I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling in order to make the most of the future.

Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

We often adapt classic books into films. Yet rarely the other way round. The image on the front of this paper is a mock Penguin Classic book-cover made by the Flickr user Spacesick for the film Back to the Future.i I borrowed the image because it questions how different media affect the way we tell stories; how as Marshall McLuhan once famously put it, the medium affects the message.ii I also borrowed it (or stole it, depending on your point of view) because it sums up what I believe to be the fundamental problem of the communications industry right now; the printed book.

I believe that as an industry, we have become uncomfortably tied to an idealised notion of storytelling as created by literature; an idealised notion, which is in fact, fundamentally at odds with the actual underlying purpose of the brand story. I believe that the time has now come for us to look instead to the past; to look back to oral rather than literary traditions of storytelling for guidance because unlike literary stories, oral stories were told in ways deliberately designed to work directly on human memories. First and foremost, oral societies told stories in order that they would be remembered.

Advertising tells stories for similar reasons

Neuroscience tells us that brands are simply a set of connections in a consumers mind; as Gordon says a brand in the brain is nothing more than a web of connecting neurones that fire together in different patterns.iii Psychologists also tells us that stories are one of the most powerful ways for the human brain to link and make associations between things; of carrying out the process of elaborate encoding.iv It is no wonder then, that stories have become so integral to branding. They are the best way for humans to remember clusters of associations and connections between disparate elements the very core of any brands existence.

But having a brand story is in itself not enough. It is how you tell that story that is in fact the important part. As Heath has warned us, when it comes to memory what you say is far less important than how you say it.v I believe that we should stop focussing on the types of brand stories1 we tell and focus instead on how we tell them; more specifically, how we tell them in ways that make elaborate encoding easy, that make the most of their power as mnemonic devices. And as much as it pains our literate, copywriting temperaments to admit it, it was the pre-literate oral poets who were (and still are) the masters at the art of mnemonic storytelling. Welcome to Homer on Advertising. Confessions of an Epic Poet.
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Some like Christopher Booker, would argue that there only seven different types of story for us to tell anyway. (See The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories, Christopher Booker) Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

Oral storytelling techniques evolved directly from the human memory process

Memories, neuroscientists have revealed are built from fragments and it is from these piecemeal fragments that we then reconstruct events or experiences.vi The narrative techniques developed by oral storytellers directly reflected this facet of human memory. In the 1930s an academic called Millman Parry threw the literary establishment into disarray, proving that the great creative genius Homer had actually constructed his epics by stitching together the pre-fabricated fragments of songs and epics he had heard from numerous others before him. Parry showed that Homer had in fact constructed the amazing, hulking dinosaur of the Iliad from bones he had already been given.vii The Iliad, like all oral texts2 was an episodic patch-work, continually re-constructed and reconstituted from thousands of fragmented, pre-fabricated pieces as it passed from poet to poet. Each time it was recited, the dinosaur looked different. Parry left the literary world with the uncomfortable conclusion that oral epics were, like the human memory, non-linear, ever-changing entities. They were he asserted never sung the same way twice. The same formulas and themes recurred but they were stitched together or rhapsodized differently in each rendition even by the same poet depending on audience reaction, the mood of the poet or of the occasion and other social and psychological factors.viii In other words, the stories were told in a way that mirrored the way human memory worked. We must not forget Professor Walter J. Ong tells us that episodic structure was the natural way to talk out a story. The experience of real life he notes is more like episodes than it is like a Freytag pyramid. Indeed, non-linear stitching techniques are still often used today to mimic the structure and recall of human memory.ix (Think of the film Memento)

Whether we realise it or not the advertising industry has always borrowed many of the more basic mnemonic devices from oral narrative techniques. Indeed, semiotics is, I believe, an attempt to identify what are essentially the visual equivalents of oral mnemonic patterning within a brands story.3 The formulas and themes. Take for example Coca-Cola. Each advert, each telling of its story may be different over the years, but like Beowulf or the Iliad the core units, the standard thematic settings and re-occurring motifs that constitute its stories have always been the same. Where Beowulf always had a hall-feast and a fascination with the description of heros sword, likewise Coke

Today we define the word text as meaning printed words; but the original roots of the word reveal not only the very different meaning attached to it in oral cultures but also the validity of Parrys pre-fabrication theory; the word text actually originates from the Latin to weave hence our word textile; likewise the word rhapsodise originates from the Greek words for song and to sew or stitch. 3 Indeed Ong argues that the early appearance of semiotic signs (such as the use of Zodiac symbols instead of words to label apothecary bottles) were in fact evidence of primary orality lingering in residue centuries after the invention of writing and print. Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

has always had the Christmas celebration and the curves of its bottle.4 Over the years it has weaved itself an epic from a series of core mnemonic patterns.x Bizarre figures were also another mnemonic mainstay of oral poets, something which the advertising industry has always copied. A Drumming Gorilla for instance is no different in its function to a Cyclops5. Batchelors Hug Monster and The Honey Monster as powerfully remembered as Scylla and Charybdis. Formulaic groupings also pervaded oral texts; there were Three Graces and Three Fates for the same reason that we ended up with Snap, Crackle and Pop or Barley, Hops and Malt in beer advertising, Blue, White and Red fresh-mint stripes in toothpaste because three is a long-standing mnemonic formula.

Advertising attitudes belong to a post-Caxton world of literature and print

And yet despite the fact that we have (consciously or otherwise) borrowed many pre-literate mnemonic devices, we are still surprisingly dismissive of them. Semiotics struggles to gain real recognition as a valid field of research.xi And we have great contempt for any advertising considered to favour the emotional. We struggle to understand and explain the success of the bizarre.6 This disdain is, Heath notes part of a long cultural history stretching through the Enlightenment and back to the ancient Greeks that reason is a sound and virtuous guide, while the passions, or emotions are dangerous, foolish and evil.xii A disdain, that as Heaths observation unconsciously shows us, began at the same time as the introduction of writing (with the ancient Greeks) and carried on through the introduction of the printing press (during the age of Enlightenment). Indeed our deep rooted contempt for clichs, the formulaic and anything deemed repetitive or unoriginal in advertising is, unfortunately, the direct consequence of an industry trapped in a post-Caxton worldview. It was print culture,xiii Ong and others tell us that gave birth to the romantic notions of originality and creativity which set apart an individual work from other works, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence.7

It is also telling that two of the biggest ideas to have taken hold in the advertising industry in recent years actually directly challenge attitudes created by a print-literate culture. Heaths work on low4

These are to name but two examples; it would be too exhaustive a task to do here, but examining the body of Coca-Cola advertising in this way, as an epic poem to be deconstructed into its mnemonic units, would be a fascinating and I believe, revealing task. 5 Seth Godins Purple Cow theory makes a similar point; the bizarre is memorable. (Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable) 6 It would be interesting to track the vast number of blog posts and column inches generated by planners and industry commentators alike in trying to rationalise and explain the logic behind the success of a drumming Gorilla. 7 Ong reminds us that until the introduction of writing there was in fact no word for plagiarism in Latin. It was simply not a concept in oral societies. Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

attention processing for instance, essentially questions our bias towards rational, logic a bias which came from the introduction of writing.8 Likewise, Earls work on our herd naturexiv directly challenges the cult of individualism. Since the Age of Enlightenment, he laments, explanations of what it is to be human have been dominated by the notion of the individual, a notion fuelled by the introduction of the printing press. Print Ong tells us created a new sense of the private ownership of words, encouraging individual, silent reading and thought. The drift in human consciousness toward greater individualism, he comments had been served well by print. And then there is of course, the ever-constant industry debate about originality - yet another effect of the post-Caxton world. Genius, we are increasingly realising, is not an originator.9 It is a thief. Just like Homer.

Heath has questioned the suitability of the language of advertising, noting that in terms such as copywriter we have a natural bias towards the verbal.xv I would go one stage further however and argue that the bias of the advertising industry is in fact towards the world of print and literacy. We have copywriters, creative genius who write ads and write endlines, a lexicon that reveals our awkward heritage and allegiance to the closed, fixed view of the text and the story. And yet, just like Heaths and Earls theories, the new language entering the industry at the moment further challenges the world of print and literacy. Industry papers and columns are now routinely full of terms such as conversation, dialogue and word of mouth. And whether you believe in what people mean by these terms or not, their etymological heritage is never-the-less striking; it is firmly oral in nature. These terms may not hold the answers to the future of advertising but they certainly signal a fascinating and growing frustration with the post-Caxton world of storytelling. Whether we realise it or not, a shift in our lexicon has organically already begun.

Digital is allowing us to experiment with oral story-telling techniques

Interestingly, alongside this subconscious frustration with the post-Caxton creation of storytelling is another frustration amongst some commentators that digital is somehow undermining the world of print as we know it. Last year Nicolas Carr summed up a long running fear by provocatively asking, Is Google Making Us Stupid10? The web he argued, is changing the way people read, destroying our
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Platos philosophically analytic thought, as has been seen (Havelock 1963) was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes (Ong Writing Restructures Consciousness) 9 This is something that Faris Yakob has continually drawn attention to, most notably in his referencing of T.S Eliots famous notion that immature poets imitate but mature poets steal in the title of his blog, Talent Imitates, Genius Steals. 10 The fact that Carr chooses to use the word stupid reveals a print-literate bias of the type Heath draws our attention to; the automatic assumption that anything that moves us away from logical, rationality is somehow lower and base and challenges rational, intellectual man. Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

ability to deep read and leaving us instead with a tendency to exhibit what he calls staccato reading as we flit from one source to another. Carrs language in the article is revealing. He talks of the crazy quilt of the internetxvi - an interesting metaphor given that oral storytelling has long been linked to quilting in many cultures; an art form that stitches fragments together in a patchwork, just like our memory does. Digital is not making us stupid; it is simply oral in nature.

Many have noted that as a medium, digital has a lot more in common with pre-literate oral cultures in the way that it treats texts than it does with print cultures. In his comparative analysis of literate and pre-literate storytelling techniques, Ong notes for instance that oral stories were empathetic and participatory.xvii Two terms regularly applied to digital. Likewise when William Gibson declared that remix is the very nature of digital it was something that Parry could equally have said about oral cultures thirty years before him. Indeed, the retelling of Cadburys Gorilla ad by online audiences who re-stitched the images to fit different songs was nothing more than a twentieth century version of the way poems spread through a culture centuries ago. Rhapsodised in the truest sense of the word; re-stitched and reconstructed as they were retold.11 We are seeing the reappearance of many oral story-telling techniques as more and more brands experiment in digital. Ong also notes for example that another common theme of oral narratives is their use of the nonlinear, in media res technique: in which the epic poet hastens into the action and precipitates the hearer into the middle of things often without any linear explanation. It is a technique we are increasingly seeing mimicked by brands online. Both Philips Carousel filmxviii and the Halo 3 campaign film Believexix take viewers on a journey through a scene frozen in time, throwing them into a scene of battle in much the same way oral poets did.

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Cadburys Drumming Gorilla ad was remixed by numerous people online it became something of an internet phenomenon, so much so that one version made by a fan using a Bonnie Tyler track was subsequently used as a TV spot a few months after the original Agency version. As The Telegraph and other mainstream media sources reported Cadbury has produced a new version of its popular drumming gorilla advert after receiving hundreds of remixes from members of the public. (Cadburys gorilla drums to Bonnie Tyler in remixed th advert Telegraph 5 September 2008) Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

In Media Res: Adam Berg plunges the audience into the heart of the action with no traditional linear explanation with his film Carousel.

In Media Res: Xbox also plunges the audience into the heart of the action with its Believe campaign.

Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

There is not space here to discuss in any depth all the experiments being undertaken by brands but one thing is clear; digital has given us the fluidity to experiment with mnemonic storytelling techniques and not surprisingly those brands that are doing it well are, consciously or not, harking back to the themes and techniques of oral poets,12 the masters of such storytelling techniques.

A new chapter

I began with a reference to Penguin, blaming books and the romantic ideals introduced by writing and printing for preventing advertising from fully embracing the techniques of mnemonic storytelling; for encouraging us to dismiss and reject those who we should be holding up as the ancient masters of our industry. I believe however, that whilst this may be the case, we can also take (or perhaps steal) an important lesson from the enemy. Last year the publisher launched a project entitled Digital fiction from Penguin.xx Six authors were commissioned to adapt six classic stories for the web, to re-tell familiar tales using a range of non-linear narrative techniques What was interesting was how the brand defined itself. It no longer defined itself as a publisher of books. At the top of the site, instead Penguin simply declared we tell stories.

Like Penguin, I believe, we too need to acknowledge a linguistic shift in what we do. Because we dont write ads. We tell memorable stories. Just like Homer did.

Word count: 2,092

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It is perhaps no co-incidence that we are seeing many old oral narrative themes emerging during these early experiments in mnemonic storytelling techniques; Ong identifies a number of common themes including heroworshipping and an agnostic tone. Enthusiastic description of physical violence often marks oral narrative he notes, commenting that praise goes with the highly polarized, agnostic, oral world of good and evil, virtue and vice, villains and heros. Carousel, Halo 3 and the award-winning ARG created by Warner Brothers for the launch of The Dark Knight all play to these traditions. Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling

References
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacesick/3228382703/in/set-72157614482499746/ Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore; The Medium is the Massage iii Wendy Gordon; Brands on the brain: new scientific discoveries to support new brand thinking iv Daniel L. Schacter: Searching for memory the brain, the mind and the past v Robert Heath: 50 Years Using The Wrong Model of TV Advertising vi Daniel L. Schacter: Searching for memory the brain, the mind and the past vii The metaphor of a palaeontologist constructing a dinosaur from bone fragments is one used by Daniel L. Schacter in Searching for memory the brain, the mind and the past viii Walter J. Ong; Orality and Literacy The Technologising of the Word ix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_narrative x Walter J. Ong; Orality and Literacy The Technologising of the Word xi Virginia Valentine: Semiotics, what now, my love? MRS Conference 2007 xii Robert Heath: 50 Years Using The Wrong Model of TV Advertising xiii Walter J. Ong; Orality and Literacy The Technologising of the Word xiv Mark Earls, Advertising to the herd: how understanding our true nature challenges the ways we think about advertising and market research International Journal of Market Research xv Robert Heath: 50 Years Using The Wrong Model of TV Advertising xvi Nicolas Carr: Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Atlantic magazine xvii Walter J. Ong; Orality and Literacy The Technologising of the Word xviii Philips Carousel, Adam Berg http://www.cinema.philips.com/ xix Xbox 360: Halo 3 Believe Case Study http://creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=c5f3545d xx Digital Fiction From Penguin http://wetellstories.co.uk/
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Candidate no: 2001 I believe we need to go back to the old oral origins of storytelling