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 “overperformers” 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 6 million views on The Diary of a CEO.

“Steve [Bartlett] goes in all different directions, but it isn’t always people you think who are going to be the highest performers, and that allows us to lead without ego or bias to think that we know, because we might have looked at that person’s following and say they don’t have an audience to bring with them,” Holt argued.

When pitching FlightStory on a podcast project, she insisted the biggest mistake was not explaining why they wanted to produce content. “As a creator, it’s so hard to build an audience. There are so many things competing against you for it not to work: economics, algorithms, competition,” Holt said.  

So she looks for passion in those pitching her, if not obsession. And creators with essential personal brands as FlightStory is thriving as digital creators and brand marketers increasingly get a seat at Hollywood’s creative table alongside writers, directors and talent as they make original IP series together.

But while driven by data, Holt insisted she wants real people for FlightStory content. “We really want the human,” she said, arguing against the AI slop that is infiltrating into social media spaces to compete against podcasts and other longform content.

“We’re in the messy middle of humanity. Longform is the tool to mess. You get longer amounts of time to spend in your world, and it’s a bit messy,” Holt said. AI promises too much of a perfect world for its users, which works against reaching and holding big 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 really, really quickly,” Holt argued. Take reality TV. It has prospered in an increasingly crowded media space because it’s messy, built on gossip, and has “connected with audiences and building creator-led brands.”

After the box office success of the horror pics Obsession and Backrooms, which were directed by filmmakers raised on YouTube, Holt said the big mistake among major studios and streamers will be “to assume Hollywood knows better than the creators themselves.”

“They can build their own movies and they can distribute to any channel they want to distribute on,” Holt said of digital creators. She added Hollywood is still writing big checks based on guesswork for pilot season episodes or movie pitches, while digital creators have been relying on data to predict outcomes for a long time.

“We should be so lucky to be in their world,” Holt said of creators who have been scrambling and scraping to get content onto platforms everywhere, and all after much trial and error. That’s the experience Bartlett had ahead of launching The Diary of a CEO, recording and testing and going nowhere for two years, until he understood the story data was telling him and only then launched a popular podcast.

So when Holt tied up with Bartlett to launch FlightStory, she took care to get out of his way and look to data for direction to “balance art and science.”