Falk Ebert · Strategy and Innovation Consultant
Falk Ebert has spent his career working at the intersection of marketing innovation and new channels — from NFC and QR codes to the metaverse and AI. In every cycle, he observed the same mistake: brands chasing new formats while ignoring the most powerful storytelling mechanic available to any company at any size, on any channel. That mechanic is showing what you actually do. This playbook captures his framework for authentic business storytelling.
The most interesting content is hiding in your daily operations. You do not need a creative brief to find it.
The headline principles from the episode. The full step-by-step framework follows below.
The Playbook
Real-life storytelling (showing what you actually do) and fictional storytelling (creative narrative) can both thrive on TikTok or on television. The mistake is choosing story type based on channel rather than based on what is actually true and interesting about the brand.
Why it's overlooked: Marketers conflate "modern channel" with "authentic story" and end up making try-hard content that signals effort without delivering substance.
The Playbook
A mortician posting about death on TikTok attracted over a million followers because the content was genuinely interesting — not because the platform was new. Find the interesting truth in your operations and keep showing it. Interest compounds.
Why it's overlooked: True authenticity feels slow and risky. Brands want viral shortcuts. But the mortician example is not a hack — it is a long-term commitment to a clear point of view.
The Playbook
Before you amplify a story externally, ensure the people inside the company understand and own the narrative. External amplification of an internally contested story creates contradictions that audiences detect immediately.
Why it's overlooked: Internal alignment feels like overhead with no visible external payoff. It is actually the foundation that determines whether external storytelling lands or falls apart.
The Playbook
Building in public — sharing roadmaps, decisions, challenges, and reasoning — creates a story that is inherently episodic, credible, and differentiated. Most brands hide their process and narrate their outcomes. The opposite approach builds more durable trust.
Why it's overlooked: Transparency about process feels vulnerable and hard to control. But control is the enemy of credibility in a world where audiences are trained to detect managed narratives.
Falk's central distinction: all business communication splits into two modes.
Real-life storytelling uses what actually happens in a company's operations — the projects, the expertise, the people, the process, the daily reality — as the raw material for content.
Fictional storytelling invents narrative, creates characters, and builds stories that are only tangentially related to the company's actual activities.
Both work. Both have produced famous, effective marketing. The mistake is assuming that one belongs to certain channels and the other to others. The channel does not determine the story type. The available truth does.
Bestattungen Burger, a small Bavarian funeral company, has 1.3 million followers on TikTok. The mechanic is simple: one younger employee answers questions about death, dying, and the work of a mortician, plainly and without sensationalism. No creative concept. No production budget. No agency brief. Just genuinely interesting content from an unexplored category.
List five things that happen in your company every week that the people you want to reach have never seen or thought about. Pick the most genuinely interesting one. Make one piece of content about it this week with minimal production. Observe how it performs relative to your polished marketing content.
Every company has operational truths it treats as unremarkable because the people inside see them every day. A logistics company has ships, containers, global supply chains, and stories of engineering decisions at a scale most people never encounter. A carpentry apprenticeship programme has young people building extraordinary objects for their final exams. A technical B2B company has engineers solving problems most people never even think about.
The challenge is not finding interesting content. It is developing the discipline to recognise it. Things that seem ordinary from the inside are often extraordinary to anyone outside.
Maersk, the global shipping company, started sharing pictures from their daily operations on Instagram when social media launched. Ships at sea, containers in ports, logistics decisions under unusual conditions. When one of their ships struck a whale, they turned it into a candid account of what happened and what Maersk is doing to prevent it. The content worked not because it was creative but because it was real, and the reality was interesting.
Schedule a 90-minute conversation with someone in your company who does work that most customers never see. Ask them to show you what they do and explain why it is complicated or unusual. Record it. Use it as a brief for your next content piece.
Building in public is the practice of sharing your process, roadmap, decisions, and reasoning with an external audience — not as a finished product, but as work in progress.
Markus Persson built Minecraft as an open alpha, invited players in, made it easy for developers to write modifications, and publicly acknowledged using community ideas to improve the game. Millions of players had invested emotionally in a product before it officially shipped. That investment created true believers at launch — not through advertising, but through participation in the creation process.
For brands with products or platforms that people invest in over time, transparency about direction creates confidence. Customers who understand where you are going can invest in it.
Falk's practical check: "If you have products or ecosystems that people sign up for and invest in and build upon — just being a little bit more transparent about your roadmap, what you want to do or achieve in the next couple of years with your product, might actually help to give your customers the confidence to invest in that ecosystem." — Falk Ebert
Identify one decision your company is making that could be shared publicly. Write a short post explaining the decision, the reasoning, and what you are going to do. Publish it. Observe whether transparency on process generates more engagement and trust than polished outcome announcements.
Falk's distinction between narrative and story matters practically. A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A narrative has a beginning and a direction, but no end. It is an ongoing frame that gives individual stories their meaning.
A brand's narrative is the vector: the direction it is pointing and the values it is moving toward. Individual stories — a campaign, a customer case, a product launch — are points along that vector.
The strongest brand communications serve both. They are stories in their own right — engaging, complete, emotionally coherent — and they contribute to a larger narrative that accumulates over time.
"Whether you tell real-life stories or fictional ones, they should all contribute to the bigger narrative that your brand is pointing toward." — Falk Ebert
Write your brand's narrative in one sentence: "We are moving toward a world where..." Audit your last ten pieces of content. How many clearly serve that narrative versus pulling in other directions? Reduce the noise. Increase the consistency.
Real-life storytelling naturally shifts targeting from demographic to interest-based. A video about excavating machines will attract six-year-olds fascinated by construction, 45-year-old engineers, and anyone else who finds the subject genuinely interesting — regardless of what a media planner would have put in the brief.
This is not a problem. It is an advantage. Platforms reward interest-based engagement because it drives time-on-platform. Content that connects with genuine interest communities reaches further and costs less than content targeting synthetic demographic profiles.
"Whoever is interested in that content is welcome — doesn't matter whether it's a six-year-old or a sixty-year-old veteran. All of them interacting with our content will help us get more exposure for it — and more exposure for the people who need to see it from a business perspective." — Falk Ebert
For your next piece of content, remove the demographic targeting criteria and replace them with interest-based criteria. Ask: who would find this genuinely interesting, regardless of age or job title? Write for that person.
Falk is direct: the most expensive mistake in marketing innovation is investing in Roblox, NFTs, or AI avatars before you have mastered email.
The opportunity cost is enormous. Two full-time employees on an experimental format means two people not improving the channels that drive real results.
His framework: master email before doing social. Master social before moving to gaming platforms. Have a solid sponsorship strategy before exploring e-sports. Every new channel adds complexity. Complexity only adds value when the foundation is strong.
"First do your homework before you do the super fancy stuff. The biggest risk of doing innovative stuff in marketing is never brand reputation risk. The biggest risk is always just wasting your marketing budget." — Falk Ebert
Rank your marketing channels by maturity: fully optimised, developing, or experimental. Make sure each higher-investment channel is performing before adding a new one. Any channel below its potential is where your attention should go first.
The playbook is derived from the conversation. The nuance and the reasoning behind every principle are in the episode itself.
"Just show what you're doing. Reality is interesting enough."
Episode 001 · Feb 2024