A friend of the school is speaking at an event and asked me if I would provide a quote about the importance of story-telling in the context of a mufti-platform world.

She had just seen some of the most recent work from our SPANK intake and was impressed.

She had identified a trait that runs through all of our students.

They like to tell a good story.

We try to bring great story-tellers into the studio because we can learn so much from them.  Today we were blessed to have Jörg Tittel as one of our visiting mentors.

I was quite pleased with the quote that I offered up, so I wanted to post it up on our site.

Story telling is in humankind’s DNA.  Our primordial relatives  –  those who were the marketers of their day  –  learned that the best way to get people understanding, feeling, remembering, transmitting and sharing important information is through the framework of a simple story.

This is why story-telling has always been such an important part of what we call the Communication Arts. (Some people still refer to them by their ‘oldie-worldie’ labels of Advertising, PR and Design)

In a multi-platform world the importance of story-telling is amplified because we are constantly being bombarded by an exponentially overwhelming wave of information.  Our minds are engineered to find or form patterns and then store them in small chunks  –  and the framework of a simple story does its job brilliantly.

In today’s multi-platform, inter-connected world we can share the story in non-linear or in linear ways.  We can whisper the story personally through some channels or shout it loudly and publicly through others.  Or vice versa.

So the story lives through PR, social media, user experience, advertising, product design, direct marketing, and so on.

Our job as practitioners of the communication arts is to find ways of telling stories that resonate and create positive experiences between people and then execute them elegantly with craft and passion.  Always with the purpose of persuading behaviour.

See.  We really are no different to our primordial relatives!

What do you think?  Do you agree or disagree?  Am I overstating the importance of story-telling?  Comments welcome below.