Narrative Marketing: Tell Me, Don’t Sell Me!

Posted on Feb 1, 2012 in Visionaries | 0 comments

By Larry Thomas, Latergy

Narrative marketing is the delivery of a PR message, most often video, in an advertising vehicle. A straight forward way to deliver a message, the technique incorporates PR video (raw b-roll and sound-bites) into a :30 or :60 second spot for TV or a :15 to 3 minute clip on the web.

The principles and practice of ‘tell me, don’t sell me’ and ‘know me, than show me’ resonate more than ever with consumers in this day of corporate greed, government gridlock, civil unrest and social media. New and existing products and services are vetted via Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Bing where ‘comment and share’ tactics are applied by critical ‘prospects’. The ‘narrative’ approach, a direct descendant of the testimonial, has become noticeably more popular recently but it has existed for a long time.

As the lines between PR and Advertising continue to blur across the on-air and online digital landscape I expect the practice of narrative marketing will continue to flourish. The question is who will devour who’s slice of the pie? Progressive PR pros have a small slice and should package in small (sometimes large) media buys to jump start and enhance earned media campaigns. Here are two examples:

Progressive, or possibly regressive, advertisng pros revisit and reembrace the power of the narrative message. Here are two examples from an industry that needed to, and did, regain public trust:

Hopefully, I placed the spots in the right category. Differentiating PR from marketing is becoming difficult, which is good. Few effective communications agencies solely focus on paid or earned media. They blend both to drive the desired outcome. Some of my clients are in ‘PR’, others in ‘Advertising’ and more frequently of late … integrated marketing communications. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter what kind of communications pro you call yourself … Just deliver messages that evoke outcomes that drive measurable results.

If you’re in business, that ineviatbly means profit. Be a pro the CFO, CEO, shareholders and customers would love. Then feature them all in narrative videos. And, yes PR pros, at times that means strategic micro-media buys that spark earned media campaigns. I call it narrative marketing, but the name does not matter. Results do.

Take Aways:

Narrative marketing involves the delivery of a PR message via on-air and online media buys.

It relies on real people with real stories to deliver key messages. Few, if any graphics.

Effective tool for marketers that want to build trust, soft sell concepts, products and services.

Larry is president of Latergy, a video services boutique that provides multimedia content strategy, production, distribution and measurement services to professional communicators. Prior to Latergy, Thomas pioneered online video marketing and PR as co-founder and president of PR Newswire’s MultiVu and COO of Medialink Worldwide, a NASDAQ company that was sold to a VC-backed competitor. He lives in NJ with his wife, Sherry Lynn, and their plethora of pups. Contact him at lthomas@Latergy.com.