The business of storytelling
Key to capturing audience attention in the shortest time span
WITH more Malaysians engaging in online activities, the question that frequently pops up in a marketer’s mind is “how can a brand capture audience attention in the shortest time span?”
The answer, according to media and creative agencies, lies on how a story is conveyed on multi-screen platforms. Agencies agree that this is not an easy feat as the business of storytelling is as much art as in science and no brand can create synergy if either one, creativity or a channel of communication, is shortchanged.
As one agency put it: “It is important to understand both the romance and math of stories that will help marketers achieve in brand penetration.”
Dentsu Aegis Network Malaysia concurs that great story telling among various multi-screen channels will determine which one effectively catches consumers’ eye balls.
Its chief data and strategy officer Sue-Anne Lim says capturing audience attention online is not just about slapping a message right in front of their eyes.
Marketers’ video has about 0.2 seconds to fight with the consumers’ mind before their thumb pushes it upwards, she says. Catching a person’s attention means brand creators have to do better in storytelling and making consumers’ time spent on a particular video worthwhile. And if it does, Lim says the brand is usually rewarded with genuine advocacy.
Isobar Malaysia executive creative director Liew San Yen says: “The rise of multi-screening means that whichever screen tells a better story – there lies the attention.
“You should never exchange creativity for data because you’ll be amazed by what content can do when you fuse the power of both together. Great story that moves people, moves business,” Liew notes.
Isobar Malaysia is a digitally-led creative agency under the Dentsu Aegis Network. The idea of combining great storytelling with strategic channelling has shown to be effective in Isobar’s recent cam- paigns for Mudah.my, Malaysia’s largest online marketplace, namely the Chinese New Year #HoEeKi video series and the even more topical #GoodByeGoodBuy campaign for Hari Raya Aidilfitri.
Designed to pull at the heartstrings, the story is presumably told through the eyes of a young man, but a twist at the end reveals otherwise and results in an unexpected happy ending.
Within a month, the video has received over three million impressions on Facebook along with over 13,000 reactions, 2,000 shares and 350 comments. Meanwhile, the video on YouTube has garnered more than 5.1 million views to date.
According to data from Dentsu Aegis Network Malaysia’s proprietary tool, Consumer Connection System, 47% of Malaysian adults who are 15 years and above are multiple screen viewers and 63% of them are aged 15 to 34. The market for multi-screen activity currently amounts to a whopping 6.5 million audience.
Mobile, needless to say, is the dominant screen with a viewing incidence of 92% compared to just 20% on computers and a meagre 8% on tablets. So what is driving this multi-screen behaviour?
Media agency Vizeum Malaysia strategist Teo Chin Wern explains: “Malaysia is at the tipping point of complete media digitisation. We have the right infrastructure; hyper connectivity and mass adoption of mobile technologies which are at a far greater penetration than fixed connections. At over 142%, Malaysia is one off, if not the country with the highest mobile penetration around the world.”
“Malaysians’ cross-screening behaviour is highly driven by two underlying motivations – instant gratification for content and the Fomo Syndrome (Fear-Of-Missing-Out from their social networks).
“The cultural irony is that as the society becomes better in multi-tasking, they are also becoming more impatient. This is a generation who hates to wait, even for a few seconds and this behaviour is prevalent across age groups. If you notice, we have a tendency to turn to our smartphones to kill even 10 seconds of boredom.”
Lim says that in order to keep up with consumers’ attention, marketers will need to rely on their strategic media partners who understand both the importance and nuance of multi-screening.
Multi-screen stacking is planning screens accordingly to achieve highest reach or impression, she notes. This is not something new to media but it has been gaining significant traction in the past year, she adds, considering the explosion of videos and proliferation of mobile as first media.
The idea, Lim says, is that marketers can achieve incremental reach via an optimum stacking of TV and online TV instead of putting all investments on a single screen.
To this end, Vizeum Malaysia CEO Wong Siew Wai elaborates: “While digital is shifting consumer behaviour, we recognise the power of audio-visual and its continued relevance in the communication industry. Therefore, we have and will continue to invest in understanding the multi-screen universe.
“As part of Dentsu Aegis Network, we are proud of our proprietary tool which allows us to optimise the mix of digital video and TV, to maximise reach and gross rating points for every campaign. We stretch the dollar for our clients simply because we can very accurately do it.”