 We humans have always been obsessed with communicating. It's how we turn ideas into the glue that binds us together, into tribes and societies. In oral traditions, an idea spreads from person to person. Everyone briefly owns it, modifies it, and can choose to pass it through social networks or let it die. Its survival of the fittest and only the most compelling ideas thrive. But the last hundred years of the broadcast era changed all that. Here, audiences became consumers of ideas, not participants in spreading them. Brands and causes with access to broadcasts could guarantee attention. It became survival of the richest. Now that the broadcast era is ending, what will come next? With audiences again in charge of what ideas they seek, skip, and pass along, we are entering a time that looks like a digitally empowered version of the oral tradition. The digital era. Here it's survival of the fittest again. And what kind of ideas survive in any oral tradition? Stories. It's time we all became storytellers again. But how? It starts by thinking of your brand itself as a story. Every communication you create is another chapter in an unfolding epic starring you and your audience. On the surface of any story, you'll find characters, settings, conflict. None of these things are placed there by chance. Every visible element of a well-told story is there to illustrate a core truth about the world, a moral of the story. Morals are themselves expressions of values that the storyteller wants to share. Different values create vastly different morals and story surfaces. Joseph Campbell, who studied stories across cultures and millennia, discovered the most universally successful stories, or myths, call audiences to hire human values, like community, justice, truth, and self-expression. Campbell also uncovered the hero's journey, a formula for iconic storytelling that has always worked. We still see it everywhere, and it provides huge insights for a story-based brand. An unlikely hero, a powerless outsider muddles through a broken world. She wants to live out her higher values but feels powerless to do so. Then she meets a mentor who tells her so much more as possible. He gives her a magic gift and calls her to a dangerous adventure of self-discovery. On this adventure, she confronts the evil source of the world's brokenness and seizes a treasure with which she comes back to heal society. Audiences thrill to hear this story again and again. Brands can use this formula to become storytelling masters, too. How? Start with the hero. This hero doesn't start out as the insider, the one with the power. She is an outsider to your brand. So she's not you. The hero of your story is your audience. So if you're not the hero, who are you? The mentor. You are the character that reveals more as possible. You work to connect audiences to their deeper values. You teach a core truth, a moral of the story that provides hope to heal a broken world. Stop talking about how great you are and start telling stories about how great your audience can be. And give them a magic gift, something that makes the adventure you're offering seem likely to succeed. A great brand gift has taken good story brands and made them cultural icons. Any brand can become a story brand by finding its relevance in its values, its consistency by building every communication around its moral. It finds resonance in its unique voices mentor rather than hero and its differentiator in its gift. But that's the easy part. In the transparent world of the digital era, mythic success will take something more, a commitment to live the higher values you espouse. Those that don't will lose credibility and their stories with it. Brands brave enough to live their values will reach iconic status and light up the digital landscape. They will tell the stories and create the myths that will win the story wars.