Storytelling

I recently stumbled upon the Talentworks section of AdAge.com, whereupon I came across this story about R/GA’s newest Executive Creative Director. And I decided to share it with you because it’s significant for so many reasons.

First and foremost is that it makes use of my new favorite buzzword: Storytelling. Now a few weeks ago, I noticed that an acquaintance had taken a new job as “Director of Storytelling” for a company I’d never heard of. Foolishly, I assumed he was working for some kiddie web site, where his job would be to somehow get Johnny Tremaine, Misty of Chincoteague, The Phantom Tollbooth and other childhood classics onto the internet.

But no, it turns out “storytelling” is something completely different. It’s what “media agnostic” agencies do for their clients: they tell the brand’s “story” over a variety of media.

Really.

It’s such a perfect buzzword too, because it sounds so warm and fuzzy, not to mention sort of classy. Storytelling. I mean who could be against something so positively “engaging”?

It’s also a great term because you can apply it to just about anything. The “storytelling” experience in the article, for instance, was “a JetBlue campaign that integrated traditional storytelling with interactive media in the form of a traveling "story booth," where travelers could videotape their stories about experiences with the airline. The videos became the basis for the campaign's work online and on TV.” (emphasis added)

Now call me crazy, but “traditional storytelling” to me is a children’s librarian sitting in a chair surrounded by a couple dozen kids as she acts out some fable about a Lithuanian ox. It’s certainly not about a clever way to gather customer testimonials.

You can be sure to see “storytelling” cropping up all the time now as a way of describing pretty much anything having to do with advertising or marketing, especially anything untraditional. Clients all think their brands have an interesting story to tell, and agencies will only be too happy to tell it for them.

What’s baffling, however, is that where I come from, advertising is supposed to be about news. You know, tell me something I didn’t know about the product, something I might actually care about, because that’s the only reason I’m going to take the time to listen to you. Now “storytelling” sounds dangerously like “tell the consumer what I, the brand, want to say” rather than “tell the consumer what s/he wants to hear.” It makes that deadly assumption that I actually want to sit down and hear some long drawn out story from your brand, and as we all know Your Brand Is Not My Friend. So I don’t really care to hear its story. Unless, of course, there’s some news in there for me.

Now there are two other things of note in this TalentWorks story. The first of which is yet another example of lazy, reprint-the-press-release journalism. The ECD in question, Robert Rasmussen, is going to be running the Nike account at R/GA. And the article plays up his whole JetBlue “storytelling” experience, while failing to even once mention that he spent 10 years (1994 – 2004) working on Nike at Wieden and Kennedy, doing all sorts of award-winning work and no doubt greatly endearing himself to the Nike client. A fact that I, no brilliant journo myself, was able to quickly glean from his public LinkedIn Profile.

Finally, there’s this gem: the article, as so many do in this 2.0 world of ours, allows for unedited commentary. And the one comment (as of today) is this vituperative screed from a “Jennifer A. of Norwalk, CT”

Can we be honest here? Anyone who has worked with Robert knows he is arrogant, rude and a hack who lucked out with this job. This is one reader who will happily watch his demise. JWT Forever! –NORWALK, CT

Wow. That is nasty, public, raw, inappropriate and leaves you wondering WTF? Is Jennifer his ex-wife? A friend with a PoMo sense of humor? A jealous rival for the JetBlue account? A young assistant whose advances he spurned? I mean I assume Rasmussen and his friends won’t have too much trouble figuring out who “Jennifer A. of Norwalk, CT” is.

The whole thing is rather fascinating in a People magazine sort of way. And if we were to somehow find out the actual history behind this post, that, my friends, would be storytelling.

Blogging For Dollars

Ever since the woman who started MediaBistro sold her blog for $23 million, there's been a lot of talk about bloggers actually making money for this.

But I think we need to look at blogs for what they are: online evolutions of newspapers and magazines.

There are really two types of blogs, particularly in the advertising and new media space: Aggregators, like Adfreak and Adrants, where you can find all sorts of new and unusual work along with some mildly snarky commentary, and OpinionBlogs, like this one and most of the ones in the links column on your right, which are basically daily op-ed columns on what's on the writers mind.

And like most things in life, there's a whole lot of gray in this: few blogs fall exclusively in one camp or the other.

Much as we'd like to think that they're some revolutionary new thing, most blogs are basically not that different than what newspapers were about a few hundred years ago: one persons opinion of the news.

And readers of newspapers and magazines have come to accept that a certain amount of advertising is necessary to get the content they want. Provided it's clear that the advertising doesn't in any way impact the editorial.

Now what gets dodgy and what's causing so many bloggers so much tsouris, is the fact that the money bloggers in the advertising and marketing arena-- especially opinion bloggers (as opposed to aggregators) can make from advertising is pretty minimal. Certainly not enough to support themselves or to enable them to provide better or different content. (Let's face it: we're talking to a pretty limited audience.)

So then it starts to seem like a vanity project. Jaffe asking for an iPhone becomes "Is my blog that cool that you'd give up an iPhone to be associated with it?"

That's a whole different question than "Are the readers of your blog valuable enough as potential consumers for me to pay money to advertise my iPhone to them?"

And even if it's not, even if someone's really bartering an iPhone because they want to reach Jaffe's readers, it doesn't come off that way. Because the advertising becomes noteworthy. It intrudes into the editorial in a way that offends us. I mean when was the last time you saw a magazine article about how the publisher landed the Mercedes ad on the back cover?

Seeing ads on blogs I read doesn't bother me. I mean more power to you if you can get someone to pay you. But when you start letting the advertising become part of the editorial (the whole Nikon blogger outreach program) then you've pissed me off and likely lost me as a reader.

And that's probably not worth the $20 a week most of us can actually make from advertisers.

Persistent Spammers

Check out the second comment to the post below this.
It's a spam message for some website about the Kennedy assasination.
Now this is the third or fourth (unrelated) spam message I've gotten on the Toad Stool so far. I usually just delete them, but it's got me wondering.

I have one of those password-protect things on here, where you need to type in the secret hard-to-read alphanumeric code in order to post a comment.

So either these guys took the time to hand-post the spam or hacker technology is better than Google Blogger technology.

EIther way, it seems like a whole lot of effort for what promises to be very little profit.

More Generational Thoughts

My post the other day about the whole "Gen Y is spoiled" nonsense made me think of one of my favorite sociology-type books of all time. Neil Howe and William Strauss' 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

Funny how old-school the title sounds, but at the time the book was published (1993) the phrase "Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?" was completely unfamiliar to most anyone over 30. (For those of you too young to remember, it was what PCs asked when they were thinking of crashing.)

Strauss and Howe were the first to highlight Gen X as a separate and unique entity. And while many reporters defaulted to Doug Coupland's Generation X as the seminal generation-defining novel, it has none of the insight of Strauss and Howe.

A lot of their theories and observations still hold up. For instance they spend a lot of time talking about how kids became a low-level priority in the 1970s as their parents (and society) devoted their time to "finding themselves" and how this effected Gen Xers psychologically by making them more self-reliant than the generations before and after. They also define Gen X as being anyone too young to remember the Kennedy assassination, thus including the cohort born between 1961 and 1964.

Well worth a look (or second look) for anyone whose interested in how generations affect consumer behavior.

Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery

Thanks to Matt Dickman of Techno/Marketer for flagging this very funny parody of all the new video sites.

Parody is a lot harder to pull off than you'd think, so props to the people to made this.

Second Life Needs One

One of my loyal readers, Jonathan Trenn, sent me a link to a fascinating article in the current issue of Wired about Second Life and what a complete bust it's turning out to be.

The entire article is well worth reading, but here's a brief excerpt to whet the appetite:

What's behind this stampede is not that hard to divine. "A terror has gripped corporate America," says Joseph Plummer, chief research officer at the Advertising Research Foundation, an industry think tank. Plummer has been around Madison Avenue since the early '60s, when modern advertising techniques materialized. "The simple model they all grew up with" — the 30-second spot, delivered through the mass reach of television — "is no longer working. And there are two types of people out there: a small group that's experimenting thoughtfully, and a large group that's trying the next thing to come through the door." Second Life appeals to the latter — the ones who are afraid of missing out, who don't consider half a million dollars to be a lot of money, and who haven't figured out (or don't want to admit) that Second Life is less than the bold new frontier it appears to be.

There's even a cameo appearance by Joseph Jaffe, whose not-an-agency Crayon created Coke's Second Life "presence."

Or Maybe It's Just Because They're 21

Today's New York Times features an article by Lisa Belkin about the clash between Boomers and Gen Y-ers at work. There's been a recent spate of these kind of articles, all of which, like Belkins, trot out the usual examples of clueless interns wearing flip-flops to meetings and having a hard time adjusting to the idea of regularly showing up for work at 9 AM.

Now what's baffling to me about this is that these behaviors are all being attributed to some sort of generational zeitgeist rather than to the fact that 21 year old interns have always had trouble adjusting to the schedule of the work world and that the offspring of the upper middle class have always entered the workforce with a sense of entitlement.

One curious behavior, which Belkin didn't mention, but which I've seen reported several times in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, is parents calling employers on behalf of their 20something children. Either to demand raises, get feedback from interviews or negotiate a job offer. Now I will tell you that I have never heard of such a thing from anyone in the ad business, and we certainly employ a large number of 20somethings. But I can't begin to fathom why the employers in question allow this. I mean if someone who worked for me (or wanted to work for me) had their parents call to demand a raise, said employee would be out on the street in a heartbeat. Or at least suffer a huge drop in my estimation. And it would take all of my willpower to remain civil to the parents.

Now the reason I'm posting about this is that you know this is bound to show up on a brief sometime soon. Product X is aimed at Generation Y and this is what they're all about.

Just wanted to prepare you all with the proper objections.

Social Media Is Only "Social" If You’re Alone

A few weeks back I was preaching about how Social Media sites are quite anti-social if there are other people in the room, and thus mainly appeal to two demographics: teenagers and affluent, workaholic, single 20 and 30somethings.
What both groups have in common is a feeling of isolation based on the fact that friends and loved ones are not accessible on a constant basis- either because they are living in a college dorm or with their parents (teenagers) or because they work 18 hours a day and tend not to live in the same cities as their college friends.
And as if to prove the existence of this latter group, I stumbled upon this post written by a woman in praise of Web 2.0. Entitled “10 Things We Can Learn From Facebook,” I’ll give you the relevant excerpts:

Local is a state of mind. My new best friend, who I met in December, lives in New York; most of our friendship is bites and bytes, but she's my can I borrow a cup of sugar/do I look fat in the dress pal. (In other words, tech powers connections--powerfully.)
We want to be local, not global. Small is beautiful, and a digital backfence like Facebook's status updates or twitter, has irresistible appeal.
Forget Starbucks, the third place is digital. Got 5 minutes? Need a break? That place you like to go is probably right on your screen.

Again, for the groups I mentioned, social media is a wonderful thing. For a teen or 20something for whom social life is paramount, it’s a way to keep the party going all the time. And for someone as isolated as the blogger above (who it turns out is actually a bit older than the main demographic) it’s a way to stay connected. But for the rest of us, it actually has the reverse effect. I mean do you really want someone Twittering at the dinner table? Checking their Facebook mid-conversation?

I thought not.