A Narrative Strategy of Storytelling Advertising Videos: Heineken's Case

A Narrative Strategy of Storytelling Advertising Videos: Heineken's Case

The purpose of this paper was to explore the narrative strategy of storytelling advertisement videos for a beer brand Heineken. Heineken was one of the most active advertisers who had made very impressive ad videos. The author selected five story driven advertisement videos which had been most frequently watched by Internet viewers. Those were "The Insider", "Odyssey 2011", "Heineken lip gross", "Italy Activation Milan AC vs. Real Madrid", "the Match". The five selected videos have 90 second running time. The target videos were repeatedly watched and the expected key image cuts and key verbal copies were captured as well. To categorize the narrative structure and key copies of each video, Fog, Budtz & Yakaboylu's four element model of storytelling and Gustav Freytag's three act structure or five stage model of a plot were exploited as underlying theories. Most of the ad videos had clear boundary between or among the stages of the plot and used emotional appeals including humor and sexual appeals. This paper found that the target videos used visual rhetorics to enhance the viewers' persuasion and comprehension. It also revealed that the target videos took advantage of football match as an emotional engagement to get ad viewers closely banded with Heineken.