Prologue
Just over a decade ago I wrote a book about corporate storytelling. I called it Only Connect.
“Brand Storytelling” had become a hot topic as the B2B and corporate world began to catch up with its B2C counterparts in humanising its communications through narrative. “B2B, B2C”? Such distinctions, I argued, would become meaningless as the universal currency of storytelling continued to forge human connections regardless of audience or channel.
Little did I imagine that this human currency would need to be reassessed in the light of a seismic shift in technology that puts everything up for grabs. M2M (Machine to Machine) storytelling played no part in any future I imagined back then.
It’s now time to imagine that future. But before I leap headlong into futurology (unwise at the best of times, especially so when change is so rapid), I’ll fill in the back story of how brands and storytelling came together in the first place.
How we got to where we are will help us understand where we might be going, and what might be useful to take with us.
First, there were stories
The story of humanity is also the history of storytelling. Stories helped homo sapiens make sense of their world long before the invention of writing. The human brain loves to enquire, and loves to forge connections in its constant search for meaning. Narrative results from these needs, and has served us ever since.
The rules and principles of narrative were established at least as early as the ancient Greeks, and have been largely constant from Homer through to Shakespeare to George Lucas and HBO. As Robert McKee puts it in his classic screenwriting primer Story: “In the twenty-three centuries since Aristotle wrote The Poetics, the ‘secrets’ of story have been as public as the library down the street”.
Then there were brands
Brands emerged during the first industrial revolution, the result of rapid urbanisation. Villagers didn’t need brands. You knew the baker, butcher, apothecary and innkeeper, as well as the quality of their goods. Personal knowledge was the guarantor of trust, and word-of-mouth guaranteed quality in a closed community of consumers. With mass urbanisation, mass production and distribution, the provenance of commodities was unknown. Noone knew who or what to trust, so brands stepped in to help. The symbols, design signals and messages they devised served as surrogates for personal knowledge in these new urban contexts.
It’s revealing that some of the earliest brands employed human avatars (eg. Quaker Oats was registered in 1877 with “a man in Quaker garb” as its symbol), as these surrogates for human knowledge borrowed human attributes and meanings. And stories too, as the most effective means of building relationships across these dispersed populations.
Then brands told stories
Consumer brands have always told stories. It’s called advertising. In its heyday, the classic TV spot was effectively 30-second theatre, balancing the demands of the well-made play with those of media spend and audience attention. We can still recognise advertising as a narrative artform in such legends as Guinness’ “Surfer” spot (quoting Moby Dick & Leftfiled to epic effect). Or Apple’s 1984 (Directed by Ridley Scott) and Think Different campaigns, inviting the Rest of Us to identify with the rebellious spirit its brand embodied once upon a time.
This invitation identifies a core principle of all narrative that the best brand storytellers have successfully embraced. That the hero (brand in this case), is not really the hero. The audience is. Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ puts this powerfully to work. “It” is not the brand’s story, but the infinite individual aspirations it reflects or inspires. It is not Nike’s story, but a myth it made its own. The American Dream, no less. In three monosyllables.
Then everything changed
The Golden Age of brand storytelling depended on the Broadcast era of mass communications. Through terrestrial TV and radio, print media and billboards, a brand broadcasted its messages to the masses, and hoped that something would stick. The internet and social media challenged this model.
When I was writing my book, it looked like these changes heralded a new era for brand storytelling. As I naively enthused then, the many-to-many, peer-to-peer conversations of the social web “made the whole world a village again. (…) Humanity is back on top, and steadily wresting control of the media once preserved for the few, to tell its own stories”. The social web amplified word of mouth exponentially, meaning brand storytelling was less what the brand officially promoted, so much as what circulated freely through these networks.
That’s how it looked, momentarily. But soon influencers established their own version of Broadcast, becoming Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) to influence their growing network of followers with their brand-sponsored stories. And soon we realised we were less participants as products in the value exchanges steadily enriching the new social media megabrands.
Social media became a two-way mirror, a vast perpetual focus group of market insight gained from our reflections. The most valuable stories were not those we shared, but what they revealed, constituting a goldmine of data to be mined and monetized for advertising. Our cookie trails were our most significant narrative contributions to the digital universe. That’s where we shared our real brand stories.
Now everything is changing again
And so we find ourselves crossing the threshold of yet another industrial revolution, again wondering who or what to trust. The three-way relationship between humans, brands and stories whose narrative I’ve chronicled now admits a fourth player – the Machine. The breakneck rise of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) in their popular applications compels us to speculate on the future of these relationships.
That future is, of course, already with us. As ever, it is unevenly distributed.
New technologies, however disruptive, are generally modelled on existing ones. The World Wide Web was effectively a vast library, with your search engine acting like a librarian who fetched up suggestions from the stack. Page, index, browser, Wikipedia as an infinitely expanding Encyclopedia – the conceptual origins that shaped this paradigm were as old as the book itself.
This paradigm is being replaced as the new Gen-AI search interfaces transform the internet from a library to consult, to a living, responsive brain to converse with. Fully-formed answers in something like conversational prose (although, to my ear, still sounding like a bad undergraduate essay, blagging authority on something it had just mugged up on) can now be accessed immediately, shortcutting the need to consult the original sources.
Like Douglas Adams’ Deep Thought, or a desktop Delphic Oracle, the collective wisdom of humanity is now but a prompt away.
Where this might leave brands
Trust is the currency of all brand exchanges and storytelling. And some of that trust will transfer from the brands to the GenAI bot who brings you what you need without expecting you to work for it. The popular promise of GenAi is a helpful time-saver, shortcutting the grunt work, to give you more time to… erm, I’ll get back to you on that one.
As each new upgrade straightens out the early “hallucinations”, and as familiarity normalises our relationship with these new technologies, humanity will grow to trust these interfaces and the suggested (and even sponsored) content they surface to serve our needs. The currency of this trust will be the zero party data we now willingly give in exchange for recommendations from the friendly bot who grows to know us better than we know ourselves.
Dare I suggest this scenario, takes us back to a version of the village again (without bucolic sentimentality this time around)? The AI assumes the role of shopkeeper, whose personalised suggestions we grow to personally trust. Back in the village, the shopkeeper knew you intimately as you knew him. But now you have the whole consumable world behind his counter. When ads appear, as they inevitably will, for GenAI search services such as ChatGPT’s, the step from recommendation to transaction will be seamless and intuitive.
Where this might leave brand stories
The hyper-personalisation of brand transactions – making Amazon’s “you bought this, you might also like this” gambit appear Stone Age in comparison – might also be carried through to content. It’s only a matter of time before content will be real-time responsive, and tailored to recipients identified by their zero and first party data IDs. The trade will again be trust, the reward will be the personalisation that marketing has long promised but can now finally deliver, through data-informed machine-learned content-serving.
Storytelling may even thrive if current emerging trends continue. The Social Media platforms that seemingly spelt the death knell for the broadcast advertising that had its heyday with terrestrial TV, may themselves be losing their grip on user loyalties and advertising budgets, and a new epoch emerging globally.
At the high point of their popularity and power about a decade ago, the “walled gardens” of YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, claimed on average 62% of users’ digital days. Today that figure is closer to 30%, as users discover a world of quality audio, film, series, news, sport, gaming and lifestyle content, beyond their walls. Although advertisers were slow to catch on, the tide has decidedly turned. According to a recent report by an AdTech company called The Trade Desk:
“2022 was the first year in a decade when Google and Facebook did not account for more than half of all digital advertising spend. This trend continued into 2023, with these two walled-garden giants now accounting for 46.6% of digital advertising spend, down from over 53% in 2019”.
Advertisers are being lured away from the walled gardens not by user volumes alone (and FaceBook is far from depolated even now), but the quality of their attention on the channels devoted to professional rather than User Generated Content (UGC). Ads served on paid-for platforms, where professional content is the product, generally perform better than those on the free platforms, where we are.
The user who has elected to be served stories on a platform like Netflix has signalled a receptiveness to narrative content far more strongly than the intrusive ad-bombing of the social media environment. The result is a renaissance in TV, but now the Connected kind. CTV may well usher in a new age for brand storytelling. But with a difference. The one-to-many model of the Broadcast days will be refined to a nicety with zero party data assisting precise personalised targeting and placement. The personalisation of ads customised for each individual viewer by AI is already emerging.
Where this might lead humanity
Short-cutting, time-saving, hyper-personalisation are all attractive benefits in their ways, and the world has embraced them with (cautious) enthusiasm. I’ve so far surveyed what the Machine might bring, but what of the distinctly human might this all take away?
- The first is Curiosity. Being served ready-made complete answers and solutions might be more rapid and efficient than the old “librarian” model that offered suggestions. But it reduces human agency and suppresses curiosity. And curiosity about the world, the universe and its possibilities was a driver of both human development and storytelling since first spurred each other on.
It’s an adage of narrative craft that the storyteller should not give the audience 4, but 2 + 2, and to let them arrive at 4. Chat gives you 4 (or maybe even 5 soon. Who needs Big Brother when Big Tech has such powerful friends?). Will curiosity die out when human quests are answered instantaneously and reward the urgent need to move on? The first Delphic Oracle spoke in riddles. Its latest tech upgrade tells it straight.
- Community. For all their abuses and deceptions, social media served a basic human need to belong, and encouraged the exchange of views, anecdotes and stories as a technologically-enabled recreation of the fireside exchanges of humanity’s first tribal gatherings. Will this function of narrative dwindle as personalised transactions and consumption narrow the sphere of human interaction?
- Authenticity. The internet constitutes the vast sum of human knowledge, information and opinion. The problem was how to find the answers you sought. When GenAI learns the entire contents of the infinitely expanding web this will be a problem no more. Its answers will carry the authority of the entire web, but will it suppress and silence the multitude of authentic voices of those who contributed to this sum of knowledge, aggregated into some bite-sized version of knowledge? From Key Opinion Leaders to King Opinion Leader, making life so much easier and consensual.
As I recently argued: “Authenticity is not just a bulwark against fakery and misinformation when seeking Authoritative knowledge through AI. It is, or should be, a benchmark of originality and quality. Ultimately, of humanity”.
Epilogue
All of this and none of this might happen.
But this much we do know. Human beings have not evolved one jot since they swung down from the trees, stood upright, mastered the physical world and mastered narrative as a way to make sense of and influence it. However the Machines evolve if (or when) Artificial General Intelligence happens, if humans are still in the picture and worth talking or selling to, stories will play a role and brands will continue to use them.
The human spirit will still haunt the Artificial future being engineered around us. Our stories may be all that remains of us.
The Ghosts in the Machine.
About the author
Robert Mighall has been working in B2B and Corporate branding and communications for over 25 years. Before that, he was an academic, holding a research fellowship in English Literature at the University of Oxford. The world of branding and literature came together when he published Only Connect: The Art of Corporate Storytelling in 2013, his fourth published work. He now works as a brand and content strategist and advisor to leadership teams, specialising in helping companies scale globally in Asia Pacific.