<\/p>\n
FlightStory co-founder Georgie Holt says storytelling amid a fast-growing creator economy is about data.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou truly don\u2019t need to guess anymore. We\u2019re in the creative age of media,\u201d Holt told the Banff World Media Festival during a sit-down interview led by Mikey O\u2019Connell, senior entertainment editor at\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter.\u00a0\u201cWe don\u2019t guess. We test,\u201d Holt added of an in-house division, called the Failure and Experimentation team, to sort through ideas for new content.<\/p>\n
More from The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n FlightStory is best known for its The Diary of a CEO podcast, hosted by company co-founder Steven Bartlett<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cover-performers\u201d as potential guests.<\/p>\n \u201cWe get celebrities pitched to us all the time and we put them into the tool and we\u2019re like, not so much,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSteve [Bartlett] goes in all different directions, but it isn\u2019t 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\u2019s following and say they don\u2019t have an audience to bring with them,\u201d Holt argued.<\/p>\n When pitching FlightStory on a podcast project, she insisted the biggest mistake was not explaining why they wanted to produce content. \u201cAs a creator, it\u2019s so hard to build an audience. There are so many things competing against you for it not to work: economics, algorithms, competition,\u201d Holt said. <\/p>\n 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\u2019s creative table alongside writers, directors and talent as they make original IP series together.<\/p>\n But while driven by data, Holt insisted she wants real people for FlightStory content. \u201cWe really want the human,\u201d as she argued against the AI slop that is infiltrating into social media spaces to compete against podcasts and other longform content.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re 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\u2019s a bit messy,\u201d Holt said. AI promises too much of a perfect world for its users, which mitigates against reaching and holding big audiences.<\/p>\n \u201cPerfect people are really boring, and we\u2019re going to build perfect AI, perfect tools, perfect technology, and it\u2019s going to get boring really, really quickly,\u201d Holt argued. Take reality TV. It has prospered in an increasingly crowded media space because it\u2019s messy, built on gossip, and has \u201cconnected with audiences and building creator-led brands.\u201d<\/p>\n After the box office success of the horror pics Obsession and Backrooms, which were directed by filmmakers raised on YouTube<\/a>, Holt said the big mistake among major studios and streamers will be \u201cto assume Hollywood knows better than the creators themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey can build their own movies and they can distribute to any channel they want to distribute on,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe should be so lucky to be in their world,\u201d Holt said of creators who have been scrambling and scraping to get content onto platforms everywhere, and all after much trial and error. That\u2019s the experience of Bartlett ahead of launching The Diary of a CEO, who for two years kept recording and testing and going nowhere until he understood the story data was telling him and only then launched a popular podcast.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cbalance art and science.\u201d<\/p>\n Best of The Hollywood Reporter<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for THR’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" FlightStory co-founder Georgie Holt says storytelling amid a fast-growing creator economy is about data. \u201cYou truly don\u2019t need to guess anymore. We\u2019re in the creative age of media,\u201d Holt told the Banff World Media Festival during a sit-down interview led by Mikey O\u2019Connell, senior entertainment editor at\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter.\u00a0\u201cWe don\u2019t guess. We test,\u201d Holt added […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2462664,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[484391,34395,484392,428598],"class_list":["post-2462663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-georgie-holt","tag-hollywood-reporter","tag-holt","tag-steven-bartlett"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/FlightStory-Founder-Georgie-Holt-Says-Storytelling-Is-About-Data.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2462663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2462666,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462663\/revisions\/2462666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2462664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2462663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2462663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2462663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}