Stories Run on Conflict

Okay, speaking of Star Wars, let's stop for a moment and imagine Star Wars without Darth Vader.

We'd open on young Skywalker, maybe, holding his light saber and then…uh, and then he puts it down and goes inside, probably for dinner or something.

The moral of this nonstory is: If you don't have conflict, you don't have a story.

All drama is conflict. Every story you've ever heard, read, or seen has had conflict at its core. Sadly, this observation seems to be lost on many clients and agencies. The reason is that most of the time clients want to show how great life is after purchasing their fine products. It's a happy place where nobody ever has cavities, everybody's car always starts, and no one is overdrawn at the bank.

The problem when there's no bad guy is that we short-circuit the structure of story and start at the happy ending. I don't know about you, but life in Pleasantville is boring. Conflict* is what makes things interesting. Tension makes us lean in to see what's goin' on.

When Everything is Okay, We Aren't Interested

You will never see this headline in the newspaper: “Area Bank Not Robbed.” Yes, we're all pleased the bank wasn't robbed today, but we're also not interested. Our disinterest doesn't mean we're bad. It's simply natural to tune out the status quo and tune back in only when the status changes.

In Seducing Strangers, author and Mad Men consultant Josh Weltman explained why conflict and negativity are such effective ways to communicate.

If a jaguar is near and a monkey screams in monkey-speak, ‘Hey! Danger! Danger! There's a jaguar—get out of here!’ not only do monkeys, but also toucans, deer, and any other jaguar prey hearing the warning will all clear the area. In the jungle, the researchers found, warnings are understood and obeyed.…Negative ads work because people behave like animals. We are wired to heed warnings.¹

Our brains are wired to heed warnings. This is not to say all ads need to be negative. It's just that, to be interesting, a story needs both positive and negative forces in play.

Entire brand dynasties have been built on what one might call “warning signals.” FedEx, for example. For the first decade of their existence, they aired commercials showing all the horrible things that happened to corporate drones foolish enough to use another service.

Goodby's “Got milk?” campaign from the '90s is another strong campaign built entirely upon a negative premise. The strategist who helped create it, Jon Steele, called it a “deprivation strategy.” A big peanut butter sandwich without milk? Who wants that, right? Or cookies without milk? Not gonna happen. whipple5gotmilk

Without is Usually More Interesting than With

Let's compare Steele's without-milk strategy to the way agencies have been selling milk for 100 years: “MILK BUILDS STRONG BONES.” It's true, yes, but who cares? Do you? It's boring because there's no story. It bypasses any problem and cuts right to the happy ending. (Yay! Strong bones…! Really?) Here's the scary part (or rather the boring part): In your career you're going to run into a whole lot of advertising briefs that ask you to cut to the happy ending. It's still how most briefs are written.

Take this brief, for example, for a natural foods retailer: “We believe fresh food means better health.”

Sounds like a workable brief, right? That's what we thought when we first heard it, but if you sit down and try to work with it, like we did, you may end up agreeing it's not very inspiring. It doesn't go anywhere. The reason it doesn't go anywhere is this: Creativity happens in response to a problem, and the statement “fresh food means better health” isn't a problem, it's a solution. And solutions are about as interesting as filled-in crossword puzzles. The interesting part is over. Which is why the cops in the movies are always saying, “Move along, folks, nothin' to see here.” There isn't anything to see here once the problem's gone.

In my experience, the best strategies and the best work usually come from a place of conflict and tension: strategies built on top of—and powered by—tensions. When a strategy can be built on top of one of these tensions, great work fairly bursts out of it. Like a volcano along the edge of two tectonic plates, there's a natural energy at these points of stress—a conflict of opinions, or colors, or themes—that make it a lively birthplace for ideas of force and substance.

And these tensions can come from pretty much anywhere.

Identify and Leverage the Central Conflicts Within Your Client's Company or Category

The tensions can come from anywhere. They can be thematic tensions, category, or cultural tensions. For example, a thematic tension might be “man vs. machine.” Apple's been exploiting a variety of that tension since 1984.

Tension can also come from conflicts that exist inside any given industry. Take the financial category. I happen to be angry at all the fat-cat bankers; really angry. They got rich crashing our economy, tipped their caddies with our overdraft fees, and nobody spent a day in jail. So perhaps the conflict I work with would be Wall-Street-vs.-Main-Street. Or lying vs. truth. In Baked In, authors Winsor and Bogusky put it this way:

Think about the categories you work in and the conflicts that exist there. If you're in the traditional energy business, it's pretty obvious that you have a conflict with the environmental movement. If you're in the financial world, there's a lot of conflict around public trust. The cultural conflicts in your category are probably a bit subtler. What are the big, hairy cultural conflicts affecting your company that everyone knows about but no one really likes to discuss?²

You could also explore leveraging cultural tensions. For example, American culture is conflicted about food. We love our Triple Patty-Melt Bacon Bombs and 44-Cheese Pizzas. We also love skinny jeans and weight-loss plans.

As you can imagine, there are conflicts all over the place—our culture, our language, the brand, the category—everywhere.

1. Republican vs. Democrat
2. Hot vs. cold
3. Love vs. hate
4. Religion vs. science
5. Cheap vs. expensive
6. Big business vs. small business
7. Red vs. green

Here's why all this conflict stuff is worth talking about.

Wherever you find polarities or opposing energies, you'll find conflict. And where you find conflict, you'll find the rudiments of story. The trick, then, is to pit these opposing energies against each other and look for stories to emerge.

To Spark Story, Start with This-vs-That

Okay, what if I told you, “I need you to show me a campaign for Coca-Cola tomorrow by lunch.” I might ship my pants, like in that K-Mart spot. But what if the orders were, “I need you to do a Coke-vs.-Pepsi ad.”

Wow. That feels different, doesn't it? When the problem is put to me this way, for some reason, I feel ideas start to form. I feel a little traction forming under my tires. I have a general sense that maybe I should try this first, then maybe that. Things start to bubble up out of my subconscious.

So, here's what I do. (It's kind of silly, but it sometimes starts the storytelling engine.) Draw a rectangle with a line down the middle (Figure 8.2) and imagine the line represents the term “vs.” Now let the two spaces on either side of the line represent any kind of conflict that works for you: life with the product vs. life without it. Our product vs. their product. Or before vs. after.

The conflicts we leverage can be a big as good vs. evil or as banal as Tide vs. stains. With some products the conflicts are kind of obvious. For example, with bug killer we could start with bug killer vs. bugs. Or we could do creepy live cockroaches vs. satisfyingly dead ones. Or we could do Bug Monsters vs. civilization. All these conflicts suggest stories.

Here's the fun part. If a conflict or tension isn't apparent in a product or category, fine; make one up. For example, where's the tension in, say, bananas? Bananas. Couldn't be more of a commodity product, right? Well, our list of story-starters might look like:

1. Good food vs. junk food
2. Health vs. obesity
3. Has its own wrapper vs. canned foods
4. Ready-to-eat vs. crap you gotta cook
5. Yellow vs. “boring” colors

As silly as some of these polarities are, I'm pretty sure we could build a story around one of 'em and create some advertising way more interesting than “bananas have potassium.” The lesson here is, if we can do this for bananas, we can probably do it for other products, other categories.*

So start your own list. Then go all Boy Scouts on it and start rubbing the polarities together to generate sparks, heat, and story.

Brands as Archetypes

An archetype is popularly described as a recurring symbol or motif in literature, art, or mythology. The Villain, for example; villains have been causing trouble in stories back before Homer's Odyssey. There's also the Wise Old Man, the Outlaw, the Trickster, the Magician, the Hero; the list goes on and on, and it's a list we all know by heart because archetypes are built into our movies, our fairy tales, and sitcoms.

Here's where I'm goin' with this: To get your story engine started, try seeing your brand as an archetype. By dint of the character traits in each one, archetypes suggest story. The Hero saves the day. The Outlaw fought the law and the law won. So what archetype feels right for your brand? Maybe you're working on Anacin. Okay, Anacin as Defender suggests a story, right? Or Allstate Insurance. Insurance defends us, right? From accidents, disasters, mayhem.

Now, obviously, brand-as-archetype doesn't make the creative process this fast or simple, and I'm sure the creative team at Leo Burnett who created Mayhem would probably tell me to shut up already about archetypes (“We just came up with it one day, alright??”). So I'll shut up about it. I'm just sayin', when the ideas aren't coming, brand-as-archetype may help start your storytelling engine.

Campaigns vs. Platforms

When you first join an agency as junior creative person, you'll probably be assigned 50 banner ads or 50 radio spots. Your first months will almost certainly be spent doing all the crap jobs senior people hated doing: say, rewriting copy on some website or resizing a full-page ad to a half-page. Yes, you've landed a job in a creative industry but for a while, there will be little for you to brag about at parties. (“Hey, ya know that little survey card that came along with your phone bill? Yeah, I did that.”)

So you do your time. Because you know, one day, you'll get a chance to work on bigger projects, maybe steer an entire brand. It may happen during a new business pitch. Or maybe the agency has to reposition an old brand. Or maybe the client's launching a new product.

When agencies get a chance to shake the Etch-A-Sketch on a brand and start over, they often find it's best to work toward the highest place they can, a place where a brand can live for a long time.

Which makes this the perfect time to talk about brand platforms.

Platforms Are Ideas That Create Ideas

A platform is not a campaign.

For the purposes of discussion, I'll define a campaign as a series of ads held together by similar messaging, or typeface, art direction, or architecture. Campaigns can be great. For example, take this one for the computer-assisted parallel-parking feature in the new VWs (Figure 8.3). It's an extremely good One-Show-winning campaign and is another great example of the power of simplicity. (We'll come back to this campaign in a minute.)

A platform, on the other hand, is a world. And here's the important part. It's a world with its own rules.

Think of a Campaign as a Movie and a Platform as a Hollywood Franchise

What distinguishes the kind of movie that becomes a Hollywood franchise? For my money, any movie that's “franchisable” creates more than just a story but an entire world: one from which many stories can spring. Take Harry Potter, for example. Author J. K. Rowling built a rich, magical world where fireplaces were travel ports and talking hats sorted students. However fanciful her world of muggles and magic was, all the Potter stories obeyed an internal logic and ran according to the same set of rules.

Here's why the idea of rules is important: Once you've created the rules for a new world, they can be used again and again to spin other stories; prequels, sequels, and spin-offs.

Here's an example of a great platform with lots of rules.

Coke Zero's brief to Crispin was simple: communicate Coke Zero tastes as good as Coca-Cola. In their final executions, two actors posing as brand managers for the main Coke brand were filmed trying to hire real-life lawyers to sue Coke Zero—for what they call “taste infringement.” whipple5zero

The rules of this world, then, were all about courtrooms or lawyers; you know, all those conventions we've seen in every TV courtroom drama—“I object” and “guilty as charged” and “order in the court.” These rules from the legal world then allowed the creatives to create other stories using legal themes and memes. One such spin-off for Coke Zero was a subcampaign about an ambulance-chaser of a lawyer trying to file a class-action suit: “Are you a victim of ‘Taste Confusion’?”

As you can see, a platform is an idea that creates ideas. And the richer the set of rules in your world, the more stories you can pull out of it. This is why platforms often last much longer than campaigns. To see why, let's go back to that wonderful campaign for VW's computer-assisted parallel parking.

As great as that campaign is, it's not a world. Well, it is a world, but it's a small one with just the one rule—you change what's on either side of the parking space. So, the next ad can maybe have, say, a handicapped van on one side and a Hell's Angel's motorcycle on the other. We could probably do a few more, but how long can the campaign last? The point here is, the more rules to your world, the better.

Two Signs You Have a Platform: It Fits on a Post-It Note, and It Starts Talking to You and Won't Shut Up

It's kind of weird, but if you can't write your idea on a Post-It note, it's probably not a very big idea. Big ideas can be summed up in a sentence. If you find yourself needing more than a sentence or two to set up an idea, well, your idea probably isn't there yet (Figure 8.4).

Take that Coke Zero premise, for example. I guess I'd write the Post-It note something like, “Coca-Cola company sues itself for ‘Taste Infringement.’” Easy-peasy. The whole thing fits on a Post-It note; in 49 characters. We could fit it in a tweet; a couple of times, in fact. Here's another platform on a Post-It, this one from one of my students.

It fits on a Post-It note, and because of all the dog-vs.-cat rules we've learned from a lifetime of dog-vs.-cat cartoons, movies, and YouTube clips, the platform starts talking.

1. Dogs are friendly, cats are aloof.
2. Dogs like bones, cats like milk.
3. Dogs like postmen, cats like mice.
4. Dogs fetch, cats not so much.
5. One goes BOW WOW, one goes MEOW.

But they both agree, there's good stuff at PetSmart.

The coolest part is that as soon as this student spoke this idea aloud in class, the platform worked instantly and everybody started throwing out other ideas. When you finally hit on a working platform, you'll feel a release of energy, as all the rules start talking and the possibilities begin to unfold. The rules of the new world will be obvious and plentiful, and the fun begins when you start recombining the rules to tell a brand story in a variety of ways.

A platform isn't just a story. It's the mother of stories.

Truth + Conflict = Platform

I'm not trying to write a formula for the creative process. But folks, I gotta say, in the classroom I've seen this formula work. Once they learned it, beginning ad students started coming into class bearing platform ideas I'd be proud to present to any client anywhere. See if it works for you.

1. Start with the truest thing you can say about the brand.
2. Then start looking for conflicts/tensions that happen as a result of that truth.

We talked about the “truest thing” before. (See page 48.) There's no correct answer, and it's almost never mentioned in the brief because the truest thing is often something the client would rather deny or minimize.

Here's a student example for Crocs, the shoes. What's the truest thing we could say about Crocs? Well, the client would probably want us to say “comfortable” (and they are kinda comfortable) but the truest thing—according to this student and everyone else in class that day—is that Crocs are ugly. (Obviously, getting the client to agree with this would be hard, but stay with me.)

Okay so, UGLY is the truth we'll work with. Now let's play around with UGLY + CONFLICT. What conflicts arise as a result of that truth? Remember a conflict can be any opposing forces we might use to generate story. What conflicts come from ugly shoes? Well, if you wear ugly shoes to the dance, you'll probably be going home alone. And so the student wrote this formula on her page and used it as her jumping off point.

The platform this student finally arrived at was “Crocs. The World's Most Comfortable Birth Control in 15 Bright Colors.” It's indeed a platform when you consider all the rules we can now borrow from the world of contraception. (“Crocs. They're 98 percent effective.”) Oh, and see how we managed to talk about comfort in a way that's engaging and believable?

Remember, TRUTH + CONFLICT isn't a rule, it's just a tool I've found sometimes helps start my storytelling engines and get me to a platform. Use it if it works for you. Here are some other platforms-on-Post-Its from my ad students.

• Reese's Peanut Butter Cups: “The tragic love story of how Peanut Butter left Jelly for Chocolate.”
• Airstream trailers (you know, the silver-lookin'ones): “Hippie on the outside, plush Republican interior.”
• eHarmony: “Works so well, Cupid ends up out of work.” (Ends up doing day jobs like assistant coach on the high school archery team.)
• Bed, Bath & Beyond has 20-percent-off coupons that don't expire: “Immortal Coupons: Good Thru the Apocalypse.”
• Tide Pods: “The fastest way to start the laundry and get out of scary basements.”