Selling tales

Until fairly recently, I used to think I worked in advertising. Well, recruitment advertising, but more or less the same thing, like cod roe is to caviare  It was fairly straightforward: you created a proposition based upon something that made your client's product (or, in my case, job) sound better than the competition and then told people about it. And it seems it's the telling that is now the thing, possibly at the expense of the product itself. Because we are no longer in the advertising business. These days we are story-tellers.

This trend really struck me during a recent trip to the cinema; in the advertising break preceding the film I noticed that, although the ads were produced entirely independently of each other, without exception they had this technique in common. In fact, when viewed sequentially, it gave the ad break a greater narrative coherence than the film I had actually paid to see. Not one of the products would deign to tell me why I should part with my hard-earned for it. They were softening me up with a sappy tale, so I'd befriend them on Facebook, or tweet my followers how moved I was by their heart-warming narrative. And I forgot them instantly.

But there's no shortage of ad campaigns to illustrate this trend. Here's a particularly fatuous example by Nurofen, a generic drug to cure a hangover. Unless you work in advertising:

If you go to the Facebook page, you could view stories about people who "have lives bigger than pain".



These people are just too damn sexy to let something like pain get in their way. They are too busy being dynamic and inspirational to have a headache. They don't just laugh in the face of pain, they chase it down in their helicopters and run it over with their motorbikes. For them, Nurofen is not a confined to the medicine cabinet, it is a part of them. It makes them the successful overachieving human beings they are. If your own life doesn't live up to this, maybe it's time you took more drugs.

This campaign was lauded in the marketing press for positioning Nurofen as a "lifestyle brand", putting “emotional resonance” alongside what it says is “established functional brilliance”. And it can be argued this is no different from the old advertising adage of "dramatising the benefit" of your product. That's benefit, singular - if you'll allow me a diversion into Advertising 101 for a moment, there may be many things about your product that you think are marvellous, but you need to find the single strongest point of difference and amplify it. This "Unique Selling Point/Proposition" is usually simple and short, containing a single idea ('soft, strong and very, very long'; 'No ordinary battery looks like or lasts like it'; 'a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat'), in order to be memorable. If you pack too much into a Proposition, you can't remember it easily. It takes a surprising amount of work and creativity to strip something down to this level of simplicity but, like a revealed truth, when you get it right, it has a power and resonance that can transform an entire business's commercial performance.

But where once we had a line on a poster or 30 seconds in the middle of "Catchphrase", we now have YouTube channels, twitter, FourSquare and Instagram. We can make 6-second Vines of how our lives are bigger than pain and send them to Nurofen for the chance to win a life. We can make friends with a paracetamol on Facebook and share pictures of our children. And for me, here's where the difference lies between real advertising and what Nurofen is doing. The creative articulation of your proposition is a distillation. You take lots of boring information, snapshots, opinions, market data, customer views and try reduce them to the best way to express your product's strongest point. Like an atom, you try to pack as much meaning and insight into as small a space as possible to create a building block for your campaign. Here Nurofen have taken their proposition - For Lives Bigger Than Pain - and have done the opposite. They have unpacked it, split the atom and blown wide a mess of "content" to share among their audience, all with lives bigger than pain, apparently. And like an atom, they have discovered at its core, it is almost entirely empty space.

For Lives Bigger Than Pain is almost entirely meaningless. If your life isn't "bigger than pain", you're going to need something a damn sight more powerful than Nurofen to get you through the day. Whereas you might have gotten away with a vacuous strapline in the days of Old Media, in today's media landscape, you're going to get found out. Because no matter how weak your story, a campaign now demands you tell it repeatedly across every media channel in Christendom.

Nurofen are not the only ones. Vanish detergent's TV spots promote its Facebook-based "Tip Exchange", where apparently otherwise sensible people befriend each other over a shared love of stain removal. Tips that seem to begin and end with "use Vanish detergent". Ambrosia custard is now re-telling us our social histories through puddings (though given their product tastes of reconstituted bee shit, maybe this is a good tactic). Even dear old Andrex has moved on from puppy-based euphemisms for softness to asking people to tell them how they wipe their arses (I wish I were joking - here). All ideas born of a rush to create an idea on the thinnest of premises with one eye on how many Likes they can get on Facebook without thinking if this is giving people a reason to buy the product.

Campaign propositions are being stretched and tested by the rise of social media and turned into become something more sophisticated. Or at least more complicated. All of which makes me hopeful for the future quality of advertising. Because now it's not enough to tell people why your product is good. You have to tell them a story. But the most important point to remember is that a good story comes from a good idea. And the scope for sharing ideas in an interconnected world will quickly show up the limitations of bad ones.

Taking the Mickey

"Hello, my name is Victoria. How can I sprinkle some Disney magic on your day?"

I'm not sure if this is a question one adult should ask of another as part of a serious business transaction, but it was one that was addressed to me today. To which I replied "you could start by saying things that are less likely to make me throw up".

Of course I didn't. I'm English, so I said "Um, hello, yes, well."

What had brought me to this unexpected gambit was the need for information. A few days ago I spent an evening researching the options for a short trip to Disneyland Paris on their surprisingly poor website, which is all about pushing unnecessary rich branded content at the expense of cramped text and slow-loading information. Having near worn-out the F5 key through repeated page-loading, thanks to their over-use of Flash, I had eventually found the information I needed, except one important detail: could I park my car at the hotel for free or would it cost extra? It was not mentioned as part of the standard benefits, and Valet parking was mentioned only at the most expensive hotels. What about the plebs looking to drive and stay at the middle-of-the-range places?

The "Search" function on the site could tell you the daily parking rates inside the park itself. After that, the word "parking" becomes assumed to be a long-tail search variant on "park", and there are lots of Disney words about the Parks at Disneyland Paris on their website.

But there was also an FAQ section that either offered answers to the sort of questions no-one would actually ask, or were patsies to sell you, once again, the magical details about the magical park features. For example: "What is a resort?" or "Are there any special offers?" Not "will you bastards sting me for more money if I bring my car?"

In the absence of an email option (!), I was forced to use the phone, carefully navigating the menus until I reached "For any other questions about your Disneyland Paris holiday, press 3". I pressed in triumph, only to hear a recorded message asking me rhetorically whether I knew that "ALL the answers to your questions about a holiday can be found on our website". At that point, I was cheerily cut-off. I tried again, just to be sure I hadn't accidentally terminated the call myself. No, it was definitely Disney who didn't want to talk. The customer is clearly only right at Disney as long as they ask the sort of questions it wants to answer.

To get the answer to my question, I had to break the system: pretend to make a booking and then, when put through to the lovely Victoria, ask my question. At first I was annoyed by the arrogance of Disney, simply denying there would be a question they had not already answered. It's certainly a patronising, not to say insulting, approach to customer service to take a "mummy knows best" approach, and ignore the crying in the nursery.

But it reflects a paradox at the heart of Disney's customer service. As they so proudly admit "At Disneyland, kids rule". The Kids Are King, but the parents must pay their taxes. And to deliver a child's paradise, you must start by infantilising the parents. We will take away all your need to think, plan or rationalise, we will swamp you with convenience to give you the full transplanted American experience: a holiday of customer service. No faced left unsmiled, no arse left unwiped. And in return we'll make it as difficult as we can to do anything other than pay us all your money to do everything for you: hotel, travel, tickets, meals, entertainment. The promise of Disney's service is not built around the customer's desires, but the illusion of choice between a small number of bolted-together packages. Because the point of a conjurer's act is to enjoy the magic not to ask how the trick is done, in case you spoil it for the children.