Who Owns My Marketing Story? The Answer May Surprise You

Who Owns Your Story?

I wrote a post for a creative agency the other day that was summarily rejected. The driving point behind the post, and the idea that the agency disagreed with was that the agency never owns the story.

“Nope,” they said (paraphrasing of course), “We the agency DO own the story!”

I have to admit that at first, I bristled. “What?!?” I thought to myself, “an agency shouldn’t own their client’s story, they should simply help add color.”

But I have to admit that I was wrong. We cannot engage our creative partner from an us vs. them perspective; it has to be all us and them all the time. I’ll elaborate on that thought in just a bit, but first give the next couple of lines a read. The meat of the idea I had in the original post that the agency rejected.

Who is in charge of the story?  Is it you or the agency?  Who is in charge of the essence and nuance of the tale you are telling to the marketplace.  You or the agency?  

You see the agency should never own the story. Not to suggest that they don’t breathe life into the story, but rather that the agency should not be burdened with the task of coming up with the single best story that is going to resonate with your marketplace.  

You own the story.  

You own the responsibility of communicating the story to the agency so they can internalize it as their own and create against it.

Story ownership ultimately does rest with the person telling the story, but how do we discover that story. How do we build a foundational narrative on top of which we can build out all of the content that we want to share with our marketplace? If we choose to engage outside help, then we must inherently believe that the effort to find and fine tune our story is a collaborative creative exercise.

Consider it from this perspective. Think for a moment of the two great film directors of the last several decades, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. What films comes to mind when you think of them? For Scorsese maybe you’ll think of Taxi Driver, The Departed, or the Wolf of Wall Street. And where Spielberg is concerned Jaws, ET, Indian Jones or the Color Purple might pop into your head. These are all classic films that bear the mark of their director’s mastery. So we might come to think that these directors own these stories. But in each of these instances neither Scorsese nor Spielberg received writing credit. Does that make the story any less theirs? Not all all. In fact, we can argue that these great creative minds breathed life into the story.

That is the sort of approach we must take when seeking help to build our story. We have to play the role that is right for us and empower the creative partner that we engage to live up to the full potential of their skill set. And most importantly, we must execute in an environment filled with trust, collaboration, and a commitment to getting the story right regardless of where ownership may lie.