Sell A Story, Not Ad: Fitbit and Adidas
Research has shown that people do not believe in advertising, plus, there is a rise of popularity in mini film due to growth explosion of social medias.
People loves story, human loves news (which is why we spread fake news so easily). I remember last year when I was on my way to the workshop for design tutorial, my lecturer told one of my senior
"You have to know how to sell a story."
Being an egoistic kid, I did not fully understand the statement. This sentence lingered in my mind for a long time without any enlightenment from anyone. All this while, I assume that "selling a story" is just to create 9-minute film and feature a product, or create a 9 feet tall sculpture and tell everyone this sculpture symbolises fortune. How stupid! That's not even how art works!
I landed my answer with a pretty straightforward thinking, until I few days ago this one ad particularly sparked my thought on "selling a story".
A film by Eugen Merher: http://www.eugen-merher.com/
This video is the much controversial (not official) Adidas advertising film. Whole story is here. It cleverly tells a story of an old man trying to "break free", which the slogan also much like a slogan that Adidas would adopt.
Another video that I've encountered during shopping was the fitbit "Know Your Heart" short film.
What these videos have in similarity is that they are perfectly crafted as story, which leads to a new thought: create a slogan for your brand like you're telling a story. After all, branding is really all about storytelling! The role of branding is to tell everyone what your brand will behave as a character.
The role of branding is to tell everyone what your brand will behave as a character, and urge everyone to join the story as a whole.
People will not blame you if you quietly slip in your product into the film. People who watch the film probably knew it is a advertisement, but we have to try to think in this way: people scroll their social medias and constantly look for fresh and "live" material to indulge. Watching a film or even a short gif image is like an escape from the cold-blooded society.
Here is some quotes of Hayao Mizaki from Studio Ghibli said:
“Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It's a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually opressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own - a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world."
He then added:
"I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It's a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it's that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime.” ― Hayao Miyazaki, Starting Point: 1979-1996
For me, there's one thing we can learn from anime, which drew a lot attention from youths all the time. Anime is really indeed like a private world where youths can find themselves escape. The magic of film really lies on this concept, why can't every director think like this?
Then, how bad is a bad ad film? Here you go.
