The Rise Of ‘Empirical’ Storytelling

Savvy CMOs in the Asia-Pacific region are developing new messaging strategies to get their messages across and engage (or re-engage) customers.

Great marketing stories work only if you can figure out where your audience is and then offer them something engaging and relevant. Increasingly, traditional advertising is no longer cut out for the job.

Indeed, Adobe Digital Index’s recent “Best of the Best” report finds consumers visited brand websites fewer times and for shorter periods in 2015 across all industries. Industry pundits point to poorly executed content strategies as the reason consumers are turning away.

“The audience will smell a rat so fast if you are trying to ‘Trojan horse’ your very obvious brand message into narrative-style content,” said Jennifer Muir, national president of the Public Relations Institute of Australia.

But some savvy CMOs in the Asia-Pacific region are bucking this trend by adopting sophisticated storytelling techniques and developing new messaging strategies to get their messages across and engage (or re-engage) customers.

The Need For Change

Digital technology has forced a significant shift in the way organisations communicate with audiences–not in the least because, for the first time, consumers can “mute” the conversation whenever it suits them.

Another challenge: Ad-blocking apps and settings, first introduced as an add-on to Internet software in 2002, have moved from the periphery to a default element of operating systems and browsers.

“[Apple’s] iOS9 brought it more to the mainstream and democratised ad-blocking ideals even further, but it was a matter of time,” said Michel de Rijk, chief executive, Asia Pacific, of programmatic advertising platform Xaxis. “Consumers block ads because they are largely intrusive and possibly irrelevant. So marketers need to make sure that their ads are not just creatively better and relevant, but the execution of the ads needs to be less invasive.”

With more than 200 million ad-blocking apps downloaded by mid-2015, plus the steady growth in traffic visiting websites directly from mobile, it’s more important than ever for marketers to add value to the discussions they join, he told CMO.com.

Go Native

Interestingly, Xaxis’s Asia-Pacific research showed that 60% of current ad-block users would turn off the functionality if they were confident they would receive relevant, well-produced content. This suggests that it’s not the ads, per se, that consumers find annoying, but, rather, poor targeting.

A solid storytelling and content strategy can help. One of the most popular and effective ways of late is to integrate brand messages with engaging, independent content. As the volume of digital traffic booms, brands that are sharing revenue-generating success stories are opting for a “utility” approach through native advertising.

Ian McClelland, managing director at The Guardian Australia, was brought in to lead the “native utility” side of the business, working with companies to curate and produce branded content. Running sponsored stories alongside the Guardian’s award-winning journalism allows brands to piggyback on the publication’s reach, keeping advertisers happy.

To maintain the right balance between independently produced content, native advertising, and quality journalism, the Guardian provides full and transparent disclaimers of who produced the content.

“An explainer said the money for this content has been provided by a brand or paid for by a sponsor–so the brand is in control,” McClelland said. “We explain all that, so we’re pretty comfortable with that terminology, and we know that our readers are because we’ve done this in dialogue with them.”

Empirical Storytelling

Many brands look to produce their own content and launch it through owned media platforms as part of a more independent marketing strategy. While attractive, this approach is not without its challenges.

“[There are] 1,000 media platforms that brands have attempted to create and just not realised that either, first, they still have their brand at the centre of their marketing plan rather than their target audience,” McClelland said. “Second is the 24/7 nature of a media platform, or a utility, or a community.”

It is, however, possible for many brands to create well-targeted niche content to reach out to existing audiences and other stakeholders by using data to inform storytelling decisions and directions.

Stephen Tracy, data and insights lead at agency SapientNitro, likes to call the use of content supported by extensive analytical evidence “empirical storytelling” or, rather, “where the art and science of storytelling meet.”

“Empirical storytellers require a proficiency with collecting, cleaning, interpreting, and visualising data,” Tracy told CMO.com. “They also need to be someone who can communicate the data and key message in a way that resonates with the audience.”

Tracy pointed to Swedish statistician and marketing guru Hans Rosling as an example of an empirical storyteller who minimises vast dumps of data into workflows and dynamic graphs with accessible messages.

Tracy added that he believes the best way marketers can integrate empirical storytellers is to hire people with the right skills. “The best place to start is talent,” he said. “There are lots of number crunchers out there who can work wonders with data, and, likewise, there are plenty of people who are great presenters but who can’t work with data. Empirical storytellers are people who can do both.”