Story-telling: So far in this thread about stories and their telling, we’ve had highbrow and lowbrow, ancient and modern, written and spoken. How far can we stretch it? I think that every form of human communication involves story-telling. So ads, if they’re good, are stories too.

Consider the following, which is arguably the most famous single ad:

Ira Glass would commend it for immediately making us fell that:

• “something is about to occur”
• we are “heading in a direction” and “can’t get out” of the story now
• there is “a bigger, universal something” (Orwellian oppression vs individual expression)
• there is “action, action, action … and then thought”. (IBM = Big Brother; Apple = freedom)

It’s good storytelling.