Rick Williams

Currently, at the heart of all brand planning lies the single-minded brand proposition. This is, by necessity, a highly focused and concentrated concept expressed in very few words (sometimes only one word). Its primacy as a planning tool derives from the fact that you need this level of focus to make an ad and ads have been the principal communications tool for most brands. However, we all know the world is changing away from advertising and the type of one-way, didactic advertising we’re used to.

Consumers want more engagement and conversation and the new media channels that are opening up also require this in order to operate successfully within them. The brand proposition is a singularly unhelpful tool as the basis for conversation or richer forms of consumer engagement. If a brand were to walk into a room of metaphorical consumers and, with a look of determination, say “Just Do It’, she would be classified as socially dysfunctional and avoided at all costs.

What a brand needs in order to be successful at a party full of consumers, is a story. Stories are richer and deeper than brand propositions and extend backwards into a brand’s category and history and also forwards into the functional reality of product delivery. It will essentially be the brand’s claim to trust and authority.

Dove’s “Evolution” and “Nike +” came out as two of the big winners from the Cannes Advertising Festival.

One of these is a compelling story. The other is a compelling experience (or brand application). Both leverage digital technologies to bring the consumer closer to the brand. But I’m biased. While I think the Dove video was a wonderful short film—brilliant in fact, I feel that pursuing this model exclusively will hinder the growth of traditional Ad agencies.

Re-purposing video for online media channels doesn’t make them interactive. Whilst traditional ads currently tell brilliant stories, there’s nothing interactive about them with the exception of clicking a virtual button to play it. In fact, the only re-tooling a traditional Ad agency needs to do to fulfill this model is to tell really good stories which people will distribute. They’ll have to do better than the typical 30 second spot, because videos that tend to go viral are usually emotionally charged in some way. They aren’t watered down. There’s also a danger to seeking “prestige” via video—a video can go viral and do nothing for the brand but everything for the agency who produced it. Dove does not fit this model—but others may. Tea Partay was cute, but honestly, I forgot what brand/product it was promoting in the first place.

So agencies who go after the holy grail of viral videos, just need to make sure they staff really good storytellers. But many traditional Ad agencies already have good storytellers, consequently, they’re bound to overcome the digital agency upstarts.

What happens if you go the other way and believe experiences are more persuasive than video spots. Digital agencies who create user experiences don’t always have the best storytellers working for them. Even if they’ve figured out how to design useful and usable digital applications which go beyond the Web, they sometimes lack the ability to tell a story that’s as powerful as something like Dove’s Evolution.

So what’s an agency to do?

The reality is that we don’t have to do anything. Agencies who know how to tell stories can adapt and tell these stories where the eyeballs are moving (Web, mobile, etc). Firms who have designed and built good user experiences can continue to do this both on the web and in other places. But imagine the opportunity for the company, brand, or agency who cracks the experience+storyteller code. Maybe it comes from one source—or maybe it’s orchestrated through the joint efforts of internal and external resources (including consumers). It doesn’t matter—as long as both storytelling+experience are there.

Another way to look at this is if Dove had come up with a “brand application” as cool and useful as Nike’s—or if Nike had produced a short film as compelling as Dove’s…that would have shown some real evolution within the industry