Cannes 2008: The Year of Storytelling

When I was a kid, I had a dog. And one day the vet said that heartworm was a risk for all young dogs and that we should give the animal a pill once a day as a preventive measure. Problem is, the vet said, most dogs didn’t seem to like the taste of the pill and in order to get it down, we had to slip it into its dog food. The dog would eat the food, unaware that the medicine was nestled into the meal. Problem solved.

I tell you this story for two reasons: First, it is a situation that is analogous to advertising in some basic sense. Advertisers all have a pill of information they want their audience to consume. But if you just tell people the information cold, they tend to miss or forget it. As ad folks, we are the ones who make the information more palatable by weaving it into some more entertaining, interesting, digestible form. Now, consumers are not dogs and our advertising creations are not dog food (usually), but I think you get the idea.

The second reason I tell this story is that it illustrates the larger point that was the theme at Cannes this year: the importance of storytelling as a means of conveying information. I could have begun this article simply saying, “Advertisers often have to make pieces of information more palatable by weaving them into stories” — but where’s the fun in that? Would you have kept reading? Maybe, maybe not. But engaging the audience in a story is a time-tested way to pique people’s interest and make them more likely to absorb your information, whatever it may be.

The following is a look at five secrets to telling a good story – and how Cannes winners used them to generate publicity for their brands.

1. Involving the audience makes a good story. Simpsonizeme.com generated tons of attention for Burger King and ‘The Simpsons Movie’ by enabling people to see how they would appear in a Simpsons world. By uploading a photo of themselves and feeding them into the Simpsonizer, people could transform themselves into bona fide Simpsons characters. It was an idea that brought people into the experience and generated lots of D’oh!
2. Ordinary people who become heroes makes a good story. The genius of the common man is celebrated in Bud Light’s ‘Real Men of Genius’ TV and radio campaign. From the Edible Panties Inventor to Overzealous Flag Football Player, the Real Men of Genius campaign sends up quirky aspects of American culture in a brilliantly fresh way. Audiences across the country buzzed about each new spot.

3. Practical jokes make a good story. Burger King’s ‘Whopper Freakout’ prank got attention by essentially ‘punking’ their customers. Burger King told their customers that they – the self-proclaimed “Home of the Whopper” – had officially discontinued the Whopper. The customers’ reactions were videotaped and put online. It was a royal success in generating publicity on both the Web and TV.
4. A little shock value makes for a good story. Finetra ‘The bed and bedding experts’ used a little shock value to grab attention in a print campaign recently. Using the line, “Where even nightmares come to rest,” Finetra showed children asleep in bed with their arms wrapped around horrific sleeping monsters. The effect of seeing innocent children and these fanged beasts together dialed-up the shock value and Finetra brand awareness all at once.

5. A great character makes for a good story. Stavros, a German practitioner of ‘position art’ is the creation of Nokia to promote the GPS feature of their phones. By using the feature on the phones, he showed how people could actually create pictures across miles of landscape. The character’s unflagging self-seriousness – evidenced by his insistence on referring to himself in the third person– and unwavering enthusiasm for the world’s newest art form, was just the right mix of pomposity and pluck to introduce an interesting use for these phones.
Tom McManus
Creative Director
Cheil USA