“I had a real love for Homer, not the yellow guy on TV, the author of ancient Greek literature,” says Tas as he talks about his childhood.
With a love for Latin and Greek history, Tas grew up in Essex and went to university at Oxford to study Classics. While he loved it, he didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted to pursue as a career.
At the time, his girlfriend, now his wife, was doing market research, and he started wondering more about the commercial world. That’s when he decided to take a leap and took a full-time role as an account planner for an advertising agency. He stayed in advertising for 17 years. However, one train ride home from work really opened up his eyes to changing his trajectory.
Changing directions
Tas said: “My account director was on his 47th gin and tonic on the train so he was knocked out and asleep. I thought to myself, I’ll have a look at my calendar to look and see how much time I spent doing stuff I actually enjoyed. There were many briefs, pitches and countless meetings I didn’t really want to go to.”
When he inputted all the data, a pie chart popped out that said 13% of his time was doing tasks that he genuinely liked. That’s how his career as a trainer, lecturer and author was born. At the time, he wanted to bring new ideas that people in advertising and marketing weren’t utilising.
Anthony recalls sitting in meetings with clients and discussing how humans make decisions and realised the reason there was a constant disagreement was because there was no agreed theory. This was what sparked his interest to change things up.
“So then I got into doing training in three areas: the power of storytelling, behavioural economics, and the nature of insight and creativity. Working in an ad agency you have to build a bridge between what clients want and what creatives do.”
Becoming a triple threat
Currently, Tas runs his own training company and is a course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Market Research Society, the Institute of Internal Communication, the AAR (ad agency/client relationship advisers) and the Civil Service College, running courses on storytelling, behavioural economics, insightment and creative briefing.
Besides this, he is also an associate lecturer at Bucks New University, Nottingham Trent and Beijing Normal University, as well as a Principal Advisor for CIO Connect in Hong Kong –the premier advisory service dedicated to CIOs and other technology leaders in HK.
Tas regularly speaks at client events and international conferences, for example keynoting at Microsoft’s Global Sales Summit in Seattle. He is also the author of several books, including: ‘The Storytelling Book’ – the award-winning guide to using storytelling techniques to improve presentations and communication; ‘The Inspiratorium’ – a compendium of insight and inspiration, which graced shelves in 2018; and his latest book ‘Incitations’ – a collection of expressions, phrases and words designed to incite insight.
The power of storytelling
Tas admits that out of 10,000 presentations he’s seen over the years, only about six were memorable. He would sit and look through his clients’ 100-page documents and 300-slide PowerPoint presentations and often think to himself: “Why are these so boring?”
“In our business, we’re obsessed with messaging people and giving them data, statistics and figures. It’s very parent/child, very lecture-like and didactic and patronising. Communication is about making people feel good about their decisions and choices they make. You’re telling people this will make you feel better about yourself.”
Tas often pushes clients to use a mixture of anecdotes, quotes, stories, jokes and cartoons, still making all their points, but making it both meaningful and memorable. He reiterated that our brains simply can’t remember everything from presentations, but they can recall anything that is emotional or might have meaning to us.
So why do people still utilise outdated presentations with hundreds of slides?
He says: “We’ve ended up creating this system of presentation of how we communicate, and one of the words I coined was arithmocracy. We’ve become increasingly obsessed with KPIs and measurements and have become slaves to the algorithm. I’m not saying these data numbers are wrong, I’m just saying we’ve become far too obsessed with it. And you can’t have data without a story.”
What to expect at Ignite UK
Tas will be tying his love for Greek mythology with the B2B world during his keynote session. In Greek mythology, a mythical creature called the Minotaur dwelt at the centre of a maze-like construction called the Labyrinth. No one could kill the monster because they would often get lost in the maze. However, before entering the maze, Athenian hero Theseus, took a golden thread to mark his steps as it unravelled and slayed the monster. Once he accomplished this, he was able to retrace his steps using the thread and claimed his throne.
Tas says: “I’ve always used it for a metaphor. Every presentation you write, it should have a thread, it’s going back to what you’re trying to say. Too many speeches are just one damn slide after another. Your brain goes ‘OK, where is this going?’ You need to have a thread: write a logical thread wherever it starts, where it’s ending and have it there so the brain can latch on to it and know where that thread is.”
He’ll discuss how to edit, find a thread and rigorously take out anything that doesn’t relate to that thread. He’ll also discuss how to distinguish between data and insights, and how to start your stories with selected insights instead of random data statistics.
