Advertising PerspectivesFeatured

Our Top 10 Takeaways from the Future of StoryTelling

By October 9, 2018 No Comments
Future of Story Telling Banner

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.”

For marketers and brands, it’s more than a mantra. It’s a mandate.

Every October, at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, the invite-only Future of StoryTelling (FoST) conference brings together artists, agency execs, brands, journalists, technologists, filmmakers, academics, social impact organizations and other thought leaders to explore “what’s next in narrative”. Our Director of Strategy & Partnerships, Peter Field, has attended the past few years, each time emerging more dialed into what the future holds for our own business and excited to apply that thinking to our clients.

“The common thread through all of it is the common thread through all of us: story,” says Peter. “We talk about 6- and 15-second ads, we engage an amazing curation of Virtual Reality work, we take in pioneering research and we’re led through the thought processes of media & agency pioneers.” But it’s not all about work. After filling their brains with knowledge and ideas, “We break for dinner, then wrap up the evening with a dozen or so mind-blowing performances on the main stage.”

Fresh from last week’s FoST, we asked Peter to provide his Top 10 Takeaways:

1

Both brands and marketers are challenged by the volume of quality content needed for a full funnel social advertising approach.
2

Of those that aren’t using a full-funnel approach, only a minority are taking steps to adapt and future-proof their organizations.
3

Data IS informing decisions. If it's not informing yours, it's informing your competitors' decisions.
4

Having a bunch of data is (still) not the same thing as data informing decisions.
5

Being smart with just one refined insight from data can make a big difference. Learning how to communicate that insight upstream internally makes a bigger difference.
6

You have to version creative. You have to version creative. You have to version creative.
7

You have to version creative.
8

"Brand" is still SUPER important, but its meaning has changed.
9

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are changing minds and markets right now. It's not 20 years in the future. This is as revolutionary—and as lasting—as the advent of websites.
10

That may not mean you need to create a VR or AR experience right away. But it does mean acknowledging that some people are doing it really well, and thinking about what that means for you.

Putting just a portion of this thinking to work is a huge change-management undertaking for many agencies. At By & Large, we’re encouraged that so much of it is inherent to what we do every day. But there’s no time to pat ourselves on the back…there’s work to be done and stories to tell.