Marketing as Storytelling
For us journalists, storytelling is the core of our profession. No matter the medium, our primary goal is to tell novel and interesting stories to our audience. And Newt Barrett of Content Marketing Today explains in this piece that marketers share this same goal and did even before the rise of Internet and its opportunities to better reach consumers.
He uses an example from AMC’s popular TV show Mad Men to illustrate this point. In coming up with an ad campaign to promote Kodak’s slide viewer, protagonist (or antagonist, for those of us who watch the show?) Don Draper likened the device to a carousel and therefore to childhood memories. He created a narrative around this slide viewer not only in that it moves much like a carousel but that it can take you back to good moments in the past. Barrett quotes him as calling the device “a time machine.”
Image courtesy of Content Marketing Today
Using Barrett’s argument that effective marketing has long been based in storytelling, I’d argue that the line between marketing and journalism has never been as clear as we might have thought, even in the era of straight print and broadcast advertising that was not interactive in the slightest. Barrett says, “Marketing is still all about telling stories that connect with your customers.” Fellow journalists, does this sound familiar? It should.