It seems everyone in advertising is desperate to call themselves a storyteller.
They write articles about storytelling, they give lectures, make videos, even offer courses on storytelling.
They must be seen to have mastered the ancient craft of storytelling.
They want everyone to know they can keep an entire village spellbound around the fire, with their tales.
Well, unlike everyone else in advertising, I’m not a storyteller.
I’ve always been a creative director.
And I never had a storyteller in any of my departments.
I never hired storytellers, I hired thinkers, creative people.
The change from copywriters and art directors to storytellers is part of the artisanal trend.
Everything must be stone ground, or made by hand, or traced back to some pre-industrial roots.
So storytelling harks back to the days before video games and mobile phones.
Before television, before electricity.
When we’d sit around the fire and drink mead and eat venison.
Listening to the skilled weaver of tales who held the yokels spellbound.
That’s all very well.
But the storyteller never had to actually sell a product.
Beowulf wasn’t sponsored by anyone.
It was just a story.
And also the storyteller was guaranteed the full attention of his audience.
There was no competition.
It was his story or nothing.
But today there’s £20 billion spent on advertising in the UK.
And 89% of it is not noticed or remembered.
That’s roughly £18 billion ignored, because it’s all wallpaper.
So nine out of ten storytellers are talking to themselves.
Of course what everyone loves about being called a ‘storyteller’ is that it can be defined as whatever you like.
So anyone can claim to do it.
Wherever job you do, you can make it sound like telling a story.
Whether you’re a ‘marketing storyteller’, a ‘digital storyteller’, a ‘financial storyteller’, a brand ‘storyteller’, or a ‘management storyteller’.
All you have to do is add storyteller to the end of your job title to make it sound more creative.
Which is why I find it patronising to be called a storyteller.
It demeans the real job of advertising.
The job I’m supposed to be doing.
Which is getting my message noticed and remembered.
In the old days, storytellers got noticed simply by telling a story.
They were the only one in their village doing it.
Nowadays everyone, everywhere is doing it all the time.
So being a storyteller just means being exactly like everyone else.
Being part of the wallpaper.
Which guarantees you won’t get noticed or remembered.
Just like the other £18 billion of storytellers all telling similar stories.
The £2 billion that gets noticed are the ones concentrating on making themselves different from everyone else.
Concentrating on standing out from the wallpaper.
The ones who aren’t storytellers.
Thank you, Dave; makes sense, as ever. At a time when CCOs blindly bang on the need to be a master yarn spinner, this comes in handy.
I put it down to the lack of originality. Everyone thinks they can write Green eggs and ham, but they can’t. Green eggs and ham can only be written once. Once it’s written it’s written. It seems to me Dave, from what you’re saying, the old illness of “Do it like that new Marks & Spencer’s ad”, or “I want some thing similar to that Selfridges Christmas ad” is rearing it’s ugly seven headed torso from the dead again. I had this with one retail client who demanded we look at the competitor’s ads every week. It was like looking at a charcoal smudge where someone had wiped his arse on a broadsheet and they’d say “Do it like that.” It was soul destroying. One charcoal asshole made me change an ad 17 times. When the business finally went (Thank God) we won the competitor, and guess what he said: He showed us our old client’s ads and said “Do it like that.” 89% of advertisers don’t want advertising. They want their agency to “Do it like that.” and then they have the gaul to complain because the ads or stories, or whatever don’t pull and they blame it on the agency, when really they only have themselves to blame for being compliant, dull, and boring. I had a great car ad turned down once because the marketing boss said: “We can’t do that! We all sit down together around a table and they’ll have my guts for garters if I say that!”
For a non storyteller you don’t half spin a good yarn Dave.
Hi Dave, Here’s what you get if you Google. Why do businesses fail? I’ve lifted a few chunks of information: The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 400,000 new businesses are started every year in the USA, but 470,000 are dying. (96% of businesses used to fail in their first year, so it means there are more businesses than start-ups out there who are about to fail). Source: Success Harbour. According to Bloomberg, 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months. A whopping 80% crash and burn. 90% Of Startups Fail: Here’s What You Need To Know About The 10% : 1. 42% Produce products nobody needs. 2. A good product idea and a strong technical team are not a guarantee of a sustainable business. One should not ignore the business process and issues of a company because it is not their job. It can eventually deprive them from any future in that company. 3.The second major reason why startups fail is that they “ran out of cash.” Why did they run out of cash? Because they didn’t grow fast enough. If your startup can grow fast, you can effectively bypass some of the biggest startup killers — losing to the competition, losing customers, losing personnel, and losing passion.4. “Versatility” is often viewed in a limited sense, that of possessing more than one skill or talent. Versatility in the startup environment involves much more than someone’s skillset. It involves mindset. Startup teams must possess the ability to change products, adjust to different compensation plans, take up a new marketing approach, shift industries, rebrand the business, or even tear down a business and start all over again.Neil Patel. Forbes. Now, all of these problems centre around sales and for some reason, when you talk about SELLING in advertising, people look at you as if you’ve just said something bad or wrong. It’s the attitude that needs to change, but I must admit, most companies sell crap. Rubbish. Things people don’t want. I believe the modern Ad agency needs to be selective. It should have a mantra. “If your product is crap, I’m not touching it, but the money talks to 89% of agencies while 42% of that 11% produce products nobody want, so 95% of companies and consumers buy and sell crap. Sound like a tough market!
I called you out on this “I’m not a storyteller” thing when you said it on Twitter last week. And I will do so again. You may believe that being a storyteller demeans the rest of what you do. That your story has to lead somewhere. That calling yourself a storyteller ignores the rest of the work you do, work that isn’t interesting or thought provoking or funny, but work that sells.
But you tell stories. Your stories do more than just spin a good yarn. Your stories here have brought a huge following, people who read your blog every week. Why? Because you give them a story, a story that goes deeper than just a man went to fight a god. A story that sells. Your ads contain stories. The ads you mention time and again as your favourites have stories.
Just because a term is hijacked by a group full of hot air does not mean it is a term that does not fit you. A term that expresses part of what you do perfectly.
As storytelling is one key part of advertising. Sure, it’s vital we see it as one part and not the whole, but it is one part. Tell the story of your target and your brand. Whether that’s those funny moments in the pub having a pint of bitter, being the only one in a storm whose umbrella stays intact, or anything else.
So you’re not just a storyteller, Dave. But you are a storyteller, and your stories keep bringing people back to your words time after time (after time after time).
‘I’ll tell you a story’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQR-rMVEeKY
Lord, do I abhor the made up titles!
Hi Dave, I’ve just read your blog again because I think we are all missing what you’re saying.
Michio Kaku talked about electricity becoming so big, it became meaningless.
People are now saying we are at the end of the Mobile Phone era and we are entering the
era of superconnectivity. Their concern is that when that happens, everyone will be
inundated with so much online trash from (storytellers) that we will no longer be able to
separate truth from lies. This may be why Publicis has decided to build its own search engine.
It may also have been why Maurice Levy and Sir Martin Sorrell wanted to join forces.
It would have been easier to eat up the advertising universe with one big black hole death star
than it will be with two competitors as automation removes the remaining 10% of people
left working in the industry. I believe what you are trying to tell us is that people have to leave
behind this an awfully uncreative comfort zone and brave the new world. Advertising has to
reinvent itself again, but it’s got so bad now, it will take a wormhole to get us out of storytelling
and back to those wonderful times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYAdwS5MFjQ
Hi Kev,
I think a more salient point here is scale.
Ad agencies are like any other organisation. They exist in a world where there’s problems. Occasionally, they develop a way to solve some of those problems. Which seems great… except it leads to new problems.
And the problem with that is that once you’ve solved a problem, it’s very difficult to ‘unsolve’ it. I’ll give an example: Grateful as I am to be able to read Dave’s blog and others like it, I’m confident in saying that the internet has actually had a net negative effect on society and businesses.
Yes, it allows us to do things with a great deal more speed and efficiency – but it’s at the cost of an almost directly proportional loss in the quality of a lot of the work that gets done. Yes, it allows us to stay in touch with many more people at much greater distances – but in doing so it cheapens the quality of our social interactions and leaves many people feeling anxious and adrift.
All that being said – and in spite of all the talk of ‘unplugging’ and ‘digital detox,’ – nobody would seriously advocate shutting off the internet for good. So in our attempt to solve a problem, we’ve arrived at a problem of even greater magnitude an complexity. That problem with require a solution – and it’ll probably be a very complex solution – if there even is one.
This process/trend is visible in all businesses, but it’s especially obvious in advertising. Agencies and their people solved the problems they faced by consolidating into a handful of behemoths to capture the resources needed to service increasingly complex and demanding client businesses. They did this in spite of almost everyone noticing that it didn’t result in advertising getting any better, almost because the market demanded they do it in order to remain relevant. That’s why we almost had the OmniPube merger, as well – create as great a concentration of resources as possible under a single umbrella in the hopes of maintaining a competitive advantage. Publicis’s Marcel debacle seems ridiculous, but considering the overwhelming complexity of the problems they face right now, it must feel like the only sensible choice to them.
You can say the same for most other industries and their products as well – consolidation is the most overwhelming trend across industry in this age, in spite of business press crowing over ‘startups.’ It’s the fastest way to ensure a company has the best choices over increasingly fragile supply chains, resource pools, etc etc etc. Things like ‘big data’ are just the rather risible attempts to solve the problems that this kind of scale inevitably creates for beings with limited attention spans, time, and conceptual ‘space’ in which to process information.
I believe we’re now starting to see the inevitable end of this process – businesses become ever more complex and concentrated to extract greater profits (even though those profits become marginal relative to costs thanks to the complexity, and because everyone else is doing it too). As a result, they become increasingly brittle and prone to catastrophic failure in the face of smaller and smaller upsets in their markets. Eventually the marginal returns on that complexity will become so small these mega businesses are simply treading water, and they’ll start to unravel. Failing that, they’ll become so complex and unwieldy that a stiff breeze will bring them tumbling down.
I can see two outcomes to all this:
1. Wait for the whole house of cards to collapse.
2. Deliberately scale back and learn to live with some of the problems that this leaves us with.
I think the ‘learn to live’ bit is the operative thing here – there will be better and worse ways of doing this. Remember another blogger (Ad Contrarian maybe?) once pointed out that many global brands are now simply /too big/ for strategy? I think we all know this is a huge problem on some level, and that idiocies like ‘storytelling’ and artisinal, stone ground, hand-made etc. are a feeble attempt to address this.
It’s a cry in the wilderness for a return to a more manageable, human scale. For us, I guess that means brands people can actually relate to on a personal level. Unfortunately, it’s being offered up by exactly the bloated, unwieldy monstrosities which can’t ever hope to give it to us.
Storytellers = Liars
I can see people changing their LinkedIn titles as soon as they read this Dave.
There’s an irrational eagerness for people to want to follow the crowd and use the latest marketing buzzwords. Scary considering people in creative industries are supposed to inspire. Put simply, my dad always said to me when I was a kid: “Don’t be a sheep.”
Hi J. The problem is “the consumerist brandwagon” is over but agencies fail to recognise it. In the pursuit of profit, they have overlooked the man in the street. Keeping up with the Kardashians is a prime example. Nobody cares who has had sex with who, or what the result was. It does not resonate with everyday life. As far as the public are concerned it’s all fabricated nonsense. We’ve seen it all before with Celebrity endorsement scandals when every advertiser stopped being lazy and getting celebrities to sell everything by association. This is the sad situation the industry seems to be in now. Keyboard Cats and Black Chynas apart,I think Dave is trying to say the industry has dug whole for itself by cheapening creativity for the sake of media saturation, the same way as Morgan Spurlock Superized himself with a dreadful diet of fast food for a month. Now we have the equivalent of “Storytellers” “Circuit speakers” “ten minute wonders” all telling us how we should live our lives and how we have all gone wrong and quite frankly the public has answered back by saying: F.O. We don’t need you, we were here first. Brexit, Trump, it’s all going in one direction, and the current trend for Adland seems to be “If you can’t fix it, Axeit.”
Peter, don’t you think there are 6 types. Storytellers, Storysellers, Fairytalers, Bullshitters, Liars and Bots.
What advertising should be doing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj6r3-sQr58
I’m sure that whoever wrote ‘Beowulf’ did so for commercial reasons: he needed to please the king, feed his family, buy a new hut… and since we’re still reading it 1000 years later, he did a pretty good job. I’ve left the ad business and now I write novels. I don’t call myself an author, or a novelist, or a ‘storyteller’ – all too arty-farty for me – I’m a writer, plain and simple. And my work is sponsored just like advertising is by clients, in my case by my publishers. I make them money so they give me money. But the lesson I know from advertising and take into my work is – grab attention. Get them to turn the page. Keep them reading. Get them buying the next one. How do I (hopefully) do it it? Storytelling…
Absolutely Tom. It is the people who should be telling the stories, not the Ad agencies, and writers, artists, should be the catalysts. I think that is what Dave is on about.
Isn’t the issue not about ‘storytelling’ but about ‘effective storytelling’ and in the case of advertising, that means telling a story that motivates me to explore, try and become loyal to the brand that sponsors it? It’s clear that the second part of the equation is often lost by the need of people (creative, faux-creative, whatever) to show off their individuality rather than to sell things.
Look at the new ‘Sleepwalking’ ad for BMW. Sweet little girl, cute story, a smile; but what happens if I peel off the BMW logo and replace it with Volvo? Mercedes? Skoda? Where’s the USP? (I know, I’m a dinosaur and totally out of touch).
If you want to tell an effective story (of any kind and in any media) remember this: After Cicero finished, people said ‘How well he talks’; after Demosthenes spoke, the people said ‘Let us march.’
(In my case, I hope it’s to their nearest bookstore.)
Tom, Do writers have to market themselves now or do they go through literary agents? There seems to be three levels of storyteller. The writer (Originator), the publisher (Publicist), and the reader (Word of Mouth). Similar in working principle to the ad industry, or is it?
When I think of storytelling as a technique, I think of this blog.
Kev, I think there is only one storyteller (the writer/originator). The rest are facilitators for the process of getting the work into the hands of the reader (account men/media, etc). A lot of the ‘post-writing process’ has to do with the genre you write in. Of course there are writers who are self-published, who have done amazingly well. Mainly chick lit, fantasy, swords & sorcery, and of course, erotica (50 Shades). (That suggests the target audience is younger, digital-savvy, and perhaps not demanding a literary masterpiece). The publishing costs are minimal and the profit per sale can be very good, depending on how you structure it. The question then is, do you want to spend a lot of your time ‘marketing’? Personally, I’d rather my agent and publisher ‘pushed’ the book and let me get on with writing the next one. I’ve been very lucky with both agent and publisher, and Book 3 comes out next month. Word of mouth is great, but the sheer volume of volumes can mean that only the Lee Child, Dan Brown and John Grisham writers get pride of place in bookshops, online offers and so on. A very well-known writer of crime novels (TV series adapted and an award-winner) told me that it took until Book 10 before he started to make ‘live on this’ money. To give you an idea, that’s somewhere in the region of a million words, written for the discerning reader ! A bit different to writing headlines and 60 words of body copy or a TV spot, that no-one opened a paper or switched on the telly to watch…
Hi Dave, do you have the source for the 89% stat please? I don’t know it and I really should so would like to read more. Many thanks Karen
Karen,
About 7 years ago a researcher named Alan Reid told me those statistics and he gave me the source.
But I’m a creative not a planner, so I don’t remember sources exactly.
In New York I was always taught that 90% of advertising is ignored so it fits.
But personally I think it’s worse than that.
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Thanks for calling out the bullshit. I know a few brand storytellers. I stuck this on LinkedIn and I can imagine them all cringing in their black t-shirt.
But storytellers aren’t talking to themselves; they’re talking to each other.