webstorytelling

There is more and more evidence that designing the right experience is key to the success of contemporary brands and companies. And this point was made exceptionally clear two months ago by Joe Gebbia, one of Airbnb’s two founders, in his speech at the TED conference in Vancouver.

If Airbnb has been so hugely successful it’s because – as Joe and his partner Brian Chesky discovered to their own surprise – good design can help people overcome their natural fears and get to trust perfect strangers. That’s actually how Airbnb came to life.

At the beginning, this was not crystal clear. And investors were not able to see how one could persuade people to rent their homes and their most private spaces to guests they knew nothing about. After all, said Joe, “we’ve all been taught, as kids, that strangers equal danger”.

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Thanks to a smart piece by Jeff Rum in Social Media Today – 3 Steps to Effective Brand Storytelling Using Emotions – I discovered a Google video that I had missed. It’s called Reunion, and it was produced for the Indian market. It was published on YouTube on November 13, 2013 and immediately went viral, reaching 1.6 million views before debuting on television on November 15, 2013. As of today, the ad has earned more than 13 million views on YouTube.

As Jeff rightly says, Google could easily communicate with lists of facts and statistics (the vast number of people who use their search engine), but they don’t: “Instead, they run ads like this video, which cleverly tells an emotional story that hinges on the use of Google. Instead of being told about the product, we are seeing it in action”.

Not all Google ads are similarly effective, yet this one is enough to tell that Google, indeed, understands emotional storytelling. The story is simple. Baldev is an old Hindu man in Delhi, India, and Yusuf is an old Muslim man in Lahore, Pakistan. One day Baldev shows his granddaughter Suman a dated photo of two children: it portrays him and his best friend Yusuf when they lived in Lahore before the Partition of India in 1947.

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A Chinese laundry detergent ad went viral last week, attracting a lot of criticism for its disgracefully racist storyline. Named by many “the most racist commercial of 2016”, it features a Chinese woman doing her washing. She is soon approached by a black man, with paint spread over his face and T-shirt.

He seems to be making some advances, but she responds by shoving him into the washing machine. He emerges after a few moments as a very clean, light-skinned Chinese man. She appears delighted, and the commercial ends with the payoff Change starts with Qiaobi.

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On April 21st 2016 Samsung won the Tribeca Film Festival branded content award with an amazing 5-minute short, beating out other excellent brand productions.

The story is about a young man suffering from achromatopsia, a rare condition that makes people totally color blind. But Neil Harbisson did not surrender to it: he just convinced doctors to implant an antenna in the back of his head allowing him to hear colors. 

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The recipe of viral is a bit of a mystery. Why is some branded content able to ignite viral wildfires? And why do many other attempts at going viral fail miserably? According to some authors, these questions have no answer. Viral in unpredictable, and it occurs accidentally. Which means that a brand cannot build content aimed at going viral in any reasonable way.

However, my study on Viral Stories produced results that are not consistent with this view. In fact, the qualitative analysis of about 40 brand videos which had a formidable viral dynamic leads to a strong hypothesis: behind any viral success there’s a good story. How good? Well, it has to include several of the 38 principles listed in the book’s last chapter as favouring a viral outcome. In other words, the secret of triggering a viral wave lies in the form and structure of a story – which implies that viral and storytelling are strictly connected.

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