Primer&Co.

Problem

In 2014, my longtime creative partner and I had an idea to merge our love of long-form narrative, explainer visuals, and digital products. In 2017, we turned it into a mission-driven microagency that still continues to this day.

Solution

Defining the Space

Our project was formed during a period where the normalization of the web was established in earnest; Squarespace sites instead of janky landing pages, Facebook ads instead of hidden SEO words, AMP pages for quick mobile loading. These trends across the board were an attempt to systemize the idiosyncratic internet trends that were developed in the boom years of the social web. Laudable goals, but like most attempts to develop a framework, many delightful parts of the web were also lost. Obeying Warren Buffet’s mandate to “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”, my partner and I endeavored to create incredibly media-rich websites that were design, not development, led.

Our suspicion was that there was a hunger for rich media experiences, and that making content more dynamic would make it more memorable and have a higher ROI. We wanted to play with the medium of storytelling on the web that felt more like a storybook and less like a marketing pitch.

Solution

Making Our Case

In order to prove our core assumption of the power of visual presentation, we first conceived of a web magazine as a stalking horse for our new type of format. Primer Stories, our first product we released, was a web magazine in which we convinced wildly successful authors and artists to write explainer pieces we could illustrate, such as Douglas Rushkoff on Authoritarianism and Jenny Odell on the Trash Dump. These pieces, which we ran over four seasons, attracted eyeballs, and also helped us build a use case around this type of blended formats.

Solution

Proving the Product

We leveraged the audience gained there to see if we could prove that dynamic visuals increase knowledge comprehension and retention.

Using control groups, we presented readers with information in a plain text format, and a Primer format, with the goal of evaluating the difference in retention of information.

For the questions pulled from the plain text document, users answered 55% of the questions correctly .For the questions pulled from the Primer treatment, users answered 78% of the questions correctly. That 23 percentage point increase, which translates to an increase in reading comprehension of 38%.

We used this data to help inform our second offering from Primer&Co, a nascent platform for building these type of rich media stories in a mobile-first format.

Solution

Delivering the Work

Our data and designs in hand, we found many eager partners in the publishing space, but we found the best match to be a space that Tim and I have for years found common cause with: mission-driven organizations. We found that the type of storytelling we excelled at was moving the needle on causes that need an emotional weight behind them. We are extremely lucky to work with clients like the International Committee of Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, The News Integrity Initiative, and many other mission-driven clients, getting nominated and winning Webbys and Anthem awards for our work.

In my role as Creative Strategist and Founder, I was responsible for the entire lifecycle of client work, from business development to creative vision, managing vendors and ICs, making sure we came in under budget and on-time, as well as client engagement.

See more at primerand.co