What NFL Films can teach you about storytelling

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Sep 12 2012 | Ragan.com - Mike Sockol
Keep the following in mind if you want to put together a powerful story.

As NFL fever grips us with the start of another season, it’s hard to believe that 50 years ago, professional football was so insignificant that Ed Sabol, an overcoat salesman who filmed his son’s high school games as a hobby, won the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship game for only $5,000.

It took a three-martini lunch with NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to seal the deal, and less than three years later this humble little video shop became NFL Films.

The NFL Films formula of slow motion collisions, multiple camera angles, soaring musical backdrops, and crisp, alliterative narrations turned a mere sporting event into a choreographed piece of riveting theatre. As Ed’s son, Steve, said in a 2008 interview online, “I think what we have done is we brought a mythology to the game. When we started, football had a tradition but we gave it a visual mythology.”

NFL Films discovered a new and powerful way to tell a story, which allowed the NFL to introduce itself to a broader audience, differentiate itself from other major sports and serve as a key catalyst for its surging popularity.

Anyone can use basic elements of the NFL Films formula to improve their communication efforts, starting with effective storytelling. Sometimes it’s difficult to see the story behind the information we want to communicate, and we adopt a “Joe Friday” approach; we just deliver the facts and put the onus on our audience to put everything into context.

Here are three things you can do to make it easier to tell a story:

First, put your audience in the action. NFL Films regularly elevates the excitement of the sport by injecting a human element into the proceedings. Let’s say you want to introduce a new service in your customer newsletter. Instead of highlighting its virtues, pick a customer or two and show how this service directly meets their needs. This helps readers relate to what you say and identify with the people you singled out.

Second, create a dramatic context. NFL Films does its most impressive work when it finds ways to make boring, non-competitive games exciting. It doesn’t settle for the inherent value of football itself, but tweaks our viewpoint by framing everything as a conflict leading to a satisfying resolution. Too often we assume what we say or write will be taken at face value with no explanations required. But if you really want to engage your audience or motivate them to take action, they need to know the rationale behind your communications. Take advantage of this latent curiosity. Show them where you are going.

Third, choose your words wisely. Steve Sabol is a masterful writer who built his scripts around carefully selected words that conveyed clear images and memorable juxtapositions. He described football as a game that “starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” You don’t need to say a lot to get your point across. Just make sure you set aside time to carefully edit what you write, so you can pare away anything clumsy or extraneous that distracts from your main message.

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