Professional Seminar : Advertising Secrets: The Art of Storytelling in the New Era

As part of the Professional Seminar Series organized by the College of Business & Finance, Ms. Lilian Leong, Managing Director of Leo Burnett Hong Kong was invited to give us a talk on “Advertising Secrets: The Art of Storytelling in the New Era” on 27th of January, 2010. Drawing a huge crowd of over 350 participants, Ms Leong demonstrated the art of story telling practically by leaving her audience spellbound for more.

Ms. Leong commenced her session by stressing on the need for marketers to embed a core human element in its creative campaigns to drive success. In her own words, ‘experience creativity through the human lens’. That is to think less in terms of consumers and demographics but more about conversations and relationships with people- something as old and as complex as the human race itself - the art of storytelling.

Digital technology has allowed the creation of a more immersive narrative than ever before. The art of storytelling is no longer a linear one. When it comes to brand stories, we present them at different levels and spice them up with strong talkability factors in order to spread the word fast. Branding strategies are now incorporating user-generated or community elements. The line between advertising and entertainment as tools for building brands are also gradually blurring, blending with emerging technologies. The ads are gearing more towards providing services people truly need rather than just pushing the messages onto their target audiences.

The interaction and relationship between brands and humans change over time. Everything now begins and ends with People and Behaviour. Unlike in the past, brands can no longer push messages out to a supposedly passive audience and hope to get a response. Instead, people or consumers are now seeking something meaningful, rewarding, relevant and personal. As a result, marketers have to adopt a new approach to marketing by putting people at the center of our mindset.

In today’s people era, what communications companies, marketers and their brands need is simply not a “positioning” strategy. Nor do they need a “promise’. We need to put a meaningful human purpose at the center of our brands, a purpose to make a qualitative difference in people’s lives. People are at its core. And to engage people, brands have to act like humans because after all, we are human too.

Ms Leong shed some light on benefit for companies in creating purpose brands. Purpose brands are more powerful – they are the ones we always quote, make reference to or look to for inspiration. They are on a mission to do something worthwhile or to make life better for the people they serve. And most important of all, purpose brands attract believers, not consumers. Most purpose brands have conviction. They know why they exist and they share their passion with their believers.

To create a purpose brand, Leo Burnett has created a propriety formula that should include four elements namely - Fuel, Behaviour, Conviction, Purpose and Acts.

Fuel refers to the cultural momentum that propels the brand’s conviction explaining the Behaviour of people. A Purpose brand has to have a conviction, its beliefs and what the brand is passionate about. Putting people at the center of our mindset would mean that a brand exists for a reason to be expressed in human terms. Ultimately, the brand should have tangible activities (e.g. products, services, customer experience, etc) that deliver against and make its conviction and purpose believable. Therefore, marketers have to deliver ‘acts’ rather than just ‘ads’  that don’t fully engage its audience.