Story Is the Form of Life - Every Brand Needs a Story - Bill Harvey - MediaBizBlogger

We remember things best and they move us the most if they are absorbed in the form of stories. Harvard's Gerald Zaltman has told us that the message recipient will tend to see everything as a story, even if there isn't anything out there that remotely looks like a story. The mind seeks stories and stores incoming information packets as stories anyway.

So we might as well convey our messages in stories. They will have more impact that way. Commercials do that, at least sometimes. The best commercials I can remember all tell stories. Someone should sort their copy tests and inspect the correlation between story and score.

But the big breakdown in the industryis that a brand's commercials may tell effective stories, but the brand itself doesn't communicate a coherent story. The brand may indeed have that story but if the public isn't aware of it, it isn't being conveyed.

Let's face it, with all the appropriate concern about the brand being alongside offensive material, the time has come for all brands to wake up and use the mechanisms that are working to quickly percolate stories throughout society. Internet storytelling forms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are the tip of the iceberg.

This means opening up the concept of advertising to a dialog. "Moderated" is the simple tool to eliminate offensive material in any such dialog. Someone is at the controls all the time. This interactivity is coming to TV next, this time for real.

But just using multiple media – and each medium has a way of adding to the conveyance of a brand's story – will not do the trick unless the brand has wisely chosen what its story should be in the first place. The story is actually discoveredrather than chosen, because it has been there all along.

The primary purpose of creative agencies used to be developing great stories embedded in 30 second videos. There has been a decline in the perceived influence of these agencies of late. One might speculate about all sorts of causes. It may have been the Universe's way of telling the industry that it has to evolve to adapt and thrive again.

Now the stories must grow bigger, to encompass the whole brand, in dialog with the populace, because this is the way it will be done from now on.

If a brand doesn't know what story it has to tell, that is focus number one.

And what will be the outcome of each brand focusing on telling its story? ROI – what else? There is no other point to the exercise of advertising. Did people respond to the story? Fortunately, nowadays that can be measured in relation to whatever you do on television.

Bill Harvey (Bill@TRAGlobal.com), President of TRA (www.TRAGlobal.com), the only electronic singlesource system in the U.S., measuring TV ROI from second by second purchases and television exposure in the same 370,000 homes, across every DMA.