Great stories enrich our imaginations like nourishment coursing through living tissue. They delight the senses and stimulate our hearts and minds. Ultimately, they feed our souls.

That might sound like a lot to visualize. But audiobook publisher Storytel reduces such weighty concepts to compelling abstractions in a campaign from B-Reel themed “Open Your Ears.”

Watch as streams of color that represent stories—i.e., new ideas and thrilling concepts—flow freely to the depths of the human psyche:

Thriller writer Harlan Corben’s 31st novel, Run Away, comes packing a supplement that breaks the paper barrier: Ambient music. 

Run Away is a family story at heart. A father who’s lost his daughter—long vanished into drugs, a bad relationship, and the streets—finds her again, busking in Central Park. What he chooses to do next triggers a labyrinthine chase, with twists both physical and psychological. 

Created by Icelandic composer/cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir, known for Chernobyl and Joker, the soundtrack features deep cello action and sorrowful violins. It feels bleak, like the gritty streets of a mean city. But it also evokes a more mythic darkness—the kind that feels sentient and watchful, like when you’re lost in the woods at dusk. 

“With films and TV series, you have so much visual info [that it] takes over,” Guðnadóttir reflects. “When you’re reading and when you’re listening to music, you have much space to create your own world.” 

Listen to more samples here; full versions are live on Spotify, though they haven’t been placed in a single playlist. Each chapter instead is its own playlist, where one song plays again and again. That’s inconvenient, but not unfixable; just make your own Runaway playlist and pop the songs in. 

“I’m not sure if there has ever been a soundtrack set to a reading experience,” Corben says of the collab, brokered by BETC Paris. “When I write, I can’t just stir your mind—I have to stir your heart. Hildur picked the perfect music for Runaway to do exactly that.” 

Below, holding the French version of Run Away, Corben explains how the listening/reading experience works. 

(Were you hoping he’d read aloud? Us too.)

A limited-edition vinyl set will be sold at some point. Information about that will presumably appear on the website. 

Ever dream of writing a children’s book? Brett Winn, partner and creative director of AV at The Refinery, literally had that dream. And he decided to follow it. 

He is now a children’s book author. His recently published book, Schnozmallow, tells the tale of a loveable half-marshmallow, half-nose who is trying to figure out where he belongs in the world.

Brett chatted with Muse about the creative process of writing a children’s book, his creative collaboration with illustrator Barbara Carlton, and what his career in creative advertising taught him about storytelling.

Books aren’t dying. In fact, thanks to the New York Public Library, they’re becoming more accessible for the Instagram generation. 

If the Kindle is too old-school for you, now you can read entire novels right within Instagram stories, thanks to a new program from the NYPL and Mother New York. The “Insta Novels” initiative launches today and features whole novels, novellas and short stories expressly designed for the Instagram Stories interface—and illustrated by designers with a significant presence on Instagram. 

The program begins today on the NYPL’s Instagram account (@nypl) with a single novel—a newly digitized version of Alice in Wonderland, the 1865 classic by Lewis Carroll. The Insta-version was illustrated by well-known designer Magoz (@magoz). 

Luckily, it was a college town—in the ’90s. 

I was with my wife (fiancée at the time), preparing to say goodbye to her for six months, gone on a deployment as the navigator on a U.S. Navy warship. We stopped into a used bookstore. My aim: read a bunch of classics that I missed out on in college and high school. Twenty-one books (and about $50) later, we were off to enjoy one of our last nights together for a long time.

It was away from my loved ones, stuck on a ship, out at sea, where I could sink into books that probably wouldn’t have had a chance at holding my attention against all the other real-life stimuli back home. And one book resonated with me, at that time in my life, in that environment, in a way it would never again: Melville’s Moby Dick. 

When you spend almost half of your waking hours on the bridge of a warship—in sun and rain, wind and calm, day and night—the salt does more than turn your brass insignia green. The sea permeates you. You become one of the billions of creatures beholden to the whims of the ocean. You are small and insignificant, but also strangely alive and connected. 

I’m sure that without Moby Dick as a companion, I wouldn’t have seen, smelled and felt what I did. Melville tapped into something deeper than story. This quest of Captain Ahab, this searching … we all felt it. All of us on that ship were seeking, lost, drifting. 

We all sought comfort—in letters from home, in dominoes with friends, in the vigilant watch. I found it at sea with Ishmael. There was purpose there in the art, in the search, in the living of the moment—a time I truly only treasured because the now was made Technicolor by the then of Melville’s hunt for the White Whale.

At nights when I’m far away from the city, when the stars shine a fraction of their oceangoing brightness, I feel the rocking, smell the sea, and hear:

“We’ll drink to-night with hearts as light,
To love, as gay and fleeting
As bubbles that swim, on the beaker’s brim,
And break on the lips while meeting.”

Iswanto Arif

I grew up in the rowdy 1950s, a boy-dog on a very long leash, maybe no leash, in my smallville American backwater of a town in upstate New York. 

Adventure stories and dreams of dangerous trekking filled my early roughshod years. My pals were Old Yeller, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin. My country-bred, only-child mom and only-child dad were raised on self-reliance, daily chores and plenty of reading. The Incredible Journey, Call of the Wild and White Fang held a place of honor for many years on my bedroom bookshelf. 

Though I never had a dog, my grandma, just a few miles away in the country, did. And I never missed an opportunity to visit for a few hours, days and weeks in the summer. “Toughy” was a dog of noble demeanor, unflagging courage and smart as a new tin whistle playing “Dixie.” He was a lanky, midsized mongrel, tawny brown with white-tipped paws, a similar patch on top of his head, and a long, bushy, spiked tail, also dipped in white. 

The joy of my life … a boy-dog life. 

I started drawing at 2 or 3. What kid doesn’t? The canine and creative juices got mixed up pretty well by the time I was in junior high. My mom had, at considerable expense to our one-income family of five, sent me to a local art tutor for private lessons. All I remember of that short-lived tutelage was making a painting of a clown … and an insatiable hunger for drawing and painting that haunts me still, with and without humor. 

When I met Mrs. Newcomb, the art teacher at Norwich Junior High, I had no idea she and my mom had made some kind of a pact: to wring the most out of me. I was a pretty crappy student until 7th grade. Then something happened. The door to a previously indistinct visual world, beyond the confines of rolling hills and dairy farms as far as the eye could see, swung wide open—in that art room. 

Books piled helter skelter from floor to ceiling, bizarre art posters, and those amazing film strips projected on the pull-down screen in the front of the darkened classroom sucked me into an art-stricken maelstrom. Little beeps reminded Mrs. Newcomb when to advance to the next slide, to keep restless, juvenile minds focused, however briefly. I was mesmerized, not by the technology but by the images. Bold, flashing by like some timeless, cerebral, magic lantern show. 

Art from around the world appeared magically on that screen: African sculpture, Asian scroll art, American masks, European painting. An explosion of art forms, from Timbuktu for all I knew. 

I remember the image distinctly. A boldly stylized, solid red ochre painting of a walking, man-like figure. Next to him, a dog, also upright, listening, waiting. It was rendered not on paper or canvas, but on stone—a cave wall. Like a stop sign that only art-dreaming dog lovers can see. It held me in a brain freeze. To this day I don’t know where it was from. Though the filmstrip kept going, beeping away, I could not move on. In some ways, I still haven’t. 

Seeing the cave art of Lascaux, Chauvet, and most recently, Sulawesi, in Indonesia, has only solidified it in my mind, psyche and spirit all the more—the power of man and animal, the canine companion and the roving hunter-gatherer, living and working as one. The original dynamic duo. Each time, it’s like being there all over again—not in the classroom, but in the cave. 

I know why the cave scene in Plato’s Republic is one of the most chilling, image-conjuring scenes in all of literature. Humans need a true friend in dark situations. And I don’t mean other people. 

When I saw my first image of that human and the dog standing erect, together, I knew it was me and my mythic, never-owned but ever-present dog, recorded for all time, from a previous-present-future life, the life of time travelers—running with the herd into eternity. 

It’s taken me more than 50 years to carry that primitive, rockbound storyteller’s image to a place of rebirth, full circle in my own life as a teacher, graphic designer and writer. My upcoming middle-reader historical novel, Lost Art Trilogy, follows Daniel, my young country-boy protagonist, and his ever faithful dog Diggit, traveling through time, rediscovering forgotten art treasures around the globe. First stop? An ancient cave, of course. Just the way Lascaux was actually discovered in 1940. The book will be ready for publication later this year. 

You slowly shuffle towards the station ticket gate, a part of the throng of passengers dressed in greys, blues and blacks. As you finally reach the turnstile your eyes are drawn towards one of the staff on duty. The man, probably in his 50s, looks like an old punk: head shaved to the scalp apart from a two-foot-tall bright blue mohawk. You wonder idly what would happen if you turned up to work with a mohawk?

Of course, you noticed the mohawk, rather than one of the hundreds of short back and sides. You’re hard-wired to notice what’s distinctive. The academic evidence for this dates back to 1933 and the experiments of a young, postdoctoral student, Hedwig von Restorff.

Restorff was a pediatrics researcher at the University of Berlin when she published her study on memorability. She gave participants a long list of text: it consisted of random strings of three letters interrupted by one set of three digits. So, for example: jrm, tws, als, huk, bnm, 153, fdy. After a short pause, the participants were asked to remember the items. The results showed that items that stood out, in this case the three digits, were most recalled. This is known as the Von Restorff, or isolation, effect. 

Unfortunately, soon afterwards Von Restorff’s career was cut tragically short. The Nazis conducted a purge of the university, and she, along with many other psychologists, was thrown out. Hedwig, who wasn’t even 30, never published again. 

Still relevant today

But that experiment was more than 80 years ago. Do the findings still stand? My colleague, Laura Weston, and I investigated. We gave 500 nationally representative participants a list of numbers: 15 written in black, one in blue. A short time later we asked which number they recalled. Respondents were 30 times more likely to recall the distinctive number. 

We repeated the experiment with brands. Respondents saw a list of logos: 11 car brands and a fast-food brand. Again, after a pause we asked which brands they could recall. Consumers were four times more likely to mention the fast-food brand than the average car brand. Being distinctive makes brands memorable. This might sound like an obvious point, but it is one that is studiously ignored by the advertising industry.

How to apply this effect?

1. Subvert category norms

Much advertising slavishly abides by category norms. Copernicus Consulting analyzed 340 TV ads that ran in peak-time TV in 2001 and identified a differentiating brand message in only 7 percent of them.

You can see the herd mentality in action in lager. In Britain, the leading brands invariably sponsor football. In 2012, four of the largest properties were sponsored by lager brands: Carling were sponsoring the League Cup, Budweiser the FA Cup, Heineken the Champion’s League and Carlsberg were the official beer of the England team. Such was the clutter that Campaign magazine said they are “playing 11-a-side on a 5-a-side pitch.”

The same lack of variation is in evidence in other categories. Car ads are prone to loving shots of the model rounding bends in the rugged countryside. Fashion ads feature beautiful people pouting at the camera. Watch ads take it the furthest. Almost every ad shows the same time on the watch—a few minutes either side of 10:10. That specific time was chosen because the hands clearly frame the logo. The HTC phone ads run 10:08 on the time on their screens, even though it’s displayed digitally! 

Mimicry comes at a cost. According to Vic Polkinghorne, founder of creative agency Sell! Sell!:

What might seem like a safe choice in the confines of a boardroom will most likely be a waste of money when it’s out in the real world. Advertising that feels safe or familiar is actually quite risky—there’s no “safety in numbers” when it comes to advertising. If someone else is doing something similar to what you’re doing, or looks or sounds like you, you’re both in trouble. 

Your task, therefore, is to identify the formulaic rules of behavior in the category you work in and subvert them. The rewards can be immense, as the case of comparison sites reveals. In 2008, the main brands followed the same tactics. Gocompare, Moneysupermarket, Confused and Comparethemarket all focused on their functional benefits—how many insurers they compared and how much they saved the average consumer. Undoubtedly, these are important benefits, but as everyone was claiming them, they conferred no commercial advantage.

In January 2009, Comparethemarket broke ranks. Instead of relentlessly communicating rational benefits, they followed a more emotional route. They created the anthropomorphic meerkat, Aleksandr Orlov, who owned Comparethemeerkat. The ads told the tale of how his site kept crashing because of all the people mistyping Comparethemarket. The results were impressive. It rose from fourth ranked site to first in terms of consideration and spontaneous awareness. Quote volumes went up by 83 percent, and the company achieved its 12-month objectives in nine weeks. Distinctiveness paid.

One of my main memories from working with Comparethemarket was how small their marketing team was. They had a tight group of two or three decision makers. I’m sure this was a factor in their success. The more people involved in a process, the less likely it is, in my experience, to be distinctive. Committees are not conducive to original work. As the comedian Allan Sherman said, “They sit there in committees day after day, and they each put in a color and it comes out gray.” 

2. Consider your target audience’s age

Richard Cimbalo and Lois Brink, from Daemen College and the University of Colorado, respectively, conducted a study in 1982 into the influence of age on the Von Restorff effect. Seventy-two college students and pensioners memorized a list on which one of the items was distinctive. As expected, the distinctive item was the most memorable, but the effect was more pronounced among the younger group. 

Advertisers who target younger age groups need to be particularly aware of this and apply it regularly.

3. Why is distinctiveness so rare?

Why, despite the evidence, do few brands break conventions? Dave Trott, the illustrious creative director says:

The problem is nobody ever explains to clients why the obvious is bad. They think it must be right because everyone in their market is doing it. Which is exactly why creatives think it’s wrong. Creatives want to be different, to stand out from the environment. But that just looks like flashy pyrotechnics to a client. 

However, distinctiveness is more than “flashy pyrotechnics.” Perhaps agencies, in their rush to promote the latest fad, have forgotten to emphasize the fundamentals? Agencies must publicize the work of Von Restorff to prove the power of being distinctive. 

However, there’s another, more intractable, issue. If you’re distinctive and the campaign fails, then you could get them fired. “Especially for junior clients,” says Trott, “the safety is in doing what everyone else is doing.”

If the campaign flops, they can point to the behavior of their competitors as a sign that they undertook due diligence before approving the ad campaign. Ironically, brands have sought to capitalize on this defensive decision-making in their own communications. The line, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” regularly acclaimed as one of the best ad slogans ever, tapped into these personal concerns.

The final explanation is a myopic approach to data. In my experience, many brands want examples of successful case studies from their category before they commit to a course of action. This leads to mimicry. If, say, all lager brands sponsor football, then there will be examples where it has worked. However, if no brand sponsors, say, table tennis, there will be a dearth of examples. This leads to a vicious circle in which more brands plough money into football regardless of the odds of success. 

Brands must seek inspiration from beyond their category. If they do so, they will see one of the common factors of the few brands who have created a genuine step-change in their category is that they were highly distinctive. As the founder of BBH, John Hegarty, put it in his ad for black Levi’s, “When the world zigs, zag.” 

—This is an excerpt from Richard Shotton’s The Choice Factory, a new book about applying findings from behavioral science to advertising. Shotton is deputy head of evidence at Manning Gottlieb OMD, the most awarded media agency in the history of the IPA Effectiveness awards. He tweets about the latest behavioral science and advertising findings from the handle @rshotton.