What Jenna Ortega’s ‘Wednesday’ Dance Teaches About Speaking and Presenting
If you want your talk or presentation to be impactful you have to build it around a hook that is memorable. That’s actually quite difficult. Ask director James Cameron. His 2009 blockbuster Avatar cost 100s of millions of dollars and is one of the highest grossing movies of all time, but left surprisingly little mark on our popular culture. Most people have seen the movie, but they don’t make references to Avatar like when they say “You have my axe!”, from the The Lord of the Rings (2001), “You’re going to need a bigger boat”, from Jaws (1975) or even “We’re not in Kansas anymore”, from the The Wizard of Oz (1939).
On the other hand, Netflix’s TV series Wednesday already earned a permanent place in our pop culture memories with the scene where Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams dances to the Cramps’ 1981 version of Goo Goo Muck. Choreographed by Ms Ortega herself, this quirky performance borrows moves from all the previous incarnations of the Addams Family, plus a few other classic movies. If you have somehow missed this dance you can watch the official clip on YouTube here https://youtu.be/NakTu_VZxJ0
Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday dance is already a viral hit on TikTok, and it looks like it will be around for a long time. Long after Netflix is forgotten people will still be doing that dance. And it is a pretty safe bet that next Halloween the Wednesday Addams dress and pigtails will be a hit in party stores.
Even if you are not making blockbuster movies or hit TV series you can learn from this story. Most talks, pitches and presentations are instantly forgettable, and the only way to avoid this is to build your content around some kind of memorable hook, an image, a case, a story or anything that attaches the whole pitch firmly in people’s memories.
Just last week I did a lecture for students in the Business Model Innovation course at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship about finding interesting new revenue models for their startups. Now I could have given this a boring title like “Some factors to be considered by entrepreneurs in the selection of revenue models for their startups”. But I didn’t. I called the lecture “Monetizing the Elephant” and built the whole thing around a story about an elephant. It begins with the elephant story, it closes with more about the elephant, the elephant is in the title and elephants appear in all the social media posts about it.
Now I know exactly what will happen now. One day I will bump into someone who will tell me that she saw one of my lectures. I will ask which one and she will reply “the one about the elephant”. They always remember the elephant.
So, if you want your pitch to make a lasting impact you just have to find a hook for your story. This might seem difficult at first, but there are simple-to-follow methods for collecting and developing the raw materials for your content design. I have already described these methods in the Medium post Building a Pipeline for Content Ideas https://andrewhennigan.medium.com/building-a-pipeline-for-content-ideas-4aa51634f6d8
And remember to always test your new ideas on at least a few friends before you bake them into an important talk or presentation. It’s surprisingly hard to predict which memory hooks will really be memorable, and which will have unexpected negative impacts. Most likely director Tim Burton and Jenna Ortega knew they had a winner with the Wednesday dance routine, but until it hit TikTok they could not have been sure.
This is just one of the many ideas that you can borrow from the world of television and movies to make your everyday storytelling more impactful. Recently I have also written about how the screen writers “prelap” method can be used for perfect slide transitions in How a Screenwriting Technique can Level up Your Presentation Skills here https://andrewhennigan.medium.com/how-a-screenwriting-technique-can-level-up-your-presentation-skills-9ba25a365247?sk=b860ef7c223496eae2f4066682bd45df
If you would like to know more about how you can learn from TV & movie storytelling methods ask me about a talk, a lecture, an interactive workshop or even one-to-one coaching on the topic. You can reach me at speaker@andrewhennigan.com
