As we approach the end of the annual GCSE and A Level season, the national conversation invariably turns to the merits of different subject and career choices.
Alarmingly for our industry, in just 10 years, English has gone from being the most popular A level topic to falling out of the top 10 today.
The outlook is equally dire for modern languages, and classics as a study topic is pretty much moribund. And if you look at enrolment figures for different university courses, the humanities are losing out to STEM; Rishi Sunak banging the drum for maths a few months back probably didn’t help.
Should our industry care? Although my motivation is likely to be different, I’m with classicist Dame Mary Beard when she says: “Do we want a world where no-one can read Homer or understand Monteverdi? Only a very tiny minority would think that. So let’s shout about it.”
Having people who study not just humanities but specifically classics is vital to the future of our industry. To understand why, let’s remind ourselves of the essence of our industry promise.
We are in business to help brands connect with consumers to forge long lasting relationships that drive commercial value.
Most of us spend our careers identifying powerful ways for brands to connect with people on a deeply emotional level.
It’s long been accepted that storytelling plays a key role in triggering an emotional response and many of us pride ourselves on being supreme brand storytellers. Let’s stop and explore that.
The “original stories” told by the human race, the ones created by our ancient cultures, from Aboriginal to Ancient Greece, to pagan Celtic, Norse and everything in between, have built the foundation for storytelling ever since.
We can think of them as a system that navigates the entire emotional spectrum of the human condition, with Greek mythology taking the lead in shaping humanity’s storytelling algorithm.
Today’s brand stories and the content we consume, from Netflix dramas to Hollywood blockbusters and even the plots of video games, are all retellings of these fables.
And when we understand this, we are able to make sense of the fact that the same storylines emerged across independent cultures, albeit with different characters. These are the core stories that lie deep in our DNA and connect us emotionally.
Someone who studies classics gets to know and understand these ancient stories better than anyone else. Working in our industry, they can help brands tell their own versions of them, translating and re-interpreting them for today’s world.
Even though consumers may not be familiar with these ancient stories, we all recognise them and are moved by them because they resonate with us on a deeply cellular, evolutionary level. We are, after all, the world’s only true narrative species.
If you look beneath the surface, you can spot the influence of the classics in many brands. Perhaps the most famous example being Nike, a brand born of the mythology of victory, and the benchmark in brand storytelling.
Without classicists who are fluent in these ancient stories working in our industry, I believe we are weakening our ability to re-engineer them for today’s world to create magnetic, addictive, powerful brands for today’s audiences.
Losing our classicists is akin to losing a tribal language or losing a craft. This is not born of elitism or or because I have a deep love of the classics, it’s because I believe the future success of our creative industry depends on doubling down to help brands build an emotional connection with human beings via the power of storytelling.
Brand impact born out of powerful storytelling may even help us to positively engage with a population to find solutions to the pressing challenges of our time, for instance the climate crisis.
Set against the appealing efficiencies of a data-led, digital world, an emotional, storytelling approach to brand-building and communications is our competitive edge.
It injects serendipity and with it, unexpected thinking and avenues that spring from a very human source, not from the black box of an AI. This is not an anti-digital rallying call, but a vision for a world where both approaches can co-exist and play to each other’s strengths.
But what I do know for sure is that classicists, the knowledge managers of the world’s original stories, have a vital role to play.
Quite simply, if you don’t have enough people coming into the creative industries who are still conversant with and fluent in these ancient stories, then you’ve lost this huge repository of culture and ability to create emotional connection.
Andy Lipscombe is director of brand strategy at FreshBritain
