During a recent visit to the cinema, I was surprised to see adverts for major digital brands on the big screen, ahead of the main feature.

I’ve always thought of cinema advertising as falling into one or more of the following categories:

• ads you don’t see on TV (often longer than their small screen counterparts)
• luxury names and aspirational brands (travel, spirits, fashion, financial services)
• local businesses (the pizzeria “just a short walk from this theatre…”)
• movie tie-ins (highlighting the product placement in the film you are about to see)
• seasonal themes (especially Christmas)

What struck me on this occasion were the ads by three DNBs (digitally native brands), featuring LinkedIn, Tik Tok and Audible. Despite the disparate nature of their businesses, I realised that there was a common element.

As the above-linked McKinsey report states, successful DNBs are really good at connecting with (and understanding) their audience, identifying and fulfilling very specific needs with unique solutions, and leveraging the very technology they are built on to promote their services and engage with their customers. Witness the well-timed “alerts” from food-delivery platforms in the early evening, the viral campaigns designed to enforce brand awareness, and the social media feeds designed to build customer engagement and loyalty. (Note that the report features Peleton as a poster child for its thesis, before the personal exercise brand ran into recent difficulties.)

If you look at most DNB campaigns, they are primarily generating demand via very specific human drivers:

1. Aspirational – the pure FOMO element (not unique to DNBs, of course, but they do it more subtly than many consumer brands)
2. Experiential – highlighting the tangible benefits (of mostly intangible products)
3. Socialisation – the paradox of building a trusted relationship through hyper-personalisation and constant sharing…

These three cinema ads each contained implicit “story-telling“. LinkedIn positioned itself as a platform for establishing our own narrative (telling our own truth?); Audible promoted its audio content (books and podcasts) as a means to find authentic stories that resonate with us (and this was long before the recent shenanigans over at Spotify); and Tik Tok used a well-known viral video as the basis for building community around shared stories.

Of course, story-telling is hardly a new concept in brand marketing, and has been eagerly adopted by digital brands (think of campaigns during the pandemic which have featured on-line connectivity and remote working). However, it has become an over-used technique, and is often cynically exploited in the service of corporate green-washing, jumping on social bandwagons, and blatant virtue signalling.

Call me jaded, but I’m old enough to remember the fad of consulting firms pitching their clients on building a “corporate narrative“, drawing on employee stories and customer experiences, as the foundation for those anodyne mission/vision “statements” – but they typically ended up as exercises in damage control in case the truth got out.

These particular cinema ads managed to use story-telling to create a human dimension (authenticity, connectivity, community, sharing, etc.) that is more than simply “buy our product” or “use our tech” (although obviously that’s the ultimate goal). It would be very interesting to read the briefs given to their creative agencies, given that the ads were all in the service of corporate branding.

Next week: Doctrine vs Doctrinaire