What’s Your Story?

If you caught a brand manager on the street (with a giant net and sedatives… don’t let it bite you!) and asked for a description of the Millennial consumer, you’d hear about how selfish, arrogant, and apathetic our generation is. The brand manager would mumble through the net about how Millennials don’t seem to care about anything and have little interest in value.

That is not true.

We do care! Take the following video as an example. Far from the instant gratification, kittens, and potty jokes you’d see in a 30-second viral video, this one is 8 minutes long and has a real story. It captures the imagination and holds it to the very end. All without using a single word. Check it out:

This is one of many stories told by Kseniya Simonova through sand and song alone. She is a Ukrainian artist who recently won the “Ukraine’s Got Talent” competition. In this particular video she tells a story from before her time, an account of WWII’s German invasion and occupation of Ukraine. Thanks to her performance style there is no language barrier, and with it, no emotional barrier.

Much like those in the audience, I became teary-eyed during the tale. Though I had no way of directly relating, I felt what they felt in her creation. Did you feel it, too?

I’ve watched this video multiple times. I keep wanting to re-experience it and share it with others. This is the power of a story well-told. What does it say when I can easily ignore most 30 second spots, but I’m willing to revisit something over eight minutes long?

You could make the argument that this is art, that it’s not trying to sell us something, but you’d be wrong. It’s selling us empathy. It’s selling us the pain of families torn apart by war. That’s the story being sold here and I’m buying it because it’s been told well.

A lot of brands seem to take this information as a blessing to copy Kseniya’s method of storytelling. But we won’t like a brand just because it used sand paintings to tell the same old story. We care about quality of execution, but nothing is more important than the story itself.

I say to the brand managers of the world: What’s your story? Ask yourself that question before you try advertising to us. You’ll find that the telling is in the knowing and that a story well told is a product well sold.

What would you say to the brand manager? Are you apathetic about value and mindless of others or do you get excited about stories that draw you in and inspire you to think, to feel, to act?

(If you know of other videos that tell great stories, feel free to include a link in your comment. Thanks!)