Learning about storytelling from a Budweiser commercial

Poynter’s Al Tompkins does a close analysis of one of this year’s most popular Super Bowl commercials, “Puppy Love,” in a post and video headlined “What you can learn about video storytelling from the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial.”

I recommend spending eight minutes with it.

“I often use commercials as ways to teach journalists how to write compelling stories,” Tompkins writes:

Great stories have so much in common with this commercial. They have tension, context and an explosion of action. They are highly focused and don’t get distracted by characters who never pay off. You don’t need music, horses or puppies to tell a story.  Stick to the fundamentals that work every time.

As you’ll see if you watch Tompkins’ video, he’s speaking directly to videographers at times, talking about pans, jump cuts and the like. “There’s a lot of cinema going on here,” he says at one point, pointing out how the lighting and shadows are working to focus viewers on the dog’s eyes in a key shot.

Anyone with an interest in creating media would probably do well to start learning at least a little bit about video storytelling if they haven’t already, but there are lessons here even for writers who only write. Storytelling is storytelling. A lot of what works for telling stories in sportswriting works for filmmakers and barstool raconteurs. It worked for Aesop.

Tompkins talks about how the opening shot, of the puppy farm’s sign, is a “scene-setter: It gives the viewer a sense of place and time.” That’s a good thing to do at the beginning of a written story too. I refer to it as giving the reader a place to stand. Where are we? Who are we talking about?

He talks about tension building, foreshadowing, the “rule of three,” and keeping the focus on the main character in the story. To do that, to not go off on tangents, you have to know who the main character of your story is.

It would be easy to make the mistake of thinking that the story is about the picturesque Clydesdale horses, or about the farmer with the Budweiser hat, the most prominent human. But it’s not:

Let’s take a second to talk about story focus. Notice how humans have only been a secondary part of the story up until now. We’ve not gotten to know the human. Only the puppy. Why? Because the story is about the puppy, loving the horse. The puppy is the main character. Not the horse. Not the humans. So the piece will start with puppies, end with puppies, and every key emotion in the piece will be about the puppy.

Have a look.