One reality in media, as with politics in our post-digital age, is how quickly stories become atomised. This impacts brand equity too, as strategic communications advisor Gavin Haycock explains.
Pretty much daily we see how challenging it can be for businesses to manage narratives and talking points when new information upends their ability to anchor against what they want to broadcast.
They say what they say – it’s not what people hear.
Atomised. The word speaks to breaking bonds, taking something distinct and recasting it into different things that may or may not have much contact or connection with each other.
We see this in various story lines, rebrands and resets. We saw it before and after Davos with its theme hooked to the ‘Intelligent Age’. We see it when politicians and people discuss major things on social apps or when leaders take a hit for being asleep while a fire burns.
“Breaking up is hard to do,” American songwriter Neil Sedaka crooned in the 1960s.
‘Truth is, we lapped them, they want us gone,” Playboi Carti sings on ‘Rather Lie’ with the Atlanta rapper’s new chart-topping album Music.
Often, breaking things is the easy thing to do and telling it like it is, is not such a high bar. And if you get knocked, it’s how you dust down, switch to a back-up plan and move forward that matters.
A US cop show launched in the early 1980s took how things were and recast them to tell stories in a different way.
At one level Hill Street Blues was punk.
It was nonchalant, didn’t seem to give a damn, set in a fictional yet seemingly close-to-us US city, and ran with a blue-hue grunge vibe well before we heard that as a sound from Seattle.
The drama seemingly spat at status quo TV programming with its non-linear stories about the beat, crimes of passion, violence, exasperating lapses of reason and ‘common-sense’ conundrums.
Instead of moving through the beginning-middle-end flow we were so used to, hand-held cameras, odd-ball characters and intercut dialogue ricocheted across the screen into our living room – our heads.
Chaotic, challenging, cathartic.
It was cool.
It broke ranks.
It broke lines.
Co-creator Steven Bochco was once quoted saying: “We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. We were figuring it out on the fly.”
How many times do you hear that with a politician, a Board, CEO or business lead?
The hard fabric and soft tear of disrupting linear thinking has its place in science and cinema too.
A straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points. The shape of an object matters.
In the first Gladiator directed by Ridley Scott, the lead general turned slave says: ‘Hold the line. Stay with me’. It links multiple moments in the movie.
Consider too discordant, mind-break, non-linear movie moments in disrupters such as Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali in 1929, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange in the early 70s, David Lynch’s cult classics Eraserhead in the 70s and Mulholland Drive 30 years later or Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite just before the global pandemic.
In 1963, French author Pierre Boulle published La Planète des Singes. Within a decade his story lines were broken up and recast into a movie that would become the longest-running US science-fiction series in film history.
I wonder if at some breaking point in future, someone might say:
“Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty (digital) ape.”
Today, our film, entertainment and ‘news’ living room has moved well beyond a connected community of viewers to the realm and ‘reality’ of a largely lone digital viewer, often on the move.
This matters given how many of us read stories handheld in our ‘first sight, first screen’ age.
It’s a clear and present challenge for brands.
Take Sky News, which is navigating a move to premium content in the face of – as one headline put it – ‘linear decline’.
Several weeks before the recent news about 2,000 job cuts at Sky, the owner of Sky News, the FT’s global media editor Daniel Thomas wrote:
“As with most linear channels, Sky News is struggling to arrest a steep decline in traditional TV audiences, putting pressure on revenues as advertising moves online and where viewers increasingly use social media platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. Sky News is also facing a threat from the growth of rival linear broadcasters such as GB News, whose average audience last November exceeded that of Sky News for the first time.”
Media, message and fragmenting narratives.
Does your business and brand hold, reframe or break its story lines?
As the character Sergeant Phil Esterhaus said in each of the Hill Street Blues episodes at the precinct’s morning briefing before officers filed out into the day.
‘Hey – let’s be careful out there.”