The Storyteller’s Story
21st April 09
Posted in creativity, interactive
If the past couple of weeks have seen some of the industry’s finest minds crystallise why there isn’t more great work in the interactive space, then from here on in – inevitably, I guess – this debate is going to need to shift on its axis slightly and focus on the trickier task of finding tangible solutions.
The good news is that there already appear to be some answers emerging, all with the potential to lead somewhere interesting and worth recording. I’m going to approach this pretty organically and see where it goes. Please feel free to jump in, disagree, debate, add your own suggestions etc.
First up, a theme that may seem controversial to some: the wholesale reinvention of a (sometimes much maligned) skill, the art of storytelling.
Ben’s second post caught my attention with the observation that “there’s currently much less of a culture of developing narrative or storytelling on the web” and this got me thinking.
Part of the issue behind this, I would hazard a guess, is the fact story telling as a skill has come to be associated with the old school mores of broadcast advertising. By way of illustration, in his NMA column last week Mark Cridge talked about the need for a creative director to be comfortable with the idea of curation, rather than control. A thought that made complete sense – no question. His piece then went on to conclude “If these are the skills that are going to be important from now on, which type of creative director would you rather work with: a big budget brand storyteller obsessed with control, or one more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the interactive world?”
Reading this, you’d be forgiven for thinking storytelling no longer has a place or is badly in need of rehab. In truth, and I am going to nail my colours to the mast here, it’s never had the potential to be more relevant or exciting.
(For full post click below)
Entertainment brands are showing us how it’s done. The days of film trailer after film trailer featuring near-identical Don LaFontaine or James Earl Jones voiceovers are kinda over. Undoubtedly these brands do have it easy – acres of high value (okay, not always the case..) content people are already prepared to pay good money to see. How hard can it be to chop up bits of a film or game into neat trailers and distribute to a waiting fan base on the web? But, in fact, they are doing so much more than that. The new movie marketing model (the latter also recently examined here by Noel Bussey) shows us that storytelling doesn’t need to be written off as antiquated, one way communication, quite the opposite. Sophisticated stories are spun around the core characters & concept behind a film, all with the aim of driving anticipation, buzz and deeper, more rewarding relationships with fans.
There are a multitude of examples to prove the point from an ever-growing line of films and TV shows (Cloverfield, The Dark Knight, Lost, Heroes, The Sopranos etc), but I am going to pick just one: Watchmen. Whatever you may think of the graphic-novel-turned-film, the marketing content was near flawless. The creation of a fictional, immersive world in which a fan could lose themselves happily over a prolonged period of time. If you haven’t read it already, check out Dan Light at PPC’s account of producing it all here. His story is a rare and useful thing: collected in one place, a candid, informative & riveting account of how a seamlessly integrated & interactive campaign was created.
Compared to an fmcg brand, say, of course we can argue that it’s easier to create an extended fictional world around an entertainment brand, especially one as hotly anticipated as this film. However, if we buy the linked principles of (a) moving from interruption to engagement (b) moving from one night stands to ongoing relationships with consumers, and (c) shifting £££ from bought to earned (& owned) media, then we have to accept we have a lot to learn from how entertainment brands are approaching these very same challenges.
At a conceptual level, they teach us that the fundamental shift in storytelling is simply this: we are now in the business of starting stories, not attempting to nail them down from beginning to end. Letting stories take on a life of their own, to be played with, passed around, modified and enriched by the audiences they’re developed for.
Here are a few observations about what it takes to put this into practice, drawn from what Light had to say:
1.The importance of starting out early and producing a LOT of content from that point on. The first part of the jigsaw, the ‘movie countdown widget’ (now a ubiquitous part of any movie launch) was available 10 months before the film was released, compared to the average 8-10 weeks. And, as Dan says, “In the case of Watchmen, content-wise, we really went for the mother lode”. See the post for why that was important.
2. Don’t expect a linear process: brief->concept sign-off->production. To get some things approved, you need to make them without being asked. There’s a risk, but proto-typing and producing at low cost & high speed means the pay-off is worth it, most of the time.
4. Fans may want to be “hunter gatherers” (see Henry Jenkins on the subject of world-building), piecing together dispersed pieces of content in order to build a fictional world, but they only have so much time to do so. The Watchmen downloadable widget was a countdown to the movie, but also a – updated weekly – portal to most of the content surrounding it.
5. The crucial importance of creating a tightly woven team (see Warren Bennis on Great Groups for the theory behind why this is critically important). Dan and his team created a space which removed them from their usual environment. It was the loading bay at their offices – effectively a stripped down warehouse area – nothing fancy. Then they gave that team the tools they needed to do what they do best. For writing purposes they used software which allowed them to co-create whilst still keeping individual ownership.
6. Seed aggressively / mobilise your network. Journalists, bloggers, fans. Despite Dan’s modesty about how last minute some of the meet-ups were, truth is, this probably added to the excitement. These relationships were all carefully identified and nurtured ahead of time. He knew a lot of them personally. Bear in mind, this was in addition to the actual movie’s pre-launch activity orchestrated by the director and production company.
All this leaves me feeling there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space. That the storyteller’s story does not, after all, end here….
40 comments on “The Storyteller’s Story”
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Mel Exon
Interesting. This immediately prompts me to question what differentiates the successful storytellers from the ones who end up as white noise.
And it seems that the former (like Watchmen) focus on WHAT story they tell, while the latter obsess too much with HOW they tell the story — for example, Disney’s failed Prince Caspian twitter tactic, a sad and utterly unengaging medium-before-message fiasco that tried to talk at an audience it didn’t remotely understand, without offering any sort of additional value extending or complementing the film’s inherent storytelling.
Another testament to the idea-first principle: “Interactive” is just a medium — a great story told by a great storyteller can be just as compelling online as it could scribbled on a piece of parchment. Perhaps the reason we see so much mediocrity online isn’t in the medium, but in the scarcity of great ideas to begin with – the interactive space is being populated almost by inertia, by companies who feel like they have to have a presence even if they don’t have anything compelling to say.
Agree wholeheartedly with this. See also my reply to William below. We need to value stories again in the first place, then reward the great storytellers who realise the game has changed. The people who have the talent to create the spark to start a great story, then curate – with real generosity and lightness of touch – how it unfolds across channel, time and audience.
Really interesting post, for lots of reasons, I really need to get in touch with you Mel and have a proper chat.
One of the first things I always ask any interactive shop that I talk to is “Do you have writers on staff?” And almost every time the answer is no. I may annoy a lot of designers / art directors when I say this but copywriters are the real life blood of most great agencies. Not all but most.
For the record I’m probably in the art director camp.
We at JWT NY have been focused on Storytelling since 1917 but it got lost for a while. The last 5 years this has been at the heart of everything we do. Storytelling is a maligned art and increasingly relevant for digital communications.
I have so much research on this and various papers written but my basic conclusion is that the last 150 years of ‘broadcast’ storytelling (printing, TV, Holywood etc) has warped our view of storytelling. If we go back in time, to when storytelling was an oral tradition both the ‘audience’ and ‘the teller’ were co-creators – much like today’s digital communications.
Stories are different to conversations or experiences. Stories are conversations that others find have value and take, edit and own. Stories, not conversations, are what get passed from one to another and get modified for different audiences and communities.
Like the web, there are millions of conversations and experiences that happen every second but only a few graduate to be the stories we all know. That’s the challenge of digital communications today in a nut shell.
The good thing about stories is that they are based around an idea, not a production value. An idea that has value to others (entertainment, history, moral value, education etc.) The biggest viral videos on you tube have very poor production values. The reason so many agency attempts at viral fail is that we think production values matter. They do not. They are a hangover from a time when the owners of the airwaves and printing presses were production focused and only broadcast the ‘gold standard’ of their art.
Man is a storytelling animal and stories did more than bring us together around the fire, they caused us to explain why the sunsets, how the world was created, why we are here in the first place and what happens when our family and loved ones die. To quote Eric Hoffer “Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story — a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
As stories pass from individual to individual, from community to community, they grow in power and strength before being written down. The stories we think of today as epics – the stories of the Bible, the Trojan wars, Adam and Eve, Robin Hood, myths and legends in all cultures were the result of numerous embellishments and adaptations as the stories passed from storyteller to storyteller.
Think now of how viral videos work. They are not only viral because everyone watches them. The real virality happens when someone takes “charlie bit my finger” and re-enacts it, modifies it, builds on it, takes it to new audiencess… “a porn version”, set to music. etc. etc.
Today our ‘read/write’ culture (or should that be hear /re-tell culture) of digital communications is a return to the dynamics of an oral tradition with the one big difference…the power to broadcast globally is now in everybody’s hands. Storytelling today is simply storytelling of old amplified to a global scale.
The good storytellers out there will not only get huge audiences. They will define how we all see the world. The additions and embellishments of audiences will be as as much part of the story as the original text.
e.g. Try to think of the story of Jesus’ last supper without calling up the image that Leonardo da Vinci created 1400 years later.
Or, as a brand (Think Domino’s brand for a moment!) you cannot control how your story is re-told.
Based on our work so far, two things seem to be important in creating an effective story. ( I have more on this and can’t write it all here!)
1) The concept of “time.” is all-important. It allows the storyteller to create an experience that is dramatically different and more emotionally rewarding than our normal everyday realities. Time allows us to manipulate the imagination of the audience, giving them just enough information to spark a reaction but not so much that we give away the stories ultimate outcome. This is where the concept of ‘plot’ is created.
2) The response of the audience is the second key element of storytelling. The true magic of the storytelling comes from a deep understanding of the needs of the audience; who they are, what they are interested in, why they are listening, an empathy for their current state of mind. This empathy is how the storyteller is able to create the sense of ‘drama’ – be that comedy or tragedy –because it is only by knowing the audiences desires of the story that we establish a relevant a sense of purpose and maintain their attention as we progress towards the stories resolution.
e.g. Bring to mind the image of David’s struggle with Goliath as depicted by Michelangelo. This representation of David, completely naked, leans heavily into the need and desires of an audience (Michelangelo’s patrons) rather than any attempt at faithful representation or historical accuracy. Yet it is burned into all of our minds the minute we think of David.
So, with the introduction of ‘time’, ‘progress’ and ‘plot’ stories take place in the past the present and the future simultaneously. “Once upon a time”, “In the beginning…”, “Long, long ago…” became the phrases that not only captured our attention, put us on the edge of our seats, they also shaped our behavior, our conversations and ultimately our vision of the future and our role in it.
I’ve only touched on a couple of bits of the puzzle here. Cobbled together in an inelegant way. There is a fuller paper written on this if anyone is interested.
I’d very much like to read it William, can you email it to me. Cheers
william at charnocks dot com
William, not sure if the inbox issues have resolved themselves, but I would still love to see the paper you mention – mel.exon@bbh-labs.com. Thank you
Awesome response William. Love the distinction made between stories and conversations. The marketing world seems obsessed by the latter at the moment, but the former seems more critical than ever. Content is still king?
Great and thoughtful commentary, William – thank you, much to chew over here. Two things you say really stand out immediately –
1. The timeless importance and shared experience provided by great storytelling. There is genetic memory involved here.. we’ve been instinctively drawn to storytelling since the days when oral tradition was the sole means by which culture was developed and handed down. Yes, there’s an emerging, intertwined, even symbiotic relationship between interactive and the starting of great stories, but this is simply the next, natural step in a rich tradition.
2. The difference between stories and conversations. To what you say here, I’d add that there are some brands with highly engaged audiences, for whom simply harnessing the conversation is enough, even a useful and/or creative act, if done right. Yet so much of the time (most recently Skittles and Maria’s Disney example spring to mind) the ‘conversation’ about your brand amongst real people is either simply not there, or the product of a temporary, quasi-Hawthorn Effect. Under those circumstances – if the end goal is a deeper, more rewarding, commercially viable relationship with your audience – the onus is on the brand to start a dialogue, to put something of real value into the conversation. We can argue that storytelling is just one way to do this (providing a human voice and great customer service is another way, of course), but I singled storytelling out for a number of reasons:- the long term media value creation delivered by a great brand story told, modified and re-told over time, as alluded to by Jinal below; my longstanding admiration for the sheer talent & courage it takes to CREATE a story worth sharing (as James says here, often for products that, at the outset at least, may not seem to lend themselves to the task..;-) and finally, in a world increasingly full of noise on the one hand or carefully honed, unsurprising utility on the other, I subscribe to the belief we need to find new ways to step up a gear – to move, inspire and galvanise our audiences. Starting a great story is a pretty good place to begin.
Hey, William, I was going to comment on Mel’s seductive post, when I read your comment and was stopped dead in my tracks. So much of what you say, particularly about a story power coming from capturing the imagination of others so they pass it along with their own additions is dead on target. Send me the paper, willya: swax@campfirenyc.com. I’ll now try to read on and comment on the main piece, but damn!
William:
Great comments! Would love to see the entire paper.
david (at) brand experience lab dot org
Bussey’s article, interestingly, mentions a quote by a director at New Media Maze that says that Fallon’s Cadbury ad used online, TV and print channels together. I disagree, in the sense that the ad was made primarily for TV and was picked up by chance on YouTube, in a completely unplanned way. I was asked last year whether I thought the gorilla ad was a TV ad or digital one (because it had more exposure on YouTube than TV, arguably). It was a TV ad, and can’t really be compared to transmedia film marketing in that way.
Similarly, most of the work that comes out of this industry is conceived as part of a ‘campaign’ or just as an ‘ad’. It isn’t thought of as a story that has multiple elements, that can be given over to the public to complete, where indeed the public can become characters themselves. As you quite rightly said, bringing the storytelling aspect back into the industry can actually be one of the ways to re-focus it, or rather, re-invigorate it, by forcing people to think creatively rather than from a different corner of the same box.
Let the storytelling begin.
Storytelling is of course still extremely important. Bob Greenberg of R/GA said it was dead (somewhere, can’t remember where) but that’s just him fishing for headlines. Storytelling has existed since cave paintings – the way stories are distributed just changes.
The thing about Watchmen and all the other movie campaigns that have won lots of praise and awards is that there is already a demand for that content. There are Watchmen nutjobs around the world who can’t wait for the widget, and people who actually want to decipher psd’s for clues as to what the Cloverfield monster looks like. I’m not saying it’s easy, all these campaigns have been executed very well, but it’s a lot easier than selling washing powder.
So in theory everything you say is right, create lots of content, be a curator, stand back – but unless your washing powder has the cache of a DC comic franchise someone, somewhere, is going to have to CREATE a story for your brand first, otherwise no one gives two hoots. Once you have a story, or for want of a better word, ‘fame’, well then you can do all the new fun whizzy stuff.
Great post
There is another metaphor I think might fit to this whole storytelling thing.
A band starting nowadays creates a myspace, where lands there first track. Then they’ll put more tracks untill they get some blog coverage.
At that point they’ll produce an arty music video of the track that got some good buzz.
If they have enough coverage more important bands will remix them. With all that material you’ll be able to get a decent EP out, including some exclusive remixes. Hopefully you get a Pitchfork review and the story continues… I don’t need to keep on you’ve understood the point.
Stories are fed, build over time, taken, remixed and shared by others if they have a good start.
Let’s now trying to define what’s a good compelling – kickin’ in the ass – start for a particuliar target, but that’s another story
Great post. I think people talk about the death of narrative whereas what we’re actually seeing is the emergence of a new kind of narrative-from the reductive narrative arc of the 60″ commercial to rich, divergent and multi-faceted narratives. Which are the best kind-if Woolf, Joyce or Beckett were writing today I suspect they’d be using digital to offer fragmented narrative, unreliable narration, meta-textuality, etc…
See this article from last year, “Has the Internet Failed as a Storytelling Medium?” written by Reuben Steiger. Steiger contends that the internet has failed as a storytelling medium but there are new forms emerging that, he believes, are the wave of storytelling future:
- Alternate Reality Games
- Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
- Transmedia Content
On another note –
I believe storytelling is being redefined. More than a distinction between ‘conversation’ and ‘storytelling’ as William has mentioned above, we are at a paradigm shift where the two are becoming one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/arts/television/21wire.html?hpw
And to your point Harper, we have a whole issue of Wired devoted to JJ Abrahms’s brand of storytelling, immersive gaming.
Interesting post and discussion. I agree with the comments about the need to create a new web-native narrative because one thing that ‘traditional storytelling’ does well, which is very hard to replicate online, is intimacy. Immersion can be done – video games for example do it fantastically. Intimacy is harder in a world of widgets, tabbed browsers, status alerts and 140-character attention spans.
Books, films, theatre all provide the necessary intimacy for a rich, emotionally engaging experience to occur. How can we digitally recreate the experience of being read to on a parent’s lap, a campfire ghost story or the oral storytellers of the Jemaa al-Fna in Marrakesh?
So it’s not simply about creating a backstory for a product or service, or using some multi-platform wizardry to produce a ’360-degree’ campaign. One also has to address the classic problem of mass communication; how can a story told to thousands or millions feel personal to an individual? As comments above suggest, this can’t be done with great technology alone. But perhaps a combination of great interaction design + great creative technology + great storytelling will result in an ending where everybody lives happily ever after.
I think you’ve made an incredibly important point here, one that was actually brought home to me properly after I’d read Steve’s comment below. Whilst wanting to spare your blushes, Penguin’s digital fiction idea We Tell Stories by Six to Start http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/ is a great example of how making an already great story participative can deliver something which feels infinitely more personal and hence powerful (intimate, if you will). I also love the term ‘digital fiction’, for what it’s worth. It helps me to pull apart the different ways in which a broad term like ‘stories’ can be interpreted. The other obvious types of story that spring to mind are the more factual or journalistic on the one hand http://www.ireport.com/home/index.jspa or on the other, the theatrical & experiential: http://www.punchdrunk.org.uk/main2.htm Either way, the fact we can *participate* is – I think – what makes all three examples truly exciting. I would love to hear about any other interactive storytelling ‘genres’ anyone thinks are valuable and worthy of exploration.
William, just tried to send you an email. Your inbox is full. How can we get in touch?
got the message thanks…working on clearing mailbox…i still get the messages though
I don’t think that digital storytelling and the brand storytelling are necessarily divorced from one another. Infact, I’m not sure if a narrative-based digital campaign will be successful on its own.
Narrative and a story builds over time. To think that digital can manage that with one campaign, one microsite, one widget is to basically apply the same, tired old advertising-thinking to new behavioral models.
I should share the story of Amul Butter. Amul is one of India’s leading dairy companies. Since the 70′s (probably even before) Amul Butter advertisements (print, billboards etc) have been satirical observations of culture, politics, cricket and bollywood. Yet – tied effortlessly to the brand. This three-decade old archive of advertisements might as well be the best interpretation and elucidation of the country’s pop culture. The consistency, the witty-writing/ creative and the dogged dedication to the narrative have made these advertisements and Amul Butter one of India’s most loved brands. The brand inspires passion, loyalty and patriotism as the new entrants try to bite off Amul’s share of the market.
Amul is not a ‘digital brand’ yet – but it operates in very different markets where billboards are more relevant and pervasive than the internet. But the larger lesson I hoped to highlight by sharing this story is that: the point of storytelling is to evoke passion. And that happens over long-term.
Sharing examples of Charlie-bit-me videos is fine – but thats a one-time hit. When was the time we spoke about the Numa song or the Chinese backstreet boys ? One-time hits fizzle out eventually – everything on the web fizzles out eventually as newwer, shiner, funnier stories emerge. I don’t argue the value of a one-time growth spurt for a brand, but if we are talking about storytelling, lets not look at the web as a as a very in-the-moment/ instant-gratification medium. Investment in new media and its planning should be a strategic long term plan, not a short-term hit. Only then, will we be adding any tangible value. AND creating stories that will be conversed about for years to come.
Just my two cents.
See the Amu ads here:
http://www.amul.com/hits.html
[...] a beautiful article from BBH Labs about how we should be telling stories in the interactive space. Read, [...]
There are two kinds of stories, those that are once told, and those that move through retelling. We need to create the latter. Stories that audiences pass along are provocative, incomplete, and personally powerful; people want to take them on, reshape and share them because the resonate.
Take one of my family’s favorite stories: The Wax family had punch lines that headlined our family tales. One went like this: “From eating meat comes a war-like spirit.”
This line was used when you get tired of arguing with someone and wanted to walk away. But it also is the way we describe my mom and her early struggles. During the Second World War she was a Communist, living in a housing project in LA with two little babies, while my dad was off in Europe fighting fascists.
Mom would attend Communist cell meetings where all sorts of sectarians — Trotskyites, Menshaviks, Spartacists, etc. — would argue bitterly with each other over radical doctrine. Finally when the meeting had collapsed in chaos, an old lady — who was a vegetarian Communist — would shout out from the back, “From eating meat comes a war-like spirit!”
And that was the signal that the meeting was over. And everyone would go home.
The story has been retold a thousand times in my family, including now by my 10-year old daughter. The line lives as a symbol of my mom’s wise, but slightly hopeless, revolutionary spirit. We continue to pass it along to friends and new family members; we embellish it, giving meaning to our radical history.
Can it be parsed and used as a model for branded storytelling? Probably. But that’s an never-ending struggle in a business context. Nonetheless, let’s keep at it.
Steve
A belated thank you for a live example a great story, well told. Also proof, if proof were needed, of the validity of Jeremy’s point (above) about the importance of intimacy. How do brands begin to recreate the power of a personal story handed down generations? Sometimes it is enough to sit back and just listen to a great story, as I just did again re-reading your post. A truly great story bears repeating, passing on or retelling – I guess what gets called ‘viral’ nowadays. But I would suggest there’s a lesson in your family’s story, which we can apply to brands if we choose. Namely a story that you can make your own, participate in and personalise (or make intimate, to use Jeremy’s term again) goes beyond viral and becomes personally resonant (much as your story is a 1000 times more powerful amongst your own family members, I would wager). Laurence Lessig’s recent presentation on ‘remix culture’ http://blip.tv/file/1821209 makes this point better than I can. Likewise we should give credit where credit’s due to Jeremy and Six to Start for their We Tell Stories work which I’ve referred to in reply to Jeremy above. And of course Campfire’s very own, such as Audi ‘Art of the Heist’ and – arguably the grand daddy of interactive storytelling – (I still remember sitting in BBH open-mouthed some years ago listening to the story unfold as it got presented…) ‘Beta 7′ for Sega ESPN http://bit.ly/10ps9U. We need more examples like these..
Funny, I read this just after reviewing the One Show interactive short list and thought to myself that there were a lot more good ideas in digital last year than I realized. Also, a lot of the nominations were for “traditional” shops, or a short list of digital shops with narrative and high level design skills.
To me there is no shortage of stories online, just as there aren’t in other mediums. But there is a significant limit of great stories and an even smaller number of great stories told well. The masters of telling stories through the dominant forms of spoken (aka. audio,) written (aka. type,) visual (aka. image) and synced motion picture and sound (aka. film) either haven’t really tried online storytelling or are doing it through the same context as the pre-existing forms.
But it seems the bigger question is will a new form of storytelling emerge online. Maybe the evolution will be more around story creation and using the innate collaborative nature of the web to build and tell stories. Though transmedia storytelling and interactive gaming/stories are interesting, I’m a big fan, but they seem more of an evolution of existing forms rather than emergence of a new form.
Though I disagree production values don’t matter. It doesn’t mean it has to be expensive. And absolutely if the idea itself isn’t that good, great production values won’t save it. But execution styles are as much part of the story as the story itself. How a great story is told is as important and strategic and the story itself. When a talented creative makes a story and works with great crafts people to produce it the nuance and detail they imbue in a story are the subtleties that induce laughter or tears.
Thank you, Steve, for seque. . . . I recall my father, a minister (among other things, so many other things), reciting Noyes’ The Highwayman and Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West and Service’s The Shooting of Dan McGrew, et al, prior to tying the knot of his tie just right and going out to stand in front of a 100 or so people and relate the parables of Jesus ( & the story of David and Goliath and Samson and Delilah . . . yes DeMille, I was primed and my dad preached the trailer) in a way that was relevant to my six-seven year old interests and the adult interests of a congregation. That was story telling in preparation for story telling in preparation for the telling of this story. A saga of sagas tied together like the planks of a rope bridge over a fathomless gorge. And lit snob and storyteller by trade that I am, I dare say I remember and treasure “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet….” more than anything that I can remember from my beloved Beckett and Joyce.
“we are now in the business of starting stories, not attempting to nail them down from beginning to end.”
love it and fully agree. also on twitter, a game for terminator. And I would even say the Halo stuff, which started way back in 99 before the first game came from the guys trying to find a way to be cryptic on one hand, and find a venue to get some more of their story out (since only a tiny fraction of central arcs get played out in the games). FFWD to all that was done around Halo 3 and its something you can look back to and say: “does it matter what originally started the ever evolving ARG trend? Or are we happy enough that its having awesome effects on community lifecycles, etc?”
Another great post and lots of excellent comments here. If you have children, you certainly know the role of stories. We’re still telling Aesop’s fables and Grimm’s fairytales to our children. Having done a lot of children’s theater before moving into the advertising world, I still bring that experience to the work I do today. Creating an authentic, relevant and compelling brand story is even more important in this economy. You just have to look at consumer spending habits right now to see how that’s playing out.
And I think that many people here have made an extremely valid point. Good storytelling is not a function of money. A few years back in NYC we had 2 versions of “A Christmas Carol playing. One, a lavish, expensive production with a large cast, special effects, animals, the whole nine yards. The second was Patrick Stewart, alone on the stage, reading the story with very minor, costuming, not set to speak of and no other performers. I understand that they were both excellent productions. You can dress up a great story and enhance the storytelling, but you can’t dress up a bad story no matter what you do.
We also have the note the power of storytelling. It can teach, elevate, entertain, engage and yes, tear down & divide as well. Storytelling is at the very core of our being. Maybe it’s something that really sets us apart from other life forms, but I’ll leave that discussion to a much more philosophical discussion! Stories start and they are shared, added to, morphed to fit the audience. Just take a look at the variations of Little Red Riding Hood at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_red_riding_hood to see how that story changed over time and through different audiences.
And if you look at the current, worldwide fascination with Susan Boyle, it’s not just her singing that makes us reach out to her. If she were an attractive 20-something, she would be just another good singer. But, it’s her back story that makes us want to make her something more then a person who sings well. We’re not supporting her singing per se, but the moral story that goes with her.
When starting an ideation session with a new client, the very first thing we have them do is write down their brand story in 10 words or less. This let’s us do 2 things. Get them to really focus on the core of their brand story and make sure that everyone in the room is telling the same story. If the people working on the brand aren’t aligned on the story, there’s no way the consumer will be.
Another exercise we do is to have someone in the group reading their brand story as if they’re telling a story to a group of first graders. Again, we do this for several reasons. One is get them to understand the difference between brand facts and brand stories. Too often people tell us their brand facts. “We were started X years ago and have Y locations. We make this product, etc.” As people, we usually don’t get passionate about the brand facts. Secondly, we get them focused on the language that they use. If you were really talking to 1st graders, you wouldn’t say things like “We’re the leading provider of peer to peer network solutions across the enterprise group.” And if you did, the children would likely hear the word “enterprise” and start talking about how their Daddy liked Star Trek (what I like to call in children, Human Keyword Search). Lastly, we make the audience be 1st graders because adults are a polite audience. We’ve all stood up in a theater to give a standing ovation for a performance we thought was OK just because the person next to us was standing. But kids are an honest audience. They’ll tell you when the don’t like something.
What I find interesting is that the advertising industry is coming back to storytelling, although I am very glad to see the discussion coming front & center. As I say all the time: Everyone wants to hear a great story; everyone wants to tell a great story and everyone wants to participate in a great story. They may know this now, but a brand without a great story is called generic. It’s our job to let brands know that storytelling is not an afterthought today, or something that we sell because I have a theater degree. It’s at the very heart of a successful business. You can either survive or you can thrive and people who thrive tell a great story.
If you’re interested , you can go to http://tinyurl.com/c25v89 and http://tinyurl.com/d4we7t, http://tinyurl.com/dz8l9u and to see some things we’ve written before about the role of storytelling.
I think transmedia storytelling is the future of communications as internet is now not another channel but at the heart of the structure of every great campaign. Transmedia planning is based on the non- linear brand narrative that instead of having a media neutral approach it draws draws people to the heart of the story in order to make them self-create and self-sustain core brand communities with build-in word of mouth engines. As Henry says, and i think this is where we all agree is that “all we have to do is pull them together and give them something to do, i don’t have to control their conversation to benefit from this”.
secondly, i was thinking that transmedia narratives demand high emotional involvement and brands that have depth and complex DNA. Can we do this with brands that are lighter and they dont demand faith or worship from their audience. I mean you can do this with PS3 but can you do it with a toothpaste brand?
Then i saw that at Media 360,last june, Jonathon Mildenhall [Vice President Global Advertising and Creative Excellence] outlined the thinking behind Coke’s Happiness Factory as transmedia creativity and you can see it here http://blog.neoco.com/2008/06/02/coke%E2%80%99s-trans-media-storytelling/
Nice work with the site guys
Congrads to made by many and you.
I agree the web is a wonderfully ripe backdrop to tell great stories, but my instinct tells me that when it comes to helping brands get their footing in this new digital age, a focus on helping brands become better storytellers is a little off the mark.
A traditional story-based brand was and is a product of a very unique era, one dominated by limited one-way media and populated with a passive consumer. Umair Haque http://www.bubblegeneration.com says this kind of branding only made sense for the economics of an industrial era when “interaction was expensive – so information about the expected benefits of consumption had to be squeezed into slogans, characters, and logos, which were then compressed into thirty-second TV ads and radio spots.”
So, if the conditions that surrounded marketing when the story-based brand emerged have now been completely uprooted shouldn’t we at least be asking if this is still the most efficient way of selling our client’s product or service? I can’t speak for clients but if I were one and I had a product to sell I wouldn’t want my agency folk fussing over storytelling, I’d want them obsessing over the new technologies, products or services on the web that are eating away at my profits, helping my competition sell more products and develop better products than me.
While I agree the web is really great at telling stories, if you’re in the game of storytelling, but it’s also a really efficient marketplace that now favours the consumer. The social web lets consumers find what they want faster than ever before, let’s them check if it’s a product or company they can trust and then let’s them buy it with one fail click. The web is effectively taking over the role of the brand in consumer’s lives.
In Umair Haque’s words “when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: the information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.”
I’m not saying we should stop thinking about brands as storytellers, but when we live in age of stripped back, authentic, peer-to-peer communication should we really be thinking about creating more layers of story for people to wade through. Marketing’s original purpose was to sell the client’s product, not to create more marketing.
Joe, It’s great to see a provocative response and my apologies it’s taken me this long to reply briefly. If I may put this in my own words, I think you’re saying the web has enabled a transparency, hyper-sociability & connectivity which makes spinning stories a rather self-indulgent act. Are we in fact in danger of obfuscating the ‘truth’ about a product and annoying the hell out of people in the process? Don’t people just want to hear straight what’s good & bad about a product (preferably from ‘people like me’ or maybe an expert)? ‘Branding’ becomes a straight forward task of name recognition & recall. One way of looking at this is that we could be heading towards a hyper-connected, virtual replica of marketing in the 1950s…
Ultimately I think we have to consider a few factors here, all of which suggest to me there is a more subtle and nuanced answer out there than ‘this is right’ or ‘this is wrong’…
1. Not all ‘storytelling’ is complex, multi-platform or even fiction, which I think may be your starting point when you talk about ‘layers to wade through’. See my earlier comment above to Jeremy for more on this. It can be an incredibly simple thing.
2. A short blogpost from earlier this month which is relevant here – http://bit.ly/12rFlI – talks compellingly about participative branding: how brands energise and contribute to conversations with interesting stories and experiences. If brands aren’t there, participating, they lose out (‘stop contributing and you’re dead’). Nor is this an old school, one way street: ‘the best brands invite people in to help create an evolving brand story’. In short, the best brand stories are fueled and curated, but only so that they can be remixed, retold and owned by others.
3. There’s is a danger we just add unnecessarily to the noise on the web if we’re not careful. But that’s as likely, if not more likely, to come from millions of voices all clamouring to be heard, as it is from brands trying to share their story. And hence the question still arises: how does anyone cut through this to sell a product in the first place? Not for nothing is getting noticed and standing out still marketing’s equivalent of first base (the latin word ‘advertere’ means to pay attention to, if I’ve remembered that right). Ultra personalised and targeted comms is of course part of the answer and you may argue that if a product is good enough it will get talked about, right? Unfortunately that is easier said than done. Instead, I think it’s beholden upon us to find new, compelling ways to communicate what a brand stands for and hence why it should be chosen. Brands that talk with their audiences in an open & direct manner (Innocent, Starbucks, Zappos are the most famous examples) still make sure they weave amazing stories into the dialogue about them and around them.
4. Finally, without question there’s a time and place for facts, rational reasons and zero wastage, I could not agree more. Equally, there are times when we want to be inspired or even moved before we make a choice. Perhaps that comes from a recommendation from someone we trust, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if – for that recommendation to be truly memorable – it involved, you guessed it, a story.
[...] terrific discussion on BBH Labs blog about the digital narrative: And here’s my [...]
Great Blog guys!
William, can I also get a copy of the full paper?
Thanks!
A
[...] love the idea of building a tribe around a story. A while ago, there was a post by Mel Exon at BBH Labs about the Storyteller’s Story, that drew heavily on Dan Light’s description of the marketing [...]
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