Storytelling and narrative tools in award-winning advertisements in Turkey: an interdisciplinary approach

Traditional marketing strategies are now no longer seen as effective in communicating with today's sophisticated groups. Today, companies employ knowledge from disciplines other than marketing – such as psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics – when communicating with their target audience. In this study, the content analysis method is used to analyse Effie Turkey gold award-winning advertisements in order to determine the storytelling elements used in advertisements. In order to show the increasing use of storytelling elements in advertisements, the 2011–2013 and 2017–2018 award winning advertisements are studied. The analysis reveals that seven basic plots are used extensively in advertisements to create empathy. We also analysed the archetypes used in the advertisements, and found that the caregiver type is the most commonly used archetype, followed by Jung's explorer type. According to the findings of this study, among all aspects of language syntactic structure seems to play the most important role.