Parallels Between Marketing & Theater // With Toto Kisaku

Pete Sena: Because now you’re teaching storytelling. You have a whole crowd of people waiting who you’re going teach about how to tell stories. Is that, for you, telling stories is how one connects identity?

Toto Kisaku: It’s another sharing of the truth. It’s the sharing of the truth because, I don’t think you like lying, right? The truth is what you need. By crossing, for example, crossing ‘The Green’ in downtown New Haven. That space is one of the areas I’ve visited most. Every day, everybody is crossing The Green and they’re going to work. But all those people have the emptiness in them. That want to be filled. That need. The homeless need something, right? You need something, right? So that empty space, that need, humans need the feeling of community. How can we do that?

Pete: Stories.

Toto: Stories. But the really, really true stories.

Pete: The word we use a lot in advertising is, and I always say the greatest ads have, "authenticity." That authentic self, that true self. Because people see through lies today.