Storytelling with Technology

Advertising has always tried to embrace the latest technology. Harking back to the early days of print, followed by the advent of radio and television.

However, early executions of these mediums often came up short. Many thought by having a brand advertising on these mediums it was enough to dazzle their audience.

In the late 1950’s there was a great deal of confusion on how best to advertise on television. Just have a look at the first ever TV ad broadcast in the UK and you’ll see how random and laboured the messaging was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g0P_ETSwko

Lessons were quickly learned, having your brand on the latest piece of technology was not enough. The audience may have been captivated by technology alone initially, but the novelty of it had quickly worn off, the message wasn’t getting across. It was time to get creative and use these new mediums to their best ability, to connect and engage with this new audience, appeal to their motivations and desires to tell brand stories.

What followed was an era of great print, radio and television advertising from the 1960’s to the 1990’s. Ads became more simple, more singular in their messaging, there was still a lot of rubbish. But the good work was really good.

Of course, along came – the internet, and that changed everything. In our ever-changing digital world, the audience is much more fragmented, more mobile and has shorter attention spans. Consumers are adopting technology at a much faster pace and it’s not slowing down.

There is more pressure than ever for us to adopt and innovate, as advertising and technology businesses are more closely aligned than ever. In a lot of cases advertising has merged with or set-up innovation companies with the sole purpose of developing new technology to market brands.

Now when a new piece of technology comes along it’s followed by a great deal of hype and excitement – it’s the new kid on the block, it’s the flavour of the month, the talk of the town and there is huge pressure to attach a brand to it.

While it may be exciting to be an early adopter or first to market with some of these innovations, it’s important to do it for the right reasons. Some brands are scrambling to use the latest technology with little or no brand story. Yes, some of the technology is impressive, but does the audience recognise what the brand is trying to say?

As practitioners it’s up to us to find the best way to communicate the brand story to our audience, whether it’s using ink, data capture or virtual reality to make sure they are engaged with that story. Technology should enable the story, not be the story.

Of course technology will keep evolving and we will endeavour to keep up. However our audience will not change. They will still be human, will all that entails, with real lives, motivations and desires, ready to be told a story.

At ICAN, we do our utmost to be up to date with the latest technologies, and figure out how to apply them in a meaningful way to the brands we work with. This is a very different process to traditional advertising and often involves keeping our fingers on the pulse with the latest innovations. A great deal of time is spent researching, testing and even physically acquiring the technology to just to mess around with it to find its strengths and weaknesses.

We did just this in two recent projects. Collaborating heavily with our technology partners, we stress tested each piece of technology, questioned their developers about any potential pitfalls. Most importantly of all, educated them on what we would like it to do for the brand.

Tennents Lager was long associated with the music scene. However it’s target audience was now a younger digitally savvy audience, who are gradually tuning out of traditional advertising, but consuming more and more content via their mobile phone.

We researched heavily what piece of technology would be suitable to answer the client’s brief, yet engage this audience. The result was Tunetap, a web responsive mobile app that acted like a jukebox in music bars and clubs.

Tunetap events were advertised and users were encouraged to use the app with prizes embedded in the music playlists.

https://vimeo.com/103817552

permanent tsb wanted to engaged with the house hunter audience and associate it’s simple mortgage process with a piece of technology that would help house hunters find a home and reinforce its proposition that they were an ally to their customer.

We discovered that the Periscope App was ideal for the task. It provided house hunters who were too busy to visit every home with a tool to view properties they were interested in via their mobile.

We partnered with estate agents to carry out viewings through the app to a mobile audience. Each viewing was broadcast live on social media, then uploaded to a video hub on partner publisher.

https://vimeo.com/146644618

If you’re interested in some more recent international work that utilises new technology to tell brand stories, check this great work out!

NETFLIX – Socks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi6RLrJrjLQ

Pepsi – Unbelievable bus shelter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go9rf9GmYpM

Lockheed Martin – Field Trip to Mars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWClyQkA32s

Peruvian red Cross – hashtag for life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x56ss54WZs

ING – The Next Rembrandt

https://www.nextrembrandt.com/