By Paul Furiga
In all of public relations, the most serious and too frequently the most boring specialty is investor relations. After all, it’s about money, it’s about stock, it’s about the SEC and it’s about lawyers. Get the picture?
Well, right, given the people and topics involved, most of the time, there is no picture. Which is why the video experiment by the glassmaker Corning and its business-to-business ad agency, Doremus, is so remarkable.
For a recent board of directors meeting, Corning engaged Doremus to produce a fascinating six-minute video called “A Day Made of Glass.” As so many good PR souls advise (including yours truly), the beautiful video was duly posted to YouTube. And then the magic happened.
Unlike most corporate videos posted to YouTube, which are truly deadly, this one went completely viral. As I write this blog post, the video’s had 11,257,918 views. Once again, let’s remember, this is a corporate video. One designed to show the investor value of Corning. Anyone still awake here? It’s impossible not to be engaged after viewing the video.
And here’s why. It’s not the technical details of the shoot, fully described here. It’s not the prowess of Doremus, a great agency I first worked with during my years at Ketchum. It’s not even the imaginative uses of glass highlighted in the video.
It’s the storytelling. By producing this video, Corning and Doremus have intentionally or unintentionally tapped the most powerful medium in the world to tell a story. In most other hands, this would be nothing more than tiny type and rivers of bullets in a Tolstoy-length slide deck. The video has no bullet points. There are no numbers to decipher. There are no lawyer-mandated disclosure statements. It’s a story about one day in the life of one family. Which is both surprising and obvious. After all, if Corning’s future as a company is to have real financial value, it’s going to have to create actual products used by real people in daily life. Well duh.
That’s what this video shows. Only the power of telling a story rooted in fact (imaginative riffs on current Corning products), employing fluent storytellers (in this case an everyday family) could bring this story to life. This is the essence of our work in developing our own StoryCrafting process at WordWrite.
Yes, storytelling is truly powerful. It can even kill the boring flavor that permeates far too much of investor relations. But don’t take my word for it. View the video for yourself on YouTube — and see why 11.2 million people have already made the case for storytelling.
_____
Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
