Story Telling: a medium for advertisement
While growing up I developed the habit of listening to my parent’s tales and yes! "I love good stories" even as a grown man now, I still adore the adorable moments of story telling. Just like me, people love stories, not just stories but GOOD stories.
The love for Stories are the reason we stay up late at night to finish a book, the enthusiasm to know what happens next is something that motivates you to read more. So why can’t we use this story telling as a medium for adverts? Think about it, if its properly done, it could make your communication more engaging and catchy to the average individuals in the society, which invariably impacts your brain positively.
What are stories?
Stories are carefully ploted events clearly narrated, it has to be sequential meaning it has to follow a thread and for advertising, however, you don’t just bring out anything, it has to appeal to your brand, and portray "story telling" in your adverts. It takes skills and creativity to make a story an effective tool for your brand.
So How do you classify a story as 'a good story
- It has to be Emotionally engaging. We happen to be one of the most emotional being treading the surface of the universe, this therefore means for your story to gain attention it has to be emotional or appeal to the soul of the potential client. The first job of any advertising is to engage the audience, if it fails to do that, it therefore means the advert has failed the purpose for it creation. Story ads result in greater merriment than the non story ads. Note the reactions on both ads i.e the story and non story ads, you’d see the story ads gains stronger ratings and reactions.
- It must create emotional journey they make us want to act on impulse. Once an ad has attracted a person’s attention it must then establish a motivating impression of the brand.
Academic research has shown that losing oneself in the flow of the story, predicts how well a viewer will recall a story and will act at a later date. research confirms that, if well-crafted, story ads can have more motivational power than non-story ads. The most successful messaging occurs in stories where the brand’s role is necessary, believable, and integral.
Stories can build brand cues and medium to reach out to the wider world. A story allows you to build and make use of cues that may have nothing to do with your product, cuing would be very difficult to establish with ads that depended on a non-narrative appeal to the rationale.
The act of story telling is Powerful when done right. So many writers make mistakes of using the right context for the wrong reasons, story telling is powerful, logically let's take this instance, you see an ad on the web and you just browse through but the first few lines becomes appealing that you couldn't just help but read the whole damn story, now that's the power we're talking about, the power of persuasion or influence.
Stories must fit with the agenda of the brand.
We know that stories are powerful devices, research shows that story ads are not always more persuasive than non-story ads. This ineffective persuasion is likely caused by a lack of the brand fitting in any story ads and unbelievability. While a story might be enough to engage viewers and generate emotions, if it conforms with how people think of the brand, then it won’t necessarily be compelling.
To conclude, I'd advise that instead of jumping on the storytelling bandwagon, know when to employ a story and when to choose a more straightforward or non-narrative approach. Stories are able to evoke stronger enjoyment and engagement, but without a clear and compelling role for your brand, the emotion generated by the story will be wasted.
