One of these things is not like the other

Let's be clear: I like me some Pringles (less so Pringle). What I don't like is them moving to be something they're not. Now, in fairness the supermarket chains demand consistent product innovation from companies, so they do somewhat get backed into a corner (make no mistake, they are the evil empire), but I just can't let this one slide. On the left we have regular old Pringles just doing their thing Texas-BBQ stylie. This is familiar territory.



On the right though, Light Aromas. LIGHT AROMAS FROM PRINGLES. SPARE ME. This is a snack food where people compete to see how many they can fit into their mouths at once, there is nothing subtle or understated about this brand. Mediterranean Style Salsa "with a touch of Oregano Oil". I'm sorry, I didn't know Gordon Ramsay was now consulting on snack food. Is Heston Blumenthal about to roll out a selection of Smith's Crisps under the Fat Duck brand?

This is utter nonsense. Honest to God smack-my-ass-and-call-me-Judy rubbish. Oregano oil.  You couldn't make this shit up, I don't know anyone other than Pringles who has ever cooked with oregano oil, next we'll have saffron-infused potatoes being prepared in Franciscan monasteries for a deluxe Happy Meal at McDonalds. Give me strength.

Of course I could be wrong, and this is a lovely opportunity to try out Wordpress's new built-in poll. So, are Pringles jumping the shark here or should I shut up and enjoy the taste sensation?

[polldaddy poll=999595]

Just as I was about to press "Publish", I spotted the below article. Stop the world, I want to get off.

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• Chef Blumenthal working with Walkers crisps

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]

Brand tags #2

[caption id="attachment_382" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The best things in life aren't things"][/caption]

Spotted in Carlton on the opposite corner to this gem on the FCUK store. Not a great photo (my kingdom for a Blackberry with a decent camera), it reads "The best things in life aren't things" on the wall of a Country Road store.

Take that advertising...

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier

When I was in the games industry I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about how to deliver narrative in an environment where the progression of the story depended entirely on the end-user's ability to navigate the obsacles we put in their path, all under the guise of gameplay. It sounds counter-productive, but some of those games can go for upwards of 60 hours, and running in a straight line while a plot unfolds is fun for about 67 seconds, so you have some space to fill.

One of the other crucial elements is understanding what stories you can and can't apply. Design is invarably driven by experiences designers believe players what to have, you almost never hear a designer say "This is the story I want to tell, what is the best way to do that?". Funnily enough, while that was my approach, very few people wanted to make my re-telling of King Lear set during the handover of Hong Kong...I can't say I blame them. Games are, for the most part, engineered so you play the hero and affect the main course of the narrative (what little there is), so the stories are constructed within cumbersome paradigms of good vs. bad, triumph over impossible odds, saving the day and winning the girl's heart (because you're almost always a guy).

This may all sound fairly abstract under the harsh light of day in marketing, but the parallels are there to be drawn and should be if we want to get better at telling stories with and through our brands, products and services. I've said hundreds of times now - experiences facilitated by but not about a brand; this is key.

When dealing with brands we need to understand the parameters within which we have the opportunity to engage narrative, both for the benefit of an audience and for the brand itself. I'm proposing that there are three types of story-telling we engage in in marketing, and each one should be employed in different circumstances depending on what the aim is:

1. A traditional, linear narrative where a single point is meant to be reached, leaving the audience with a very distinct idea of what the brand, product or service is about, what it means and what its intent is.


2. A narrative with the brand at the centre of the story but with the story being generated by consumers, leaving the direction of it loosely defined, usually through a particular campaign moving in a very particular direction.


3. Narrative with the audience at the centre of the story, narrative where the story is in fact the customer's own, one where a person doesn't inform the brand's story, rather the brand plays but a part in a much larger whole. Hardest to affect, though I'll argue the most compelling by a long way.

I'm really looking forward to getting into this. If you have any ideas or if you think there are other categories story-telling with brands can fit into, I'd love to hear from you. See you tomorrow when we tackle the first one on the list.

**Update** Tim Beveridge left a great comment below and then wrote some more on Insight + Ideas. Worth checking out!

--

Image courtesy of Doğuş Kozal, with thanks to compfight.

I know what you're about to say like your hype man

I was going to spend the week talking about story-telling in interactive mediums and the ways brands can leverage it, and I'l get to that, but I've woken up with something on my mind that I want to get to first.

Over the weekend when not lying in the park or dining with friends I was working on my latest (overdue) column for Marketing Magazine. It will be out in their December/January issue and I was talking about brands finding their voice online, which I'm quite excited about, I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts when it comes out.

I feel though like that's the running part, and we're struggling to get the walking right; we're doing that because the fundamentals of success in business and marketing are shifting and we're not keeping pace with it. I harp on about it, but only because I think it is important enough to do so: intent. Intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent, intent.

While you're at your desk this week, in each situation I want you to ask yourself "What's my intent here?". We make sales calls under the guise of building relationships, we dump on other agencies under the guise of offering advice. We put energy into things that distract us from our main purpose in the hopes that people won't really get what we're on about.

And then we go do it with the brands we're supposed to be building.

Let's all agree, week beginning Monday October 13th, 2008 to gut-check what the intent is in the work we do this week. Let's not discuss "new ways to talk to our customers" when the reality is we need email addresses added to a database. By stripping away the stuff we cloak our actions with, we get to the heart of the matter much faster.

And I promise, the campaigns you run are going to be all the more effective for it.

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Image courtesy of The Alieness Gisela Giardino, with thanks to compfight.

The company and kindness of strangers

A month or so ago I was interviewed by Brad Howarth on social media and blogging for an article he was writing for B&T. That has just hit the news stands, which is great. You can find the article on page 34 (it's also available online).

Brad also contributed an article to Smart Company and I've been included in a list of 15 of Australia's best business blogs. A couple friends such as Julian Cole and Gavin Heaton are included, along with a great new blog I've only recently discovered, Get Shouty which is written by The White Agency's Katie Chatfield. In addition there's a collection of other blogs I haven't had the chance to read yet, but I'm looking forward to getting into them.

One thing I'm quoted as saying in the B&T article which is absolutely true is the comments on this blog at times have been far more insightful and valuable than the post they were attached to. To everyone who stops by and shares their two cents, it is really appreciated.

When I was young like you

I was doing some house-keeping, cleaning up old files and I came across this image I snapped when I was logged into Facebook on my house mate's laptop.

You'll need to click on it to see, but those yellow boxes are help tips - the one in the middle is a message telling her she is using Internet Explorer 6, and should upgrade to IE 7 or switch to a different browser. On the right is a message introducing Facebook Chat, which also says she'll need to upgrade her browser or switch to Firefox in order to get the most out of it.

Interesting stuff here:

• Browsers listed are IE 7, Firefox, Safari and Flock! Big coup for them, I wonder how many readers have actually heard of it, let alone people who would still be using IE6.


• FB is using data that is freely available to everyone in order to make these tips appear


• They are aware of the possibility for people to have negative experiences that are usually outside the scope for the service to control, yet they're going an extra step to ensure that doesn't happen.


• Has me wondering how I can provide better service for my clients by doing the things that take no time, but have far reaching effects


• Since FB delivers me my FB emails straight to my Gmail, I don't log in to check them. So they stay unread. Someone please tell me the ability to reply to them without having to log in is coming...?