Most briefs arrive with a product that has no natural claim on attention. The category is established, the benefit is functional, and the audience has already decided how interested they are. These tactics don't try to manufacture interest from scratch — they borrow it. A story structure, a genre, a cultural ritual that arrives pre-loaded with the emotion the brief needs. The audience is already inside it before the product appears. Here are five tactics from the Storytelling Engine that borrow the world to sell the point.
- Rewrite the fairy tale to prove the brand truth
- Turn the problem into a horror story
- Frame the benefit as a mission
- Use the training montage
- Disguise the truth as entertainment
1. Rewrite the Fairy Tale
Take a story structure the audience already knows — and twist it to prove the brand truth.
Adulting — Heinz, Wieden+Kennedy, 2022
Heinz needed to sell a No Sugar Added Ketchup without slipping into worthy health-speak. Wieden+Kennedy's answer: reverse the fairy tale. Instead of treating adulthood as a happy ending, the animated film shows it as the point where the fantasy collapses — bills, bad days, the slow indignity of real life. The product becomes one of the few small wins that survive the disillusionment. A functional reformulation became a culturally legible story about adulting. The fairy tale logic did the emotional work that a rational claim never could.
Volkswagen's Fairy Tales in Reverse retold classic stories backwards to dramatise the danger of reversing without a camera — using iconic narratives as a metaphor for product utility. The story structure became the product argument.
2. Turn the Problem into a Horror Story
Exaggerate an ordinary frustration, risk or lapse into something genuinely scary (or embarrassing) — and the stakes become impossible to ignore.
The Clogging — Scott / Kimberly-Clark, VaynerMedia, 2023
Toilet paper is one of the lowest-interest categories in advertising. Scott needed to make its anti-clogging benefit feel noticeable without sounding like a product spec sheet. VaynerMedia's answer: treat clogging the toilet at your in-laws' as the setup for a full-blown horror film. Classic horror conventions — ominous pacing, rising dread, escalating panic, full cinematic sound design — applied to one of the most painfully relatable household disasters imaginable. The genre exaggeration inflated the emotional stakes of a small product truth into something people would actually watch and share.
HP's Join the Flip Side (Wieden+Kennedy, 2021) used a comedic horror mini-series to dramatise a family of vampires whose printer runs out of ink in the night — with sunlight off-limits, HP Instant Ink became the undead's most vital subscription. A mundane SaaS benefit reframed as a life-or-death genre moment.
3. Frame It as a Mission
Borrow the pace, urgency and momentum of an action sequence — and make the product the hero of the rescue.
Your Mission — Etsy, Orchard, 2023
Etsy needed a Christmas campaign with real momentum. Orchard's answer: borrow Mission: Impossible. The famous theme, the espionage urgency, the high-stakes countdown — all redirected toward the pressure of finding a meaningful Christmas gift. The borrowed action language gave the audience an instant emotional frame for a familiar retail problem, without building a new story world from scratch. The campaign landed with stronger energy and immediate recognisability than a seasonal retail ad has any right to.
SKYN's No SKYN No Love (UltraSuperNew Tokyo, 2023) escalated a moment of romantic unpreparedness into a full obstacle-filled action mission — the quest became so absurdly difficult that the real lesson landed naturally: you should have been ready already. TAG Heuer's The Chase for Carrera (DDB, 2023) built a movie-style pursuit around the watch itself, giving the product a more active heroic role than static luxury imagery ever could.
