Is Twitter a Gold Mine for Character-Based Brand Storytelling?

Posted by Jon Thomas, 18 Dec 2012

This post originally appeared in our December '12 issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

My wife has never seen the movie Goonies, released in 1985. That’s a shame. So many classic lines, and one of the most well known yet practically silent characters, Lotney Fratelli, better known to the masses as Sloth. 

The strong, silent type, Sloth had only three audible lines, but anyone who has seen the movie can recite his most famous one, “Sloth love Chunk!” 

For the more than two decades since the movie’s release, the only words Sloth muttered were those in his three lines. That is, until he joined Twitter.

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10 Marketing Lessons You Can’t Learn From Walmart

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Nov 2012

This post originally appeared in our November '12 issue of “Live Report from the Future of Marketing,” our monthly Post-Advertising newsletter. Subscribe for free here.

I’m not ashamed to admit that one of my favorite movies is You’ve Got Mail—a complete rip-off of Sleepless in Seattle, even using the same lead actors (Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan). Ryan’s character runs a small independent bookshop in Manhattan, while Hanks’s character is opening a large retail bookstore with low prices (if only he’d known how technology would change the way we read) just down the block.

In the late 1990s, when the movie was made, this was a common story line. What were small businesses going to do when Borders, Walmart, Kmart and Target moved into town? How could they compete with rock-bottom prices and one-stop shopping?

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When is Manipulation in Advertising Okay?

Posted by Tom Cleeland, 14 Nov 2012

Manipulation: the action of controlling someone in a clever or unscrupulous way.

It’s a touchy subject, but arguably advertising in its purest form is manipulation. Campaigns want to change behaviour or elicit a response. You can’t argue with that. 

But we’re not in the business of manipulation, are we? We’re in the business of moving and compelling people to engage with, share and advocate a brand or product.

We’re in the business of storytelling.

Meet documentary maker Ken Burns—a master of manipulation through the medium of storytelling. He’s the man behind titles such as The Civil War and Baseball. He argues a good point and one that has inspired this blog post.

Manipulation is present in every story whether we like it or not.

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Fight Club, Cinderella, and What Storytelling Means for Brands

Posted by Claire Robinson, 08 Oct 2012

What does Cinderella have in common with Fight Club?

Lots, according to Jon King, Story Worldwide's Chief Storyteller. During the ‘Storytelling for Brands’ session at our London office last week, part of Social Media Week London, we shared Story’s brand-centred approach to narrative content.

We draw our inspiration from the most important study of storytelling ever done, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell. Campbell’s insights have influenced and guided the approach, which he called the hero’s journey and which is used in all forms of narrative, including classic films from Cinderella to Fight Club.

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Social Media Week London 2012: The Full Story

Posted by Claire Robinson, 24 Sep 2012

It’s time to get your Twit on and fire up your Facebook! Social Media Week London is back and it promises to be bigger and more collaborative than ever.

For those of you who don’t know, Social Media Week returns to London for it’s fourth consecutive year from 24th – 28th September 2012. Hosted by Chinwag, this year’s theme is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. Digital dons and social-savvy client-siders will reflect on the global impact of social media and its role as a catalyst in driving cultural, political, economic and social change.

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3 Carmakers Embracing Brand Stories

Posted by Jon Thomas, 19 Sep 2012

My first car was a gray 1987 Honda Accord LXi hatchback. Well, it was actually a two-toned gray, since I never bothered to get the replacement panels painted after a fender bender (primer gray was close enough).

I bought the car using the money I earned scooping ice cream and washing dishes at Brigham’s restaurant the two years before. It was a stick shift, and since I didn’t know how to drive a stick yet, my mom had to test-drive it as I sat in the passenger seat. I remember that test-drive vividly. Supposedly it had great gas mileage and shifted like butter. I didn’t pay much attention. I was on cloud nine because I knew this would be my car, and I was dreaming of the possibilities.

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4 Great Ways to Leverage User-Generated Content

Posted by Paige Beaumont, 05 Sep 2012

Great user-generated content (UGC) should not exist in a vacuum—it should be reused, when and where appropriate, to bring color and authenticity to a brand’s marketing.

As brands expand their social-media footprints, many have also (smartly) placed more emphasis on engaging with their fans. As a result, they’ve begun proudly featuring selected consumer contributions in print, TV and online advertising. Dedicated fans often create a gold mine of content that’s just waiting to be explored, and in due course, brands have begun to dip into this resource. It’s the easiest and most direct way to build relationships with customers, because their passion for their favorite brands makes them happy to respond and share their stories—messages that are infinitely more compelling than what the brand might say.

Here are some great ways to use freely made consumer-generated content from social channels to great effect.

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4 Lame Excuses for Not Creating Content

Posted by Jon Thomas, 29 Aug 2012

Content marketing is all the rage, and brands of all shapes and sizes are focusing more time, effort and budget dollars on creating entertaining, useful and relevant content that audiences will want to share. Some brands, however, still stand at the water’s edge, not so sure an always-on commitment to social media and content creation is right for them. 

Even the most successful marketing efforts have their detractors and doubters, who hold tight to the traditional methods: interruption and overexposure of their brands. They cling to the past and continue to invest in telemarketing, direct mail and pricey television spots and billboards. Even the London Olympics, which were praised as the most tech-savvy and social-media-supported games ever, were heavily supplemented (or, rather, dominated) by traditional advertising.

While those methods have their place, it’s about time we set the record straight and started to challenge those who insist that content marketing isn’t yet an established brand communication strategy.

Here are some of the reasons brands are abstaining from content and why they’re on the wrong side of history.

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7 Reasons Storytelling Is Important for Branded Content

Posted by Jon Thomas, 15 Aug 2012

Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440. 
The first radio transmissions were in the early 1900s.
The television became commercially available less than a century ago. 
The Internet is not even old enough to have a drink (legally; at least not in the United States).
Facebook and Twitter are just out of diapers, and the next big marketing tool is still in the womb or possibly just a twinkle in its creator’s eye. 

When most people think about marketing, these are the tools they think of: print, radio, TV and the web. None of these, however, are ingrained in us as much as storytelling. We’ve been telling stories for thousands of years, but we don’t have to go back that far to understand storytelling’s powerful effect on our hearts and minds. Go back only as far as your childhood, when you begged your parents to read your favorite story—the one you already knew by heart—just one more time. Why did you do that? Why was it so important to hear that story?

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Ten Brands Doing Post-Advertising Right: Spring Edition

Posted by Jon Thomas, 02 May 2012

Every once in a while, the editorial team at Post-Advertising is so impressed by a brand’s work that we share it with each other. Just the fact that we enjoyed the content so much that we were compelled to share it with the rest of our team proves that it’s worthy of a post-advertising nod.

But since we’ve focused this blog on topics that educate our readers, we’ve spent less time sharing the great work we’ve found with all of you. Last September we decided to feature 10 brands that impressed us with their content marketing and brand storytelling efforts. But as we see more brands embracing post-advertising, we realized that we should start doing our list more often.

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