Performance Story Telling: How to cut through the noise

Every PR scribe, marketer, journo and blogger is now capable of at least quadrupling their output with the help of generative AI.

Suddenly, even when we thought we were already being deluged by ‘content’ in the digital world things have kind of got out of control.

Adding to the problem is the rise and rise of the TikTokers of the world and peddlers of fake news, fake pictures, fake videos and fake voices.

Detecting the real from the fake, the AI version vs the human  version is, well, for those of us who care, kinda difficult.

The first question is, should we care? Like if this shite continues to get out of control, then so what? Maybe it means that trustworthiness in anything digital dies. And because we are wired to digital, then trust in everything, every institution essential to a democratic life, dies with it. Gosh!

No wonder us simple homo sapiens are being accused of having shorter attention spans. We still have only 24 hours in a day and most of us (hopefully) spend a majority of that time not staring at a device.

Imagine if we were somehow convinced that we needed to consume 10 times the amount of food per day or only sleep 3 hours per. Some performance hurdles are simply unattainable.

In human evolution time, it was only a few hours ago we were wandering around hoping to catch a rabbit for dinner and measuring time by glancing at the stars.

The commercial world is all about Brands. Sad but true. And great brands have historically been correlated with great story telling. Think Nike, Apple and Tim Cook, Tim Minchin, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Beethoven. If you’re up for it think (erk) Elon Musk.

Great brands don’t need to be about rampant consumerism. Brands that cut through, the brands you trust are more likely to be your local footy club, School Strikers for Climate, maybe the CWA in regional Oz. The faders are the one’s becoming irrelevant like Australia’s major political parties. Yeah!

The magic ingredients in believable, trusted, human-induced communications are first the face-to-face engagement over a cuppa. When it gets to big time story telling it is the engagement of the artistic/creative community. Think again about the composers and musicians allude to above.

Performance story telling draws on the weird and wonderful, the ‘not-seen-before’, the surprising mix of performance genres, the instantly sharable breakthrough.

Real performance sends you home with unforgettable memories.

Many a business retreat at Spring Bay Mill has been elevated to unforeseen levels by the inclusion of creative types. Like comedians, composers, choreographers and writers who bring completely new perspectives to what otherwise would end up on the scrap heap of uninspiring, forgettable corporate babble.

And the organizations that experience these uplifting events tend to return to the Mill for another (and a vastly different dose) of more inspiration.

Turns out, we at the Mill are well connected in the ‘creative industries’. We are motivated to highlight how ‘creatives’ are both legitimate and essential players in corporate story telling success. It’s been a long time coming

How about a cuppa?