Ads That Do Not Sell

When an ad won’t sell its product it embodies a failure of storytelling

A televised commercial represents a beautifully condensed form of storytelling or talesmanship as I call it. In a mere 30 seconds all the bits of a full story must be gathered together, put into an effective order and presented to the audience in a powerful manner.

The ad also presents us with a sort of tale that has a very simple intention or aim. An ad means to get its audience to buy the featured product.

There are a few ways the talesman telling the ad’s tale can use to prod his audience to buy. The way this is usually done is by making the audience want that product — appealing to their emotions. The most straightforward way is by informing the audience about the superior virtues of the product — appealing to their intellect. He can also make the audience fear or doubt themselves or their lives should they fail to buy the product — appealing to their fear.

Whatever the means or strategy the talesman uses, he can measure the success of the ad simply by tracking sales for the product before and after the ads run.

Over the past few years I’ve seen an increasing number of ads that take a very strange angle on selling. These ads make it difficult for their audience to grasp why they should buy the product — it often becomes hard to understand even what the product is at all.

This sorry state of affairs shows us some of the basics of talesmanship: in order to succeed the talesman must—

1. Know his tale
2. Know his audience
3. Know how he intends his tale to affect his audience
4. Know how to tell his tale so that it does affect his audience in the way that he intends

These are the Four Legs of Talesmanship. The talesman must balance all four under his workbench whenever he takes up his tale. Without them we are lost, or groping blindly in a strange land. And yet at the same time the master talesman will hold these four legs so snugly in his heart that he seems not to know them at all; but he does; he does.

And the best way for us apprentice talesmen to balance upon these four legs is to act out both parts at once, and be both the teller and the audience of our own tale as we tells it.