Today at Ad Week Europe, I’ll be part of a panel exploring what it means to tell stories in real-time. If you think about that concept for a second, you realise that it’s a fundamentally challenging one. It’s challenging because it calls into question what a story actually is.
To get real-time storytelling right, marketers need to rethink the storytelling process, emphasizing listening first and foremost. Many people, and in particular many marketers, have quite an idealised, romantic concept of the storytelling process. I mean romantic in the sense of troubled Victorian geniuses rather than unfeasibly good-looking characters gazing into each other’s eyes. We imagine great storytellers locking themselves away in ivory towers, or going on long solitary walks in the hills where their imaginations are free to conjure up brilliant, original narratives that the rest of us couldn’t dream of – and which they then relate to their eager audiences. Storytelling feels very much like a one-way process.
That’s also how I believe many marketers have interpreted the concept of brand storytelling. They sit in an office, or a creative studio, and come up with a great, compelling story or series of stories to tell about their brand – then plan how to put those stories out there and engage people with them. It’s a bit like making advertising – but usually with longer copy.