Placing a modern problem in the past might sound like a gimmick. It isn't. When you transplant a contemporary behaviour, excuse, or injustice into a historical setting, you strip away all the rationalisations audiences use to defend it. History becomes a mirror, not wallpaper.
Here are four tactics from the Storytelling Engine that send modern problems back in time to make them entertaining and memorable.
- Transplant the excuse into a historical mirror
- Use a famous past event to prove the product's stakes
- Reimagine history to prove the product's value
- Draw the historical parallel to indict the present
1. Transplant the excuse into a historical mirror
The period setting doesn't change the behaviour — it just removes every defence the audience had for it.
Helmet Is Always a Good Idea — Danish Road Safety Council, & Co Copenhagen, 2021
Around 45% of Copenhagen's cycling casualties weren't wearing a helmet, and consumer research kept surfacing the same excuses: too itchy, ruins the hair, I never fall off. Rather than refute them, the Danish Road Safety Council transported them wholesale to 893 AD. The film opens in a Viking village on the eve of a raid, where warrior Svend announces to his army that he won't be wearing his helmet — because it's itchy, wrecks his hair, and he's a careful rider. The strategy landed because Denmark wears Viking helmets with national pride at international sporting events; seeing the same excuses delivered by the group most historically associated with wearing helmets made modern cyclists look not just vain, but absurd. Campaign liking hit 87%, organic reach reached 84%, and one in three non-users seriously considered buying a helmet after seeing the film.
KitKat Password (Wunderman Thompson, 2023) used the same logic for a different brief — a knight at a medieval drawbridge struggles to remember his password to enter the castle, takes a break, and remembers it. The modern frustration transplanted into period setting made the case for KitKat's 85-year-old brand truth without needing to update a word of it. Heineken Silver's Viking Saga (BBH USA, 2023) used the same setting for a different purpose entirely — a Viking love story without a bitter ending became a metaphor for a beer without a bitter taste. Same era, different strategic function: product demo rather than behavioural mirror.
