The Sound of Business

The Art of Website Storytelling

Article written by Jerry Bader, Partner MRPwebmedia
info@mrpwebmedia.com, Telephone: 905.764.1246

Marketing and its little brother advertising are all about storytelling. It doesn't matter if you are talking about a display ad for a magazine or a Web-video for your website or for a Google Video Ad, if it doesn't tell a story then it's not going to do the job.

When people asked us what we did, we used to tell them we were a website design firm that specialized in audio and video, today we tell them we are corporate storytellers. If you aren't telling your story you are not going to meet your marketing goals.

If you want to know how to tell your corporate story well, or even if you want to hire someone to do it for you, you at least need to know what makes a good story; and the best place to learn is the home of storytelling, Hollywood.

Learn From The Experts

If you want to learn how to tell your corporate story on the Web using video, you could do worse than reading Blake Snyder's book, "Save The Cat.' Blake is a successful Hollywood screenwriter and his book provides a lot of inspiration for aspiring screenwriters, but if you are like me and see marketing as the Art of Storytelling, then you can learn a lot about how to create Web-marketing videos and complete marketing websites that effectively deliver your marketing message and help you meet your business goals.

Movies are made up of scenes and 'beats.' The average movie has about forty of these scenes. In order to organize these scenes, screenwriters describe each scene on a 3x5 index card with color-coded notations. The important thing for us as crass commercial business people intent on selling our products and services is that each card is a story in and of itself. Think of each card as a commercial for a specific product or service you sell. If you string a bunch of these together, one for each product or service, you have a multimedia website that tells your marketing story.

Provide The Change and Solve The Conflict

In 'Save The Cat' Snyder refers to colleague Robert McKee who has a technique that he uses, one that you may want to consider next time you are thinking of initiating a marketing campaign. McKee uses two notations (+/- and ><) at the bottom of each card followed by a sentence of explanation. The +/- notation refers to the emotional change that the protagonist undergoes during that scene. If the protagonist hasn't changed in some way, if he or she hasn't been affected, then you don't have a viable scene or presentation.

The second notation (><) describes the conflict in the scene. All stories must have conflict and commercials or advertisements are no different.

Think of your average laundry detergent commercial. The woman of the house, excuse the sexist reference, starts off being unhappy (emotional distress) with her dull and dingy clothes. Her kids, spouse, and dog are constantly creating an increasing pile of laundry that never seems to get totally clean (conflict). By the end of the commercial with the use of your wonderful new formulation of laundry soap, she solves her problem. The clothes are clean and bright and she no longer resents her family (conflict resolved) and she is now a happy mother and wife (emotional change). It may sound pretty sappy when laid-out this way, but that is the way it works. And that, at least in part, is how you create Web-advertisements and marketing campaigns that tell a story.

Mission Statements vs. Loglines and High Concept

No matter who you are or what you do, you are a salesman. We are all constantly selling whether we are aware of it or not. You had to sell yourself to your 'significant other' and if you have children you are continuously selling them on how they should behave. At the office, even if you aren't in sales, you are forever selling your ideas to colleagues or trying to convince staff to get the job done the way you want it done. We are all salesman, all the time.

If you have been in business as long as I have you will have written your share of business plans, mission statements and all. You present your plan to 'The Man' and the first thing he or she does is flip to the last page of your beautiful thirty page color laser printed document to look at the projected financial statements. Why ask for a business plan if you're not going to read it? As far as the ubiquitous Missions Statement is concerned, for most businesses it has become nothing more than a platitude-laden piece of gobbledygook.

Because we live in such a fast paced world, our sales techniques have to be efficient, engaging, and effective. As we stated earlier business executives can learn a lot from successful screenwriters like Blake Snyder.

Snyder talks a lot about 'loglines', which are short one or two sentence synopses of movie or television concepts. They appear on the surface to sound a lot like 'mission statements' but they may provide a slightly different perspective on what has become an exercise in b-school-jargon mumbo jumbo.

Whether you are developing a new Web-marketing campaign for your company or a complete new website, you could do worse than start with a well-defined logline and title. It will put the entire project into focus, provide a reference so you don't get sidetracked, and it will provide a great 'elevator pitch' when you need to deliver the essence of your business in thirty-seconds. Believe it or not, fifty million dollar movie concepts are sold on the basis of a logline and movie title. They are in short, everything that you need to sell an idea and they are only one or two sentences long.

What's A Logline?

A website, or marketing campaign logline is your company's 'high concept' idea. It is a one or two line statement that answers specific questions. It should also be accompanied by a project title, and if you really want to get fancy, you can add what the 'old-timers' used to call a "One-Sheet" or movie poster style visual or video trailer for the campaign.

To find out what your high concept is, answer these questions, and if you can't, then maybe it's back to the drawing board:

1. What is your project, website, or ad campaign all about: what is its purpose?
2. Who is the audience for this presentation?
3. How will your audience be emotionally affected?
4. What personal or business conflict does your product or service resolve?
5. Do your words paint a memorable mental image?
6. Does the project title capture the audience's attention with an engaging hook?

A good campaign logline will help you maintain focus so your project will be fine-tuned to achieve its purpose. Even if the project does not meet expectations, by keeping on track, you will be able to analysis what went wrong and learn how to improve the next campaign.

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