The Storytelling Edge

5The Killer Formula for Building an Audience

In this book, we've covered how great stories build relationships and make people care. And that the businesses that historically have had the best relationships with their customers are the ones where storytelling is their business. We're talking about newspapers. Magazines. Television networks. Netflix. HBO. These are businesses that have the loyal subscribers the rest of us have had to pay money to reach.

So what can we learn from them? What's their secret? If you look closely, you'll notice that all of them essentially follow the same time-tested playbook.

The CCO Pattern: Create, Connect, Optimize

Throughout history, there's a pattern for how media organizations have used storytelling to build audiences. The pattern starts with the very first example of mass media in history, during the Italian Renaissance.

Sixteenth-century Europe was home to a flurry of art, commerce, and science. Wealthy families began gaining power, and wars and skirmishes were frequent.

This meant there was also a lot of gossip.

The very first mass media business was the gossip rag. Think of it as an ancient TMZ. Every day, gossip writers would run around cities like Milan to gather the news and rumors of the day. They'd go to the churches, markets, and barracks to find scuttlebutt. Then they'd converge at a writing house and create a newsletter with all the rumors fit to linotype.

They would print all that gossip using the fanciest new technology: the ...