WTF is going on with Britain's Heartland? (Post 3)
POST 3: THE ORAL HISTORY BOOK - CLAIM YOUR FREE COPY BELOW
This is the third post in a 3-part series where we’re sharing a deep-dive into Saatchi & Saatchi’s recent piece of research “What the fuck is going on with Britain’s Heartland?” - again with huge thanks to Richard Huntington and the agency for allowing us to share so much.
POST 1 was an overview of the entire project and can be seen here.
POST 2 was a deep-dive into one of the themes and can be seen here.
In this third post we’re going to share how we are passionate not only about ‘running some research’ but capturing people’s views, thoughts, perceptions and realities for posterity. Maximising research budgets and content, and capturing people’s realities as history.
In that spirit, for this project we collated and curated our own Oral History book.
It stands as a companion piece to the brilliant Saatchi & Saatchi book that you can find out more about here.
Oral History: Essential and Insightful
Firstly - what exactly is Oral History?
Well, according to the oracle…
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries.[1][2][3][4] Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.[5]
As we see it, it’s the capturing of individual perspectives about their lives and society at that particular moment in time.
If you’re traditionally ‘running some research’ for a client, it would be difficult to do this. The Discussion Guide would be focused on their specific brand, category or business challenge. It’d make the conversation closed-off to wider conversations, and you’d probably have participant contracts and client contracts that prohibit wider sharing of the content.
With projects like “What the fuck is going on? with the Heartland?” - as mentioned in post one, the Discussion Guide was intentionally wide and allowed us to gather views and opinions about life, lives, passions and fears. (In fact - we only really went into ‘brand world’ if the participant started talking about it…)
In ourselves it was an interesting mindset shift. From ‘running research for a client’ To ‘capturing wider perspectives for posterity’. If you shift your mindset like that you realise you relate to the participant differently. There’s less pressure on finding something ‘insightful’ for the client’s brand, and more openness about what they deem to be interesting and relevant in their life. Reality First, Brand Second in its purest form.
Personal inspirations: Tony Parker and Studs Terkel
We’ve mentioned in previous posts how we’ve been finding a growing interest in this area - citing Tony Parker and Studs Terkel (that post about Studs will be written at some point!).
The curation and design of our book is heavily influenced by reading books like ‘Red Hill: A Mining Community’ by Tony Parker. How he sets the scene, absents himself from the outputs and lets the humanity behind the words shine through.
Tony was a core part of our passion for this project. Yes we have the video, the photography and the audio, but we didn’t want the words - the written form - to feel like it was secondary.
Tony’s descriptions mean you have to use your imagination more than moving image. You picture the scene. You piece together the fashion of the time, the interior decorations, the sounds, the smells of the time. And the accents too.
Your experience of reading a few sentences from the participant will be different to mine. Yet they’re both the reality Tony is expressing.
So where does Studs come into it?
Well, when we are travelling around the UK visiting people, we listen to his endless recordings. Some more mundane and everyday than others, some more aligned to historic events, yet all personal realities.
This specific audio recording is one that has stuck with us. It’s Studs chatting to cab drivers and barbers in Montgomery, Alabama in April 1965, as the Selma to Montgomery marches were arriving.
What struck us is that the marches themselves, and Dr. Martin Luther King’s involvement, and the police brutality are all widely recorded. But the normal working people who were present? The cab drivers and the barbershop owners?
The audio below is essential listening. It highlights the individual views of people of that town, of that town. Specifically, the participant who first speaks 14mins into the conversation we found fascinating. The more he speaks the more nuance you pick up. The more you realise he is conflicted. He understands the march from his point of view, from the point of view of his father, and also what this march means for the future of his children. His words go beyond a soundbite. His thoughts go beyond a short clip. Him speaking reminds us that people’s important, nuanced view and opinions can sometimes take time to be explained.
Listen here. (WARNING: Explicit and offensive racial language is included).
Our process to capture reality
We wanted to keep the process as simple and as pure as possible. For authenticity reasons, but also for workload reasons!
After each visit, we merged audio from each of the microphones that we had used in our time with the participants. We then took this audio, and used an AI app to transcribe into a raw transcription (including all the pauses, ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, and typos that this brings).
Looking through our notes, and of the themes that emerged during the debrief phase, we then used Tony Parker as an inspiration to set the scene. (Seen in Post 1 where we shared mini bios with the agency).
So, as well as pulling out themes that emerged across the visits, we were also curating the realities of each participant.
We then selected chunks of conversation that pertained to the areas we thought were interesting, re-ordered and tidied up the copy - being very mindful of maintaining the participant’s realities authentically. The rules we set ourselves are here:
THE RESULT: VOICES FROM THE HEARTLAND
The output was this. A self-published book that captures the realities of 11 people around the UK in early 2024.
No photographs, only words. An intentional decision to let the reader feel the reality of each participant via only their words.
It’s something we’re very proud of. Something we have produced to explore, try something new, and to bring voices of real people to life with more nuance and time and space to breathe.
It begs the question to all of us - when we’re ‘running some research’ - why can’t this be a new output touchpoint? Must it always be a presentation with ‘findings’? Why can’t we let people’s words speak for themselves?
Why can’t we create something with more longevity, more meaning, more depth?
Get your copy here
If you’re interested in getting a free copy of the book please send us your postal address here.
We hope you’ve found this 3-part overview interesting and informative.
If you’d like to know more about how we can help your business understand the true realities going on in your customers lives, drop us a line here.