Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World

by Robert McKee

A study by Infolinks found that “after being asked to recall the last display ad they saw, only 14% of users could name the company, the brand, or the product, suggesting that brands are wasting millions of dollars in ads that consumers don’t remember.”

Today its research finds that advertising overall is rapidly losing effect, and when aimed at millennials, it’s virtually useless.

To persuade the consumer, the creators of ads needed to touch people’s basic, unchanging instincts—their ‘obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of their own.’”

The target of all business strategy is the human mind, that biological engine built by evolution to constantly create and consume stories. Storified communication is not just another selling technique, but the key to capturing, engaging, and rewarding customer attention.

The nervous systems of billions upon billions of creatures evolved into greater and greater complexity over hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years. Then beginning two to three million years ago, severe planetary changes forced the central nervous systems of anthropoid bipeds to add brain matter, gray and white, at an average rate of one milliliter every three thousand years.3 The front-most portion of the prefrontal cortex known as Brodmann area 10 sits just behind the forehead. During human evolution, its six cortical layers expanded enormously in both size and reticulation, forcing the skull to grow wide and high. Over time, mutation by mutation, the hominid cerebrum gained one full liter of mass and became so tumescent, so structurally complex, its hundred billion cells so interconnected, that the brain, straining to the breaking point, erupted with the first human thought: I am.

For an event to be meaningful, the mind must sense that the charge of at least one value has undergone change. The reason is obvious: If the charge of a value at stake in a situation does not change, what happens is a trivial activity of no significance. But when a value’s charge changes from positive to negative or negative to positive (for instance, from love to hate or hate to love; from winning to losing or losing to winning), the event becomes meaningful and emotions flow.

Data, for example, only measures the outer results of what has changed; insight discovers how and why what has changed has changed.

From the earliest, talented storytellers performed three kinds of stories around the fire: action epics of hunting, combat, and survival against the elements; tales of the supernatural powers that control nature; and myths of immortality in an afterlife realm. The first became the foundation legends of civilizations, the second made sense out of time and space, and the third founded the world’s religions.

a dynamic escalation of conflict-driven events that cause meaningful change in a character’s life.

the core of all stories pulses at least one binary value—

the dynamic of cause and effect within the story’s events expresses the hows and whys, the “because” of change.

Subject matter for a story contains three major components: a physical and social setting, a protagonist, and a core value.

The more specific the setting, the more universal the story’s appeal.

the deepest audience pleasure is learning without being taught.

the purpose of the purpose-told story is to transform the aesthetic pleasure of a story’s climax into a viable action in the marketplace—to turn audiences into consumers.

The enormously successful “Get a Mac” campaign ran from 2006 through 2009 and told sixty-six different thirty-second stories. Each featured two characters symbolizing competing computer brands standing against an abstract, ultra-minimalist milk-white background. One dressed in casual clothes (actor Justin Long) and introduced himself as a Mac computer; the other dressed in a suit and tie (comedian John Hodgman) and declared that he was a PC. In each mini-story, a conflict quickly develops between the two “computers,” then pivots around a single turning point, with the Mac always winning. The “Get a Mac” campaign received the Grand Effie Award in 2007.8

In “Misunderstood,” realism rules as a true-to-life family celebrates Christmas in a true-to-life suburban home. The ad’s ultra-naturalistic images tell the story of a teenage loner, surrounded by a lively family gathering, but spending his day face-deep in an iPhone. With a bolt of surprise, the turning point reveals that in fact the kid has used his iPhone to make a mini-film celebrating his family’s joy-filled holiday.