Storytelling In Advertising

AY2023/2024 Semester 2

In order to sell a product, one must tell a story: one that engages the customer on a deeply emotional level. This is vital to modern branding, defining your company ethos and building long-term customer relationships. This course concentrates on visual storytelling for cinema, television and multi-media. Story depends on solid structuring and the ability to utilise storytelling to awaken the imagination of the buyer, but first and foremost it is about emotion: generating the right degree of emotion and aligning that to company and product branding for given visual media. We therefore need to understand psychology and have real insight into people, not just as a persuasive tool, but a genuine understanding of what people's deepest desires are and how your brand delivers that desire. Having understood the tones, attitudes and empathy generated by your product, we must then structure well. There are two concepts we need to understand to convey this: striking the note of simplicity to engage the emotions and secondly basing those stories on timeless myths and storytelling principles. Having instilled all this, we must then question the nature of advertising as a metacognitive process for the designer of commercials. This provides perspectives on the story being told and why we are compelled to tell it well. By viewing advertising examples from cinema, television and multi-media and investigating the myths and principles that underpin their success, this course reaches deep into the creativity of the student to grow beyond outmoded forms of selling and embrace the future of visual sales-personship. The course therefore generates competency in storytelling for practitioners and researchers in the field of effective advertising. Enrollment is suited to advertising students, advertising industry practitioners, journalists, communications students as well as film, television and transmedia practitioners.