On 14 February, 2018, at Stoneman Douglas high school in Florida, seventeen children and teachers were shot dead. As a European in the US with kids attending middle school, this act of violence hit hard. We had just moved to the US. We were more than devastated. This was suddenly close. This was suddenly not just ‘something that happened in the US’. Those classrooms looked like the classrooms my kids sat in every day.
It was senseless on so many levels; national, state and local. As a team, over dinner, with friends, I had many conversations about what we could do, what we should do – if we should do anything. My kids wrote letters to the government. We had just finished a 20-day festival in downtown LA called Into Action – an initiative trying to end the gun violence insanity.
One night I had dinner with some Dutch friends who were also living in LA. We discussed producing a film. While eating dinner, everyone talks about wanting to produce a film. It’s an old LA custom. Again, in this small, persistent way, we thought our idea could be different. The film could raise awareness. It could also serve as an announcement of sorts, a statement of belief.
The following day, the producer Ellen Utrecht rang me to say that she had a director who was an ex-veteran, who was willing to shoot something within a week. The piece would feature veterans talking about the senseless nature of automatic weapons. She asked whether we would support it financially.
This wasn’t exactly our country. This wasn’t exactly our fight. But it seemed like the right step for us. I believed in the cause, obviously, but there was also a sense that it was time for the company to serve a different purpose. It was time for movement. This, for me, was part of the maturation of the company.
We performed a service well, and now that a platform had been created, this seemed to be how we should use the platform. Besides: Why not?
We hustled together the money. Ellen found the crew. My wife did the catering. The film was made and finished in a week: 38 million people saw that film, as it went viral on Twitter, pinned by Emma González, and was taken and broadcast at the March for Our Lives in Washington.
It went live alongside two other stories dedicated to examining the narrative of gun violence in the US. As a team we agreed to remove all advertising from the site, for the first time ever, and focus all of our efforts on gun reform over the weekend of the Washington march.
‘Wow,’ you’re thinking. ‘A company gets a conscience. A Dutch company all of a sudden cares about the US.’ But there was something else going on.
The second piece in the series was entitled Anything But Guns. It wasn’t a film, nor was it a static piece of text. The piece was important because it pointed towards how WeTransfer could work with writers in the same creative way we’d collaborated with musicians and film-makers.
Anyone who has seen the state of the newspaper business will tell you, the future of print storytelling is up in the air. Who is able to tell stories these days? How can true stories be presented? There’s great technology out there to combine with and complement text. But, again and again, we see the technology used in facile ways.
The tech, the design, the visual experience need to be paired with meaningful stories. With the Anything But Guns project, we applied storytelling lessons learned from Pixar and other animation studios. Narrative must be tested ruthlessly before technology becomes involved. There’s a temptation to leap in, to make something first, to allow the technology to guide the story.
Anything But Guns allowed us to enter the realm of journalism. But it was a different kind of journalism. Just as animation sequences need to be written and rewritten, tested out, storyboarded, tested again, rewritten, our gun violence story was written and rewritten. The story took the form of an interview.
At first it looked like the reader was asking questions of an interviewee, a woman named Carolyn who lost her daughter in a mass shooting. But, again and again, the voice questioned the reader. Is it okay to go on?
Could Carolyn continue to tell her story? Could the reader handle the details? It was a choose-your-own-adventure where the narrative voice kept asking if the reader could handle the subject matter. During the experience, the reader was given multiple chances to opt out. The reader could just leave through exit points (leading to images of sun-swept beaches) if he or she couldn’t fully deal with the story of gun violence and the attendant issues of grief. But the interviewee would always speak directly to the reader and offer reasons to stay.
A creative idea needs to prove itself. Increasingly, we’re discovering what we can do as a company with our roots in design, with new technology and with editorial ideas. Facebook would like us to believe tech companies should be nothing more than platforms, passing information to people. They’d like us to believe that being a platform, absolving ourselves of responsibility, is something to aspire to. As part of a belief in responsible tech, companies have to begin to disagree. But what should we do with technology?
What impressed readers who came across the Anything But Guns project was the change that occurred over the course of the interview. A sense of intimacy grew between the voice onscreen and the reader. What interests me is the interchange of two prepositions: ‘with’ and ‘in’. We realized that in our collaborations with readers we could draw them in. Increasingly, we can draw in readers. They can be ‘with’ a story and ‘in’ a story.
I don’t mean role-playing, in that you dress up. More and more, I felt the company could not just transfer information but bring readers and collaborators and users – whatever you want to call them – closer to the story at the heart of it.
As storytellers we need to look at increasing the intimacy of storytelling, not pretending we are simply platforms. Whatever kind of narrative you’re telling, whatever message you’re trying to get across, we need to maintain contact in an increasingly fragmented world.
As I mentioned, the word ‘flow’ had become introduced at the company, and for good reason. How do you maintain that in a creative project? How do we forge a connection? First, people must trust you. Then, you must offer them something that warrants their trust.
With this piece, we saw we could lead readers through the story incrementally. That’s why they stayed with the piece for ten or twenty minutes. It brought about a surprising closeness. Imagine a story – a tough story – where a voice is asking you if you’re okay. Is it okay to go on? Would it be okay if I told you about the towel?
When the voice on the screen asks you, the reader, that question, you have the option to say yes. Or you can leave.
If you say yes, the narrator, Carolyn, goes on to tell you that, after her daughter died, when she could finally go into her bedroom, the toughest thing was not the belongings, the posters, the clothes, it was a towel in Kirsten’s bathroom with two of her footprints still impressed in the fabric.
To be able to create a story, a program, that feels like a conversation with this person – a conversation that directs readers through a story, that challenges their expectations and draws them close – that’s the kind of thing we saw we could create. Great stories, tested for strength, and then brought into the world.
As the company grows in confidence, as we pivot out to build and collaborate and produce things, we know we have to pair our considerable technical skills with artists and creators. Don’t monitor, don’t mine them for data, but work alongside them. If we do this, we’ll be able to handle whatever lies ahead – because in the coming years there will be issues to fight for and against.
Here is a case in point. In April 2018, in light of the impending changes to net neutrality in the US, we launched our own net-neutral internet. This comprised a free service to the local residents of Venice Beach, offering them simple, fast, snooping-free internet.
So where are we at now? The creative projects pushed us towards a long-term goal. When WeTransfer started, back in 2009, we were placing long bets that certain market conditions would move in our favour. We believed that ‘small’ data and transparency would build long-term trust. With the rise of fake news and the increased understanding (particularly in Europe) of data rights and privacy, punctuated by the introduction of the GDPR, market conditions shifted. Towards us.
Today, some 50 million people in over 195 countries use WeTransfer every month. Some basic settings have become de facto within WeTransfer, namely:
They’re being adopted by others in an attempt to harness some of the trust that we have amassed over our short history. Not to mention that WeTransfer has a Net Promoter Score of around 80 per cent.
User experience, flow and frictionless movement across the site have been at the forefront of all decision making, with the priority being put on:
Over the last six years, we have given away billions of impressions. We’ve given them to friends, artists, illustrators, film-makers, charities and start-ups. If it wasn’t a structured partnership, we never asked for anything in return.
This is important. To most people, WeTransfer is nearly invisible. We’re just the transfer box – Bill Gates’s ‘plumbing of the internet’. The background belongs to someone else, but it accounts for 95 per cent of what people recognize as the brand. Therefore, curating and showcasing and working with other people and brands has always been, and will always be, important.
Today, when we highlight someone’s work, we reach more than 80 million people per month. I’m proud to say that we now also have a home to provide more context to a lot of the artwork we feature; WePresent tells the stories of the artists who make the site so visually alive.
This push can make a huge difference to an up-and-coming artist. From my perch, I love watching the process happen. It feels like we’re using the reach of the internet for the right reasons. I get a kick out of seeing an artist grow and get somewhere – thanks, in part, to this exposure.
And the other thing I get a kick out of is making meaningful art ourselves.