Storytelling on video - a winning way

If you haven’t seen this ad for Nike, it’s well worth watching from a storytelling point of view and to get you excited about the World Cup of course.

Actually, it’s well worth watching from several points of view. The piece is extremely well produced, edited, post-produced. It's extravagant. They've used dozens of locations, they've super-imposed backgrounds so well that you'll have a hard time figuring out which ones are real and which ones were added in the studio afterwards.

But the story is really what grips you; picturing what goes through the minds of the footballers and how they see the consequences of their actions on the field playing out in their lives. It's well worth watching.

I follow a blog by a Danish chap called Thomas Baekdal. He writes good stuff so I’m giving him a bit of a plug here. He wrote about this ad and got a bit of a hammering for it since he described it as simple to produce, which it clearly isn't. But many of the critics missed his main point, which was that the storytelling approach was a winning approach.

Tell a story and people want to listen. Advertise in the traditional way and everyone will filter it away from the start.

As Thomas Baekdal got hammered by the video production gurus on his blog, he posted another link to another story well told and much simpler in production terms. And this really brings home the point that if you tell a story and tell it well, then people will talk about it and spread the word about it.

Here it is - a short 12-minute love story almost without dialogue but very well told. It's also a particularly good example of how much of a story you can tell on video without actually saying a word.

Colm

Colm O'Callaghan is JG Communication’s Head of Operations so when he’s not blogging he’s looking after the day to day business at this wonderful communicaitons agency.
So, who’s JG Communication? We’re Sweden’s largest and, we think, ‘leading’ communications agency in Sweden. We help our clients have conversations with the people that matter most to them using the tools that matter most to us, words, sound and vision.

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