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Storytelling in Advertising: History
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Contributor: Elsa Simões

Storytelling in advertising is an organising principle through which narrative meaning can be constructed at different but interconnected levels, from individual advertisements to campaigns and more enduring brand narratives across changing media environments. It provides the narrative logic through which individual advertisements can function as narratives in their own right while also contributing to broader narrative structures, allowing audiences to interpret them within wider cultural frameworks. Although its forms have evolved with successive developments in advertising media, storytelling continues to rely on the narrative processes through which meaning is constructed. The distinction between the narrative content (tale) and its modes of expression (telling) explains how similar stories may be communicated differently as advertising adapts to new media. Storytelling therefore encompasses a wide range of narrative strategies while preserving its underlying narrative function. The emergence of generative artificial intelligence marks the latest stage in this historical development. Narrative production is increasingly distributed across human creators and computational systems. The construction of narrative meaning nevertheless continues to depend on human judgement, which remains central to advertising storytelling.

  • storytelling
  • advertising
  • narrative
  • brand communication
  • persuasion
  • transmedia storytelling
  • artificial intelligence
Storytelling is a fundamental mode of human cognition that lies at the heart of human life and social relationships. Through stories, individuals organise experience and construct meaning, making storytelling fundamental to learning throughout life [1].
Traditionally, narratives were regarded primarily as vehicles for fiction. Nowadays, however, they are recognised as a fundamental cognitive form for organising and structuring human experience [2]. This broader understanding underpins the concept of narrative intelligence, understood as the ability to structure experience through stories.
As storytelling came to be understood as a cognitive process, its application expanded beyond literature and entertainment [3]. Today, stories play an important role in fields as diverse as management, marketing and business [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]; tourism [11][12][13][14][15][16]; healthcare [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]; science communication [24][25] and education [26][27], where they contribute to organisational thinking, professional practice, learning and the communication of complex realities [28]. In fields such as digital storytelling, narratives encourage emotional expression and interpersonal connection across different media [29]. Against this background, storytelling is not an accessory or a recent technique in advertising. It is a constitutive principle of advertising discourse whose forms evolve with media technologies, while its underlying narrative mechanisms remain remarkably stable.
Narratives are particularly significant because they create shared meanings about events, helping individuals interpret their actions within social contexts. By placing experiences within a narrative sequence, they connect past events with present understanding and open possibilities for future action [30]. Furthermore, storytelling stimulates dialogue and personal reflection by enabling individuals to express and interpret their lived experiences [31][32].
The widespread adoption of storytelling has also contributed to an increasingly broad use of the concept. As storytelling became a popular term across academic and professional contexts, it has often been used to describe almost any form of engaging communication.
Although storytelling can be found across a wide variety of communicative contexts, not every form of communication constitutes storytelling. This conceptual clarification also provides the basis for the perspective adopted throughout this entry. For the purposes of this entry, and building on the work of Fog et al. [1], storytelling is understood as a deliberate communicative strategy that uses structured narrative to organise experiences, construct meaning and establish a meaningful relationship between narrator and audience. Storytelling does more than transmit information. It frames experience through narrative, integrating cognitive and affective dimensions in ways that encourage engagement and participation. In this sense, story refers to the events, experiences or transformations that constitute the represented content, whereas narrative refers to the way in which that content is organised and made meaningful. Storytelling, in turn, refers here to the communicative use of narrative to shape how such content is interpreted and experienced by an audience. Here, structured narrative refers to the organisation of events, experiences or changes into meaningful relationships through which audiences can construct narrative coherence. Narrative is therefore understood not simply in terms of the presence of particular elements, but as a way of organising experience and constructing meaning [33][34]. Such coherence need not be fully explicit: advertising may provide only selected narrative cues, leaving audiences to infer connections and construct aspects of the underlying story. In advertising, storytelling is thus distinguished from the mere presence of characters, symbols, sequential events or general brand associations by the purposeful organisation of such elements within a narrative framework through which audiences construct meaning and interpret the persuasive message.
Advertising storytelling can operate at different but interconnected levels. A single advertisement may constitute a relatively complete narrative, while a series of advertisements may develop narrative continuity across a campaign. At a broader level, successive communications can contribute to more enduring brand narratives, which may themselves develop across different media and platforms. These levels are not mutually exclusive: an individual advertisement may function as a narrative in its own right while also contributing to a campaign or to the longer-term narrative identity of the brand. Transmedia storytelling represents a particular form of this broader development, in which different media contribute distinct elements to an expanding narrative world.
This entry examines storytelling in advertising from a conceptual and historical perspective. It begins by discussing the conceptual bases of storytelling and its relationship with advertising, before analysing its historical development, the transformation of narrative strategies through different media, and the impact of artificial intelligence on contemporary advertising narratives. Throughout the entry, particular attention is given to the continuity of storytelling as a cognitive and communicative practice, despite the technological transformations that have reshaped the media through which stories are told and experienced.

This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6090191

References

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