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.