Winning the Story Wars — Our Upcoming Book

July 10, 2012 is the big day. After a year and a half of development, Winning the Story Wars is going to hit the shelves (hopefully there will still be plenty of physical stores by then). The book, published by Harvard Business Review Press, is a deep exploration of mythmaking, marketing and the shape of the future. I want to share it all right now, but I'm told if I publish all the content online, nobody will buy the book. So, I'm resisting the urge and just sharing a taste of it. I'd really love to know what you think.

Winning the Story Wars: The Prologue

A few minutes after getting home from the audition, my phone rang. I made a silent wish that it would be the director. It was.

“Jonah?”

“Yes?” I replied, trying to sound as if my nascent hopes for a career in front of the camera weren’t teetering desperately on his whim.

“Good news. I think you’re right for the part. But there is one thing.“

“Ok…”

“We’re not going to use your voice — you’ll be dubbed. I like the way you did the lines and you look perfect, but you sounded a little too, uh, squeaky.”

“Squeaky?” I felt the excitement drain out of me.

“Look, Darth Vader is supposed to be the scariest guy in the galaxy. You’re just not that scary. “

I was in little position to argue. At 9, Louis Fox was a year older than me. He was the one with the camera, the mimeographed Star Wars script and the mother willing to drive us on endless location scouts. It was his idea to remake Star Wars shot for shot. I was just a third-grader with a high-pitched voice.

“Ok,” I squeaked. “I’ll do it.”

The project, not surprisingly, took a while to get off the ground. Louis and I spent the first summer poring over catalogs filled with masks we could not afford, checking out dirt patches that failed to meet even our low standards for an extra-terrestrial desert and unsuccessfully trying to convince his bookish sister to play Princess Leia.

In fact, for twenty years, the project was on hold. But in 2005, we finally launched our own version of Star Wars on the Internet. Within a year, it would get more than 20 million views, be screened at film festivals around the world, and earn us a fan letter from Lucasfilms. And just as he’d always planned it, Louis got to do the voice of Darth Vader. Only it wasn’t me that he was dubbing over, it was a Russet potato playing the part of the Dark Lord.

Our movie had morphed considerably over the years from a two-hour retelling of the classic sci-fi fantasy into a five-minute advertisement for organic food. We called it Grocery Store Wars and it starred a complete cast of bad puns — Cuke Skywalker, Chewbroccoli and of course, the infamous Darth Tater. Not exactly what we’d had in mind but it was hard to argue with the results.

++

That disappointing phone call of two decades past was on my mind as I paced the hotel room, trying desperately to turn the presentation I had prepared into something coherent. I was about to give a lecture to five hundred eager marketing professionals looking for clues as to why Store Wars, and its equally popular progenitor The Meatrix, an exploration of the evils of industrial meat farming, had been so explosively successful. These short spoof pieces were an experimental mix between entertainment and advertisement and they had gotten the Internet to deliver on its promise of explosive results for very little money.   Everyone knew that free distribution and easy sharing had torn down the barriers to the media marketplace. You didn’t need to buy a spot on TV or rent a billboard to reach millions anymore. In those days, just before YouTube, everyone was trying to figure out how to use video to go from zero to world famous in 60 seconds. And we had done it. We had created a piece of Internet history — twice. And I had absolutely no idea how.

I pictured myself on the ballroom stage, my movies projected behind me. At 29, I figured I looked about right for the part of young online marketing guru. And then I’d open my mouth and the words that would come out would make me sound just as I had at eight.

“Our ads work because they’re funny.” Squeak. “They work because they’re spoofs of movies people really like.” Squeak, squeak. “They’re not too long?”

I had always done my creative work on feel, following my gut to whatever excited me creatively. I paid little attention to research or to process or to reflection, for that matter. This way of working had served me well. Louis and I had built a successful national creative firm focused on social change. We’d done a number of notably successful projects that pushed forward the causes of human rights, environmental protection and socially responsible business. We just had no idea why some of our projects had become cultural phenomena while others just fizzled. And I hadn’t bothered to try to figure it out before I agreed to this talk. I had just followed my gut to the edge of a cliff.

I was hit with a wave of regret that every creative person I know encounters regularly. It’s the feeling of being a fraud — a vehicle for occasional, random, and unrepeatable creative success. To make matters worse, I felt I had stumbled into a field in which I didn’t really belong. I had never identified myself as a marketer or intended to be one. Instead, I saw myself as a creative person with a passion for ideas — ideas I wanted to share to help make the world a better place. I had not yet realized that this new media landscape of unprecedented competition between ideas has made us all marketers. Anyone who wants influence these days — whether it’s to push forward a social cause, to sell products, or simply to change the way people think — has no choice but to step into our global media marketplace and embrace this unlikely new job title. I embrace it now but I hadn’t then. 

I needed to find my bearings and fast.

It was in that sorry state that I Googled both The Matrix and Star Wars — the two films upon which my successes had been based — to see what, if anything, they had in common, hoping for some clue as to why they were so imaginatively powerful that even spoofs created years after their theatrical releases could capture the imagination and compel the actions of millions.

That one search changed everything. It was the tornado that swept me up out of my black-and-white world of communications and deposited me into a Technicolor realm of endless possibilities for breakthrough, crushing my wicked witch of self-doubt in the process.

What I discovered was that both films had been written, intentionally, to reflect ancient mythological formula. These stories were merely recent adaptations of stories that have persisted in the human consciousness, around the world, for millennia.

Okay.  I discovered something that an awful lot of people already knew.  The fact that George Lucas read the work of Joseph Campbell, a giant in the field of comparative mythology, to combat writer’s block while he worked on his script is a bit of film lore familiar to many.  And the Matrix’s Wachowski brothers had followed Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” formula to a tee . But while film critics, scholars and storytelling enthusiasts had been well aware of the influence of myth-based narratives on cultural meaning making, I had been in the dark.

I followed my search through weird sci-fi fan sites, scholarly texts and ancient sources themselves where I began to grasp what myth experts had proposed: Human beings share stories to remind each other of who they are and how they should act. These tales are deeply ingrained in our DNA and no matter where or when you were born, certain patterns of stories will influence you enormously.  When we hear stories based on these patterns, we feel more like we’re remembering something forgotten than learning something new.

The stories that work tend to be about reluctant or unlikely heroes (think Dorothy, Frodo or Rosa Parks) lured into a dangerous quest of self-discovery. Hearing these stories excites and entertains us on a conscious level but they also subtly influence our very conception of what is possible in our real lives, because each of us is a hero in our own personal myth. Just as a child looks to her parents to learn to negotiate her new world, adults look to myths for guidance in their much more complex lives.

I thought back to those days in the mid-80s when Louis and I felt such a deep need to help defeat the dark side of the force that we had devoted our lives to recreating the world of Jedis in our yards in upstate New York. I went back even earlier to the first time I heard the story of Lucy entering the enchanted wardrobe that led to the troubled land of Narnia, and how as a six year old I had come to understand that one day I’d have to leave the safety of my parents’ home to try to do something to help make the world a better place. I then fast-forwarded to the creative sessions in which we thought of the Meatrix and how perfect the metaphor was that we borrowed from that film with a similar name: it was undeniably true that some social ills – in the case of our project, factory farming – were so horrific that only a massive cultural trance could hide them.

Each of these stories is about something larger than a hero kicking ass and grabbing treasure. They are stories of social change, of the victory of humanity over tyranny; of the natural world over soulless machines; of people restoring ethics to a corrupt society. Human rights, environmentalism, corporate ethics — these were the very same battles that I, as a socially-minded advertiser, was in the game to help fight.

That day in the hotel, with only the barest hints of what I would discover later, I was able to begin explaining my storytelling successes. I stopped reading with the intense feeling that I was remembering something long forgotten but incredibly familiar.

The stories that have really stuck, that have shaped culture, are all about one thing: renewing society, struggling to create a better world. If the test of time is our judge, stories with this formula have a near monopoly on greatness. It turns out that a small group of storytellers have known or at least sensed this all along, building wildly successful brands, entertainment and political messages that burst through the media din and become legendary by understanding this formula. They are practicing an art which has evolved into a quiet but powerful counter force to the much decried practice of influencing audiences through manipulation and insecurity that dominates our media marketplace.  These storytellers are creating  practice of marketing that can be a powerful force for good. Without knowing it, I had become one of them

I pulled up my PowerPoint presentation and erased all my gropings and half-formed explanations. I created a blank slide and placed a red pill on it –you know, the kind offered to Neo in The Matrix to show him the real world. And then for that audience waiting downstairs, I improvised a version of the gospel I’ve been spreading ever since. It goes something like this:

We live in a world that has lost its connection to its traditional myths and we are now trying to find new ones – we’re people and that’s what people without myths do.

These myths will shape our future, how we live, what we do and what we buy. They will touch all of us. But not all of us get to write them. Those who do have tremendous power.

And where there is power, there is struggle for it. That’s why, just below the surface, just beyond what the uninitiated can see, there are wars going on. The soldiers are Tea Party demonstrators and champions of “The 99%,” climate change advocates, makers of computers and sneaker brands. They seem to be fighting over ideas and dollars but they are really fighting for control of our stories. The best of them, those who know this and can convince us that their story is true are blowing everyone else to smithereens.