Take a message to my love

There's this age old idea that people got into advertising who wanted to make movies, the same way every journalist is supposedly a frustrated novelist. I'm sure it is true for some, and entirely not true for many. My friend Matt used to be a journalist and now works in advertising, he might have something interesting to say there (he usually does).

There's a distinction, an important one I think, between people wanting to make movies and people wanting to tell stories. I'm wondering if advertising always has to tell stories, at least, needs to tell them in a traditional sense. One thing I think old media advertising did and still does much better than digital is deliver a whole story in just a single image and a bit of copy. We can argue until the cows come home that that isn't the point any more, but that's for another post.

In writing this I've been thinking about ads that have conveyed a story for me, and particularly ones that didn't have narrative at their core, but still managed to tell us a whole lot. Take for example one of my favourite commercials ever (yes, forever-ever, forever-ever):

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM]

There's a whole lot of story going on here, it isn't just five guys goofing off with each other. The bikes hanging up in the first apartment, the cut to Dookie who is clearly the rennaissance man of the bunch, left-handed and a gamer, at the end we're even shown it's winter outside. We could make some guesses around the character archetypes employed to bring the story to life, but we've already got a variety of things to work with, and in a transmedia environment there's a lot of fun to be had very quickly, and very easily.

Another commercial that only came out this year that I loved was this one from HSBC:

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=UaRYR7wQPsk]

What did you think? One colleague I showed it to said it made him angry, he really got worked up by it. I thought it was great though, brilliantly executed to deliver a very particular point - and in delivering a point we get to the heart of narrative in traditional advertising.

Advertising, in telling a story, requires a very specific emotion or lesson to come out of the narrative in order for the brand's proposition to connect with the audience; if there's ambiguity it falls flat, it only works if it can't be easily refuted, and that's really, really hard to do. With this in mind they have more in common with Hans Christian Anderson than they do with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (great book, read it), stories employed to deliver a very particular point, constructed from very simple devices to make the re-telling as simple and easy as possible, which is why when I get around to having kids they're still going to be hearing about Hansel and Gretel, even though I'd much rather be telling them about Han Solo and Chewie.

This is getting a bit long, so I'm going to split this into two sections as I still want to talk about ambiguity and how it works in favour of the story when done right (it's more interesting than it sounds, I promise). To whet the appetite, if you haven't seen the HBO Voyeur site, then that is homework.

Meanwhile, what's your favourite example of a linear story in advertising?

**Update** October 29th, 2008

Watch the Budweiser guys get resurrected in this pseudo-spot for Barack Obama. This is now a meme as much as it was ever a commercial, which means the fun is only just getting started.

[youtube=http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=S-vpUqOMtdI]

The song remains the same

[wp_caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="...a story that is never completely told..."][/wp_caption]

"A great brand is a story that is never completely told."

I just clocked this over at TIGS, what a great quote. I was sitting having breakfast with a good friend yesterday morning and he was wondering aloud why some brands that couldn't possibly have been bigger all of a sudden become tiny before disappearing completely. He was talking about a particular American beer (whose name I can't remember) that was the Budweiser of its day (I couldn't imagine saying anything more insulting about a beer, except maybe this).

This has me thinking about brand extension - do brands therefore extend themselves because they finish the story they set out to tell? Once extended, do they find their story wasn't al that interested in the first place?

Thinking about the uber-brands, Cadbury certainly has story left to tell, as does Apple, Nike, Vogue, who else? Contrast that with brands that we perhaps know too much about, like Microsoft or McDonalds. Those are easy targets though, who else is out there that seems to have run out of things to say?

(This also has me thinking about luxury brands, how open would not beat closed in that situation, and how not knowing the story adds to their appeal...hmmm that's another post entirely.)

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Image courtesy of Mikey G Ottawa, with thanks to compfight.