What is storytelling?
Storytelling is the oldest technology for holding attention, applied to brands. Instead of listing what a product does, a story shows someone who wants something, what stands in the way and what changes. A founder who built a company from one bag, an instructor whose class saved someone's year, a city getting its team back: these are stories, and the brand is in them without being the point of them.
In an agency, storytelling is the discipline behind brand films, documentaries, campaign narratives and the arc of a social series. It is also a way of thinking that shapes everything else: a logo reveal, a product launch and even a sizzle reel are better when they have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Why it matters
Why storytelling matters
People remember stories and forget claims. A list of features is processed and discarded; a story is lived through, which is why audiences will give ten minutes to a documentary about a brand that they would not give ten seconds to an ad for it. Stories also carry emotion, and emotion is what moves people from knowing a brand to caring about it.
Storytelling is also honest in a way advertising often is not. A real story about real people cannot be faked for long, which is why brands with good stories tend to be brands with something true to say.
In practice
How storytelling works in practice
- 01
It starts with finding the story, which is research as much as writing: interviews, time with the people involved, a search for the moment where something changed. A writer or director shapes that material into a structure, with a protagonist, a tension and a resolution, and a treatment describes how it will look and sound on screen.
- 02
Production captures it, and the edit finds it again, because a true story rarely arrives in order. Documentary work is cut from hours of footage down to the minutes that carry the arc; scripted work is shot to a plan and refined in post. The finished piece is then cut into the lengths each channel needs without losing the shape that made it work.
At RIOT
Storytelling at RIOT
Our documentary work is storytelling in its purest form: the Lew Frankfort "Bag Man" documentary for Coach, the SoulCycle instructor series of seventeen films, each built around one person's story, and The Medusa film for Tiffany & Co., which told the story behind a single piece of jewelry. The brand is in every one of them; the story is what people watch.
Watch out
What people get wrong about storytelling
Calling everything a story. A list of product benefits with a voiceover is not a story; it has no one who wants anything and nothing that changes. The other mistake is making the brand the hero. The audience is the hero, or the person on screen is; the brand is the thing that helped. Work that forgets this feels like advertising wearing a documentary's clothes.
