FlightStory co-founder Georgie Holt says storytelling amid a fast-growing creator economy is about data.
“You truly don’t need to guess anymore. We’re in the creative age of media,” Holt told the Banff World Media Festival during a sit-down interview led by Mikey O’Connell, senior entertainment editor at The Hollywood Reporter. “We don’t guess. We test,” Holt added of an in-house division, called the Failure and Experimentation team, to sort through ideas for new content.
FlightStory is best known for its The Diary of a CEO podcast, hosted by company co-founder Steven Bartlett, who has interviewed guests like Michelle Obama, Scooter Braun, Simon Cowell and Richard Branson, among many others. Bartlett gets endlessly pitched by powerful people looking to get on his podcast.
So FlightStory needs to test how a potential guest might perform before they get in front on a microphone and cameras on a FlightStory production. That led to the development of a Guest Radar to find “over-performers” as potential guests.
“We get celebrities pitched to us all the time and we put them into the tool and we’re like, not so much,” Holt said. But creators with 20,000 followers online that are plugged into the Guest Radar test well and go on to do six million views on The Diary of a CEO.
