Harmony Labs

04/15/2026

What does it look like to use AI to give voice to the responses of real people?

After six years of understanding not just what media is out there but what real people are actually choosing to consume and how it's affecting them, we're building a new set of audience intelligence tools on top of that data – starting with a persona and focus group tool designed to help make that knowledge accessible to far more partners and help them inhabit audiences' realities.

Here's an early look at what we're building, and why: https://harmonylabs.org/news/audience-research-increasing-utility-democratizing-access-1

04/10/2026

"A deep story is like values tied up in a coherent syntax, an operating system that sits underneath and makes possible all the applications we interact with on the surface."

Brian Waniewski and Riki Conrey explore why the work of change isn't about rewriting people's stories, but about fitting your story inside the one they're already living.

Read how we're extracting and articulating deep stories from research findings across 13,000 respondents, combined with behavioral media data from the Narrative Observatory:

How social change interacts with the values and stories people are already living

04/06/2026

In our first year of the Narrative R&D Lab, we built audience mapping tools drawing from 8M+ data points, a content testing platform that collected over 1.1 million responses from 32,000+ participants, creator briefing systems, and diagnostic tools to identify audience fit before production begins — all tested through live campaign experiments with media partners including NowThis Impact, BuzzFeed, ParentsTogether, and Plus Más.

Read on for three patterns that emerged from the process of making content, what they mean for narrative change practice, and why our next topic focus is AI.

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Lessons from a year of experimentation in the economic mobility space, and why we’re focusing on AI narratives next.

03/03/2026

What’s a show or movie you’ve watched recently that made systemic change feel possible?

Our new report with Democracy 2076 analyzes streaming behavior across 116,000+ viewers to understand how entertainment media shapes people’s sense of democracy.

The big takeaway is that there isn’t one “pro-democracy story.” Different audiences gravitate toward different hero archetypes—insiders vs. outsiders, restorers vs. transformers—signaling how they want systems to change.

This is a map for storytellers and democracy advocates: the kinds of protagonists and arcs that can expand people’s sense of agency and unlock imagination about the future.

Read more + get the briefing:

Small story choices can fuel demand for a healthier democracy and unlock greater agency and imagination

02/23/2026

✨ In 2026, we're ready to do work that is more responsive to rapid shifts in culture, media, and technology; more global in scope; and more transformational in its contribution to a positive, pluralistic world. Explore everything we researched and wrote about in 2025, in one place:

What a year of research taught us about starting with people in culture, learning in community, and thinking beyond borders

01/07/2026

“Two years ago, we identified climate’s distribution problem—it was stuck in the political echo chamber. While that’s still largely true, when nearly half of climate content focuses on media commentary about discourse itself, and when topics like energy transition materials get treated through stories of national security and economic competition, the big storytelling insight is that it’s not the issues themselves that matter so much as the content that carries them. If climate can be absorbed into stories about security and growth, it can also be woven into all kinds of stories that resonate with audiences, including lifestyle, gaming, and other content types.”

Our refreshed Climate Audiences research offers practical audience insights and tools for climate storytellers and communicators working within today’s media environment.

🌎 Explore updated profiles across 8 audience zones with fresh creator examples and storytelling tips on our Narrative Observatory site: https://narrativeobservatory.org/climate

✨ Get a look at what’s shifting in climate culture, and what that means for reaching audiences in 2025 and beyond: https://harmonylabs.org/news/climate-narrative-update

Exploring what’s changed in the narrative landscape in 2025 and how to reach audiences for climate going forward

12/19/2025

We’re honored to be named a 2025 grantee by the Nielsen Foundation! Their support helps us power our partners with data-driven storytelling strategies and reshape how audiences engage with climate narratives. We’re excited to learn alongside this inspiring cohort and harness the power of media to drive positive social impact.

Learn more about the projects:

The Nielsen Foundation is pleased to support six organizations in 2025 through our annual Data for Good grants program...

12/02/2025

At Harmony Labs, our four design principles grew out of years of research and collaboration with partners working to reach real audiences in a noisy media landscape. The principles now guide every project, and we're sharing them as a toolkit for anyone aiming to shift narratives toward a more positive, pluralistic future.

Listen to our team break down the principles and what they look like in practice: https://harmonylabs.org/news/design-principles

11/21/2025

What does racial equality look like onscreen?

Our new report examines how over 100,000 viewers engaged with nearly 2,000 streaming shows and movies in 2024, revealing what makes stories about racial equality connect across audiences.

🎬 Across genres, audiences engage with stories that frame racism as systemic, and show heroes pushing against these barriers.

💫 The systemic barriers often take the form of antagonists or agents of exclusion, driving the story’s conflict and the hero’s quest for transformation.

We created this report for storytellers who want to reach new audiences with stories that match diverse perspectives on systemic change, helping more people see themselves in the journey toward racial justice and envision futures worth striving for.

Check out the full report: harmonylabs.org/racial-equality-in-fiction

11/13/2025

If you'll be at Race Forward’s Just Narratives for Multiracial Solidarity convening in St. Louis this week, we’re excited to be in conversation about how narratives can build multiracial solidarity.

In preparation for the conversation, we were curious about how solidarity actually works, so we surveyed 600 Americans across racial groups to understand how it’s created and sustained.

We found that for many people outside organizing spaces, solidarity isn't a starting point—it’s the outcome of doing meaningful work together.

When people recognize shared fate and work together toward shared goals, closeness follows. Those bonds, in turn, make people more likely to take further action in solidarity.

More than a century after Durkheim first observed that structured roles create social cohesion, our data show that it’s still true across races and issues.

Read the full piece and let us know what you think:

11/07/2025

At Harmony Labs, we map how values-based audiences engage with online media to deliver data-driven evidence for what kinds of stories work, and for whom, in shaping the futures we believe are possible.

Our new report, Racial Equality in Fiction, finds that audiences across values choose TV/film that present racial equality as a systemic issue.

Huge thanks to our advisors and creative experts for their partnership in this work. Check it out and tell us what you think: https://harmonylabs.org/project/racial-equality-in-fiction

10/30/2025

“Your identity is who you are—as the hero of your life story.” Harmony Labs' principal scientist Riki Conrey joined our friends at RALLY on their podcast What If We? to unpack what audience identity really means—and how shared values and lived experiences can make persuasion more human and more powerful. Check it out at the links below or wherever you get your podcasts. 🎙️

Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/43DS4uV
Spotify: http://bit.ly/3Ldst5O

What if We? · Episode