Storytelling from a professional and academic perspective: conceptual affiliations and factors of its rise in advertising

Abstract

Despite being an anglicism inherited from other disciplines, storytelling has been taking shape for some years now as one of the main weapons of advertising to achieve its objectives. Both the professional advertising performance itself and its specialised news media and its main meeting forums have been praising it as a tool to be used in order to improve the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. The speed of this idea within the brand ecosystem means that its emergence and conceptual approach are diluted by its constant application, evolution and feedback. For this reason, we conducted qualitative research through four online focus groups composed of thirty-two communication professionals whose positions play a key role in this performance: creative direction, strategic planning and advertiser. We also included a panel of academics to collate the findings from the different professional perspectives. The results indicate the lack of conceptual convergence on storytelling in advertising, its relationship with other areas of communication such as the transmedia paradigm and the existence of certain common features when it comes to pointing out which possible factors make storytelling for brands a newsworthy reality today in the advertising sector, according to its professionals. It is concluded that storytelling has always existed and that its prevalence and application in different disciplines, in addition to offering a marked conceptual dissonance, may have turned the term into an ambiguous word.