Thought: What happened to Storytelling?

One of the buzzwords of last year was Storytelling. 

While I never really fall in love with buzzwords, and I never really was sure how many examples of storytelling written about were great, I have always loved a great story.

It’s the story that grabs our attention and becomes a gripping vice for our imagination. It’s the story that takes us on a ride through the creator’s vision. So little in branding and advertising is truly storytelling. I don’t know why it is the case. I had hoped the buzzword fuss would spur a greater focus on this kind of communication style. However I haven’t really seen very many great examples in mainstream advertising.

And then I saw this: Restless

The first 2’30” of this short film is more than a little bit special. It breaks the mould of ski movies. Its intro is nothing short of being a spectacular story set-up of cinema proportions. And it works to hook in the viewer and take them into the film. It made me wish advertising was more cinematic.

Restless from Leo Zuckerman on Vimeo

Lesson: Cheap, not done cheaply

“Cheap” is a hard thing to claim.

Price checking puts the truthfulness of the claim to the test. But the reality is that most people don’t evaluate every brand or option. They start with what they know, then add a few, remove a few and come to a decision as to which they value most. And which they then buy. So getting on the list is pretty crucial. And to do that you need to own a position, occupy a space in people’s minds.  

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Analogy isn’t proof

Analogy helps explain concepts, but it’s not proof.

I have an issue with many strategy decks I see on Slideshare. It is the same issue that makes me stop reading many blog or opinion pieces midway through. It’s the use of analogy as evidence of an idea’s validity & truth.

Analogies are a powerful communication tool. They help people understand new ideas by relating them to familiar ones. I love a good analogy. And strategy can often use them to explain themselves. And that is fine.

However, the fact that an analogy can be drawn to your idea, doesn’t make it proof of the concept. And this is why I get so annoyed when marketers talk about interactivity and engagement and their argument is evidenced not by data or facts but by a quote from a few thousand years ago.

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.”

No matter how smart Confucius was, I would not be willing to invest my marketing budget with this as the supporting argument.

Analogy is enough to explain, not sell.

Spotify Australia: no one is listening

So I am quite shocked that on my return to Australia, no one (or very few) is using Spotify. Even a year after the service launched in Oz, its presence doesn’t really seem to be heard. Which is strange when it is a household name in homeland Sweden and even in other European markets like the UK.

So the marketer and Spotify fan in me decided to take a closer look. Here are my conclusions from an outside in view.

What’s going on?

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Thought: Advertising futurists are naïve

The future of advertising has been speculated upon by everyone. There are hundreds of presentations flying around. There are Harvard Business Review articles. There are seminars and lectures. All come to the same conclusion, the future is ‘about making things people want, not making people want things’. I have an issue with this: these are not mutually exclusive concepts.

I often think about ‘making things people want’ marketing as hollywood sequels. Films that deliver what people want, to a formula they expect. To give them something to do on a Saturday night. It can make modest money. Sometimes alot. But with every sequel, the returns diminish.

Then I think about brands doing their own thing. Sometimes doing truly disruptive stuff. They are like the art house films. There is a loyal following who will go and see any arty film (i.e the early adopter). These are the brands that do their own thing. That have a clear idea of the story they believe is worth telling. But it isn’t what most people want. In most cases, there are so few people who want this that the films don’t make money.

The difficulty with this route is how to create the demand (make people want things), to get people beyond the art house crowd to want to see it. Harvey Weinstein (Miramax), who made indie films into mainstream successes, can teach a few of these futurists a thing or two. They bought/financed/produced the movies they wanted. Tarantino (one of their directors) for example, famously said “I am making the film [Pulp Fiction] for me not for the audience”. But then, to sell the movie, they honed in on some core things and made ads that made people, mainstream people, want to see it.

It meant that films like Sex, Lies & Videotapes and The Scandal drew large crowds. They created demand for their film. They didn’t change the film or product, they changed how they communicated it. And the communication wasn’t to convince people to see an art house movie. It was to convince them that this movie is what they like: mainstream scandal, or sex, or entertainment. They reframed the perceptions.

There is a lot of confused writing around “make things people want” vs “make people want things”. One is about fulfilling existing needs. The other is about creating needs. They work together, sometimes in tandem, sometimes simultaneously, depending on where the product is in its life.

But creating demand isn’t bad, right? The fact that I saw a movie I didnt consider at first, but then enjoyed, isn’t bad. The fact that I wasn’t planning on going to the gym, but feel better and am more healthy, isn’t bad. The fact that I decadently enjoyed a massage I was sold, isn’t bad.

So why is there so much bashing about creating demand? Is it an anti-capitalist response? That ‘making things people want’ is socially noble and doesn’t spur consumption, instead just meeting the existing hunger for things. Well it could be this, but I suspect it is more about a false sense that advertising’s image needs cleaning up.

Creating demand doesn’t exclude doing something meaningful. In fact, ‘making people want things’ is what most social marketing is about. There isn’t a great demand for donating to charities. There isn’t a great number of people who volunteer to save pandas or make soup. All social marketing is about making people do something different. Making them want to donate, to sponsor, to volunteer. All for the greater good.

So to say the future of advertising isn’t to sell things, to change people from a state of ‘not wanting’ to ‘wanting’ is naïve  And a great way to drive a business to the ground. 

Thought: the problem is the problem

Some thoughts on why solving problems is important, and what is planning’s biggest challenge in Swedish agency land.

Many planners talk and write about collaborating in parts of the creative process. That can be smart and useful. Or dangerous. It depends on the planner and how this influences what they see their role being in the whole process. 

See creatives can solve a problem and come up with a great looking ad or idea or thing. But the chance of it being the right solution, the right idea for the problem at hand is minimal. The quality and effectiveness of the work depends on it being pointed at the place. It is dependent on a brief that sets out the problem and task correctly.

Many Swedish creatives and agencies make great ads, often without any planning. Many are effective. Many aren’t. I think this is mainly a result of some senior creatives having the skill to do the planning work themselves. Others aren’t interested or capable.

Planning’s role isn’t to get in the way of the creatives. It is to make sure they are attacking the right problem. Putting the creative energy to use in the right way. Then if the planner is to collaborate on the solution depends on many factors, but that shouldn’t distract them from the key task at hand. If it does distract them, they become some kind of creative assistant, a role not necessarily billable in an agency.

So Swedish planners have to compete for relevance against creatives who are capable of doing their job. They need to think about their role in the process, and prove over and over that some smart problem identification (planning) will give the creatives a head-start and make the work better. 

Thought: Talking true

A lot of marketers, bloggers and indeed strategists are asking the question: How can we get people to talk about our brand, our products and services?

I wonder why this is the question posed. It feels like this kind of WOM/social/P2P approach is often put forward as THE solution to today’s media landscape. But is it? Or is it just one way, a seemingly easier way, to be heard?

Yes word of mouth is valuable. Yes the Internet makes things extremely transparent. Lies are caught out faster than ever before. But getting other people to talk about your brand, for you, is only part of the equation.

People (allegedly) don’t trust brands. If this is true, does that mean that the only solution is to change the salesman? To have someone else do the talking? Or is it to change how and what you say?

I believe too many brands don’t try hard enough, or at all, to find their voice. A voice that’s authentic. To forget the empty handshakes and false smiles. And find a voice that is relatable. Honorable. Perhaps irreverent. Perhaps solemn. Something that blends rational and emotional and is true to the product and business. 

Instead of finding and using your own voice, everyone is recommending that you borrow someone else’s. This isn’t new. Sponsorship, endorsements, testimonials. They have all been used by business for decades. But they can’t do all the talking for them. I’m not saying that cannot work, but it is just ONE approach, not the ONLY approach.

Take Red Bull. They sponsor extreme sports. Even create their own sporting events. They are everywhere in that space. But this is advertising spring-boarding off their voice and personality. They still rely on their TVCs and other ads which communicate them, their product, in their own words.

Its having a voice to speak through that creates a strong platform. Being true fights the transparency issue of digital background checks. And it becomes an anchor for others to then go out and talk about your product for you…in their own voice, but true to yours.

WOM/P2P marketing is important. But it’s not a replacement for a brand’s own voice and point of view. 

Lesson: Explain now or I’ll pull the trigger

The video pre-roll is one of the ways traditional advertising can be easily be re-used online. It doesn’t involve any production and the format is supported across basically any pre-roll media buy. No surprise they’re everywhere.

Placements on Youtube have, not uniquely, a skip feature. This is equivalent to those cliche movie scenes where some guy with a gun yells, “you’ve got 5 seconds to explain”.

So here’s a thought, if you haven’t hooked in someone in 5 seconds, to give you another 25, you might want to give up on pre-roll buys. It perhaps means there are a few types of storylines or message build-ups that just aren’t suited to the medium. 

To do it well, requires a hook. A ‘don’t shoot because…’. The hook could be the music, the fact that the ad doesn’t start screaming at you when you expect a different video, the fact you get to the point across fast or something else entirely. But the hook needs to convince me to listen, to relax a trigger happy finger or else I’ll press skip.

Lesson: What Bear Grylls taught me about leadership

Business is survival of the fittest. 

In the first season finale of Man vs Wild, Bear Grylls has a reflection about survival while camped out in the Scottish wilderness.

He said, “What matters much more than knowing all the skills in the world, is having that determination to stay alive, to keep going, to keep making decisions, to keep calm…and to keep cheerful, even when things seem really stacked against you”

In our world, it’s business vs business, fighting it out on sometimes baron or fertile land.

Bear is spot on. Leading a team through mediocrity to greatness requires more than knowing the skills.

• You have to have the guts to do challenging things.
• To commit and keep going, to follow through.
• To be able to continuous make decisions, but ones that keep you moving forward, not in circles.
• To be able to have a cool head and the self-belief to motivate yourself and others through the tougher times.

Lesson: using marketing jargon is like talking french

Marketing speak is when a company (brand) decides to talk (communicate) to people (consumers) in words (content) that are jargonized (proprietarily branded).

If you think about it from an outsiders point of view, from a non-business point of view, it’s kind of like going to Paris. You arrive with high hopes. But you cannot read anything. You cannot make yourself understood. You don’t understand what’s being said to you.

Marketing speak is like the French insisting on speaking French with tourists.

Nearly everything is lost in translation.

The French come across as arrogant.

You leave annoyed and disappointed.

They ponder your ignorance.

So if the people who are buying are English speaking, it’s you who needs to learn English. i.e. drop the marketing speak.

But if the people you are talking with already speak French, by all means speak French. i.e. B2B sales.