Two days after Kristin Slye had emerged from a house fire that consumed most of her possessions, the reality of it backed up on her while driving in her car.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks,” Slye said in our recent interview. “It finally sunk in. I remember screaming in my car, ‘I’m here. I came out of this burning house. I’m alive.’”
Slye’s epiphany took place in June of 2000 and it is now part of a beautifully executed advertising campaign for Mutual of Omaha called ‘aha moments.’ If you haven’t caught the commercials, you are missing something special. They are snippets of aha moments as told by the people who experienced them, bright spots on an ever darkening media landscape.
“When you have nothing, you have everything,” Slye says in her spot.
What happened to Slye in her car can be explained by a 2004 study at Northwestern University cited on ahamoment.com. Researchers discovered that “a split second before having an aha moment, we experience a burst of electrical brain activity ... kind of like a big light bulb going off in your brain.”
You might say it was a bit of a light bulb moment on the creative front when Todd Lieman and Jon Wank of Skadaddle Media -- working late one night after several months of kicking around ideas for their client -- stared at a crammed white board and decided to erase everything and write just this: Mutual of Omaha.
“And then I said, ‘what about aha, Omaha?’” Lieman said, emphasizing the rhyme.
The campaign grew from there, a natural for an advertising company that prides itself on its authenticity and transparency.
“It’s about life changes,” Lieman said. “What better way to convey an insurance company’s message?”
He loves that the spots are real people who responded to an ad on craigslist.org to talk about their personal epiphanies. Skadaddle pitched the idea to Mutual of Omaha on Valentine’s Day of 2008, notable because our economic downturn had only just begun, so the campaign seems almost prescient at its launch a year later.
By now many television viewers have seen the story of Ed, who lost his job but was spurred on to do what he’d really wanted to do -- become a personal trainer. In one compelling clip, a woman named Paige talks about following her gut and sending an appetizer of lemongrass beef to a guy at a restaurant bar; he’s now her husband.
And then, of course, there’s Kristin Slye and the fire in 2000. She describes two aha moments in her video. The first was the aforementioned incident. The second deserves a proper setup.
Slye, a hospitality marketing consultant (http://slyemarketing.com/), had grabbed an opportunity to live in what was the former house from MTV’s Real World (1994 season). She had six roommates, pretty much the norm in the ‘dotcom’ era when apartments were expensive and hard to come by. Six months into it, she was awakened at 3:20 a.m. by a fire. Slye wasn’t even wearing shoes, just pajama bottoms and a tank top. That was all she had left. With the help of good people in her life and her epiphany that she hadn’t lost what was important, she started rebuilding.
Then came a visit to Burning Man, the largest outdoor art festival in the world with a name that felt like a metaphor to Slye. When she got there, she found out they actually burn a wooden man as part of the festivities. At that point she didn’t even want to be around a lit candle, so she steered clear. But each year when she returned to the event, she inched closer and by 2004 Slye, a lifelong dancer, was close enough to see dancers with hula hoops of fire and flaming balls of fire attached to chains.
“I thought, don’t these people know that fire can destroy things?” Slye said. “I was both horrified and bewitched.”
Interestingly, the same Northwestern research team that had done the 2004 study about aha moments did another study in 2006 -- also cited on ahamoment.com -- and in it they found that “if we're open to change and maybe even looking for some kind of change -- an aha moment is more likely to happen.”
Tired of being afraid of fire, Slye was primed for change. So she trained to be a fire dancer and learned poi, the actual name of the dancing with chains she had seen. Her second aha moment came later while performing at a Burning Man ceremony.
“It was seeing people’s faces and their cheering,” Slye said. “Something that gave me so much pain, I realized people could get so much joy out of it.”
Slye, now married and the mother of a two-year-old, teaches and performs fire dancing. She and her family live simply – “Stuff makes me anxious” -- and, well, she lets her husband worry about the economy.
“We’re going to be fine,” Slye said. “All that really matters is we have each other. Fire has given me that gift. I’m really grateful that it happened.”
Skadaddle Media and Mutual of Omaha, it seems, have given us all a gift – stories that manage to resonate deeply in tiny sound bites while we’re watching Medium .
“It’s about a better life,” Lieman said. “That’s what we’re trying to inspire.”
Works for me.
Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.
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