Man, I am so glad I saw that advertisement.
—Nobody, ever
GE had a problem. Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt had successfully led GE’s transformation from a company with a very large financial services business into what leadership now calls a “digital industrial company.” The company had shifted gears to capitalize on a more connected world, where massive linked machines provided opportunities for new, sustained revenue streams, much the way the consumer-focused Internet of Things has begun to do in our personal lives. Today GE’s portfolio is focused on transportation (aviation and rail), health care, and energy. But just making the machines was insufficient. The company would need the best engineers, thousands of them, to fully realize Immelt’s vision.
“One of the things that we have made a big bet on,” explained Linda Boff, CMO,1 “is the digitization of industry. We are now living in a time when simply selling the hardware, if you want to call a jet engine a piece of hardware, isn’t enough. We need to be in the business of helping our customers gain productive outcomes. And to get to results, we have created a whole group, thousands of people, primarily new to the company, that have a deep software background. [They] are building the analytics and data that will enable our customers, whether it’s a rail customer or aviation or a power plant or a food and beverage corporation, to operate more effectively, more cheaply, or more productively by being able to anticipate where there are efficiencies… that might be being able to predict whether a jet engine needs to come off-plane to be maintained… or where a wind farm needs to expand next.”
But before they could recruit the world’s most talented engineers who would write the new software to run, monitor, and optimize the performance of the planes, trains, and wind farms, GE needed to get the word out about its new direction. Most software engineers didn’t realize that GE had begun tackling complex, interesting challenges in technology, and those engineers were still flocking to jobs at the FANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), as well as Apple and Microsoft.2
GE’s marketing team was tasked with changing how engineers viewed the company. Boff started with a story. She said: “I believe, and our team believes, that idea-generated media is going to win out over programmatic, no matter the scale. We are buyers of impact, not frequency. Partly because we can’t spend enough to achieve frequency, and partly because I really do believe that ideas break through.” So her team worked with GE’s agency to create a story.
Enter Owen.
GE’s protagonist Owen is a young graduate engineer who got a job with GE. The campaign “What’s the Matter with Owen?” captures how Owen’s friends and family react to the news. In one spot, his parents, excited that he’ll be working at GE, give him his grandfather’s sledgehammer. Owen has to explain that he won’t be building machines, he’ll be writing the code that lets them talk with one another. In another, he shares news of his new job with a group of friends at a picnic table. Another friend announces that he has just taken a job at a fictional company called “Zazzies.”3 Zazzies offers an app where you put fruit hats on pictures of animals. His friends are big Zazzie fans and are thrilled and distracted by the second announcement. “I’ll be helping turbines power cities,” Owen protests. “I just put a turban on a cat,” his friend counters. “I can make hospitals run more efficiently,” Owen offers. “It’s not a competition,” a friend chimes in.
The ads delivered powerful results. Not only has Owen helped bring GE’s brand into alignment with its new strategy and portfolio, but the campaign has increased job applications from software engineers tenfold. All thanks to a good story.
When you storify advertising, you build an emotional connection between your brand and your audience. Owen is an underdog. We all imagine ourselves to be underdogs in the world. We identify with Owen when he is misunderstood by the world. We empathize with him and, by the end of the story, we want the world to understand that Owen is doing something important. He is creating software that makes big machines work far better than ever before.
Now imagine if GE’s ads said that directly: As the company logo fills the TV screen, a voice intones, “We at GE create the software that connects the biggest and best machines of this world.” Would audiences believe it? Or care? Doubtful. The Owen stories touch emotions bragging could never reach. That’s power.
Although the long-term future of broadcast advertising seems bleak, television and radio will remain marketing platforms for those who can afford them for some time to come. So if your strategy calls for disrupting dramas and comedies with ads, then do it as tactfully as possible by putting a story within the story.
The mind jumps from story to story rather easily. For example, when viewers change channels in search of something good, or when story lines crosscut from central plot to subplot and back, audience engagement switches gears in a heartbeat. Story always feels welcome. So when your ad interrupts one story with another, the transition seems relatively smooth, but when you break deep, ongoing narrative involvement with a bragging/promising sales pitch, people hate it and ignore it.
Consider the Super Bowl of commercials, the Super Bowl. This is the only day of the year when you’ll hear that odd rebuke, “Quiet, guys! It’s the commercials!” For a good reason. Brands and their agencies work all year to craft stories to fill most of these ad spots.
Super Bowl fans argue about their favorite ads during the game and then publish best and worst lists online the next day. Have you ever noticed that old-school bragging/promising ads tend to sit at the bottom of those lists, whereas storified ads rush to the top?
Storified ads win off the field as well. When brands do their homework and truly come to understand their customers, they can craft stories that disrupt markets.
In India, for example, marketers for the laundry detergent brand Ariel found deep disparity in the social norms for women and men in the household. Seventy percent of men believed their wives should do the laundry. Even among children, two in three believed women were responsible for household chores.4 Today women in India spend an average of six hours each day on housework, compared with men who spend less than one.5 While this difference itself is unfair, it contributes to far broader inequality over time.
Young women have nearly two thousand fewer hours a year to study and prepare themselves for careers, leading to fewer and lower-quality jobs and depressed wages. Women who are already in the workforce have less opportunity to advance because they must balance work and home life differently.
The share of India’s workforce comprising women fell from 31 percent to 24 percent between 2004 and 2011. Declining workforce participation has an adverse effect on the lives of women and the overall success of the Indian economy, as Harvard professor Rohini Pande has explained: “Working, and the control of assets it allows, lowers rates of domestic violence and increases women’s decision-making in the household. And an economy where all the most able citizens can enter the labor force is more efficient and grows faster.”6
Indian women long for change. Eighty-five percent of Indian women reported feeling like they have two jobs, one at work and one at home. Eighty-three percent believed men should share the burden of household work.7 Marketers at Ariel and their agency BBDO India (Mumbai) understood this growing inequity and tapped into its social undercurrent, a growing sense of injustice, with their ad “Share the Load.”8
“Share the Load” opens with the voice of its protagonist, a grandfather, narrating a letter that he writes to his daughter while she races around her home one evening. As he watches her juggle work, making tea for her husband, and caring for her children, the grandfather becomes increasingly aware of how he passed these social stereotypes on to the daughter he raised.
The story establishes a powerful negative floor by demonstrating how these norms have passed and continue to pass from generation to generation. Then the story turns from negative to positive when the daughter reads his note and discovers the grandfather’s promise to share the burden of housework with his own wife and model the way for others.
The shift in the core value pair at stake here, from injustice to justice, connected with Indian women and ignited a conversation across the country. The Share the Load video was viewed more than fifty million times in fifty days. It generated more than 2 billion earned impressions online, the equivalent of $11 million in ad spending had that exposure been purchased. Talk shows devoted entire episodes to discussing how to balance the role of men and women in the household. Major clothing brands changed washing instructions on clothing tags, adding “May be washed by men or women” to traditional instructions. More than two million men visited the Ariel website (a laundry detergent site) and signed a pledge to #ShareTheLoad. Dating sites then added a new question to profiles, “Will you share the load?” This allowed people committed to finding a better balance to find one another.9
The social impact of this storified campaign must have delighted marketers at Ariel almost as much as this statistic: Sales of Ariel in India grew 75 percent year over year.10
Storified commercials are far more engaging and effective than those that brag and promise, but in a world where consumers seek uninterrupted experiences, they will never be sufficient. With millions of consumers shifting to ad-free experiences every month, marketers must adjust their approach as well.11
The modern marketer must offer her customers unique, valued, and, most important, fluid, nonstop experiences. In the same way that media companies built and maintained their audiences for decades, brands, too, must tell stories at a sustained pace to earn the respect of their customers and keep it.