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.

Failure is divine and good for the mind…

To paraphrase Ol’ Blue Eyes… “When I was twenty-one, it was a very good year…” It was actually at twenty-three, but why hassle a year or two when you’re young and naïve. Fresh out of school with a graduate degree, a beautiful young family, a dream PR job in New York, and an unlimited future laid out before me...and most important, an attitude of nothing but success. Failure? Not in my world. No way. Businesses didn’t fail. Marriages didn’t fail. And certainly, personal failure (as in getting fired) was not even a passing thought. Failure was for losers…and to be shunned and buried.

But to paraphrase, with literary license, Bob Seger…”I’m glad I know now, what I didn’t know then…” As is well documented in today’s economy, businesses do fail, half of all marriages crumble, and people in this industry do get fired, usually more than once. Thank goodness and probably for good reason.

Whoa…before I alienate all the ‘invest in success’ do-gooders out there... I’m not denigrating nor ignoring the pain; or even that much failure could have been avoided with additional diligence or effort. But if I have learned nothing else in my forty years it’s that failure can and should be a precursor to success. I once worked with an extremely successful and wealthy technology entrepreneur that claimed in a Business Week interview that he had won big and lost big in business twice before his latest climb to the top. I had another client from a wealthy background that ended up on the street, homeless and an addict, before making a twenty-year rise to greatness… economically and personally. Most importantly, both these individuals state categorically, they will not hire nor invest in anyone that has not tasted failure. That “failures” ought to be a line item on any resume worth their time to review. For it is failure that tests us in ways not imagined nor taught. Failure teaches and corrects and fills in the unimagined blanks of our youth. Failure is painful and it’s from that pain that learning and change comes, but it should never be dehabilitating. If you’ve never failed, you’ve never been tested. And if you’ve never been tested, how can you grow.

Yes, there are those that seem to always get it right the first time. People that that seem to have the Midas touch in their business life or in their personal life. Someone with a life too good to be true…a well-suited career, great well-behaved kids, a loving devoted life-mate, loyal forgiving friends, a knack for being in just the right time and place for life’s twisting rope of fate to swing in front of them exactly when needed most to lift them from peril.

Don’t waste time envying them… Rather, wish them well and push on down the road you’ve been traveling… the one with the potholes and hazard signs… and that next great growth opportunity around the corner.