Phew!
This is my chosen topic for a talk at Internet World this afternoon - what was I thinking!
Anyway, I'm going to turn my talk into a blog entry just to get my thoughts in order... here goes.
The starting point for this came from a piece of academic research I stumbled upon - it's a paper on 'Narrative Processing: Building Consumer Connections to Brands' by Jennifer Escalas at the University of Arizona.
To quote from the abstract:
"Narrative processing creates or enhances self-brand connections (SBC) because people generally interpret the meaning of their experiences by fitting them into a story. Similarly, in response to an ad that tells a story, narrative processing may create a link between a brand and the self when consumers attempt to map incoming narrative information onto stories in memory. Our approach rests on the notion that a brand becomes more meaningful the more closely it is linked to the self. We conceptualize this linkage at an aggregate level in terms of SBCs, that is, the extent to which consumers have incorporated the brand into their self-concepts. The results of an experiment show that narrative processing in response to a narratively structured ad is positively related to SBCs, which in turn have a positive relation with brand attitudes and behavioral intentions."
This feels pretty fair to me. When we engage with a story, we subconsciously put ourselves into the story: if the story involves a brand, we imagine ourselves engaging with the brand.
However - and here comes a pretty broad brush statement - whilst above the line advertising intuitively understands this, I wonder whether digital agencies really focus enough on narrative structures.
Here's a classic commercial for Hamlet cigars which I still find funny no matter how many times I've seen it. And yet it isn't just humour for humour's sake - the payoff is that Hamlet makes the frustrations of everyday life somehow a little more bearable.
Set against this, an awful lot of digital advertising is really very utilitarian.
This banner for airport parking is actually not exceptionally bad - it's just representative of the kind of droning offer-based creative that we see online all the time.
OK, that isn't really a fair fight! Of course there are some great examples of narratives appearing online. For instance, the About Us page on the Innocent site tells the familiar story of how Innocent was founded:
"In the summer of 1998 when we had developed our first smoothie recipes but were still nervous about giving up our proper jobs, we bought £500 worth of fruit, turned it into smoothies and sold them from a stall at a little music festival in London. We put up a big sign saying 'Do you think we should give up our jobs to make these smoothies?' and put out a bin saying 'YES' and a bin saying 'NO' and asked people to put the empty bottle in the right bin. At the end of the weekend the 'YES' bin was full so we went in the next day and resigned."
Great stuff!
Stories are particularly important online because we know that people have a myriad of ways to pass on good content to their friends: through blogs, email, social networking sites, user reviews, forums and chat.
So the viral impact of the web is one key factor. Another is the amazing rise in broadband access speeds, which have on average trebled in the UK over the past two years.
That makes video content an increasingly important part of the mix. But that doesn't mean that the web will become a channel for 30 second commercials. In fact there are some fascinating new formats developing that could never have evolved in the more rigid environment of TV.
Take for example, the bizarre case of 'Cheddarvision' - a 24 hour live webcam pointed at, you've guessed it, a cheese. Cheddarvision, which attracted 1.7 million viewers, has now helpfully compressed 9 months of video into a 60 second film on YouTube.
Even the dullest of marketing devices, the product demonstration, can work spectacularly well online, as the brilliant series of videos for Blendtec proves.
At time of writing, this particular film has had 2.7 million views on YouTube.
That's great, but I'm a bit worried by the fact that both these examples are coming from clients rather than agencies. Of course, everyone can have a good idea, but the trouble is that when agencies get involved in this space, the results sometimes backfire spectacularly.
The Cillit Bang incident, where a PR agency writing as the brand spokesman Barry Scott added a comment to a blog written by Tom Coates is still rippling around the Internet. This all happened two and a half years ago, and the Guardian wrote a story on it at the time: "Cleaner caught playing dirty on the net". And all these months later, the Guardian story is still ranking on the first page of Google results for searches on the Cillit Bang brand - and the Wikipedia entry for Cillit Bang retells the story.
I'm worried that many digital agencies are stuck into a direct response, results driven mentality and simply aren't thinking about creating strong narratives that will build brands. I saw a presentation from a major online retailer where they described the steps in the life-stage strategy they followed as:
1) Relationship starts
2) Honeymoon period
3) Ongoing relationship
4) Frustration
5) Disillusionment
6) Abandonment
Of course, this describes a classic story arc, which makes me wonder whether email couldn't be used within part of a narrative structure. Years ago, this was exactly the pretext of the interactive drama Online Caroline, where emails from the lead character knitted together short video episodes.
Online Caroline - which was created by XPT and bought by Freeserve - is the direct precursor of the fascinating soap operas being developed by Bebo.
These kicked off with Kate Modern - which was created by the team behind the YouTube hit lonelygirl15.
Gap Year is currently in development, and will be a fantastically ambitious project - especially since the characters are real people who will be filming themselves as they play within a loosely plotted narrative as they travel around the world.
And my current favourite is Sofia's Diary (not that I'm especially the target audience!) With its snappy 3 minute webisode format and integrated pre-roll advertising, I think that Bebo has really stumbled upon a format that will work incredibly well online. It's well worth checking out an episode or two.
So where is this all going. I think that stories and brands are natural bed-fellows and have been for a long time. I think that digital can be an incredibly exciting environment to deliver stories and see their impact really multiply. And sadly, I don't see agencies making a lot of the running here, as opposed to clients and media owners.
