Introduction
The J Shape gives you a lot of freedom. This is the mood piece Shape, the portrait Shape, the Shape where you want to take the listener down some rabbit holes. You have complete freedom to say whatever you want for most of this script. You can be sarcastic, go on a rant, take the side of your competitors, or even agree with your biggest critics.
But there’s a catch. You must tie the enjoyable misdirection firmly back to your product, big idea, campaign, or brand. Your audience is counting on you to resolve loose ends. If you have a concept that can pull that off, they’ll be thrilled to listen again and again.
How it works
Step 1: Hook — Make us want to know more
Similar to the W Shape and the Z Shape, your first line needs to do some heavy lifting. For J Shapes, that means saying something so intriguing that the listener has no choice but to continue. They want to go back to their grocery lists, but what they just heard is too weird, too fascinating, too confusing, too unexpected, just too much to ignore.
Flying First Class is all very well, but in the end, it's still public transport …
—from “Flying First Class,” Air Asia
Sometimes, the first line is the start of a story, any story, usually about something completely different than your brand. (If it were about your brand, it’d be a W Shape. The non sequitur is what makes it a J Shape.)
I shouldn't be alive today …
—from “Yusra Mardini,” Under Armour
A disproportionally high number of J Shape scripts are in the second person. I believe the reason is that second-person scripts do much better when the context is provided at the end.
You are a good person. You spend time with your family. You workout at the gym. You conserve water while showering. You like nice clothes. You give to charity. You recycle. You drive a Prius but you use your bike when you can. You enjoy the occasional distraction at work and you always send a card on Mother's Day. Always …
—from “Follow the Frog,” Rain Forest Alliance
You can also start your J Shape by just describing details. I like to think of this as scene painting. No hard edges. Just brush strokes. You’re not giving the listeners anything to hold on to. You’re just providing flashes that start to illuminate the world. The “After Hours Athlete” manifesto does this beautifully:
Backspin on a warped table under a bad light.
A kiss off the 8-ball, a bank on the six.
Double bull on a single throw, three pints in …
—from “After Hours Athlete,” Puma
At this point, you might wonder what I mean by the listener having no context during the Hook. Don’t all of these openings lay the foundation in some way?
Yes, they’re all starting their own stories, narratives, or arcs. But contrary to S Shape and Z Shape manifestos, we don’t know why our brand is talking about them. We don’t know the POV. We’re not being asked to connect this delightful thing to the brand yet. That’s the no-context part. Put another way, the context we lack is not the what. It’s the why. For J Shapes, the why comes later.
To illustrate this, let’s look at one of my favorite opening sentences of any manifesto. It’s from Krispy Kreme. The insight is brilliant, and I can’t believe they sold it:
Donuts are bad for you …
—from “Donuts Are Bad for You,” Krispy Kreme
This is just amazing. I can’t imagine any donut brand saying this. I can’t imagine any maker of desserts anywhere saying this. It’s the sentence that completely undercuts their product offering.
But notice how we don’t know why we’re being told this. We don’t know Krispy Kreme’s take on this yet. In an extreme example, Krispy Kreme could go on to say that people who say this aren’t to be trusted. Or they could say that these are just people who have never had Krispy Kreme donuts. Or they could say that people who say this are fools who don’t have enough experience in life to know what good or bad is.
All of those are possible versions of the Why that we could learn later. If this were a Z Shape script, we would have our answer in the next few sentences. But since this is a J Shape, the script is going to have a lot of fun before the answer is revealed.
I refer to all the fun that J Shapes get to have as the Spectacle. And it’s Step 2.
Step 2: Spectacle — Entertain, entertain, entertain
Now that your hook is in place, it’s time to go nuts. J Shape scripts aren’t always lighthearted or sarcastic, but even the more serious ones are built to be completely engaging. That’s why this is called the Spectacle. You’re putting on a show. Listeners have stopped to watch your street performance. Your job now is to be so riveting that you get them to stay.
If you have a good concept, this part should already be figured out. Did you start a story? Then continue that for most of the script. Talk about the challenges that were faced. Show what was scary, what was exciting. What blockers got in the way? How were they overcome?
…I should have been killed by the bomb that hit the pool in Damascus. I should have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. I should have been one of the many faceless refugees who died along the way. But I am here. Alive. Because I kept moving. So many things tried to stop me. To break me. So many times something whispered, ”This. Now this will defeat you.” But I kept moving. Moving as I left my family behind. Moving through the fear when I was hiding in the forest. Moving through the sea, pulling a boat through the waves …
—from “Yusra Mardini,” Under Armour
Did you introduce a character in the Hook? Let them loose:
… Well this is what you're not going to do. You're not going to quit your job, leave your family, get on the next flight to Nicaragua, take a bus to the edge of the jungle, then hoof it across rivers, lakes and streams on a quest to the very heart of the rainforest. You're not going to ingratiate yourself with the local tribesmen, go to great lengths to earn their respect and trust. It is around now that you realize you are living out the cliche gringo fantasy of becoming an honorary native and leading the resistance forces. But screw it. If they can do it, so can you. You're not going to coordinate an Occupy-the-Rainforest movement, realize it's hopeless, summon the power of the gods, lead a revolution against the deforesters and their multinational employers in an apocalyptic, only to awaken two days later in an El Salvadorian hospital with two toes missing on your left foot, hobble out of Central America, up through Mexico, across the Sierra Madre, where you break down, have your first cigarette in four years, accidentally start a wildfire killing off the endangered species that once served as your occupational distraction, finally make it back home only to find you've been replaced at work by a guy named TJ and that things at home are not what they used to be …
—from “Follow the Frog,” Rain Forest Alliance
If you’ve talked about a culture, bring it to life. Make the examples more and more interesting. Raise the stakes. Show us the hardship and the celebration. What do they think about it?
… When you’re younger sticking out makes it harder at school. They teach that blending in enhances your chances of cool. Yet the black sheep’s the one that they ask for the wool, so I hit em with a yessir, three bags full. You cannot make a difference if indifferent. We as dreamers need to put the “if” in different. You never get ahead if you step at a set pace. But if you give a little more that’s when you expect change. A lot of dishes like to simmer with a similar pan, but there is going with the flow and there’s giving a damn. You can’t grab peoples’ attention if you sit on your hands. Sometimes it takes a lightbulb to switch up the plan. The ugly ducking realized something wasn’t quite how it was billed. Sitting on the fence is what got Humpty Dumpty killed. The chicken crossed the road cause it got bored of facing the same. And throwing stones in glass houses is what breaks through the pain …
—from “The Power of Difference,” BBH
Did you say something nobody expected you to say? Great. Continue with the thread. Don’t play it safe. Go all the way.
… So spare a thought, please, for the absurdly rich. Not the merely well off, who get to pay ten times the price to sit in the front of the plane and get a glass of sour, fizzy wine. They still have to eat their congealing steak with a plastic knife and fork, and their chances of sitting next to a fat, flatulent foreigner with bad breath and an attitude to match is correspondingly (and satisfyingly, to the rest of us) high. No, not those poor, misguided, souls. If you're going to envy anyone, how about envying the people they envy; the bloated plutocrats, the absolutely rolling-in-it, the mind-bogglingly wealthy. The owners of that ultimate liability: the private jet. Consider their problems. Not the money: money they've got. Buckets of the stuff. Stolen, most of it. No, it's the constant hassle. The eye-popping. kniption-inducing, impotent frustration of the thing. Having to put up with wild-eyed madmen in oily overalls clambering about the innards of their (frequently-malfunctioning) million-dollar toys, to emerge clutching what looks like a bolt, and explaining with po-faced glee that this, the culprit, costs more than the gross national product of Guam …
—from “Flying First Class,” Air Asia
If you started talking in the second person, don’t stop now. Keep going. Make assumptions. Be vivid. Be concrete. You don’t have to represent everybody’s experience accurately. You only have to be truthful to one person’s experience. Everyone else will respect the specificity and insight.
… If you have it you need more of it. If you have more of it you don't need less of it. You need it to get it. And you certainly need it to get more of it. But if you don't already have any of it begin with, you can't get any of it to get started which means you really have no idea how to get it in the first place, do you? You can share it, sure. You can even stockpile it if you'd like. But you can't fake it …
—from “Painted Experience,” Nike
With every type of middle section, you want to get more specific, detailed, and connected to your core idea as the script goes on. I think of it as a gravitational pull drawing the What closer and closer to the Why that is revealed at the end of the script.
Take the PlayStation “Double Life” ad. Notice the beginning examples are smaller and more abstract. We hear about “dubious virtue” and “engaging in violence.” By the end, we’re talking about “commanding armies” and “conquering worlds.” When you start blurry and get sharper, it builds anticipation. The listener feels that we’re leading to something, finding our way through a maze:
… Under a million make varsity. One will outscore the country, average 43 points per game. And put Norman on the map. Less than 1% of high school players get a college scholarship. Odds of a freshman leading the nation in scoring and assists? One in never-been-done. 1.3% of college players get drafted to the NBA. Even less likely if you’re 6’1”. Only one will wear shorts to the draft. Of 30 first-round picks, one will become the youngest ever with 18 assists in a playoff game. Be the only one to drop 48 and 11 in the conference finals …
—from “Trae Young,” Adidas
If you’re getting stuck writing the middle, it might be a sign to take a step back and rethink your concept. The J Shape is not a script that you want to figure out as you go. It’s much better to have a firm idea of your big idea before you start. Consider what you’re trying to say. What happens if I take this idea to the extreme? What happens if you agree with your sharpest criticism? What do my critics say about this, and why are they wrong? Which person, living or dead, embodies the essence of our brand? Which culture, clique, or group most represents our target audience?
Answering questions like these is just a thought exercise, but it can help clarify what job the Spectacle needs to do. Anything you can figure out here will save you hours of frustration down the line.
Once you have the bulk of your script sorted, it’s time to crack the code.
Step 3: Reveal — The missing piece that explains everything
This is what your whole spot has been leading up to. You need to provide the decoder ring that translates everything we’ve heard into something that matters. Reveals hold the insight that tells the listeners what the joke is. We’ve kept people on the other side of the curtain for long enough. Now it’s time to bring them around back and see how it all works.
There are two perfect Reveals that I always return to for inspiration. The first is from Krispy Kreme. This manifesto has spent the entire time musing about all the things in the world that could kill us and only one of them is donuts. Then they come in with the Reveal:
… At Krispy Kreme, we think the key to life, by which we mean eating doughnuts, is balance. Sure, if you eat them morning, noon, and night and they are brought directly to your armchair, then that would be bad. But then if you've never felt the pleasure of eating a delicious fluffy original glazed doughnut hot off the line and, heaven forbid, you get struck by lightning, well surely that would be really bad. Really really bad.
—from “Donuts are Bad for You,” Krispy Kreme
That’s beautiful. Beyond just being good writing, it taps into a universal truth that feels obvious and true the moment it’s said out loud. Of course it’s okay to have a donut occasionally. And if you’re going to have the occasional donut, you owe it to yourself to have the most delicious one you can find.
I return to the Krispy Kreme script as well as a reminder that a Reveal doesn’t have to be one line at the end. It can be a paragraph. That’s okay. In longer J Shapes, you’ll have a bit to say to tighten everything up and make your point.
… Sooner or later, you start taking yourself seriously. You know when you need a break. You know when you need a rest. You know what to get worked up about and what to get rid of. And you know when it’s time to take care of yourself, for your‐ self. To do something that makes you stronger, faster, more complete. Because you know it’s never too late to have a life. And never too late to change one.
—from “You Were Born a Daughter,” Nike
One-line Reveals are common in shorter manifestos and scripts. It’s possible that these shorter scripts came from longer manifestos (likely written as other Shapes) that explained this stuff in a lot more detail. When they’re cut down to 30’s and there isn’t enough room, putting it in the super works well.
… super: 1 in 3 men say they have often felt lonely. Reach out.
—from “Reach Out,” Nivea Men
They can also just be the final word of the piece. It says a lot about a manifesto when everything can come down to a single word.
The length of the Reveal doesn’t matter as long as it’s not more than 25% to 30% of your entire script. Just make sure it’s clear. The Why doesn’t have to be cool. It’s the key that makes everything else we just heard seem cool. Do that, and they’ll love you every time.
Want more?
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Get the book or ebook and dive into 2,969 more words on the J Shape. Available now on Amazon.
Any questions?
I’d love to help. Send me an email with whatever you’re working on. (But please mind all NDAs.)
I’d love to help. Send me an email with whatever you’re working on. (But please mind all NDAs.)