Empty Word: Zeus Jones on Storytelling
Zeus Jones has nice, but regrettably short, piece about storytelling in marketing and advertising. It’s built around a line from Lee Clowe at AAAAAAAAA:
The ability to use the internet in terms of great brand storytelling is still at its infancy,” he said. “The internet advertising media, cross my fingers and hope to God, with bandwidth and with some ability, is going to become more artful; it’s going to become more interesting. … But it’s going to take creative people to embrace the possibilities of what you can do on the internet in terms of advertising and storytelling and make it a little better and smarter.
This reminds me a little of Spielberg’s line about a decade ago that video games would become an art form when one makes us cry: it’s a weird evaluation of one medium, through the value system of another one. In both cases, it’s a an older medium evaluating an emergent medium by its own standards. Z-J goes on to point out, rather crisply that, “There’s no doubt that online advertising is generally pretty dire, but then the Web isn’t really a great medium for delivering traditional advertising. But even more importantly it’s absolutely the wrong medium if all you want to do is tell stories.”
As advertisers and interactives race towards each others’ capabilities, storytelling is the word that many, most, nearly everybody uses to characterize that sacred center. Like concept, or big idea, storytelling is getting added on to the fundamental requirements of interactive experiences. For certain kinds of experiences, it seems like an unnatural bolting on. Is the logic that we should extend the formula of useful, usable, engaging to:
useful + usable + engaging + story == good experience?
Or are we saying that the way to be engaging should be through story?
In any case, it feels like storytelling is a heavy throw-weight word — strong on emotional attention-getting, light on impact — that we throw into the mix to let others know that we’re thinking of the next big thing.