Don’t Call Me A Storyteller

Now that the fucking "conversation" is finally dead and buried, the marketing industry has a new maddening cliché — "storytelling."

I hate it.

I was hoping if I ignored it long enough it would just go away. But it hasn’t. It is metastisizing.

I’m not a fucking storyteller, I’m a writer.

Calling me a storyteller is an insult. I don’t like the sound of it. It’s too cute. It’s too easy. It’s too comfortable.

Storytelling is what babysitters, drunks, substitute teachers and recalcitrant teenagers do.

Even if I write stories, I don’t like being called a storyteller. Shakespeare wrote stories, but he wasn’t a fucking storyteller. He was a writer.

Yeah, I know. I’m not exactly Shakespeare. That's not the point.

Writing at any level is hard work. Don’t believe me? Try writing something new every day for a week and posting it and see if anyone reads it.

Storytelling is easy. Writing is hard.

Being a writer may make you a storyteller, but being a storyteller doesn’t make you a writer.

What's In Free Fall? TV Viewing Or Industry Credibility?

"No End In Sight For TV Ratings Free Fall..." blared a headline in Advertising Age last week.

Not surprisingly, this misleading story continues a decade-old narrative. Over ten years ago the chattering geniuses of the advertising, marketing, and media industries -- and their lapdogs in the trade press -- decided that the web was an advertising miracle and TV was going to die.

This created a narrative about the death of TV that has progressed unabated.

Anyone with an ounce of sense or perspective would be telling a completely different story. The story is this -- the astounding staying power of television despite the constant negative press and amazing new media options.

The trick that the press uses -- and particularly the advertising trade press -- is to ignore the big picture. They gloss over the overall strength of television viewing and focus on a particular aspect of the industry that happens to be weak at the moment.

Nielsen released its Total Audience Report last week for the 3rd quarter of 2015. Here is a chart I created from their data that compares video viewing on TV, online on a PC, and on a Smart Phone.

This is a chart you will NEVER see in any advertising conference, media "summit", or press report.

The bottom line is that consumers watch 95% of video on a TV and 5% on PCs and Smart Phones combined.

The truly amazing thing about TV is that after all these years of bullshit about its demise, and the introduction of umpteen new media options, TV still thoroughly dominates media habits. In fact, people spend about 4 times as much time per day watching live TV as they do online on a PC. And about 3 1/2 times as much time watching live TV as they do on a smart phone on line or in app combined.

Here are two charts that show what the hysterical "free fall" looks like in graphic form:

Pretty fucking alarming, huh? Has there ever been a less dramatic "free fall?"

The literature and the narrative of our industry have been hijacked by...

a) people with an agenda
b) people who are too stupid to see the big picture
c) people who are afraid to contradict the prevailing plot line

These people carefully "curate" the facts to select only the ones that bolster their narrative. Their credibility falls somewhere between zero and nothing.

Study The Geniuses, Ignore The Experts

There are two kinds of famous people inside the advertising business -- geniuses and experts.

The geniuses have done remarkable things. They have a body of stunning work.

The experts talk about doing remarkable things. They write books, and blogs, and make speeches (doh!)

The geniuses have talent. The experts are merely clever. 

My advice to you, if you want to be really good, is to study the geniuses. This is not always easy. The thoughts of the geniuses aren't usually as accessible or as easily understood as the chattering of the experts.

If you want to understand how the geniuses do what they do you're going to have to work it out for yourself. You're going to have to find their work and study it.

My second piece of advice is to ignore the experts. Many advertising "experts" have never even worked in an agency, created anything exceptional, or built a brand. All they have is a book, a Powerpoint presentation, and an agent.

There are remarkably few people in the advertising business who deeply understand how advertising works. Most of us think in the trite, logical vocabulary of marketing -- "engagement" and "branding" and "value propositions." The geniuses don't think this way at all. They think in silly, unpopular terms like charm and sympathy.

Studying the geniuses is not going to make you a genius. But it will make you better. Listening to the experts will not make you better. It will only make you trendier.

Our experts are usually functionaries who may be competent in an aspect of the advertising business, but aren't usually insightful in a comprehensive way.

The geniuses understand how advertising works in a profound way that transcends the rules and the protocols of the experts.

Making exceptional advertising is a lot harder than it looks. The experts know how to talk about it. The geniuses know how to do it.