Managing the narrative arc

This is my working framework for marketing in today’s world.

Using it to find the pace and language to share our stories cross communities, cross the long span of a company’s evolution, iteratively piece by piece, over time.

In every era, we need to discover the relevant language that helps us understand our actions with intent, that work as directional signals to guide us through changing market turns.

Today, with the breakneck speed and constant interactions, with the atomic nature of our communities themselves, episodic storytelling is that framework in a nutshell.

In fact, the narratives we construct are the only design element that lets us find a path to cut through the noise, and uncover ways to coalesce collective beliefs in the face of so much activity, diversity, and division.

I came on this from looking into the language and cadence of episodic TV as a unique approach to storytelling and a new hierarchy of decision making that fits current market dynamics like a glove.

With the added twist that in this model writers are the managing storytellers, the new leadership under the moniker of a Showrunner. They are the top of the creative decision matrix, the head of how the story arc will flow to the public, analogous to how you as a company organize your approach to the world.

A good place to start if the job of Showrunner and the dynamics of Episodic TV are foreign to you, is the excellent A16 podcast with Sonal Chokshi leading a discussion with Marc Andreesen and Showtime’s quite brilliant Billions Showrunner Brian Koppelman.

Koppelman is a treat.

A renaissance man of sorts, endearing cross his many obsessions and tangents from daily meditation to Morning Pages, to writers block, the creative process, writing partnerships, and more.

He is as well, a product of the changing dynamics of visual storytelling from the dominance of traditional Hollywood and movies, to today, where serial episodic TV and the new distribution models have changed the media consumption game. And culture along with it.

There are two shifts worth noting.

The first is that in traditional Hollywood, coming out of the studio system, the hierarchy of control was always director, producer, then writer.

Directors were the leads and called the shots. This from the days where we experienced the most creative stories and the best produced presentations in movies not on the small screen, from the golden age of studios, not independents nor certainly streaming models.

A decade or so ago, this started morphing.

Serial live TV (think soap operas) introduced the episodic, diurnal pulse of engagement, with stories changing almost daily. We as the viewer became in a personal sense part of the story itself, living it daily with the on screen characters as literally part of our lives.

The writer in this paradigm, went from being what followed the production, to what led it. They were writing the viewers story, day by day.

This is most obvious today in the new studios like Amazon and Netflix where most everything is writer driven, and writers as Koppelman defines them are the Showrunners. In this newish Showrunner driven reality, production supports the narrative and the writer, not the other way around.

Narrative is truly king in every sense.

The second shift is in the iterative arc and episodic nature of the storyline.

When we moved out of the theaters to an every-screen-wherever-we-are reality, we took the story with us. The arc was not the start and stop of a movie but of a season, of multi-season, of in many cases a generation.

We lived the story daily as popular culture, as one community experiencing it together. Think of GoT and the tens of millions talking, discussing, sharing excitedly, listening to podcasts as the final episodes unwind.

Listening to Koppelman meander on, you get the sense that he and his partner start with the arc of the season itself and write to that as a backfill. A strategic story arc, like a strategic plan that changes over time, influenced by their changing moods and our collective responses to the the plot twists.

I create products and markets, not TV shows obviously.

But in the work of discovering communities of early acceptance, building cultures of developer support, thinking through the long process of launch and follow-up, of brand and product introduction, it is all about the iterative narrative arc. The long plan, the story and dialogue, and the invariable changes the market demands.

We understand that in everything we do as a company, we are part of a process, some of it controlled, much of it unexpected, but needing a living story to tie it together.

We need to think of marketing as the choreographer of sorts, the conductor even of an improv group of uncontrollable talents, where we understand directionally where we want to get to and let the ball roll forward, recalibrating as time passes.

Think about this in context of your company, product or brand needs. You will have many analogs.

It is essential in a Marshall McLuhanish kind of way that we find not a bridge, but a narrative to lean on as a platform defined over time. By a multiplicity of content strategies, events, interactions that in some inchoate way merge with the consumption habits of our customers.

I think there are more similarities than differences between the dynamics of a markets relationship to a fictional story—be it Billions, GoT, Lost, even the Sopranos–and how we build platforms for a protocol, or a brand for a DTC product, or the balance of sustainability in a fashion apparel product.

I used to believe that marketing is what bridges the distance between what you sell and what the customer thinks they bought.

Not any longer.

The times have changed and brands go way beyond and deeper than a transaction.

It’s the story you initiate that the market makes their own, in their own way, over time. That they love when you get it right, and hopefully tune back into give you another chance to fix it when you screw it up.

When it comes together, it’s their story. They are simply letting us write it for them.