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The myth of storytelling in new marketing.

Posted 05.07.08 by Adrian Ho


Back in the day, many of you may remember an arcade game called Dragon’s Lair. At a time when the graphics in most games was rudimentary at best, Dragon’s Lair sported visuals that were (almost literally) pulled from the scenes of a Disney movie. It was a sensation. Instead of having to imagine the blobs on the screen were trolls, goblins, or princesses, Dragon’s Lair presented them in their full glory, letting you completely immerse yourself in the role of Dirk the Daring…

…well actually not quite.

The price you paid for all of that visual splendour was excruciatingly limited gameplay. Because the animation was stored on a laserdisc, the game essentially presented a set of choices at various intervals which would load and play the corresponding cut scenes. Basically, you walked down a path that had been pre-defined and pre-configured by the game’s designers. It grew boring very quickly. So while the game attracted a lot of people initially, it failed to have a lasting impact in the long run because it offered an incredibly limited amount of interaction and an overly prescriptive narrative.

I was reminded of this by the recent remarks from Lee Clow at a 4As event. He said:

“Online advertising is still semi-nowhere. It’s very intrusive and annoying and kind of the worst of our business in terms of pop-up and flash, and jump up and down.”

However, there is hope:

“The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter”.

There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.

The web isn’t just a communications medium, it is a medium for interacting with people. Storytelling is inherently one-way, in fact, the main use for stories in the history of humans has been to teach. Using the Web for teaching and one-way dissemination of information are a waste its talents.

The application of a storytelling model has IMHO, led to overly rigid segmentation of users and overly prescriptive user-scenarios that assume far too much about users. These are behind the all too familiar navigation choices:

Click here if you’re a business user
Click here if you’re a home user
And so on…

Storytelling leads to the kind of design that hobbled Dragon’s Lair. High-production, visually stunning but functionally crippled.

I have enormous respect for Lee Clow, and I think Chiat/Day is one of the best agencies in the world. They’re also far from being a laggard in pioneering new media, and most would put them on the progressive end. However, I think that agencies have to re-engineer a lot more than just their media departments if they want to stay relevant.

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  • Dion Hughes

    among the many things i’ve never fully understood (ie why advertising people don’t turn up to presentations themed ‘the future of advertising’!!!) is the full reliance on ‘storytelling’ as a role for brand communications. even back in the day when it was a much more linear ’30 second’ x ’30 second’ x ‘magazine campaign’ life, no audience EVER consumed the information in a clean narrative fashion. our audience’s lives and minds are way more jumbled than we can ever match, no matter how fragmented media has become. the story of a brand can be told over years, but not so much, now or ever, in days or months. right now, it’s more like we are inside the story, acting it out, changing its course, rewriting it. how about ‘storybeing’?

  • Helge Tennø

    Interesting post, and love the comment from Dion Hughes referencing “storybeing” :o)

    If I might air my personal opinion:

    Marketing in its essence is about communicating meaning in order to establish preference in a sea of undifferentiable products.

    Storytelling in this case doesn’t need to be a literal story, but might just as well be an application, an experience, a mindset or a way of authoring the content etc.

    I think the digital sphere is in dire need of stories, in order to create, maintain and strengthen brands, not only put a tag on top of content saying who the copyright owners are.

    When it comes to time spent/wasted on rich content: An interesting research from UIE performed in 2001 (but released some years later due to the moral implications of the findings) found that even though ask.com where ten times as fast to load than amazon.com the latter was perceived as fast and effective and the former as slow. The reason being that people found what they were looking for on Amazon, but didn’t on Ask.

    Humans don’t measure seconds or pageviews, they look for meaning and value. And on Amazon they found value, but on Ask they didn’t find a thing.

    A different study from 2002 also found that of eight tested factors, the least significant in creating loyalty was “user friendly design”, where as “care” and “personality” hat the biggest potential and the highest “elasticity”.

    Gitte Lindgaard also includes “sophisticated”, “creative”, “use special effects” and “fascinating” as elements in creating the crucially important first impression on websites.

    So, my take is that storytelling is at it’s most important on the Internet or other digital channels. But as you say; it can’t be a story that is suited for “telling”, it has to be one that can be shared, discussed and participated with.

  • Adrian

    I like storybeing. It gets directly to the fact that it is the users who create their own stories on the web. The best experiences (and I’d include Amazon in this) allow the user to create his own story and doesn’t foist someone’s predetermined story on him.

    I think where we diverge is around your definition of marketing. I believe that the role of marketing is to add value to companies (in fact this is also what the AMA says). Communicating meaning is one way to add value but there are more direct ways such as simply delivering more value.

    I don’t think that Amazon communicates more meaning than Ask, but it definitely delivers more value (although it’s hard to compare them as they have different purposes).

  • Ross

    Since the Web is interactive, it makes sense its utilized best when we enable people to tell their own stories.

    Just like how, if you’re playing Grand Theft Auto III — you the player create a narrative by interacting in a game world.

    But a I sit here struggling to think of a campaign or brand that’s let me tell my story on the web, I question that.

    “I went on myspace, met a girl, we dated…” That’s a story, but no brand had any influence there.

    “I wasted time today watching BMW’s http://www.rampenfest.com.” RampenFest is it’s own story, although just a 30 minute 30 second spot on the Web.

    “I went into second life and took up residence in Scion City where I made some friends.” That’s the closest I can see to a Web story…

    Any one know of a real meaningful story a person experienced online because of a brand?

  • Helge Tennø

    @Adrian, thanks for your remark. I totally agree that a brand has to add value, or else the brand means nothing and creates nothing worth spending time on.

    But any value created has to be in order to support and communicate the core motivation of the brand, and that means it all has to add to the same meaning. “Value” is “meaning”, isn’t it?

    @Ross. What about The New Coke Zero Game – turning their story into your story? http://www.cokezerogame.com/
    - To thin? :o)

  • Adrian

    Ross, I agree with you – Brands aren’t the sorts of things most people want to tell stories around. However, to Helge’s point – I think brands can let you create your own meaning rather than imposing their meaning upon you.

  • Hannes

    Hi Adrian, love your post. Love the comment of Dion Hughes as well. Although I would add “-becoming” as a process to his state-like concept of “story-being”.

    Today, stories “are” as long as they “become”. Once they became established, we usually refer to them as “history” although one can argue that even our histories aren’t defined as much as we think they are.

    Whereas brandmanagers and marketeers used to be the authors of brandstories (which were prefab histories by then) and whereas they seemed to have complete power over these stories, nowadays they have become actors.

    An actor can influence the course of events, can stage a part of a scene, can seduce you into following him, can chase you away, but he cannot define nor control the complete outcome of the story nor the setting (the experiential context). In short, there’s a shift from controlling to contributing.

    You refer to these old-school stories as an instrumental tool at the hands of marketeers and brandmanagers. These stories are poor experiental tools. I agree. But does that mean that stories as such don’t belong in the toolkit of a marketeer anymore?

    Over the last years there seems to be a kind of revival of the homo ludens, ‘man playing’. It’s like we’ve come to realize that our rational, instructive way of learning has fallen short, that it doesn’t provide us with all the tools needed to control, understand, survive and change the world we live in. (from coming to sense to coming to our senses). It’s a profound social change.

    The role of storytelling in this playful approach of the world is still very important. A story is a suggestion, an invitation to ‘walk along’ for a while. It can encourage us to make our way in this world.

    Authoritative stories seduce (convince) you with the idea that you are lost, that there is only one goal in your life and that the author and his story are the only way to get you there.

    Non-authoritative stories – the ones where your marketeer is rather an actor than an author – let you enjoy the ride. They make you aware of the possibilities along the way. They enrich the stories of your life, they encourage you to become an explorer. (in other words, i agree with helge here)

    You say marketing and branding is about adding value. Can it be that marketing today is more about offering the opportunity to customers to add value to their lives (their own stories) and that they might add value to the brand by referring to that brand as a starting point or a point of reference for their experiences?

    Is it possible that consumers are adding brand value when they use their ‘meeting’ with a brand as background information for yet another story? (e.g. I was playing around on the Amazon website when I discovered this or that book …). Ross says we don’t talk about brands in particular. But we do talk about our encounters with them, don’t we?

    Then what role do marketeers and brandmanagers play in this era of non-authoritative stories? What should they do for / with the brand’s story? Simply make it available? Or is there more to it?

  • Adrian

    @hannes I’m glad you commented about this. I completely agree that storytelling and stories are essential today for all of the reasons you put forth. My main issue is the role of storytelling on the web and, in particular, storytelling as the solution for increasing the quality of advertising on the web.

  • Charles Brown

    Funny you should write on this topic. Lately I’ve been reading everything I can lay my hands on related to storytelling and marketing.

    By profession, I am a copywriter who specializes in writing case studies, which are simply true customer success stories designed to sell the same product or service that helped the featured customer get out of a bad situation.

    If you’ve ever tried to close a good novel or turn off the TV at bedtime, you know how powerful a good story can be.

    If I could, I’d like to recommend two free ebooks that incorporate both storytelling and marketing. The first is Vin Montello’s Seven Story Secrets That Skyrocket Sales.

    The second is my own ebook about marketing with case studies called, The Plot Thickens: Why Case Studies Create New Customers.

    I hope both of these free ebooks help.

    Charles Brown

  • elizabethdhill

    The casting people/paperwork are/is specifically calling it ‘Kingdom Hearts Chains of Memories’ and are SPECIFICALLY casting the 5 Organization members that I named in the article, all of whom were in disney acting auditions CoM and don’t have cast English voice actors (outside of those 5 I don’t know if anyone else is being cast in any fashion, although I THINK those were the only 5 characters who are in CoM who don’t already have English actors from KH/KH2).”

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