A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms

7 How Story and Branding Affect Marketing

You may be asking yourself, does story really have to have all this stuff? Themes and moods and rising tension? What if I’m in marketing—it doesn’t apply to me then, does it?

Folks in the advertising business often refer to themselves as storytellers, but this can cause some eye rolling when it comes up in other circles. That’s because the ad industry uses the word story a little differently from the way novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers do. In entertainment, it’s generally agreed that a story has certain key characteristics: characters, a plot, cause and effect. Marketers, though, often use the word story to mean something subtly different; it refers to a message, imagery intended to evoke a specific ...