Branding and marketing executives have always loved nothing more than seizing the latest, abstraction that can somehow bend the ever-changing Zeitgeist to their favor and tell a tale, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
In recent years, CEOs, CMOs and brand managers swooned over leverage, alignment, blue-skying, thought leadership, convergence, unleash, pivot, impact, 30,000 feet, bandwidth, best practices, innovation, breakthrough, people-first and, of course, paradigm shift. Never to be outgunned in the jargon department, advertising agencies fell in and out of love with synergy, connected, transformation, disruption, scaling up, human-centered, omnichannel, media agnostic, relevance, purpose-driven and creative effectiveness to make their offering indispensable. And everyone has been caught slow dancing in dive bars with rockstar, brand evangelist, the customer journey and, of course, authenticity.
But a new shibboleth has seized the day. Unlike the overheated adjectives that preceded it, this bit of legerdemain is a proper noun. A title, one spoken of in hushed, awed tones: The Storyteller.
Like some fabled creature risen from primordial waters, The Storyteller is said to be gifted with the wisdom of poets, like Milton and Homer; endowed with an otherworldly insight into the human condition; as rendered in the novels of Austen, Dickens and Dostoevsky; seized by the futuristic vision of H.G. Wells, Orwell and Atwood; tested in the battle-scarred knowledge of life’s granularities transmuted into the emotional anthems of Springsteen, Dylan and Chuck D; and driven to deliver the subversive truth-telling of comedians like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Dave Chappelle.
Like all prophets, The Storyteller arrives at an auspicious moment in human history. Consumers—fickle, distrustful, bored, overstimulated, conspiracy-leaning—have lost faith in government institutions, the Fourth Estate, politicians and cultural gatekeepers, as well as academics, scientists, physicians and philosophers. The common bonds that held the fabric of society together have been torn to shreds and sewn together into robes that adorn the would-be benevolent dictators of culture who explain everything, apologize for nothing and lend their credibility to anyone willing to pay their fee.
Corporations, businesses and brands have raced into the arms of these gurus for hire—the podcasters, TikTokers, content creators and celebrity brand ambassadors—who have mastered the alchemy of low-information persuasion and can imbue their clients with borrowed meaning. This kind of influence is crucial as businesses are locked in a desperate race to defeat the algorithms that pervert our everyday choices and use our own pattern recognition against us to circumscribe our free will.
But now, the owners of capital want to bring the unifying corporate narrative in-house and entrust it to an insider who can create a mythology that converts brand promise into a hero’s journey, an epic tale that stars every consumer who commits him or herself to the brand’s belief system.
The Storyteller must Frankenstein together the most useful pieces from the far-flung guts of the corporate machine to birth a new version of Genesis, an origin myth that leads the brand through flood and fire and doubt to its predestined place in the world.
But these newly installed Storytellers will face a harsh reality. The fight for share of mind has become an arms race that escalated beyond common sense and lacks even the fraught guardrails of the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
Today’s anything-goes, zero-sum war for attention ignores the lessons learned in the Golden Age of advertising in the 1960s, when brands were sold with thoughtful, artistic, wise and playful takes on the human condition. Volkswagen made history by asking drivers to “Think Small.” Alka-Seltzer understood our common frailties with “I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing.” Brooklyn-based Levy’s Rye used a variety of ethnic faces to expand its New York base to the heartland with, “You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Love Levy’s.”
Today, by comparison, BMW boasts that it is “The Ultimate Driving Machine,” which elevates the suburban soccer wagon to the status of a teleportation device. Bayer proclaims the optimistic but bloviating mission to provide “Health For All, Hunger For None.” Red Bull doesn’t just amp you up, it will transform you into an otherworldly entity, because “Red Bull Gives you Wiiings.” Advertising once was intrinsically relevant; it now requires a quantum approximation of relevancy.
Adidas promises “Impossible Is Nothing” if you slip into their footwear, which only works if you are not taking Skyrizi (“Nothing Is Everything”). Kleenex presents the existential premise, “For Whatever Happens Next Grab Kleenex.” Burger King glorifies customers by consecrating them with the rubric, “You Rule.” Samsung offers to help consumers engage their inner Albert Einsteins to “Do What You Can’t.” ExxonMobil issues a Da Vinci Code-like challenge that invites car drivers to answer the intransitive phrase, “Let’s Solve This,” which might mean the fate of a dying planet or, perhaps, the persistence of potholes. Brands exhort consumers to undergo life changes: Cottonelle wants you to “Come Clean,” American Eagle insists you “Live Your Life,” Claude AI reminds you to “Keep Thinking,” which assumes cleverness but invites self-negation, and Under Armour recruits you to “Protect This House,” a poetically inconclusive ask. Numerous brands vow to unleash the unfathomable furies of the unconscious mind: Honda proffers “The Power Of Dreams,” LVMH is devoted to “The Art Of Crafting Dreams” and Disney Parks allow you to manifest “Where Dreams Come True.”
Of course, the hyperbolic nature of current branding is both a reflection of and a catalyst for the unrealistic expectations of modern consumers, trapped in a culture driven by a narcissism that values fame, fortune, beauty and power but feeds on the dopamine addiction for likes, views and comments, a feedback loop that turns us into rats running through an ever-expanding maze to chase down the next hit in a dwindling supply of rewards.
So it would seem that our Storyteller, who presumes to be omniscient, will face a brutal environment of economic, political, cultural and technological headwinds while attempting to perform the role of savant, seer and savior, all while looking over their shoulder at the line of would-be Gandalfs massing behind them.
But, given the Alice In Wonderland unreality of our modern world, perhaps The Storyteller can take a page from The King Of Hearts: “If there’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.”
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