Mike Yapp came to C2 Montréal to talk about something The Zoo at Google refers to as “hypertelling,” but the best way to get at the story is to start in New Zealand and a search for lost dogs.
Yapp, founder and director of the search engine’s group that uses technology to help its advertisers and their agencies maximize Google’s creative power, defines hypertelling as non-linear, immersive narratives where users are authors. What he didn’t talk about on stage, however, was an example of how The Zoo has already put hypertelling into action with Pedigree dog food.
“The insight was, owners of dogs love their dogs and the most frightening thing is losing their dogs,” he told Marketing in an interview. “So instead of just running ads, why not give these guys some sort of means by which you could find your dog if it was lost?”
The result was an app where users could register their pet and, if they lost it, could send out an alert to other consumers who had installed the app within a 10-mile radius. At the same time, any ad on the Google Display Network being shown on a device within that same 10-mile radius would immediately switch to the canine equivalent of an Amber alert.
“The nice thing is we addressed a real issue,” Yapp said, “and it’s now going to go well beyond New Zealand to other parts of the world.”
Yapp expects more of the work The Zoo does to have a similarly global impact. He showed a series of videos in his C2 talk that showed virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other technologies that could enable more user-generated and experiential forms of content. He suggested the advertisers who invested in such experiments now are best poised to become category leaders.
“You’re seeing millions of dollars now on innovation teams within brands. There’s been a big switch with agencies as well,” he said. “My group has been an effective partner with agencies. They’re understanding this is something that’s necessary. We become a conduit to understand what the possibilities are.”
The results are impressive even to more traditional storytellers such as Ali Velshi, a former host for Al Jazeera America who was offering his personal takeaways on stage near the end of each day at C2. Velshi singled out Yapp’s presentation for demonstrating how remarkable the behind-the-scenes work of agencies and partners like The Zoo can be.
“We just see [this kind of work] when it shows up,” he said. “We don’t understand the hard computing and thinking and brainstorming that goes into a lot of crazy ideas that become remarkable breakthroughs.”
To some extent, Yapp believes hypertelling has ancient roots. He likened the participatory nature of today’s branded content with the way early humans shared tales over a fire.
“They were demonstrative — someone told that story and then they retold that story. Now we make it illustrated, animated or made it into a movie,” he said. Giving up a degree of control and acknowledging the degree to which consumers are in control will require major changes among brands, he added.
“We essentially need to become story doers rather than story tellers,” he said.
