Advertising as storytelling

Conventional wisdom tells us much of the best advertising consists of short stories, well told. That Volkswagen spot featuring the young couple dancing and the old guy living below them complaining is a prime example.
If ads are often stories, then copywriters and art directors can be seen as modern day storytellers of a sort. But the storytelling doesn’t stop there.
Ad agencies themselves are collective storytellers as well. The stories ad agencies tell, however, don’t take place within an advertisement. They take place within a meeting room as they present their work to a client.
Agencies don’t simply present work and then plead with the client to buy the recommended campaign. They sell work by telling a series of interrelated stories that are often largely conjecture. The effectiveness of these stories ultimately comes down to how plausible, how coherent and credible, how passionately it’s presented, rather than how true the story is.
Of course, agencies would like to think that what they do is construct well-reasoned and well-supported arguments in favor of whatever they’re selling. Sometimes they do. But very often their arguments are built on loads of speculation, guesstimation and best case scenario-building. The guesswork may be grounded in intuition, judgement, probability and experience, but it’s still guesswork. If the client finds the guesses to be reasonable or likely ones, then they will buy the work. If they don’t, the agency can only try to make up some other story that the client will nod their heads to.
I call this persuasive speculation. The ability of an agency to tell clients stories that effectively sell ads and then, once the ads are running, stories that credibly credit success in the marketplace to the advertising.
There’s nothing wrong with this, per se. But there is something wrong when there is the pretense of a high degree of predictability. There is something wrong when agencies feel compelled to characterize their stories as more true than they actually are, because the client needs this illusion of certainty in order to buy the work. There is something wrong when methodology dresses up as science. Or when correlations parade as causal.
So what kinds of stories do agencies tell clients? Stories about how their customers think and feel and behave, about what they care about and don’t care about. Stories about how target audiences break out into nice, neat, discrete demographic segments. Stories about cluttered environments, about what words and pictures will affect their customers and in what ways. Stories about the competition. Stories about brand equities and how to leverage them. Stories about how many people look at this or that magazine or website or TV show. Stories about how “look at” equals “engage with” or “pay attention to.” Stories about the dynamics of surfing and zapping. Stories about how people who tend to do such and such are also likely to do so and so.
Because these stories are speculative, an infinite number of them can be generated. Genuine knowledge and true understanding seldom constrain them.
The most important stories agencies tell clients are about how the advertising they are trying to sell will affect the clients’ customers. Of course, the agency can’t really know ahead of time whether any of these stories is true. Because they are predictions. Speculations. Guesses. Hypotheses. Only consumers’ actions over time will tell if the story turns out to be true. And most of the time, even time doesn’t reveal the truth. Because most of the time there is no clean, unambiguous, unspeculative way to measure the effectiveness of the ad.
The ad runs. Sales go up. But wait, there was also an FSI running that week. And, uh-oh, the POP materials went into stores that week as well. When there’s one effect and several possible causes of that effect, how do you determine the true cause or combination of causes? It could be any one potential cause or any combination of them. The agency can tell the client a story about why sales went up, but there are any number of other stories that might be true instead, and the truth of these stories may preclude the truth of the story the agency is telling.
The illusion ad agencies and clients often mutually agree to sustain is that they are working together to plot out courses of advertising action based on information, facts, insights, solid research, hard numbers, etc. There are reams of supporting documents and Power Point presentations galore to help them prop up this mutually agreed upon illusion.
The reality is that, very often, both parties agree to accept as true and real this or that highly speculative, educated guesswork and the hypotheses that such guesswork spawns. Agency and client enable each others’ rationalizations. It becomes, collectively, their story and they’re sticking to it. This is not surprising. The client is looking for some kind of assurance, an emotional comfort level, that the campaign they are about to sink a large piece of their budget into is going to work. This is an assurance that both parties know perfectly well can’t be given. But the need remains. And the agency is eager to meet their clients’ needs, even the irrational, emotional ones.
The client says, “How can we be sure this campaign is going to work?” The agency could tell the truth. “We can’t be sure. But it seems like our best shot so let’s give it a try and see what happens.” More often, having just been invited to make up a story, the agency does just that. In this case, it’s a story about how the client can be sure the campaign will work. Then the agency’s charge becomes to interpret future events so as to make this story true, whether it is or not. Rather than determining as best it can whether the campaign worked and why (or why not), which, in the long run, is far more useful information for the client.
Think how much healthier the process would be if clients and agencies recognized that advertising is inherently trial and error, every time out. That it’s the collective best guess of a group of smart people with limited information and a willingness to rely on experience, judgment and intuition. This kind of intellectual honesty would make for more realistic expectations and less need to dress guesses up as gospel.
So tell the client a story if you must. But try having the guts to recognize—out loud, to the client—that it remains to be seen whether this story will wind up being true or false, and that, with so many potential causal variables out there, you may never know for sure what the truth is. In doing this, you will contain client expectations, at the same time limiting your own tendency to take undue credit for successes and to deflect responsibility for failures.