M a r k e t e r the seven plots all stories must follow
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3 TRUST There’s no room for complacency Trust was a huge issue at Advertising Week Europe – whether it was the ongoing issues around brand safety or the need for platforms to demonstrate trustworthiness in how they use people’s data. We were treated to a lot of sessions exploring brands’ responsibilities under GDPR and the approaching ePrivacy regulation. But trust isn’t just about obeying the letter of the law. It also relates to how we use the data that we have permission to access. 4 VIDEO Time to define your signature style No one platform can own the definition of video. The reason it’s such an exciting format is that it’s so versatile. Video can incorporate anything from a few seconds of animation to an emotive three-minute film, a BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE 46 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r W0RDS BY JASON MILLER A story told by LinkedIn data The rise of storytelling in marketing
S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r 47 ots of people will tell you that market- ing has always been about storytelling – and that marketers have always been storytellers. Indeed, storytelling is such an established part of the marketing vocabulary today that it’s tempting to believe it’s always been treated as an important skill. But it hasn’t. LinkedIn data provides a unique perspective on the very rapid rise of storytelling in marketing. It shows that storytelling was very much a fringe concept as recently as six years ago. This was despite the fact that pioneers like Seth Godin were already arguing for marketers to start thinking in terms of stories. Then, very suddenly, things changed. In early summer 2011, the number of marketers listing storytelling as a skill on their LinkedIn profile was miniscule. It effectively didn’t exist as a market- ing discipline. Just two years later, storytelling was a key part of the profile of almost a quarter of a million marketers, 7% of all marketers worldwide, in fact. What had happened to turn a concept that people once associated with children’s bedtimes into an essential marketing skill? We analyzed the LinkedIn data to help tell the story of storytell- ing’s rise. It’s the tale of a 12-month period, from August 2011 to August 2012 that created unstoppa- ble momentum behind this form of content and its role in brand relationships. It’s a story populated with stand-out campaigns and great ideas that are worth revisiting today. At a time when the concept of storytelling in marketing can still feel frustrating- ly difficult to define, it reminds us what this vision of brand content means – and why it matters. L O N G F O R M IT'S TEMPTING TO ASSUME STORYTELLING HAS ALWAYS BEEN SEEN AS AN IMPORTANT MARKETING SKILL. IT HASN'T. L
48 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r L O N G F O R M THE STORY OF 2012: the year that put storytelling on the marketing map In April 2011, it was easy to poke fun at the concept of brand storytelling – and that’s what Tom Fishburne did when launching his now well-established Marketoonist cartoon series. Fishburne actually bought into the concept of brands and marketers as storytellers. He just didn’t think most brands were doing a good enough job. Judging from the LinkedIn data, he was right. Marketers may have liked the buzzword, but they didn’t take storytelling seriously as a skill.
THE TRIGGER AUGUST 2011 Number of storytellers in marketing: 0 COCA-COLA CHANGES THE GAME The launch of Coca-Cola’s Content 2020 strategy saw one of the world’s biggest brands seeking to define brand storytelling and its specific role in a connected marketing strategy. The marketing world took notice. It was at this point at which we can first detect marketers adding storytelling as a specific skill on their profile.
BEFORE THE RISE APRIL 2011 Number of storytellers in marketing: 0 STORYTELLING AS PUNCHLINE 2011 BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r 49 The Cannes Lions festival announced a new category: Branded Content and Entertainment. That wording was significant. It captured the idea that branded content was more than just a different form of advertising: it had to captivate audiences as entertainment; as stories.
Nobody tuning in to watch Adele sweep the Grammy awards expected the highlight of their evening to be a Chipotle ad. The Mexican food chain with the “Food with Integrity” message had never run a national TV campaign before. Then came a two-minute animated film backed by a heartbreaking rendition of Coldplay’s The Scientist, performed by Willie Nelson. It was a story about a farmer losing his soul to industrial techniques, and then battling resolutely to get it back. It set Twitter alight, bringing brand storytelling into the big time. Seth Godin was one of the first thinkers to argue that the art of storytelling was fundamental to marketing as a whole. He’d written about it as early as 2005, in his book All Marketers are Liars, an underground hit. In April 2012 it was re-issued, with a cheeky new cover. The original title was scrawled out and rephrased as ‘All Marketers tell Stories’. Putting storytelling center-stage in this way demonstrated that it was no longer just a content marketing tactic. It was now part of the strategic marketing discussion.
THE TAKE-OFF JANUARY 2012 Number of storytellers in marketing: 5,000 STORYTELLING GETS ITS OWN LION APRIL 2012 Number of storytellers in marketing: 12,000 THE SCIENCE BEHIND STORIES The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall was the New York Times Editor’s Choice book that put the science behind storytelling. Gottschall looked at stories through an evolutionary lens; not just as a cozy way of wrapping up a message, but as a means of shutting down critical faculties and opening people up to emotional influence and manipulation. This was serious stuff: not just a new creative technique, but a new science of storytelling. 2012 BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE 50 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r L O N G F O R M 4. THE EARLY MAJORITY MAY 2012 Number of storytellers in marketing: 18,000 THE YEAR OF STORYTELLING Late spring and early summer 2012 saw a significant shift. Bloggers and mainstream media alike stopped treating storytelling as another marketing buzzword, and started to discuss it as part of a new marketing zeitgeist. The Guardian, Fast Company and Forbes were amongst those declaring this the year of storytelling. A tipping point had been reached. If marketers needed permission to start treating storytelling as an essential skill, they now had it. JOE PULIZZI PRESENTS THE HISTORY OF STORYTELLING Joe Pulizzi’s presentation at the Online Marketing Summit argued that brands now needed to compete as media companies in order to earn audiences’ attention. That didn’t just mean putting branded content out there. It required them to develop their own compelling stories. While most attention had focused on the storytelling of consumer brands, Pulizzi showed it to be fundamental to B2B strategies as well. And through the story of brands like John Deere, he demonstrated that storytelling has always had value to add to those who can execute it properly. JUNE 2012 Number of storytellers in marketing: 21,000 CHIPOTLE WINS THE FIRST STORYTELLING GRAND PRIX Chipotle landed the first Grand Prix to be awarded at the Cannes Lions for Branded Content and Entertainment, beating off strong competition from Montblanc, Qantas, Intel, Carling Black Label and others. The 13 Gold Lions also awarded in this category showed the sudden strength in depth of storytelling campaigns.
S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r 51 5. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT STORYTELLING (number of marketers) 2010 2011
2012 2013
2014 2015
2016 2017
600k 500k
400k 300k
200k 100k
0 25,000 200,000 310,000 350,000 450,000 570,000 OCTOBER 2013: THE RISE No. of storytellers in marketing: 200,000 MASSIVE NUMBER OF PEOPLE ADDING "STORYTELLING" TO THEIR LINKEDIN PROFILE Storytelling represents 0.2% of all skills added on LinkedIn Profiles. Gary Vaynerchuk joins the keynote speakers taking it as a theme.
Subaru’s Commercial ’They lived’ demonstrates it’s not the product but the story that holds the power.
UN partnered with Unicef Jordan, Samsung and vrse.works to create a virtual reality experience that would transport the world’s top decision makers to a Syrian refugee camp. OCTOBER 2017: WHAT'S NEXT No. of storytellers in marketing: 570,000 DON’T MISS A THING The Future of StoryTelling (FoST) is a passionate community of people from the worlds of media, technology, and communications who are exploring how storytelling is evolving in the digital age. Generated from LinkedIn profile data, this graph shows how storytelling changed the landscape of marketing skills over a five-year period. With an ongoing upward trend, this is a story that's not finished yet. MAY 2016: NEW TECH No. of storytellers in marketing: 450,000 IS VIRTUAL REALITY THE FUTURE OF STORYTELLING? Whether for charity or to create marketing trends, the convergence of media and tech is enabling immersive new storytelling forms. BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE BRIAN SOLIS
ON HOW STORYTELLING CAN SAVE MARKETING ILLUSTRATIONS BY GAPINGVOID BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r 53 L O N G F O R M Brian Solis, author of Engage and X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, has teamed up with LinkedIn and Gaping Void to create an exclusive new eBook, Once Upon a Digital Time. LinkedIn’s Megan Golden talked to him about how telling better stories can help future-proof marketing itself. MEGAN GOLDEN: There are over half a million LinkedIn members with storytelling listed in their profile. Why are modern marketers self-categorizing themselves as storytellers? BRIAN SOLIS: I always remember a quote from a very interesting, well-known advertis- er, who was fond of saying to agencies and other marketers, “You’re not an effing storyteller!” This advertiser had read an interview with one of the most famous rollercoaster designers in the world, and this rollercoaster designer categorized his work as storytelling. For the advertiser, this showed how easy it is for us to believe we’re storytellers, just because we produce content or we produce experiences. He was making the point that being a storyteller takes much more than just saying you’re a story- teller. We keep saying it, not because it’s true, but because it feels good to say you’re storytelling instead of admitting you’re in marketing. Personally, I think of storytelling as an aspirational title of sorts. I’m an optimist and so I want to believe that marketers do genuinely believe that they’re storytellers. What they need to consider though, is that this is a very sacred word. We’ve bought into the aspiration and the ideal of storytelling-based marketing, but we haven’t yet gone through the exercise of what it actually takes to become a storyteller. I realized this several years ago when I was writing my book, X: The Experience When Business
I was in control of the narrative, I was a storyteller. I wasn’t. My response was to find a storyboard artist to teach me the art and science of storytelling. That made a big difference, but I can tell you that even after going through that, I would never put storyteller in my title. It’s too sacred a term and we have to respect that.
The challenge for marketing is that it’s adapting storytelling, it’s adapting social media, it’s adapting mobile, it’s adapting all of these new channels on the basis of a classical foundation of what market- ing means. It has a traditional matrix that has to adapt to new times, technologies and trends. That matrix ends up focused on the wrong things. It’s not that marketers don’t get it. It’s more that they’re packaging technology into a construct that they know. It’s self-reinforcing. Executives there- fore see marketing in these terms, and fund it and support it in these terms. They’re supporting what marketing is, not what it could be. BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE 54 S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r This is a time for reinvention and innovation. In the book, we talk about using storytelling not just as a guiding light for the future of engage- ment and experience, but also as a catalyst to drive innovation. What does it take to tell a great story? What does it take to really understand your audience? What does it take to be really compelling? What does it take to move, guide and inspire them? The answers to those questions are going to take some marketers out of that old construct and start them building something new: a new generation of marketing that’s less about ‘Marketing’ and more about experience and engagement. This raises the question: once I have your attention and you have my attention, what are we going to do about it? When you start thinking in these terms, you’re stepping in a new direction, and you continue to step in new directions as you pursue these ideas. I call it ‘progressive trans- parency,’ moving beyond what marketing used to focus on and taking an interest in ‘The Embrace’, or what happens when you engage. The challenge that marketers have today is that their budgets, resourc- es and expertise are all emblematic of how we viewed marketing yester- day, not of how marketing needs to be tomorrow. We get caught up in these cycles of allowing marketing to be driven and guided by executives, who want to see certain things communicated in certain ways. I mean the fact that legal has such a strong voice in what we can say and what we can’t say, or what the narrative has to be according to the “optics of the organization”. These are all designed based on yesterday’s view of what marketing is, and this holds marketing back from what it could be.
I was part of the startup community that eventual- ly became Web 2.0 and then developed into social media. Hugh was also part of that group. He was coming from Savile Row and leaving the advertis- ing world behind. He was using cartoons to express some of the really amazing things that technolo- gy was starting to empower us with, and all of the paradoxes that it had introduced into our lives. He was also taking shots at the way marketing kept focusing just on the next advertisement. We orbit- ed the same circles in the Web 2.0 world and in its earliest stage, that community wasn’t just about working. It was also about validation and self-help L O N G F O R M
S o p h i s t i c a t e d M a r k e t e r 55 and support. We would meet for drinks and bring all of the entrepre- neurs together to talk about what we were working on, and help us get everything to the next level. I just instantly bonded with Hugh. He’s a wonderful human being and so witty and clever.
Meets Design. In there you talked about the need for businesses to invest in experience architects. Can you explain how storytelling plays into the design of those experiences? BRIAN SOLIS: Once I got to the core of what an experience was, I realized that you can’t design experiences unless you’re intent on them. When someone comes into contact with your brand, your product, your service, your packaging or your representative, you don’t want them just feeling the value of those parts; you want them to feel more than the sum of those parts. You have to design the experience as a story where everything comes together into an arc that people will feel, walk away with, and talk about. So, it was very intentional way of looking at experiences. I think it was a little early as an idea, and now it’s starting to be appreciated a bit more. So, the idea of becoming an experience archi- tect is essentially not unlike becoming a storyteller. It’s about being able to build experiences by trans- forming every aspect of a company around the experiences you want to deliver. The real challenge is that we approach all this acting like marketers. We talk like marketers. We measure like marketers. We talk at people based on what other people have approved us to say and none of it feels human. That has to change. The first step is realizing that we’re in denial. Then we can accept the need for change and start moving in a new direction. “I love receiving generic emails and text messag- es,” said no-one ever. We have to understand that marketing is what it is. The reason it doesn’t have a seat at the table in most C-suite discussions is because it’s not aligned with business growth and it’s not aligned with customer experiences. But it could be! Marketing doesn’t have to be a discipline or a function. It could become the work that customer experience teams are doing by using communication, touchpoints, technology and channels to deliver experiences holistically. I think marketing’s futures are bigger than we give them credit for because we’re still stuck looking at what marketing was rather than what it could be. The reason storytelling in marketing matters is because it starts to force us to move beyond that. When we accept it as the sacred term that it really is, it absolutely demands transformation. It’s not just another marketing tactic.
THE OPPORTUNITY WITH STORYTELLING IS AS A CATALYST FOR INNOVATION: MOVING BEYOND THE OLD MARKETING CONSTRUCT AND BUILDING SOMETHING NEW
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