Say It Without Actually Saying It
How to Avoid “After School Special” Writing
In 1972, ABC began broadcasting an anthology series of television episodes aimed at communicating important (and often controversial) life lessons to preteens and teenagers. They called it the After School Special, and it ran for 25 years.
Episodes would star the heartthrobs of the day (like Scott Baio) and had titles like Me and Dad’s New Wife (1976), Hewitt’s Just Different (1977), What Are Best Friends For? (1980), and Sometimes I Don’t Love My Mother (1982). The writers would try to use real-life scenarios that kids would encounter as springboards to moralistic conclusions, usually wrapping up with the main character uttering something like, “Boy, I guess smoking doobies really does sap your ambition!”
Storytellers describe this sort of writing as “on the nose” and it is generally regarded as a cardinal sin. It’s easily mocked by swapping out the moral lesson for an amoral or immoral one. Before The Daily Show or The Late Show, comedian Stephen Colbert created a two-season parody of the After School Special called Strangers with Candy that thrived on this one, sarcastic twist.
Another great parody came in the Comedy Central show “Kroll Show”.
Here’s the thing: the folks who created the original earnest specials didn’t always think their writing was bad, but their need to teach the audience lessons trumped their desire to tell compelling stories. This heavy-handed approach would unfortunately result in pushing the audience away rather than connecting deeper with them.
Sound familiar, marketers?
Businesses have always cared very deeply that they are interpreted correctly by their customers. It makes perfect sense. A lot of money is sunk into marketing and advertising, and it’s often difficult to clearly see ROI. When you’re shelling out $30K in a marketing effort, business owners want to know it works, so making the message as clear as humanly possible seems a logical goal — but there is a line you don’t want to cross.
That line is insulting the intelligence of your audience.
It’s not uncommon for companies to give their production teams notes like “we want to hear our brand name spoken more often in the ad,” or “we think the message needs to be made more clear — what about adding voice-over?”
Sometimes we can be so concerned about making sure we are correctly interpreted that we overstate the message, spoon-feeding it in a way that comes off boring at best and insulting at worst. A quote from one of my favorite books on brand storytelling:
“Stories often get killed by gatekeepers if there is the slightest possibility of a negative interpretation. Any story can be misinterpreted. Real life is imperfect, and so stories of real life reflect our imperfection. It is the price we pay for true stories.” — Annette Simmons in her book, The Story Factor
Stories are about saying your intended message without actually saying it. Take a classic After School Special scenario as example: A boy and girl are playing catch with a ball. The girl throws the ball over the boy’s head. The boy turns to run after the ball into the street. His focus on the ball prevents him from seeing the oncoming car. The driver slams on the breaks, but… you know how it ends.
The logical lesson of this scenario is “be careful around roads” or more specifically, “look both ways before entering the street.” If you’re telling this story to a child, perhaps it’s worth employing After School Special techniques and stating the obvious. “Hey Timmy — next time, look both ways.” “Golly, gee!”
However, when you’re telling a story like this to an adult, stating the obvious will either bore or insult. Yet brands do this all the time because they don’t have confidence that their storytelling will communicate the message “correctly.”
If you can have confidence in your storytelling abilities, there’s no limit to the connections you can make with your audience. See the below spot:
While there is voice-over in the above spot from Thai Life, it never truly crosses the line of overstating the brand message for clarity. Imagine, by contrast, if the voice-over said things like, “This man is like Thai Life — a company that believes the true road to happiness is being a good person.” It’d be hitting the nail on the head too hard. Instead, the filmmakers were smart and trusted the audience would be smart enough to put two-and-two together.
To borrow from filmmaker Andrew Stanton, stories are about giving the audience “2+2” and letting them figure out that it’s “4.” The next time you have a brand storytelling project, your instinct will be to give the audience an explicit 4. Resist that urge! Give them 2+2 and your project will immediately become more interesting simply because you’re giving the audience’s brain something to figure out.
Say it without actually saying it.
