The lost art of story telling…

I couldn’t help but be struck by Stuart Elliott’s column in the New York Times The Power of Storytelling

“TELL to sell,” once a mantra on Madison Avenue, is making a comeback as marketers seek to engage consumers with compelling stories rather than peddle products in hit-and-run fashion with interruptive advertising like 30-second commercials…”

Having spent considerable career time (as well as a chunk of my hard earned dollars) in advertising, I am hesitant to be overly critical of my brothers and sisters on the ad-side. But the idea that consumers can be engaged through compelling story telling needs to be rediscovered, tells volumes about how far advertising has drifted from it’s origins…and how distinct it’s become from public relations. If in fact, the advertising industry is resurrecting the soft tell rather than the hard sell, I applaud it; and welcome the change certainly as a consumer and as a promotional partner.

Truthfully however, I’m not entirely sure that PR, where the good and interesting telling of a client’s story went to flourish when the ad-side abandoned it for the “interruptive 15 to 30-second blaring spot,” hasn’t also drifted from a good tale to a snappy press release or email subject line. Now, we write press releases and media alerts with precisely crafted message points and hyperlinks to maximize and optimize a web site. Yeah, ok, so…where’s the story? Just because the media as well as it’s audience’s attention spans have been reduced through a generation of MTV edits, doesn’t mean that there is any less need for a tale to be told. Something with a beginning, a middle, an end…a problem, a discovery, and a solution…all told with languid embellishments or compressed to bare essentials, but with intelligence and irony intact, for the new generation of listeners and readers…i.e., a story.

We in the PR business had better get back to it. It would be sad to let the ad guys beat us at our own game… one we should be so much better suited for, considering that the best of our breed come from the news business where truth has always been stranger and more interesting than fiction or the puffery passed as “strategic messaging.” Plus, we grew and advanced our careers not on snappy jingles or two word billboards, but on knowing how to recognize a great story as well as tell it…with all its tension, controversy, irony, pathos, and humor intact. Try packing all that in to your next media alert or 30-second spot.

Our clients all desire to see their name and message become ‘viral’ or to be old fashioned, to have ‘legs.’ What better way than to wrap them in a good tale…told with passion, integrity, and maybe even a hyperlink or two.