If You Tell The Whole Story You Tell No Story

There are many components to successful marketing.  There are many skills required.  The one that gets the least attention and is often the least understood is storytelling.  Marketing, among other things, is the act of storytelling.  Big powerful brands find ways to tell big powerful stories.  Marginal brands tell marginal stories.
What's the difference between the two?  A couple of things:

• Powerful stories talk to their audience as whole and complete humans. They speak to the logical and the emotional.
• Powerful stories don't tell the whole story.  They leave space for imagination, passion and most importantly participation.  

Errors in storytelling happen at both ends of the spectrum.  Some marketing campaigns rely completely on only communicating to the emotional and leave so many holes in the story that the audience dies off due to a lack of relevance.  Other marketing campaigns follow the belief that facts and information are what people want.  I'm sure they get this feedback when they conduct focus groups...which are hardly an accurate representation of how people truly behave.  (I think focus groups are a very accurate representation of focus group behavior.)
Telling your whole story in a detailed and completely logical fashion quite simply takes all the magic out of your message.  There is no moment of discovery for the audience and therefore no "Wow" moment.
By telling the whole story you tell no story.
In the age of social media, the need to allow your audience a "moment of discovery" is even more important than ever.  They desire the ability to explore and discover elements of your story and then they want to pass their discovery along to others.
Without question, the ability to leave your story with just the right amount of "unfinishedness" is hard.  But it's what makes good stories.  And, we must all strive to be better at it.  Unfinishedness is what makes this photograph tell a story worth exploring.

And, it is the things this MAGICAL spot doesn't say that makes it such an engaging commercial.