The Relentless Questioning of Prevailing Narratives

I know, the title makes this sound like I'm trying to be smart - well, I am. But, let's keep moving...

A narrative can be defined as "a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or set of values". Having worked in Marketing and Advertising for a number of years, one learns to either tap into prevailing narratives, or combat them on behalf of our partners. For example, "insurance is boring and necessary". We successfully turned that to an entertainment platform with GEICO that educated our targets that "15 minutes could save you 15%" with a friendly Gecco. Our initiatives also found ways of saving GEICO money by driving you to the Web where we wouldn't have to staff a call center by saying, "It's so easy a caveman can do it".

One of the most difficult things about joining or combating a narrative is determining what is real or true. Just because they prevail doesn't make them accurate.  All of us are continuously bombarded with information - but is it good information? I believe that in most cases if you don't listen to the media, you are uninformed and if you do listen to the media you are misinformed. Not in all cases, but this has been my experience.

We need to keep in mind as well that in many cases there is a vocal minority and/or a virtually silent majority. It's easy to make noise online these days. All it takes is 1 video on YouTube that gets shared or "goes viral" (urgh, I hate that term), and suddenly it's the truth. Whatever your beliefs are on vaccines, do a search for "vaccines are dangerous" and you'll see a net result of over 20 MILLION pages! yikes.

So, where are we? The Relentless Questioning of Prevailing Narratives. As Advertisers, Marketers, Researchers and frankly - as humans, we need to question how narratives come about, where they come from and what equity they possess. Here are a few items to keep in mind when figuring out prevailing narratives:

1. Trusted Data. First party data is typically more trustworthy as you know where it is from and how and when it was obtained. Make your site/app etc work harder by collecting your own data.
2. When you can't use first party data, ask your partner data provider specific questions as to how it was obtained, when it was obtained and where was it referred from (ie Search terms, referrer site/blog etc).
3. Do a search for what it is exactly that you want to own. I know this is basic, but we're currently testing taglines for one of our partners and simply looking and categorizing what it is we want to own told us not only what we're up against from a Search Term perspective but how the competition is positioning themselves and exactly what it is that they believe.
4. Keep your message(s) dynamic. Know that there are different behaviors on different social media outlets - there are different user behaviors on (for example) Twitter vs Instagram etc. Use this to your advantage to tailor your message to the platform on which it resides.
5. And finally, be creative when coming up with a strong "reason to believe" message on behalf of your brand and/or partner. Sooner or later the truth comes out. I was dealing with Tylenol when they were getting raked over the coals for "metal flakes in children's liquid Tylenol". But, as it turned out, it was a few flakes of duct tape that got WAY blown out of proportion online.

Thanks for reading everyone.

Jonathan Sackett - President and CCO of allscope, Board of Directors of Mashburn Enterprises, former collegiate sprinter and rapper - and - the baddest adman on the planet!