Storytelling in Advertisements
Everything I have been taught in regards to commercials and advertisements emphasized storytelling. The best way to connect with the audience is through stories. People watch movies and television shows for the stories and the characters in those stories. The same is true for books. This rule should also be applicable for advertisement. Right? Why shouldn’t advertisements try and reach their audience through the same methods as books, movies and film? Well, most don’t. Many advertisements are completely devoid of any semblance of a competent and compelling story.
To clarify, not every commercial or advertisement needs to tell a story. But, the majority do.
Commercials that I feel actually succeed are ones that tell stories and have believable and likeable characters. Like any good story, an advertisement needs to establish the characters, present the conflict, and provide the solution. The solution is almost always the product that the advertisement is trying to sell. However, as I mentioned earlier, most commercials throw story and character to the wayside.
The two main problems with commercials today is that they either have bad characters or that they simply cannot tell an engaging story.
The Google Pixel ads are honestly cringe. Their characters are totally weird. One I have been seeing a lot of recently is of two people having their nails manicured while they complain about the storage space on their phones. The advertisement is at least getting across the conflict, which is that the characters’ phones lack storage space for photos. The problem is that the characters are so overly enthusiastic and bizarre that they lack any form of normalcy or relatability. What human would get so hyped about storage space on their phone? A character concocted in a lab perhaps.
Another set of characters I find utterly inhuman and annoying are the two guys in the Sonic commercials. Honestly every time I see them I regret each time I ever ate at Sonic. If only these random dudes had jobs or families, the audience knew about. Perhaps then they wouldn’t seem so hollow and fake. Instead they come across as two men being paid to pretend to be funny and enjoy hamburgers. What is their story, why are they always eating together and why are their jokes so terrible?
Many car commercials fail to establish any characters, conflict or solution. The worst car advertisement I ever saw summarized the exploits of Bruce Lee for 25 seconds then said their car was just like Bruce Lee in the last five seconds. Maybe this would be fine, but the metaphor fell totally flat because no effort was made to establish the similarities between the man and the machine. All the time was spent talking about how cool Bruce Lee was. In this scenario the character/product is confusingly both Bruce Lee and the car. The conflict is…nothing. And the solution to the ‘conflict’ is what, watching all of Bruce Lee’s movies? The ad is completely forgettable and should only be committed to memory to avoid replicating in the future.
Though I have been dunking on advertisements and claiming that most are bad, there are some great advertisements out there. They come about when the creators make an effort to present an actual story to their audience with real and likable characters. One such example is the Progressive commercial with ‘Great Big Jim.’ The ad is animated in a retro style much like the Disney classics. The commercial presents the main character who is both the hero and the solution to the conflict. The conflict (flooding, fire, and other accidents) affects three separate groups of characters, demonstrating the versatility of the solution or product to various conflicts while offering many characters the audience can relate to. With the addition of a catchy jingle and some decent jokes, the ad is a success.
To conclude, I’m not saying that I am the deity of commercials, only that some companies may want to return to the fundamentals of storytelling at their next brainstorming session.
