In most pop culture depictions of the end of the world, there’s some crazy mash-up of opposites. You know, dogs getting it on with cats, clouds raining frogs or such. Plenty of traditional marketers were having such visions a few weeks ago when economist Steven Levitt spoke at a conference in London.
Levitt, a bona fide Ph.D. in economics, is a rare animal: a numbers dude who understands the power of stories. You would expect nothing less from the co-author of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics, two books that have created an entire industry of wannabes hoping to take the dismal science and make it real and relevant by providing examples of how economics is no less than “the hidden side of everything” in everyday life, as Levitt and co-author Stephen Dubner put it on their website.
So when Levitt took the stage at Idea Exchange 2013, he ruined the day for many of the advertising and marketing folks in the audience when he questioned whether good companies needed ad agencies, subtly accused marketers of manufacturing lies and compared them to the Gestapo.
Instead, Levitt advocated the value of storytelling and authenticity, two ideas that we at WordWrite have learned are inextricably linked and phenomenally powerful in creating communication success. “In a marketing world in which people are constantly bombarded with false messages, the one true thing, and what connects people with the world around them, is authenticity,” Levitt said in his keynote.
Hiring an ad agency hints at a lack of authenticity, Levitt said, adding: “You would think that no one better than you would know about your product. Why don’t Procter & Gamble with the scale they are at, have their own advertising agency in-house?”
As he put it: “It is much easier to be flashy if you are not tied down to what’s real. If you are judged not by the ultimate impact of the campaign, but by how the campaign looks and feels, I think authenticity is just a headache.”
Authenticity is so important, Levitt said, that if a company doesn’t have a worthwhile, authentic story to share, instead of spending on its marketing, it should “go and make a product that is good enough” to talk about.
When someone steeped in success in such a left brain, quantitative field as economics can clearly see that authentic storytelling is the key to success in a supposedly right-brain, creative field like marketing, are we indeed in the end times? Did Levitt overstep with his analysis? Or is it a validation of the clear, pure power of storytelling that even a left-brain savant “gets” stories?
To me, the answer is self-evident. Stories rule. And the reaction of many of the traditional marketing folk who trashed Levitt’s analysis is further proof of this.
For far too long, marketing in the modern world has been a variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes – in the case of modern marketing, often entertaining, frequently foolish, and yet, like the Emperor’s clothes in the fairly tale, something vital was missing: authenticity.
Levitt and many other “quants” have demonstrated in recent years that it doesn’t take a body-pierced, black-clad “creative” to understand what generates success in communications. It takes someone who understands the power of a great story, well told.
Levitt’s endorsement of authenticity and storytelling is hardly the signal of a new Nirvana in marketing. It is, however, an acknowledgement of a reality as old as human biology and communication. It’s time the rest of the marketing world gets on board. Now that would be really freaky.
Do you agree? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.
If you want to know more about how we approach storytelling at WordWrite in ways that deliver powerful results, download our whitepaper here. Check out our other blogs on the topic here.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications. You can find him on Twitter @paulfuriga.
