Today’s guest post is by Mike Barry (@Mike_Barry), Creative Director at the white agency.
Seems like everyone talks about storytelling in advertising. Agencies talk about it. Clients talk about it. It’s the buzzword that makes all of us sound like we know what we’re doing.
Stories have become a focus for marketers because when it comes to communicating, stories are the most powerful medium there is. They let us explain things, they let us feel things, and they have been the main currency of communication between humans since time began.
But as fun as it is to talk about stories, you may occasionally find yourself actually having to tell one. To your boss in a meeting. To a client in a presentation. Or to a consumer through a campaign. Whatever the context of your story, it’s worth asking yourself: how do I know if I’m telling a good one?
To examine this question, I’d like to begin by talking about screenwriting.
One tendency for aspiring screenwriters (confession: I’m one) is to pack every scene they write with as much information as possible to ensure the audience understands exactly what’s going on. They (er… we) make sure the audience is crystal clear on things like how the characters got there, who’s motivated by what, the reason this girl is angry, the reason that guy is late, where they’re going next, how they’re going to get there etc etc and so on and so on.
And I can tell you, this approach makes for scenes that are incredibly clear. And incredibly long. And, usually, incredibly boring. Believe me. My list of Google Docs is a cloud-based testament to this painful insight.
But when listening to an interview with the legendary screenwriter David Mamet (he wrote this), I was interested to hear his view that the key to writing a great scene is to arrive late and leave early.
Taking his advice literally, I took one of my ten page scenes and deleted the first three pages and the last three pages. The result wasn’t perfect, but I found it surprisingly coherent and even more surprisingly… engaging.
To illustrate why, I want you to imagine you are sitting (bear with me) in a foodcourt. And let’s say you overhear two people talking. Now, even if you know nothing about these people, I’m pretty confident that just by listening to them, you could actually work out quite a bit about what they’re discussing. You could probably even determine some of the dynamics of their relationship.
No matter who you are, I’m pretty confident you could do that, because “working stuff out” is more or less what we all do, all the time. In life, there is no narrator. We are always trying to work out what’s going on, and all we have is the action right in front of us. We never have the full story. We are always arriving late and leaving early, but somehow, we work it out.
A few years ago, when some super-tanned JWT guy in linen pants on stage at Cannes (yeah, I went) said the secret to engagement in advertising is to tell incomplete stories, I think this is what he was getting at. You don’t have to tell your audience everything, you don’t have to spell every little thing out for them. Instead, you can tell them a story that’s a bit more like life. You can drop them right in the middle of it and let them work out for themselves what’s going on.
Unless you think your audience isn’t smart enough.
How tempting it is to dumb things down, to treat your audience like the lowest common denominator and then see them continually stoop to meet your expectations.
Whether you’re an agency person, a client person, or just a struggling, undiscovered genius of a screenwriter toiling away in your mother’s downstairs rumpus room, I’m challenging you (and myself) to treat your audience with respect. Assume they are at least as intelligent as you are. Tell them a story that makes them think, that prompts them to join the dots in their head and work something out for themselves.
They may arrive late, they may leave early, but there’s also a pretty good chance they’ll come back.
Creative Director Mike Barry (@Mike_Barry) leads the white agency’s team of creatives solving problems for clients like Lion, Lexus, Coca-Cola and The Commonwealth Bank. This post first appeared on white’s excellent blog. If you like this, you might like: Why brands shouldn’t be storytellers.