Mechanical X storytelling: digital salt and pepper.

How to avoid mimicry and surprise your audience?

It is sadly possible to summarize our tastes and habits in a series of statistics. However, the biggest mistake a brand can make is to consider its customers as a volumetric mass, subdivided into data. The tools that allow us to refine and optimize our mechanics are wonderful, but behind these quantified truths there is the risk of drying up the initial vision and the desire to touch human beings. Can these be targets …

The diversification of web and digital communication media and formats pushes brands and agencies into a situation of hyperchoice. This choice is constantly renewed and turned upside down. The mechanisms by which you will be able to reach your consumers are endless, and the 360 takes on a dizzying meaning. From one campaign to another the desire to test new things, but also the mimicry of the last buzz observed takes precedence over consistency and truth. The background work, the step back are often sacrificed to move towards a result that has the sweet smell of ROI. But is it possible today to build a brand over time by activating only the levers of performance? What about values and storytelling when it comes to retargeting and delivery in less than an hour?

Best enemies.

On the one hand, there are the best practices of digital, the mechanical, proven means which tends to ensure a good campaign and a return on investment up to the nurtured ambitions. A reproduction trend guided by increasing engagement rates, an impressive number of impressions, powered by the dictates of the algorithms of the web giants. So, if you want to campaign on social networks, choose a short and animated video format. Yes, it is obvious that you will be much more likely to make yourself visible to the eyes of your target audience. But then branded content grows and develops like weeds, and floods our timelines a little more every day … to the point of disgust. To imitate the Raw format, start by having something to say.

Because on the other hand, there is storytelling. The art of storytelling. In this area, the technique intended to capture the attention of an audience, arouse in them emotions, results more from narrative know-how than from best practices dictated by Facebook. Generating emotional ties, belonging, preference is the mission of your brand. Your audience is loyal, attentive, because you have things to say. Not because you will have managed to cram a three infos in less than eight seconds. Among the videos of the most shared brands, live three-minute formats with proven success. People watch these videos all the way because they get something to them.

Depending on the herd, the videos are getting shorter and shorter because people are considered to be zapping faster and faster. But surfers are zapping because these shorter and shorter videos have less and less to say. So it’s time to ask the right questions.

Nor is it enough to open an Instagram account and enrich it with everyday lifestyle content to generate engagement and establish a lasting emotional connection. It turns out to be essential that the means used flow naturally from a coherent vision and that it serves history, the brand message. The more the formats and supports increase, the more important the structure of the story remains.

Conversely, if beautiful stories and beautiful messages are imagined every day by brands and agencies, only those who manage to transmit it to their target in the best possible way will touch their affect and carry their commitment.

With the multiplicity of formats, media, supports, uses, storytelling techniques and the stories that flow from them have never been as complex, multifaceted and sinuous as now. An exercise in contortion which must nevertheless maintain a narrative coherence so as not to dilute the narrative, the message and the brand experience offered on pain of staying at the dock.

Ultimately, the commitment arises from the activation of these two levers which must meet, use each other. To be seen, understood, loved, and shared, the story told must be transmitted at the right time, to the right target, in the right format, on the optimal medium.

The creative spring, the ultimate tool for taking off

To solve this equation with two unknowns, the only solution remains creativity. Know how to build a journey, a singular message, or know how to tell timeless stories, in your own words. It is therefore up to digital agencies to show themselves capable of carrying a brand discourse sporting an original mechanism, exploiting the varied potential of digital media without detracting from its values ​​and positioning.

By strongly maintaining its positioning, it will always be possible to surpass what the world imposes on us. The most powerful example is undoubtedly the American campaign of Burger King in front of the Google home enclosure. We explain to the world of communicators in a loop that this artificial intelligence will transform the relationship between consumers and brands and that we must quickly bow to it at the risk of being bypassed. The brand at the Whopper, instead of bending to the rules, is responsible for reminding everyone today how creative spring can skilfully divert the rigidity imposed by tools, by brilliantly projecting a strong message to the world. The brand had prodigiously hacked Google’s voice assistant, leaving it to promote its flagship product, the Whopper. A stroke of genius, in substance and in form.

When AI is KO, the solution is human. We must continue to touch the sensitivity of Internet users. They are the ones who love, share, commit. No brand, no algorithm is able to force their decision, their adequacy. We must try to grasp the trends of uses to surprise and revolutionize the creative approach, enrich the narrative, capture the counter-current to create stories and content that not only just mechanically trap, but move without disguising the values, the brand imagination previously built.