After recording a regular episode, Tom and Holger got into a heated discussion about storytelling – and the recorder was still running.
They discuss the matter mostly in the context of advertising. The gist of Holgers argument is that a good ad has to show the pain. Tom on the other hand says: It’s not necessary to show the pain if one can identify with the people and the situation in the ad – “I have to recognize my problems being solved.”
A supplemental comment by Tom:
Well, unscripted conversations aren’t always terribly well structured in their arguments ;). At 17:10 I refer to a psychology experiment (Dutton and Aron, 1974) that I’m not sure I ever manage to correctly relate to the discussion. It’s a damn interesting study, none-the-less, so here are two links to its Wikipedia description: Misattribution of arousal and Two factor theory of emotion. It turns out that the mapping between physiological states and specific emotions is more complicated than imagined in this work and it’s an on-going area of research. I think it elevates the quality of our discussion as a profession, however, when we can reference such work – and this, to my mind, is yet another reason to fight for much more open access to areas of the so-called ‘deep Web’.
Both Tom and Holger have some interessting points to make, but be warned: We earned that explicit rating in iTunes for a reason – this episode contains more four-letter words than all previous episodes combined!
Links for this episode:
- Der Gilb (German page about long gone pop culture items, with a brief audio snippet featuring the Gilb)
- That George Clooney movie: Up in the air
- Apple ads which show the pain and a solution:
- Apple ads with pain only, and no (clear stated) solution:
- Apple ads without any pain:
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On second thought… Unfortunately this stuff is probably already much better studied and understood by marketing-heads (any out there?), but one thing I thought of in listening to this, again, is that most likely a central part of advertising is more akin to flirting than it is to making a case in front of a judge. It’s not so much that you need to *convince* someone of something through good argument as you have to elicit an emotional response — to *be remembered* – regardless of the means. We kind of got lost talking about the persuasion side of advertising — I think Holger’s argument that a better story makes a better ad makes the most sense to me if I think about the point of an ad being the same as the point of flirting. The formula would be: Flirting: evoke a strong emotion + associate it with yourself; Advertising: evoke a strong emotion (tell a “good” story) + associate with your product/brand.