In the digital age, great storytellers still hold the power Scott Giles, Group Sales & Marketing Director, Dukes

In the digital age, great storytellers still hold the power

While marketing delivery platforms are ever-evolving, humankind still looks to the great storytellers, says Scott Giles, Group Sales and Marketing Director at Dukes Education

ʻMarketing in the digital age is about a billion tiny whispers, rather than mass interruption.ʼ

Why did some people in the 1950s pour cheaper Pepsi Cola into glass Coca Cola bottles when they entertained friends? Why do people pay nearly £70,000 for a Porsche Cayenne when a VW Touareg costs £45,000 and they are both made in the same factory and have similar specifications?

It’s because Coca Cola and Porsche each told a powerful story. A story that fits with the worldview of the people who buy their products. A story of quality. Great brand stories make a promise. They promise us something — fun or prestige or reliability.

Great stories are trusted. They are true because they are authentic and consistent. And most of all, great stories can support or even alter our ideas about the world.

So, what is the story of your nursery, school, college or business?

Storytelling in 2021 When we consider digital marketing, we sometimes go straight to thinking about technology platforms, algorithms and audience segmentation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Big Data enable companies and political parties to reach us with surgical precision. Sky AdSmart technology can beam a different ad into each house on the same street, based on data that predicts our propensity to buy a particular product. Google can serve up different digital ads to each member of the same family based on the devices we use and our browsing behaviour. While society grapples with the ethics of these practices, machine learning keeps getting smarter at delivering advertising messages.

Technology advances show no sign of plateauing. You might be familiar with a concept known as Moore’s Law. In 1965 computer engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the capacity of silicon chips — in other words, computer processing power — would double every two years, while the cost would halve. That’s one reason why the latest mobile phones have infinitely more processing power than early NASA spacecraft. Moore’s prediction continues to apply today, although eventually there will be a ceiling.

Yet, despite this rapid change in digital technology, great content is still at the heart of digital marketing. Social media brands will ebb and flow in popularity, but the adage coined by Bill Gates that ‘content is king’ is just as true for digital media as it was for print, television and radio.

Indeed, if we boil down the elements of digital marketing, they essentially consist of two things:

1) Finding the audience that is looking for what we offer 2) Telling them great stories

Author Seth Godin said: “Pure marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem, and either we tell stories that spread, or we become irrelevant.”

The pleasure of sharing stories is a deep human desire. Ancient storytellers would gather villagers around the campfire and captivate them with myths and legends. Often the story would last for several nights. While

the storytelling medium has changed over the centuries, is that campfire experience really any different to someone listening to a podcast series in 2021?

Primitive sketches on cave walls depicted the journeys and travails of early civilisations. They were a visual record of their daily observations and social structures. Today Instagram allows us to leave a modern visual legacy, in a similar vein to our ancestors.

Why are stories so meaningful? “Great stories, when told well, are memorable, impactful and personal. We are drawn like magnets to great stories”, said Matthew Luhn, Story Artist at Disney Pixar.

Stories help us remember Marketers, teachers and trainers know that storytelling is effective. When we share data and statistics without a story, most people only retain about 5% of the information when asked about it 10 minutes later. If you tell someone that same information wrapped in a story, they are 22 times more likely to remember it. Students memorising facts for exams use mnemonic devices — take the simple example of the colours of the rainbow — Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. By adding a story element to the facts, we find it easier to remember.

ʻBill Gatesʼ adage that “content is king” is just as true for digital media as it was for print, television and radio.ʼ

Show, don’t tell In telling people about our nurseries, schools, colleges and consultancies we will be more effective if we use stories to create memorable connections. We should show, not just tell. Instead of just telling people the percentage of pupils scoring well on 11+ exams, we can talk about a specific student who thrived at the school because of the individualised teaching she received, what she went on to achieve, and how happy she was at the school.

Instead of simply telling people that the unique selling point of the school is that staff know the students personally, it is far more powerful to show this in action. I recently went on a school tour with Alistair Brownlow, the principal of Rochester Independent College. As we toured the school grounds, we came across a photography student setting up a camera shot using a reflective surface in the courtyard. Alistair greeted the student by name, engaged him in conversation about the effect he was trying to achieve and told him about an innovative photography technique that he could look up on YouTube. For a prospective parent, witnessing Alistair ‘walking the talk’ becomes the story that they will remember.

Steve Jobs said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” With a founder like Steve Jobs, a master storyteller with legendary product launches, is it any coincidence that Apple is now the most valuable company on the planet? They created a story that is worth telling, and in doing so, got millions of us to pay a premium price for their devices.

So, how do we become powerful storytellers in the digital age?

Firstly, we need to shift our thinking away from interruption advertising. Historically, there was an unspoken contract where audiences would tolerate advertising — in return for free, or subsidised content. Radio ads were tolerated because listeners got to enjoy free music. TV commercials were tolerated because they paid for enjoyable shows. Advertisers had to interrupt the content to grab attention. Madison Avenue executives used clever techniques such as

ʻWhile the storytelling medium has changed over the centuries, is that campfire experience really any different to someone listening to a podcast series in 2021?ʼ

jingles and taglines to convey their client’s message and created a golden age of advertising. It was an environment where advertisers could speak to large audiences just by buying some ad slots during primetime TV or running a large print ad in a national newspaper. Stories had to be told in 30-second sound bites, or with great copywriting.

The problem with the interruption model is that the ad slots became overcrowded. Over time, advertisers had to go to extremes to grab attention. They started putting messages on billboards and buses to interrupt our journeys. Instead of just ads in our magazines, sponsored articles appear alongside editorial stories. Pre-roll advertising in movie theatres is not enough, so they push ads into movies themselves in the form of product placements. In the UK we are exposed to around 5,000 advertising messages per day.

In the internet age, our media has become even more fragmented, and the interruption model has been completely disrupted. On the internet we expect our news content to be free, we want cheap access to music and films, and we want to be able to skip ads.

So, marketing in the digital age is about a billion tiny whispers, rather than mass interruption. We must use the most popular social platforms and media channels effectively to reach our audience and we can no longer force people to pay attention.

Our challenge then is to use technology to whisper to the students and their parents, and the way we do that is to:

1. Create an authentic experience worth talking about 2. Tell stories about what we’ve created

Our schools are brimming with wonderful stories. Are we telling them well enough and often enough? Are we looking at our school from new angles? How do we make room for this in a busy school day? Sometimes the same person is left to capture everything, and we lose the richness of the whole school perspective. How can we widen participation?

As we develop a culture of positive storytelling, our community will spread our stories even wider. n