For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

A frustrated journalist wrote that 30 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. His name was Ernest Hemmingway.

You need at least four bits for a story: a protagonist, a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning sets the protagonist on a journey, the middle heightens the tension and the end moves you because someone’s life has changed. It doesn’t matter how long the story is, it will move you if it has those four bits.

Unless an ad has a story, it’s never going to move you.

TV advertising is so good because the master story-tellers of the last half century — the ones who put those four bits together better than anyone else — worked in TV advertising — they don’t work in ‘digital’, yet. You can bet that if Shakespeare or Hemmingway were alive in 2007 they would have been making Budweiser commercials for the SuperBowl and John West videos for YouTube. Give it another half century and the master story tellers will be using another medium, it will be digital — in that ones and zeroes will convey the information — but we will almost certainly be calling it something different.

I can’t wait to see what it looks like.