I’ve been impressed by UPS and how the company’s PR team embraces storytelling techniques.

I highlighted how UPS landed a Journal article around training, not the type of topic that typically cracks a national daily.

A second post on UPS analyzed BusinessWeek Bloomberg coverage titled “Squeezing More Out of Brown.”

UPS gets it.

Which is why I was so surprised to see such a dull full-page ad from the company in The New York Times.

The headline starts off promising:

“How Logistics Can Save Your Life.”

But the body copy falls flat.

There’s zero drama.

There’s not even a contrarian wrinkle.

Here’s how the story starts:

Healthcare is an enormously complex industry, characterized by constant change and its impact on the lives of patients everywhere.

Logistics is critical to the industry. The best medicines, the most effective devices, are all worthless if they can’t reach patients at the right time.

As Dudley Moore said in the original Arthur, “I’ll alert the media.”

Even the quotes from customers have that robotic quality that only comes when corporate copywriting displaces how people talk in real life:

“UPS was the only company who understood our needs and how to fulfill them. We have the flexibility to scale up or down as we …”

Plus, skip to the end of this post and take in the visual appeal of the scanned ad.

It looks horrible.

No one is going to take the time to read close to 300 words that are so uninviting.

And if a brave soul does venture forward, the lead graph should derail further reading.

This is a perfect example of choosing the wrong medium for the content.

If it’s about promotion as opposed to storytelling, then come up with a couple clever graphs, a decent visual, and be done with it. Nothing offends like sales literature copy masquerading as a story.

Personally, I think UPS should have turned the assignment over to their PR team to craft this narrative.

Click here for a larger version of the ad.

I met with Peter Lewis over a cup of joe yesterday morning to discuss a storytelling workshop that we’ll be tag-teaming on soon.

We went through the exercise of comparing notes on the storytelling front.

Peter, who now teaches at Stanford’s J school, offered a journalist’s perspective reflecting stints at The New York Times and Fortune. My input shaped from toiling in the comms trenches for 25+ years.

When I mentioned that we could spend the entire workshop on interviewing techniques, Peter responded that he teaches a class devoted to this single topic.

That’s when it struck me.

The most undervalued skill in corporate storytelling is the ability to conduct an interview.

It doesn’t matter whether you sit on the agency side or in-house, if your content consists of only the party line you’ve got no story (unless, of course, you’re Apple).

It’s the probing and cajoling of executives or domain experts that goes a long way toward determining whether you ultimately shape a story that will resonate with the target audience.

Yet, how many communication professionals have been trained in interviewing techniques?

Putting aside the journalists who’ve jumped to the PR side, I’ll bet 99% of all communicators have never had this type of training.

Not good.

Consider how journalists conduct an interview.

They’re striving to dig out content to tell a fresh story and one that often entertains or at least amuses the reader.

Such information isn’t going to come from the news release or the corporate website.

It requires extracting – the verb seems appropriate, since the feelings of the interviewee can be similar to those experienced in the dentist’s chair – information that’s not already in the public domain.

Here’s the crux.

Companies expect journalists to be aggressive and even Fifth-Ave.-During-Christmas pushy.

Companies don’t expect communicators to exhibit this type of behavior.

I’m looking forward to tackling this topic during the workshop.

That’s the title of the IABC lunch panel that takes place in Silicon Valley on April 21.

I have the pleasure of joining social media guru Steve Farnsworth for what should be a lively discussion.

Steve does believe in storytelling.

And I absolutely embrace social media.

Still, there’s plenty of provocative turf to navigate around these two areas.

But I’m not going for the sensationalistic sell, painting a picture of contention likely to degrade into a wrestling match (and one that would certainly see me pinned against the dessert tray).

Instead, Steve, Meta Mehling (who organized the lunch panel from the IABC side) and I settled on the following description:

Join communication futurists and social media leaders Lou Hoffman and Steve Farnsworth for a give-and-take panel discussion about your role as a communicator and why the “F word  (facilitation) matters. The discussion will challenge traditional beliefs – does the world need another set of pristine messages? – as well as share pragmatic approaches to social media that align with today’s world.

There is no holy grail (just ask King Arthur).

But this session should cause you to rethink social media, storytelling and all the other elements that go into communications. No doubt, it will also prompt reflection on whether your own career path is on a trajectory to be successful tomorrow.

We debated that holy grail part and whether it wouldn’t be more accurate to say, “Just ask Galahad, son of Lancelot who sat at King Arthur’s Round Table.”

When in doubt, simple is better.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the lunch panel.

It should be fun.

You can find the online registation details here.