This seems reductionist but most campaigns fail as stories, and subsequently fail as campaigns. We all know a great story when we see it, we run after it, we go out of our way to find out what happens. The best example is the “Are you still watching?” prompt on Netflix, we’ve all eagerly clicked it a dozen times, half embarrassed that our TV had to ask if we were still alive. Netflix and other data-driven producers are amazing at creating stories and characters that capture our attention. There are a number of reasons these stories are compelling and a lot that marketers can learn from the best content producers out there.
Emotional empathy
Building emotional empathy with your audience is the backbone of good storytelling. A big audience for Netflix is aging millennials in their late 20s that are coming to terms with growing up. There are dozens of great shows that trigger emotional reactions and pull this group back to when they were kids. For example, “Stranger Things” is an amazing adaptation of everything we loved about the Goonies and ET.
The plot of Stranger Things is not the most complex story but it invokes the emotions of a millennial childhood and gives the audience the chance to turn it into something more than just content but emotional engagement. Netflix has built a relentless data collection machine that reports on every aspect of our viewing behavior and feeds that intelligence into the next binge-worthy production. They combine data and creative to create an emotional relationship with the viewer.
Tell stories with a future
It is not enough to trigger emotional responses from your audience, you have to craft them into a story that transcends the moment. The adage goes that a good story is a couple of old ideas told in a new way but too often marketers settle for a pastiche of emotional triggers without a narrative thread. Recent coverage of the Olympics fell flat because broadcasters struggled to capture what the Olympics means to millennials. Growing up before the internet; the Olympics was a festival of global exploration, a showcase for unheard of nations, new cultures and epic stories of human endeavour.
Most of the coverage of Rio was streamed through web portals that offered dozens of simultaneous sports but with little or no commentary so it was hard to understand the stories of the athletes or any real context at all. The major broadcasters all had one or two main channels that were well curated by commentators but these mostly focused on national performance and interests. This is great for older generations but misses the mark for millennials that connect with the Olympics and national pride in a different way.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning can be used to listen to the signals from social media and contextualise them to help better understand audiences beyond a moment in time and across their emotional DNA. This provides a “playbook” to help creatives produce more engaging content that resonates and triggers action, engagement and a connection that can last a lifetime.
By Tom Graham, co-founder at Codec
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