Storytelling – It’s what we do

Last week we re-branded the agency from Platform PR to Platform Communications.

Primarily we did this because for over a decade we’ve done a great deal more than traditional PR and so we thought it was time the description on the outside of our particular tin gave a much better description of its contents.

Of course when you re-brand your company you reflect quite a bit on what it is and what you do within it. I realized that I have spent a great deal of time telling (factual) narratives on behalf of companies that provide technologies and services to enable the distribution of stories to consumers. So I suppose I am involved in story telling on a meta level.

I had already been reflecting quite a bit about storytelling, mainly due to a recent thought and a book that I have been reading. First the thought: while watching a Scandinavian thriller on TV I began to consider that it was perhaps slightly strange – given the number of options we have nowadays – that so many of us still spend so many hours of our precious leisure time interacting and consuming stories. Just think about the number of hours we invest in TV dramas, radio dramas, Hollywood movies, box-sets on Amazon and Netflix, etc… Does the universality of this story feasting respond to a deep-seated need in human nature to escape from the everyday and / or see the world from other perspectives?

The book that extended my thinking on storytelling was the wonderful “Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. This fascinating chronicle persuasively contends that storytelling has been absolutely critical to the success of humankind. Narratives are at the center of everything we do. It has enabled humans to work in groups larger than a village, and provided us with things to trust, such as money and law & order. It has also played a key role in creating culture and science and therefore technology.

So it looks like the craft I’ve been part of my whole career is fundamentally key to human success as a species as well as leading to the flourishing of the Scandinavian noir export phenomena that started these reflections. I look forward to crafting more stories on behalf of Platform Communication clients and in my spare time, I can’t wait to indulge in more Scandi-noir.

David Bramley, Director, Platform Communications.