REILLY NARRATIVE STRATEGY
I help complex B2B tech companies turn world-changing technology into the story that moves the people who fund, adopt and champion it — without shipping another spec-recital video nobody watches.
Who am I ?
I grew up in Providence, RI, in a big Irish family where every gathering ran on food, booze and stories. You'd wake up the next morning with your stomach sore from laughing and you couldn't tell me a single detail of any one story. But you remembered exactly how the night felt. That's the whole thing, right there. People don't remember the statistics on your infographic. They remember how the story made them feel.
I went to Northeastern in Boston for journalism and started in print, right as print was dying. At the Patriot Ledger I wrote about a World War II vet who'd run into a lost childhood friend the day before a German U-boat sank their ship. His friend didn't make it off. Weeks after the piece ran, he called me. The little sister of his friend who died that night read the article and tracked him down, fifty years later. That was the first time I felt a story land where it actually mattered. I never looked back.
Print kept shrinking, so I moved through PR and content marketing, including a stint at a B2B tech agency where I watched CEOs recite product specs at a camera nobody would watch. That's where I first saw the real problem. Then I got laid off — best thing that ever happened to me. I built Reilly Narrative Strategy and spent the next decade making films for consumer-facing brands, the kind of work people actually remember. Everywhere I pointed the camera, the same truth held: a video doesn't fail because of the gear. It fails because nobody found the story first.
Now I'm bringing that back to B2B tech, because that's where the gap is widest and where I think there's the most opportunity, for me and for the companies still stuck reciting specs.
So that's where I start — before a frame is shot. If your technology is changing an industry and the story's still invisible, let's find it before you call the next vendor.
The Market Legend Method.
Market Legend Discovery
A journalist's deep dive that surfaces the one true, high-stakes human story no competitor can own — the story before any frame is shot. This is the storyfinding most vendors skip and the reason their video gets four views and dies.
The Strategic Narrative Spine
Name the worldview shift the buyer has to make, then the keywords and stakes that align tone to audience. This is the spine the whole legend hangs on — the difference between a feeling that lands and a feature list that doesn't.
Truth-Teller Identification
Find the people inside the company who carry the most credibility with CFOs, boards and investors. Read each one's desire, motivation and uniqueness — then make them comfortable enough to be real on camera, so it's a conversation, never a performance.
Narrative Architecture Mapping
Map how the legend compounds across every surface — the raise deck, the sales conversation, the website, the recruiting pitch, the exit — so one story does work everywhere, instead of one video that does work nowhere.
Cinematic Storytelling Meets Strategic Purpose
THE ADA ADVOCACY FILM — a two-and-a-half-minute film for the American Dental Association.
THE CHALLENGE — The dental profession has a seat at the table in Congress and what happens in those halls shapes what happens in every practice across the country. The ADA needed its members to feel that, viscerally. Not just understand it — feel it. The kind of feeling that makes a dentist open an action alert, pick up the phone and show up on The Hill or at their State House knowing their voice carries weight.
WHAT WE DID — Built a story around a simple truth: every dentist who walks into a congressional office brings something powerful with them — a constituent, a neighbor, a trusted voice from back home. The film made that real. Not a call to duty, but a case for confidence — showing members that showing up isn't a formality, it's the thing that actually moves the needle.
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