What's wrong with the following?

Discussing some new research by the Advertising Research Foundation on emotional response in TV ads in this week's Adweek :

"Advertising has been standing on the sidelines, stuck on the language of positioning," said Randall Ringer, managing director and co-founder of Verse Group, New York. "Telling a story about the brand is more engaging, memorable and compelling than telling a bunch of facts. What worked 30 years ago with a 30-second spot doesn't work today."

So, here are my issues:

1.  It presupposes advertising=branding

2.  It presupposes advertising=telling

3.  It presupposes the 30 second spot is still the answer

4.  It presupposes telling is better than doing.

In a moment of sublime synchronicity, Mark has written a fantastic post triggered by some of the stuff from the connections planning conference that ties in neatly to this.

Comments

[Randall Ringer]

"Positioning" was created for an era of :30 tv spots -- and it didn't work then. So it certainly won't work now in a richer, more diverse and two-way communication universe.

My point is that Positioning is perhaps the most misguided idea in advertising, branding and marketing in the past 30 years.

Great brands tell a great story. Advertising is one (but only one) of the vehicles for telling that story.

Regards,

Randall
www.versegroup.com

[gareth]

I agree re positioning. My issue is really around telling vs. doing and that 'delivering' a message or story is what a brand should do.

[Randall Ringer]

Dear Gareth,

We propose that a brand story is more like staging a play -- Living Theater in which the wall between the brand and the audience must be broken (the proverbial "fourth wall" in theater). That is why we've developed a structured approach called NarrativeBranding(R).

Positioning presupposes "delivering" a message. Brand story presupposes the idea of "co-creation" in which meaning is co-created by the consumer.

Regards,

Randall

[Rob Mortimer]

Absolutely. The idea that ads should be telling stories is spot on, whether they are "Stories" or just brand stories moulded into ads.

To me that is one reason why John Webster created so many good ads. They had characters with stories which people really reacted to. Maybe not brand stories per se, but smaller characterised versions of those.

But I agree with your provisos.