Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, 6th Edition

7WHY IS THE BAD GUY ALWAYS MORE INTERESTING?: STORYTELLING, CONFLICT, AND BRAND PLATFORMS.

AD VETERAN RICK BOYKO explained the ad biz very simply: “We are storytellers in service of brands.”

Our job is to get our brands' stories into the national conversation and ultimately into the firmament of popular culture. “To make them famous,” as they used to say at Crispin. The thing is, we don't get people talking about our brands by reading them a list of product benefits. People talk in stories, and so must we.

There's a great book I recommend to ad students. It's not about advertising but screenwriting: Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. McKee makes a convincing case the human brain is wired to hunger for story—that a structure of three acts, taking us from problem to unexpected solution, is something our brains crave. Story just sucks us in. Even when we're watching some late-night TV movie and we know how the story's going to end, we stay up later than we ought to just to watch the dang thing, right? Theorists suggest story is a cognitive structure our brains use to encode information. So, in addition to its drawing power, story has lasting power—it helps us remember things.

This chapter is about finding the story inside a brand or product.

All stories run on conflict.

Let's stop for a moment and imagine Star Wars without Darth Vader.

We'd open on young Skywalker, maybe, holding his light saber and then … uh, and then, uh, ...