The actor Kevin Spacey once told a group of marketing professionals “Good content marketing is not a crap shoot. We know how this works…story is everything.” Spacey’s right. Story is everything. Winning pitches—in television commercials or business presentations—tell an emotional story.
As the countdown begins to Super Bowl 50, Forbes is tracking the new commercials and asking fans to vote for their favorites. If history is a guide, commercials with a strong narrative will come out on top.
Johns Hopkins marketing professor Keith Quesenberry once studied 108 Super Bowl commercials and discovered that viewers rated ads with “dramatic plotlines” more highly than ones that did not have a story. The ads with the highest scores were like mini-movies. “People are attracted to stories because we’re social creatures and we relate to other people,” Quesenberry wrote in The Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice.
Quesenberry’s research concluded that Budweiser’s 2014 commercial “Puppy Love” rated highest among viewers because it squeezed a dramatic narrative in 60-seconds. More recently TiVo conducted a survey to rank the top Super Bowl commercials of all time. The TiVo study also found that Puppy Love ranked highest across both men and women in all age groups (18 to 64). “More emotional commercials are the most popular across demographics,” according to the study.
The “Puppy Love” commercial starts with a small house, a white picket fence and a sign that reads: Warm Springs Puppy Adoption. An adorable puppy climbs out from beneath the fence to visit his friend, a Clydesdale horse in the barn next door. On the day the puppy gets adopted the horse chases the car down as the puppy is seen barking at the horse from the backseat. The horse jumps the fence and is joined by the other Clydesdale horses to stop the car. The two friends are reunited at the end and play together in the pasture. In 60 seconds it tells the story of an unbreakable friendship complete with the backstory of the characters, an inciting incident that breaks up the pair (an adoption), dramatic action (the horses racing to catch the puppy) and a final denouement (friends reunited playing gleefully in the pasture).
Super Bowl ads don’t always hit the mark, of course, but those that do have something in common—they are character driven. The same formula applies to winning business pitches. I recently had lunch with a venture capital investor who has spent six years in the profession. “I’ve heard over 2,000 pitches and I can only remember about ten,” he said.
“What made those 10 memorable?” I asked.
“Well, if I had to name one thing, they all told personal stories. I remember the stories.”
We find stories memorable because we’re hardwired for it. Beginning with the first cave paintings, stories informed others about potential threats, educated them, and ignited their imaginations. Stories do the same today. Since we process our world in story, anything that has a strong narrative structure will, by default, grab our attention.
Professionals who make it their job to scout out business opportunities agree that pitches wrapped in story stand out. “Storytelling is everything,” says Shark Tank investor Barbara Corcoran. “Show me an MBA and your sales numbers, that’s fine. But tell me a great story about how you got started and your vision, and we’ll talk.”
“Storytelling is the most underrated skill,” says Ben Horowitz, general partner with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
“Did a compelling story inspire you to an invest in a company? I asked Horowitz.
“Absolutely. I invested in a story that evolved into a company called NationBuilder.” NationBuilder is a platform used by political campaigns and non-profit organizations to raise money, engage supporters and mobilize volunteers. Founder Jim Gilliam told Horowitz the story of how he contracted a life-threatening cancer. He survived and became an activist, producing documentary films, and using the Internet to organize people to take action for the causes he believed in. “Organizing people to save his own life profoundly impacted Jim’s view of how he should spend the rest of it,” according to Horowitz.
Although the company’s early results showed positive traction, Horowitz told me that didn’t invest because of numbers on a spreadsheet. “It was Jim’s vision that compelled me to invest. As he told his story I thought of every musician that needed to organize her fans, every author that needed to reach readers, every pastor that needed to encourage his members, and every person who wanted to make a difference, but didn’t know how. And then I thought of Jim’s personal story and I was in.”
Gilliam’s story is a strong reminder that, while most Super Bowl ads are created for the sole purpose of moving product, many business leaders have even grander visions of changing the world. If you believe in the power of your idea to radically improve people’s lives, you might want to steal a page from top marketers and wrap your idea in an irresistible story. It’s a winning formula.