Storytelling in the fast-growing creator economy is all about data, says Georgie Holt, co-founder of FlightStory.
“You really don’t have to guess anymore. We’re in an age of creativity in media,” Holt said at the Banff World Media Festival during an interview conducted by Mickey O’Connell, senior entertainment editor at The New York Times. Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t guess, we test,” Holt added of an internal department, called the Failure and Experimentation Team, to sort through ideas for new content.
FlightStory is known for Diary of a CEO Podcast, hosted by company co-founder Stephen Bartlett, who has interviewed guests such as Michelle Obama, Scooter Braun, Simon Cowell, and Richard Branson, among many others. Bartlett is endlessly featured by powerful people looking to join his podcast.
So FlightStory needs to test how a potential guest will perform before they step in front of the microphone and cameras in a FlightStory production. This led to the development of a guest radar to find “high performers” as potential guests.
“We’re presented with celebrities all the time and we put them in the tool, and we don’t like them very much,” Holt said. But creators with 20,000 online followers connected to Guest Radar fare well and go on to rack up six million views on Diary of a CEO.
“Steve [Bartlett] “Holt goes in all different directions, but it’s not always the people you think are going to be the highest performers, and that allows us to lead without the arrogance or bias of thinking we know, because we might have looked at that person’s following and said they don’t have an audience to bring with them.”
When pitching FlightStory on a podcast project, she insisted the biggest mistake was not explaining why they wanted to produce the content. “As a creator, it’s very difficult to build an audience. There are too many things competing against you to not succeed: economics, algorithms, competition,” Holt said.
So she looks for passion in those who promote her, if not obsession. Creators with core personal brands like FlightStory are thriving as digital creators and brand marketers increasingly get a seat at the Hollywood creative table alongside writers, directors and talent as they create original IP series together.
But while Holt was driven by data, she insisted she wanted real people for FlightStory’s content. “We really want human,” she argued against the decline of artificial intelligence creeping into social media spaces to compete against podcasts and other long-form content.
“We’re in a messy environment for humanity,” Holt said. “The long form is the tool of chaos. You have more time to spend in your world, and it’s a little messy.” AI promises much of an ideal world for its users, alleviating the difficulty of reaching and retaining large audiences.
“Perfect people are really boring, and we’re going to build perfect AI, perfect tools, perfect technology, and it’s going to get boring very quickly,” Holt said. Take reality TV. She thrived in an increasingly crowded media space because she was chaotic, built on gossip, and “connected with audiences and built creator-led brands.”
After the success of horror films at the box office mania and Back roomswhich was directed by filmmakers who grew up on YouTube, Holt said a big mistake between major studios and streaming companies would be to “assume that Hollywood knows better than the creators themselves.”
“They can create their own movies and they can distribute them to whatever channel they want to distribute on,” Holt said of digital creators. She added that Hollywood still writes big checks based on guesswork for pilot season episodes or movie trailers, while digital creators have relied on data to predict outcomes for a long time.
“We should be so lucky to be in their world,” Holt said of the creators who were scrambling to get content on platforms everywhere, all after a lot of trial and error. This is Bartlett’s experience before launch Diary of a CEOwho continued for two years recording and testing and went nowhere until he understood that the story data was telling him and only then launched a popular podcast.
So when Holt teamed up with Bartlett to launch FlightStory, she was careful to step out of his way and dig into the data for guidance “balancing art and science.”
