When I packed up my desk at OMD New York after a year and a half as a baby media strategist, smugly tossing colorful flowcharts filled with illegibly penciled notes into the recycling bin, I was convinced I would never again utter a marketing buzzword or consult a 120 page excel document with weekly flight budgets.
No, I was done with marketing, headed for bigger and brighter things. You see, I was going to be an actress. A famous one, mind you. I knew all I had to do was move to Chicago, go through the improv program at Second City, and be discovered by SNL recruiters. I figured it would take 3-5 years to become Tina Fey.
But life, as it does, had other plans for me. Because I wasn't good at improv. In fact I was like, really bad at improv. I thought being funny onstage would come naturally to me. But even though I love performing, it terrified me to have to think on my feet in front of an audience. Improv became less of a game of "how do I make the scene as funny as possible?" and became something more like, "how do I say words. ANY WORDS??" Forget about funny, improv for me was desperation. I found it incredibly difficult to play make believe on my feet.
Find the Character, Tell the Story
But one day, an amazing improv teacher gave me some advice that, in hindsight, may have altered the course of my career.
She said: "It's not about being funny on the fly. It's about finding the character on the fly. Tell the story. The funny will come."
That changed everything. Because not only did my improv get funnier (and less terrifying), I started exploring character work in my other classes. I took traditional acting classes, film acting classes, monologue classes — and finally, writing classes. I started to fall in love with getting into the heads of imaginary people, imagining their backgrounds and figuring out what drives them. I didn't see it coming, but this affinity for "character insights" led me right back into marketing. Right to copywriting.
From Stage to Page
I quickly realized that the lessons I learned onstage weren't just applicable—they were essential. The same skills I honed in character work and storytelling became the foundation of my approach to marketing. It turns out, understanding an audience isn't so different from getting into character.
Just as an actor should understand their character's motivations and background in order to be believable, a copywriter must understand the personal motivations of their target audience in order to persuade them. The real magic happens when you can step into your audience's shoes and see the world through their eyes.
The Answer is Storytelling
Once you understand your character/audience, you can tell them a story that connects with them. In improv, we're taught to create (often absurd) scenes that an audience can relate to. In our marketing, we're doing the same thing - creating narratives that draw our audience in, making them feel understood and explaining how what you're offering fits into their life narrative.
That improv teacher may not have turned me into Tina Fey, but she taught me inadvertently that great marketing is not about impressing people (or making them laugh), it's about finding them exactly where they are and telling them the story they need to hear.
Tell the story. The results will come.
Comments