the story out.

00;19;17;26 - 00;19;49;26
Tony Sheridan
I think what Higher Ed has got wrong historically is the thing that I really feel like you put your finger on the pulse of was this idea of like narrative over declarative. And it's just always or more often than not declarative. It's this list of features rooted in the benefits. And when I try and explain this to people here in work, I use the example of the iPod, like when they launched the iPod and they said, you know, it's housing songs in your pocket.

00;19;50;17 - 00;20;13;02
Tony Sheridan
I didn't go into the technical specifications. If you went to the website, you got the technical specifications. But what they sold was the benefits. And so when we look at post-graduate studies and I did an analysis of this for a conference presentation last year and I, I got 20 different ads for postgraduate studies at universities and they all focused on the features, right?

00;20;13;05 - 00;20;32;02
Tony Sheridan
Not the benefits. And I don't do you know, I'm in the market, maybe I'll do an MBA next year. I'm not in it because it's got, you know, three semesters or two semesters or it's got these features. I want to know those things before I make the decision. But what sells it, what market to to me is the benefits.

00;20;32;02 - 00;21;01;28
Tony Sheridan
Like, I want to hear about the guy that did this, did it while working and then got a promotion. Right. Like, I want to hear from the alum who tells me the benefit. That's the thing that I want. And so in our storytelling, we could pull it back to not really knowing what we're trying to achieve, right? And I think that people just so often don't have that grand narrative or goal in mind when they're creating content.

00;21;02;22 - 00;21;24;09
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah. Not knowing what you want to achieve, not knowing what makes something, you know, different. Look, I've led video projects in the past where, you know, some would be like, okay, you know, we don't want to be like all these other whatever. You know, my corporate video days could've been any of any sort of company. Not higher ed necessarily, but And then you would deliver like the first version of what we felt was different.

00;21;24;09 - 00;21;43;16
John Azoni
And then they by the time they got done with it, it was just like just like any other video, you know? And I think we need to have a better understanding of what different looks like. And I also think that the you know, you mentioned narrative versus declarative storytelling. I think there's a lot of confusion around around storytelling because it gets that word gets thrown around so much.

00;21;43;16 - 00;22;06;23
John Azoni
So people think that everything's a story and everything. You know, they hear about the scientific benefits of storytelling in marketing, and they think they're accessing that when they're really just kind of like putting information over over a dramatic song, you know, and and it's not really doing the science thing, you know, that that a narrative story would do.

00;22;06;23 - 00;22;47;17
John Azoni
So I've learned to embrace both sides, like both definitions of storytelling, because I think storytelling, that word has evolved to just be this catchall for like, you know, marketing your organization in a well, I guess, I guess more towards like emotions or like more in just a more creative way and kind of like over time, over time communicating the value of your institution, which is, which is to say, you know, sort of storytelling globally, you know, even just through all these little short form videos or just little LinkedIn posts or whatever, you're sort of telling the story.

00;22;47;17 - 00;23;01;18
John Azoni
But, you know, I think people need to really get a better understanding of like, if you really want to, like, really do storytelling, that's a thing like, you know, there's definitive markers about what make a what make a good story.

00;23;02;04 - 00;23;23;26
Tony Sheridan
But I agree with you that if you don't do storytelling, but you do create, like Heidi, visual, emotionally engaging, good content that over time, in some way you are telling a story, you're painting a picture, maybe the audience, if you're lucky enough, tread the needle through those pieces and creates a narrative themselves about who you are as a brand.

00;23;23;26 - 00;23;44;10
Tony Sheridan
But the analogy that I use and it goes back to this art of the inspiration like process that I had, there was a key point, which is like, what makes this good, right? You know, is it good and what makes a good? And often the thing that makes it good is storytelling, right? A narrative. And that can be you can tell a story in six words.

00;23;44;25 - 00;24;06;25
Tony Sheridan
You can tell a story. I learned in a 15 second tock. I prefer sometimes telling stories with longer runtime in a video or a longer form article, but you can tell I don't. And when people don't do that analysis as to what makes a good when they can end up making something that they think is storytelling, they think it's the same thing as this and it didn't succeed.

00;24;06;25 - 00;24;27;25
Tony Sheridan
And I had that experience where someone from another university came up to me and they had said, We're doing what you're doing on Tick-Tock and it's not working. And I knew I'd seen their accounts and I took perhaps too much joy in the fact that their videos had like six views. An arrow was getting 60,000 or 2 million.

00;24;27;25 - 00;24;57;04
Tony Sheridan
And I just said to the person, I said, You're not doing the same thing. It looks similar. It's on the same platform and it's vertical and it's got a student in it, but it's not storytelling, right? And I use that analogy and I said, you know, someone could see me make a cake, right? And it could be like trying to copy me making a cake and they could put it in the oven and they could take it out and it could look like the cake.

00;24;57;13 - 00;25;20;29
Tony Sheridan
And in air temps professionally, that would be like a well-lit studio with good music, with a student in it, talking about nice things about the university in like they're cool and the B-roll is cool, right? But to me, let's say they were copying me, make the cake, and they missed that. I put sugar in it and their cake looks like my cake, but their cactus like shit, right.

00;25;21;16 - 00;25;23;01
John Azoni
With salt shaker.

00;25;23;15 - 00;25;46;10
Tony Sheridan
So. Right. Because they taught it was the same thing. And to me, the magic ingredient, the difference between the salt and the sugar is narrative versus declarative. And so you think you've made a delicious cake, you've made something that looks like a cake that tastes like shit. And that's the difference. And that's the analogy that I use. It's like the magic ingredient here.

00;25;46;10 - 00;26;15;04
Tony Sheridan
That's sugar, that's storytelling, and there are definitive markers of that. I think one interesting thing I work with universities around the world. I speak at conferences around the world and I try and get people past that barrier of these institutional corporate blockers of what other people want and stakeholder needs to get back to their core understanding. They're like ancient DNA of storytelling and get back to going, Is this good storytelling?

00;26;15;04 - 00;26;43;17
Tony Sheridan
Because you know what good storytelling is? And as much as I appeal to the fact that we all have this inherent ancient understanding of storytelling, I do also think it's important to acknowledge that some of the traditional storytelling arcs and mechanisms need to be shaken up a bit in the digital world, right? Yeah. So like the traditional movie, you know, we slowly build, you kind of do exposition, then you get to like the peak.

00;26;43;17 - 00;27;07;00
Tony Sheridan
Maybe there's slight you think it's resolving more conflict resolution conclusion. You can't really do that in content online in short form, at least, right? Like maybe there's some formats in video where you can do that. We have a captive audience, but part of the same drivers, the same fundamental drivers exist in terms of what gets our attention, holds our attention.

00;27;07;08 - 00;27;33;14
Tony Sheridan
I think you just have to work harder for it. Now, in some ways you have more opportunity because it can be easier to make content. It can be there's more audience accessible than there was 30 years ago, but there is more content than ever before. And if you if you want to do that effectively, we need to take storytelling, the traditional ancient art, and we need to just apply some developments for the digital age in 2025.

00;27;33;14 - 00;28;01;00
Tony Sheridan
And primarily, I think and I'd love to get your input on that, but to me it's really about the hook, putting the hook clean at the start and then varying the pace, but re hooking people during the content. If you want to keep them for 2 minutes, you got to hook me multiple times within days. One of the mistakes that I think people then lean into, they think that they need to be at like in this range from 95 to 100% the whole way through the video.

00;28;01;08 - 00;28;19;21
Tony Sheridan
But that's actually really annoying. Also, if you're just shouting at me trying to keep you for the whole night, five for the whole 2 minutes, but you probably need to go from 95 ese down to 60. Pull me back up to 90, then you can take a bit of a dip to get deeper and then pull me up at the end.

00;28;20;10 - 00;28;55;06
John Azoni
Right? Yeah. And I think that's why finding a good video editor is really hard because there's very few that really understand that those dynamics about what, you know, pacing and like what keeps an audience engaged and like even just like I find the number one, probably the number one trick that I do in when I'm editing is changing the song every time the the tone shifts or every time like the messaging kind of shifts, we have a new song going out and you might not even notice the transition, but there's something that I feel like it's like, okay, we're seeing something new here.

00;28;55;06 - 00;29;12;18
John Azoni
There's a new vibe. And yeah, and like if you listen to like a good speaker, you know, public speaker Yeah, they do. It's like they take you on this roller coaster ride. It's like we're up here now, we're down here now. We're talking really quietly and now, you know, and I'm moving around the stage and stuff like that.

00;29;12;18 - 00;29;32;14
John Azoni
So it really is a theater almost, you know, that you have to kind of understand how to control that sort of theatrical elements of storytelling, which is why it's not as simple as just saying things into a microphone and slapping a symphony. Dramatic song underneath it.

00;29;32;14 - 00;29;49;06
Tony Sheridan
But, you know, you talked about there is a place for that, like I think you call them sizzle reel, you know, where it's like it's just going to bring the energy. But until there's a place for that kind of like pom pom pom, pom pom, I'm going to hit you for 30 seconds with like really just ramp you up like game night video or something.

00;29;49;17 - 00;30;19;19
Tony Sheridan
But I think when we get down to storytelling, you know, we're saying, you know, you need a hook, you need to re hook. That can be maybe difficult for those, you know, tuning in to apply. One of the best ways that I've seen it described was Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the writers of South Park. I think like a random video on YouTube where it seems like it's from 20 years ago and they're I think they're at NYU or there at some university, and they're explaining to like it.

00;30;19;20 - 00;30;42;13
Tony Sheridan
They're writing concept like the breakthrough that they had for South Park. And basically how it works is they said if they looked at their scenes, I'd like a base level and it went like this. This happened and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened. They had a very boring episode and it needed to be two things.

00;30;43;03 - 00;31;11;16
Tony Sheridan
This happened, but. Right. Yeah, this happened therefore. So they just go from and then and then and then to but and therefore and so yeah. What would that look like in higher ed. Right. Well we've seen loads of the, this and this and this and this and this. Right. The course is this long and the professors, you know, and it's small class sizes and this and this and this.

00;31;11;28 - 00;31;36;15
Tony Sheridan
But true storytelling would be something like, you know, let's go to the benefits. So, you know, I've been working for five years and I really wanted to take the next step. But being a single mom, it's really hard to dedicate time as like, however, and in a psych like school had an online learning program that really met my needs not go.

00;31;36;15 - 00;32;06;16
Tony Sheridan
The study was really, really hard. However, they had this really good program and if you can pair it out with some of the brilliant techniques you have around, like asking the right questions and getting that moment rather than just the information, I think we can apply that principle into some like higher ed storytelling. Maybe not like as blatantly as short form video creators do is like this scientist had this, but you'll never believe what happened.

00;32;06;21 - 00;32;11;01
Tony Sheridan
And the last one is the most interesting. Simply, you know.

00;32;11;03 - 00;32;11;29
John Azoni
Hate when they do it.

00;32;12;09 - 00;32;50;06
Tony Sheridan
You don't want to get that cliched, but if we break it down to the avoid and then. And then. And then. And then. Or this, this this, this and we get to the boss therefore. Right. And so that said the principle that so power creators had another writer, Aaron Sorkin, he called this intention an obstacle. So if you were thinking about looking at the benefits of post-graduate studies, you would say like intention, career progression, obstacle, you know, not being able to compete in the job market, you know, being overlooked in job interviews.

00;32;50;17 - 00;33;07;03
Tony Sheridan
And so you set out that there's the intention and the obstacle, and that's how to make like dramatic movies. There's like the characters want to do something and there's an obstacle in their way that just those simple terms we could probably pull in a bit more into higher ed storytelling.

00;33;07;03 - 00;33;26;23
John Azoni
Yeah, I kind of say like there's a difference between like a story and like a profile on somebody. A profile might just be more like, they're this, they're this, they're this. And, you know, you can take their class and whatever, you know, maybe like a faculty profile. And I think there's a lot of value to that. Like, not everything has to be this.

00;33;26;23 - 00;33;44;05
John Azoni
Like there's value in getting to know your professor, right? And do they have to have some sort of dramatic story arc in order for you to put them in front of the camera? No. I mean, just, you know, there's value in just kind of like, who is this person? What do they care about? You know, And that's kind of like that.

00;33;44;14 - 00;34;02;02
John Azoni
And then and then and then kind of stuff. But like, yeah, some of those more really gripping stories. If there is like ways that you can get some conflict into there, like, yeah, like everything didn't work out or like, you know, I didn't always want to study this field because I wanted to do this other thing, but it didn't work out.

00;34;02;02 - 00;34;21;22
John Azoni
I mean, like, yeah, I think there's room for both and I think there's room for like, yeah, these profiles and students and alumni and things like that. But not every person's story needs to be forced into this like hero's journey. But it is a tried and true kind of format where if you can hit on that, you know, it's it's powerful.

00;34;22;11 - 00;34;42;02
Tony Sheridan
And it really depends on where the content going, right. Yeah. Like, you know so if you you want to engage me on social media stories, probably going to do it better. But if I've landed on a course page and I want information about that program where I'm at a different part of the funnel, then my attention span is switched up.

00;34;42;02 - 00;34;58;23
Tony Sheridan
The way that you can communicate information to me is switched off and and then the pressure for that like hero's journey or story arc, it's just not there. Like it goes back to my dad used to tell a story. Whenever my father would tell a story, he'd always present it as if it was something real that happened, you know?

00;34;58;23 - 00;35;30;03
Tony Sheridan
And so he said, like last Friday, I was driving home from work, right? And my brother would always go, Dad, is this a real story? My dad would like roll his eyes and go. Anyway, that was an indication that this was completely fake. So it was just a joke set up as like a real thing that happened. But in the story which I heard and how many times he's driving home from work on a Friday evening and he's stuck in traffic and along the side of the road, there's a grass verge and he can see up ahead of him two workers from that, let's say a city council that you call it in the US,

00;35;30;12 - 00;35;50;18
Tony Sheridan
and they've got their like visibility jackets on and one of them's just digging a hole and then he walks like two meters up and there's a guy coming behind him and he's taken the dirt and he's putting it back into the whole wheat that I see. And things. And, you know, it's Friday traffic rush hour. So he's just like stuck in traffic and he's seen him eventually get closer and closer to the lights.

00;35;50;18 - 00;36;04;13
Tony Sheridan
And these guys have been doing it for like 20 minutes these right beside them. And yeah, sure enough, one guy is like, dig in the hole, The other guy comes and puts the dirt back in and then they walk on a little bit and do it again. So that puts down the window of the car. So okay, guys.

00;36;04;22 - 00;36;25;07
Tony Sheridan
Rick, this is them. Can I ask you, like, what are you doing? One guy says, What am I doing? Well, I'm digging holes, and the other guy says, Oh, what do I do? Well, I'm filling the holes in that says, Yeah, yeah, no, I can see that. But like, am I missing something? The guy goes missing. Missing? Oh, yeah, I suppose Patti's missing.

00;36;25;22 - 00;36;29;29
Tony Sheridan
And with that, just what does Patty do? It goes, Oh, Patty is the guy that plants the trees.

00;36;30;18 - 00;36;33;06
John Azoni
Oh, okay.

00;36;33;06 - 00;36;56;22
Tony Sheridan
So this joke, when my dad tells it, is meant to talk about, like, the inefficiencies of, like, the public services, right? That they just, like, kept doing the thing what I the most important part of this. But then I tell that story in a work context because I think so much of what people are doing is just like digging a hole and filling it back in again, like in a work context.

00;36;56;29 - 00;37;27;15
Tony Sheridan
It's like, Oh, they did this thing. Like they did that. So we do that and then I do that. And to take a step back and ask, What's the tree we're trying to plant here? Like that's the important thing. What's the tree we're trying to plant? And that's strategy. That's generally the story. And if you know what the overall tree is like for the universe I'm working in, we want to be seen as an enabler of innovation, right?

00;37;27;15 - 00;37;57;05
Tony Sheridan
As key partnerships, commercializing research is a big thing. We want to tell an academic and research excellence. So I know what the big grand narrative is, and then this piece of content can just be a on a branch, right? But I know what I'm trying to do here, and if you don't think about that, each time you jump into a pot of content or something, if you don't know what the tree you're trying to plant is, then effectively you're just like these guys digging holes and filling them back in again.

00;37;57;05 - 00;37;57;11
Tony Sheridan
Yeah.

00;37;57;23 - 00;38;13;14
John Azoni
I love that. I love that analogy. All right. I've got a few minutes left here. I want to ask you, I want to get you talking about your work in Saudi Arabia. And, you know, you had some interesting, you know, storytelling stuff that you were involved in with the Saudi women. So I want I want to hear about that.

00;38;13;14 - 00;38;16;18
John Azoni
What did you learn from that? What was that experience like from you?

00;38;17;04 - 00;38;39;16
Tony Sheridan
I think the interesting thing about coming to Saudi when I did in Saudi is like the biggest success story in the world now in terms of just its economy, but also socially changing. But historically, women were excluded from media, right? So it was just not a thing to see a woman in an advertisement in a video. Digital content.

00;38;39;16 - 00;39;06;06
Tony Sheridan
And this was when I say history, I don't mean ancient history. I'm talking these social changes. These big, big changes were brought in starting in 2016 with the new crown prince. But really only in 2019 did this start to change. And in 2020 I get offered a job to come to guys and start telling stories. And this is a moment where we're literally talking about, particularly when we look at video stories that were never told in this way before.

00;39;06;12 - 00;39;41;03
Tony Sheridan
The accounts where I work first mixed gender university in the country, it has masters and Ph.D. students only, and it's got a 40% female student body in a science and tech only university like this is looking international trends in terms of like female participation in the sciences. We have like first generation college student, Saudi females like grandma, Mom's sisters never went to university going on to get PR PhDs, being like the first in the world in certain stuff.

00;39;41;14 - 00;40;08;25
Tony Sheridan
And I got to go like interview them and put them on screen. And so that has just been amazing. It's brought me loads of passion and purpose to my job. I went on to win the award at content that and 23 for like Diversity Equity and Inclusion award for the champion of that because it wasn't we had a country that was ready for change in terms of the stories it was going to tell, but it wasn't just so easy to just jump into that because had cultural norms that were changing.

00;40;08;25 - 00;40;46;19
Tony Sheridan
We had sensitivities to be aware of. I'm also clearly not Saudi, I'm not Muslim. I'm a white Irish guy coming into this Islamic culture and the Middle East that I hadn't even been to before I moved here to work here. But apart from it's just been an amazing journey and the people of Saudi being so ready to embrace these powerful, amazing women and have their stories told on video in this cool way, I think part of this access that we had was also just having systems and processes that really aligned what we're doing.

00;40;46;19 - 00;41;07;24
Tony Sheridan
So like, what is that tree we're trying to plant? You know, one simple technique that I would advise anyone to do was that I just wrote down pillars that would underpin what I was doing, right? So I had 12 that I brainstormed with the team and I got them signed off my director. But like they included, I want this content going forward to be human.

00;41;08;29 - 00;41;25;09
Tony Sheridan
What does that mean? Before we would like write about the research text on screen? Well, we would exclude the human because it wasn't the culture. No women were like put on the screen. So I want it to be human. I want to show the human in the content. I want it to be diverse, like our campus is diverse.

00;41;25;11 - 00;41;51;07
Tony Sheridan
120 nationalities working and living here. I want it to be representative. I want to show the people that are doing this. I want it to be authentic. So I wrote out these pillars, and what that did was it helped me when I was going into a conversation with senior leaders, we had this one campaign where the, you know, very senior person had picked the professors to feature in a faculty campaign, and he had picked 12 men.

00;41;51;20 - 00;42;21;07
Tony Sheridan
Right. And we have a very diverse faculty and I could go into the room and I only had a 15 minute meeting to pitch this campaign. And I said, look, we have really these were just like my thoughts and philosophies on what content should be. But because I had them written down in a nice, like, you know, graphic, I said, Well, look, yeah, we can do that and we can make an accessible campaign and we can make an optimized campaign and a strategy aligned campaign, but we can't make diverse campaign and a representative campaign.

00;42;21;15 - 00;42;47;18
Tony Sheridan
So what if we profiled faculty, included some of your 12, but we also included some junior faculty and some female faculty and some from this division and that division. So having a structure like that, that allowed and enabled me to make organizational change in a really simple way, I would recommend that to anyone. Go, just sit and write down the ten, 12, six things that you want your content to be.

00;42;47;22 - 00;43;12;16
Tony Sheridan
Call it something fancy like parametric framework alignments with Harvard standards or whatever. And then when anyone says, No, no, no, you don't do this, you said, Oh, well, that doesn't align with our pillars actually. Right? And that just worked so much better than me saying, No, I think you, Mr. Senior Leader, I'm disagreeing with you. So I said, No, I like where you're going, but it doesn't align with our pillars.

00;43;12;25 - 00;43;18;01
Tony Sheridan
But let's find a way to achieve your goal that aligns with more of these pillars.

00;43;18;20 - 00;43;33;11
John Azoni
Yeah, I like that. The answer is always, always yes, but yes. And here's what it's going to cost to get there. All right. Final thoughts on that story. What would be something you want to leave our audience with? About about storytelling in higher ed?

00;43;34;03 - 00;43;57;20
Tony Sheridan
Well, look, I started I talked about my journey into higher ed, higher ed changes lives, right? It's so important. But a part of that story was I was working construction and then I did a degree in construction, and then we had to jump some steps. But I end up running the social media for a university, right? And how I could do that was just by tapping into my own knowledge of storytelling that wasn't formally taught.

00;43;57;28 - 00;44;18;01
Tony Sheridan
It was just built in. And when I do consulting or go to conferences, all I'm really doing is trying to pull that back and you can do that yourself. So I asked people if tomorrow or next week you're creating a piece of content, use your own cost and ask yourself in the planning or in the edit stage, is this good?

00;44;18;14 - 00;44;34;02
Tony Sheridan
Would I engage with this content? And if you did that more, if the industry did that more, we'd be really much more successful at creating great content that achieves those goals that we wouldn't be digging holes and selling them back in again. We've really be planting some trees.

00;44;34;20 - 00;44;49;17
John Azoni
Gold Love that. That was solid. So. Tony, thanks so much for being here. It's great to finally get you on the show. Thanks for sharing your all your wisdom. It's been great to hear all your, you know, storytelling stories and all your philosophies and stuff like that. So thanks for being here.

00;44;50;11 - 00;44;52;13
Tony Sheridan
Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. Love that.