As a challenge to the thesis of my last post, Andrea Phillips via Twitter very kindly offered the following counterexample:
Does this Audi ad manifest a novelist’s or screenwriter’s sense of story, or a marketer’s sense?
Does it present, even implicitly, a protagonist’s pursuit of a goal amidst obstacles, or is the image simply meant to provoke an emotional response around a theme (“a powerful car can also be efficient”)?
It may seem an academic point. But for those trying to tell stories around a product or service, it helps to be clear on what sense of story they should be aiming for.
We human beings think of our lives in terms of story, i.e., the novelist’s or screenwriter’s sense of story, because, as I’ve argued before, human life itself takes the form of a story. Even the smallest and most mundane of our actions–the coffee I brewed before sitting down to write this morning–can be a tiny scene in a larger narrative: the story of my conversation with Andrea Phillips, the story of my Wednesday, the story of The Comic Muse, the story of my family. Not every action I take is terribly relevant to the arch-plot of my life. Not every action I take involves the kind of stakes and obstacles that make for a very interesting story. But generally, my actions are those of a protagonist struggling to overcome obstacles to my goal of happiness or fulfillment.
So when Audi brings one of their cars to my attention, they are, in effect, saying: this vehicle will help you in your quest. And I, in turn, comprehend their offer against the backdrop of my pursuit of fulfillment.
There’s a scene in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone where Harry goes into Ollivander’s Wand Shop to purchase a wand. Mr. Ollivander offers him a wand, a wand that has enormous significance for Harry’s quest to defeat Voldemort. I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that the Audi ad has the same narrative logic. It’s an offer of a product purported to have significance, if not enormous significance, for our desire to live a happy and fulfilled life.
Granted, the ad itself doesn’t spell all this out. But it doesn’t have to. We are so accustomed to understanding our lives as story and to fielding offers to help us achieve happiness, that all it takes is an image to suggest an entire matrix of narrative associations. The sleek image of the Q7 suggests that here is an attractive, powerful instrument that can be of great use to us in our pursuits. And the two-word logline at the top of the ad, “Never follow,” is all that is required to appeal to our desire to be pro-active, a leader, a person who does not merely follow the pack–qualities that we associate with living a successful life.
The marketer’s sense of story, therefore, the art of using imagery and copywriting to swiftly invoke certain ideas and emotions, is really only a shorthand version of the novelist’s or screenwriter’s sense of story in which a protagonist struggles for fulfillment.
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