A little over a year ago, I went to Peru. On my list was a visit to Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest navigable lake. Getting there involves a half-day-long drive from Cusco – made longer by drag in the dirt roads and the ocasional llama crossing.
En route to Amantani Island
On the shores of the lake is the city of Puno, charmless and in a perpetual state of construction, courtesy of a legal loophole where incomplete buildings are exempt from property tax. This is where we spent the night, on bug-ridden mattresses, hoping for better accommodation tomorrow.
We would be placed with local families on Amantani island within the lake, a circular land mass with a little over 3,000 Quechua-speaking inhabitants. Here we would have a taste of local life, unspoilt, we thought, by hordes of tourists.
In between Puno jetty and Amantani lie the floating islands of Uros, a community of settlers who fashion their homes, boats and even the islands themselves from dried reeds. When prompted by our tour guide, a local family waved their arms in the air and chanted in unison, “Hasta la vista, baby”.
The wholly unexpected Terminator reference threw me off – the fact that a tour company had choreographed it for the benefit of tourists was at once unsettling and jarring. The illusion of authenticity, built up after hours of travel and the surety that we had left civilisation between, had been rudely shattered.
I was reminded of this when watching a YouTube clip of Gary Vaynerchuk and Casey Neistat, both social media gurus, discussing the art of storytelling. Honesty and transparency are perhaps the most important elements of any story and brands that want to connect with their audience must embrace this ethos, the two argued.
Vaynerchuk, an early adopter of vlogging on YouTube, is now a multi-millionaire founder and owner of VaynerMedia, a social media-focused digital agency in the United States. Many accusations of self-promotion have been levelled against him, but he is also brutally honest, turning down speaking roles that would have earned him six figures simply because he could not imagine censuring himself (swearing is part of his regular speech pattern). The long game, according to Vaynerchuk, is knowing when to say no.
Our host family prepare our dinner
In a talk organised by General Assembly, Vaynerchuk makes several salient points. Big companies, he believes, place too much value on reach and brand awareness. These statistics only serve to feed the ego; what companies lack is an understanding of what users pay attention to.
The challenge – and the future of advertising – is to provide valuable content to the user in a way that doesn’t impede on what they want to do (for example, enduring an ad to view content on YouTube).
Other interesting observations made by the two speakers were that content should either be entertaining or educational to differentiate it from advertising. A great story involves truthfulness. More than anything else, the storyteller needs to believe in his or her own story.
Eventually, I found my own honest experience. It struck me on Amantani island, as I intruded upon a family of four and ate boiled potatoes on their wooden table by the light of a kerosene lamp. Social niceties seemed flimsy when our hosts were squatting on the dirt, watching us eat. Authenticity may be uncomfortable, but it is also entirely unforgettable.
