Thursday, January 31, 2013

AS GOES "AS THE WORLD TURNS," SO GOES... EVERYTHING?

We've already written about Lynn Liccardo's book chronicling the end of As the World Turns, here.

But now, Sam Ford, who contributed a piece on ATWT's Luke and Noah to my book, Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama's Greatest Moments, argues that what went wrong with ATWT can be applied to practically any business.

He writes in Fast Company:

Marketing and communications professionals alike are increasingly thinking about themselves and their everyday work as acts of "storytelling." Often, though, this is said in a vacuum, with little thought about how lessons learned from professional storytellers in the media industries might apply to the stories companies tell.

Recently, I've been reading Lynn Liccardo's e-book, As the World Stopped Turning. Liccardo (who contributed to the Survival of Soap Opera, a book I co-edited) provides a personal account, as both fan and critic, of watching the gradual deterioration of a soap opera which had been a staple of the U.S. daytime lineup for 54 years.

In her focus on the particulars of As the World Turns, I see several key lessons that corporate storytellers should take to heart, lest we (once again) live out the cliche about those not studying history being doomed to repeat it. Here are a few of those themes:

Read the entire piece at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3005076/demise-soap-operas-and-lessons-content-marketers

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