Storytelling

“The worst nightmare” Case

Challenge & Selection:

Storytelling has been one of my most useful tools, not only work wise but  life wise. It’s given me the opportunity to communicate thoughts, ideas  and data in the easiest and most direct way, since it gives me the chance  to make people identify and engage with my message, because let’s be  honest, everyone wants to hear a good story.

I work at an advertising agency and a few months ago my colleagues and I  found ourselves in front of a challenge with a big client, a chain of  hypermarkets. They wanted to promote their huge black friday sales, with  an extremely limited budget, so we had to come up with clever and  eﬀective solutions that didn’t require much money or a big production. Our  worst nightmare.

Application:

Once we had the client’s context and goals ﬁgured out, we started our  “what if” phase and began to brainstorm possible solutions to the main  problem. It sure was a tough phase. How could we let people know our  client had the best sales they could ever ﬁnd, with no outdoor or printed  ads, a huge BTL production or a well positioned TV spot? Then, during our  breaking point, I began to my colleagues the story of how I got my almost  brand new iPhone for a ridiculous price on Facebook’s Marketplace  platform. After I told them my story we realized we never thought of that  one place where people look for the biggest sales: the internet. Consumer- consumer e-commerce platforms are incredibly popular between those  who are always looking for the best prices.

And we came up with a great idea: To create an online proﬁle for our client  in the most popular consumer-consumer e-commerce platforms in Latin  America (Facebook’s Marketplace, Mercado Libre, OLX) in order to post  their top Black Friday Sale products, just like a normal person who sells  from home would do. People went crazy! They were truly attracted to the  prices and got really surprised when they realized they contacted one of

the largest chain of hypermarkets for more details on the products. We  truly had their attention, just as intended.

And of course, storytelling wasn’t only a tool that made part of our  brainstorming session. In order to “sell” the idea to our client, we told it in  the best way possible: through a story. My story, and the story of many  others who had similar experiences to mine, since we collected an  important amount of information throughout interviews and surveys in  order to strengthen our insights.

Insights and Approach:

This past experience opened our eyes. Sometimes, as advertisers or  professionals of the creative ﬁeld, pay so much attention to the given data  and obstacles given by our clients, that we put focus on the many ways to  solve their problems without even thinking about the core of our whole  purpose: the people, the customers, our target and their lives. Throughout  storytelling you can understand why your target behaves in a certain way  when confronting a problem and then tell them what the solution to that  problem is, all of this through a story they can identify with. I think that’s  gold right there and we, as communicators, should look for that gold in  every single work that we get done.

