Storytelling on Steroids

10 stories that hijacked the cultural conversation

John Weich

• Publisher: BIS Publishers
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9789063693688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

Storytelling is pop culture's 'weapon' of choice to connect, engage and ultimately convince. Every TV ad a compelling movie? Every Facebook post a contagious piece of content? Every infographic a work of art? Yes, please. Tell me where to sign up! Right now, this very minute, a junior copywriter is adding "storyteller" to his Facebook profile. There is a gaming developer doing the same on LinkedIn. A PR agent is casually including "teller of stories" in his Twitter bio. Graphic designers, journalists, editors, broadcasters, coders, model makers, set designers, ginormous brands, ocean explorers, astronauts, schoolteachers, CEOs, marketing directors, creative consultants and trend watchers are peppering their websites, blogs and email signatures with the word "storytelling." In Storytelling on Steroids, editor and adman John Weich finds out why. Where did all this storytelling come from? Why are so many professionals suddenly so eager to spread the storytelling gospel? And who blazed the trail for an Age of Storytelling in mainstream communication? In his compact, fast-moving book, Weich explores the iconic brands, cultural movements and social technologies that have contributed most to storytelling's rise in mainstream creativity and communication. Along the way, he calls out countless pop culture darlings to make his case: Batman, Banksy, Tomb Raider, TED Talks, Radiohead, Jay-Z, BMW and New York Times infographics. He even raves about a powerful little campaign about the worst hotel in the world. What we're experiencing isn't a radical new movement but a storytelling renaissance, one fueled by addictive technologies, the abundance of choice and … you! You and the billion others engaged in the most massive and shamelessly personal storytelling experiment in the history of humankind: social media.

GAME THEORY

The thing about storytelling is this: once you start thinking in stories, everything around you becomes a story. Take Monopoly, that fantastically popular board game. Monopoly is not a game, it’s a story. Sure, it’s easy to get caught up in the game’s accouterments:the plastic fantastic homes and coveted hotels; the savvy real-estate names born on Atlantic City streets; the jail roundabout; the sly, shiny Howitzers and Top Hats trying to outflank Scottie dogs and thimbles; and most of all, lots and lots of fake money, the whole purpose of which is to greedily horde. But all these are incidentals. Monopoly didn’t become the world’s best-selling proprietary board game based on cute figurines alone.[1] It got that way because of its simple universal narrative of fortunes won and lost. Turns out there’s a pretty straightforward narrative lurking behind nearly every game, film and book dear to us. The story of Gladiator, those three hours of blockbuster Roman ersatz, can be condensed to seven words: a guy who just wants to go home. Jaws? The Great White might have stolen the show, but the film is actually a story about a guy dealing with his masculinity as he finds his footing in a new town.[2] Every successful mainstream product can be summarized in a few simple words. We get fanatically caught up in the details, but it’s the universal theme that draws us in.

PEOPLE ARE NOT RATIONAL BEINGS

In recent years contemporary preachers in the form of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists have made significant contributions to our understanding of story. And along the way, they’ve busted the vast majority of our long-cherished self-delusions. Perhaps the greatest mythbuster is this: we are not as rational as we think. Not even close, actually. Stronger still, we are unapologetically animal. Drama Queenism is our default, the everyday norm. And storytelling plays into this flawlessly.

I facetiously call these scientists preachers to underscore their status in the marketing and branding world. Sociologists like Gerald Zaltman, behavioral economists like Dan Ariely, psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and best-selling raconteurs like Malcolm Gladwell have brought to mass audiences the conversation about how we behave, consume and focus.[3] Their addictive fluency and ability to talk about psychology and cognitive science in humorous, anecdotal ways has made the irrationality of human behavior a popular subject around office espresso machines. Books like Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow have helped shake industry decision-makers out of their business-as-usual stupor to embrace the economics of emotion. Using detailed field tests and sophisticated brain-scanners, these ‘mad scientists’ have convinced key decision-makers around the world that story isn’t just about telling; it’s also about selling.

This is what they’re saying: We humans are ruled by systematic biases of judgment, some of which we acknowledge, the majority of which we don’t. We like things without really knowing why and we buy things simply because our friends recommend them even when the consumer reports don’t (which is precisely what the social media mainstays are designing their business models around).[4] We enjoy certain artists and musicians for no reason other than someone else likes them. Often, they don’t even have to recommend it; it’s enough for them to be rumored to enjoy them.

If all these arguments sound rather obvious to you it’s because the above-mentioned scientists, psychologists and behavioral scientists are mainstays in popular media. They’ve been preaching so loudly and for so long that their ideas have crawled into our collective consciousness through the magazines, blogs and newspapers we read.

Like the Golem of ancient lore, these scientist-writers have given rise to the so-called ‘homo emoticus.’ Homo emoticus is not ruled by logic but by emotion. Homo emoticus does not want to be sold to, but engaged. And more than anything else, homo emoticus loves a good story.

AN ADDICTION TO IMMEDIACY

Mention storytelling to casual passersby and they’ll most likely reference fairytales and Dickens. They’ll think traditional linear narratives of good and evil, narratives that require a bit of time and peace of mind to get through. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Like many things to suddenly appear in the past two decades, the digital revolution has radically altered the way we create and consume stories. You could even say that the storytelling renaissance first reared its head in Silicon Valley, sparked by a curious crowd of digital grandstanders ready and willing to talk about anything and anyone, for profit or simply for fun. The first few Craigslist (1995) activists, the handful of e-auctioneers who sold their wares on eBay (1995), the first wave of Wikipedians (2001), the circles of friends that quietly gravitated to Friendster (2002). It began as a splash, grew into a swell that picked up much debris along its way and crashed against pop culture in the form of a tsunami. Just like that, everyone became a storyteller.

Which is to say, we are all complicit in reintroducing storytelling into the mainstream. All of us, through our daily emails, Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram snaps and Pinterest pinboards. Every day billions of us are engaged in an unprecedentedly massive and shamelessly personal storytelling campaign that has unleashed a panoply of storytelling opportunities. Where we spent most of the 1990s simply transferring analogue ideas onto the web, throughout much of the aughts our energy went into embracing the social tools that paved the way for ‘immersive experiences’ and conversational dialogue. What tools, precisely? Basically all the stuff you take for granted today—WiFi; sophisticated gaming consoles; the mainstreaming of personal (mobile) computing devices; the radical shift in communication from a spoke-hub distribution paradigm to a point-to-point one; the micro-fragmentation of the media; the rise of the individual as broadcaster and aggregate; the extraordinary ease of social sharing via neat little buttons and hashtags; the hyper-attention to detailed individual behavior courtesy of social media; the convincing transparency of Big Brother–like metrics that hasn’t even begun to tap into its potential of helping us make sense of the world.

Ironically, it’s the rise of all this cold, hard rational technology that has urged us to delve deeper into our frivolous, emotional selves. They have helped transform us—willingly or not, consciously or not—into biographers of the often (in)significant minutiae that constitute our daily lives. All our Facebook confessionals and Twitter posturing have galvanized a cataclysmic shift from a society made up primarily of passive stock narrative consumers (e.g. Grimm, Disney and Hollywood’s addiction to transformation stories with happy endings) to a society made up increasingly of hyperactive, hyperindividualistic storytellers.

For a great portion of the developed world, storytelling is now a fetishistic habit. By sheer repetition, we’ve become articulate narrators… of ourselves.

Hundreds of millions of us are addicted to evolving our individual narratives everyday, often embellishing them—okay, always embellishing them—through name-throwing, place-dropping and branded cultural showmanship: the products we buy, the music we listen to, the films we watch, the men and women we quote, the books we read and the random acts we experience on the street. And all our own tweets and pins and posts and Likes crisscross and interact with equally egocentric tweets and pins and posts and Likes.

Social media is little more than the delirious and rabid exchange of stories. Narratives that don’t require a bit of time and peace of mind to get through. They are immediate and everyday.

CONTINUOUS PARTIAL ATTENTION

Storytelling has many attributes, but chief amongst them is its ability to seize and hold our attention for hours at a time. In this age of continuous partial attention, story is a powerful tool to wield.[5]

If there is one experiment that illustrates how little control we have over our attention, it’s The Invisible Gorilla.[6] Conducted by the Harvard psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris back in 1999, the experiment asked students to watch six people—three dressed in black, three in white—toss a basketball around. The task was to count the times the players in white passed the ball to each other. As the people passed the ball around, a person dressed in a comically cliché gorilla suit walked into the frame and banged his chest a bit before walking out again. Afterwards, the researcher asked the students whether they had seen anything out of the ordinary in the video. Turned out only half actually saw the gorilla!

Today, the Invisible Gorilla is the trophy case for a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness,” the main idea of which is this: we think we are perceptually aware of our surroundings, but we are not (or not always). More to the point, it is hard to focus on multiple tasks with equal diligence and intensity. So while most of us have traversed the aughts wearing ‘multitasker’ as a title of pride, we’ve more likely cornered ourselves in a state of continuous partial attention. The only way to process all the information is to skim and speed-read all those blogs, emails and text messages. If we’re lucky, we’ll remember a few sound bites at the end of the day. More information, less knowledge.

In his cleverly titled book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr delves into the effects the “frenziedness of technology” is having on our brains.[7] “The Net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention,” he says.[8] The Shallows is an exploration of interruption. To be fair, interruption was a part of our lives before the web showed up. For most of history the primary go-to option for PR agents, admen, artists, writers and fashion designers was to interrupt our attention by any means possible: bright colors, fat fonts, sneakily tweaking up the commercial volume, the continuous drone of catchy melodies (i.e. “Big Mac, Filet-O-Fish, Quarter Pounder, French fries, icy Coke, thick shake, sundaes, apple pie!”). The Internet—and mobile phones—simply amplified it, made all that information kaleidoscopic and mediamatic. Our lives became One Big Interruption.

Interruption is a zero sum game. To stay ahead, you have to continually jack up the noise, introduce more intrusive and obnoxious ways to turn heads and attract eyeballs. How do you interrupt in an environment already defined by interruption? You don’t interrupt at all. Enter storytelling.

Advertising, PR and design agencies along with the brands that commission them embraced storytelling as the perfect antidote to continuous partial attention. After all, if storytelling could usurp attention spans for hours (cinema), days (novels), weeks (video games) and complete seasons (TV series), then why couldn’t it work for products and events and brands as well?

KEEPING IT REAL

Oh well, whatever, nevermind
—“Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana

Hey young thugs, the world is yours…
—“Until We Rich,” Ice Cube

Truth is a byproduct of story. Maybe not the whole truth, but enough to make somethingfeel authentic and real. And few things in the past twenty years have risen so quickly to cultural prominence as the battle cry for authenticity called ‘keeping it real.’

Up until the early 1990s, keeping it real was primarily the anthem of sub- and countercultures, a phrase far removed from glitzy mainstream showmanship personified by Michael Jackson and imagined in E.T. and prime-time MTV. For the majority of Western mainstream culture, keeping it real didn’t reach much further than watching anti-family sitcoms like The Simpsons and Married with Children, shows that ate away at the idealistic veneer of middle-class complacency.

But there was nothing real about The Simpsons or Married with Children or even the mouthy Roseanne; they were as scripted and fake as the next show, albeit it with a contagious flair for suburban self-awareness. For people like myself that came of age in the 1980s, keeping it real first entered the mainstream consciousness on the back of hip-hop and, more specifically, gangsta rappers like Eazy-E, Ice Cube and N.W.A., whose perilous tales of inner-city street life and cagey projects offered what we considered an uncut and uncensored (though it wasn’t) perspective beyond our own petty fretting about rising gas prices, smart trust funds and college admissions. A few years later Nirvana presented another take on keeping it real, less dramatized and infinitely closer to this middle-class white boy’s home. While gangsta rap fascinated, Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind and the grunge movement gave the other half of mainstream America its own dist...