See a photo of Steve, his bio, Part 1 of this Q&A, and Part 2, and Part 3, and Part 3.
Q&A with Steve Spalding, Question 4:
Q: Are there any current uses of storytelling that repel you or that you feel are inappropriate?
A: Advertising can be storytelling, but a lot of times it’s not. I think we’d all be better off if people who are pure marketers stopped casting themselves as storytellers.
Don’t get me wrong. I love advertising. I love marketing, and I love those who create new and interesting ways to sell products. It’s what I do, and if I didn’t like it I would have become a doctor or a used car salesman or something.
What I am saying is that I think those who do commercial storytelling
well are brilliant and are raising the bar and setting the standard for the rest of us. However, since it is so utterly fashionable to cast yourself as a storyteller these days, the result is that everyone with a Twitter account and a dream thinks that they are Kubrick and worse, they think that their particular brand of seminar-shilling wisdom represents that future of narrative.
What that does is that it destroys the trust in “storytelling” as a viable form of marketing and it makes everyone else have to work that much harder to convince people that this isn’t just the snake oil of the week.
I never fault anyone for trying to make a buck, but I do take exception when those attempts hurt the industry as a whole.