The experience isn't the storyteller

The best storyteller in the room is you.

It’s not the person on the stage. It’s not the voice in the headset walking the crowd toward the big reveal. It’s you, the one who showed up to watch. The one that cares about how the story impacts. The one who brought their own, unique experiences with them.

This was something I figured out in middle school even if I didn’t know it at the time. I had a stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books. And I read those books into the ground. I didn’t read them because of the writing. It wasn’t the best. But the fact that every reading was a different experience that my imagination could run wild with was the thing that made those books so memorable. Even to this day, I can remember the premise of many of them. Turn to one page and you live and discover the ancient ruins. Flip to another and you fall to your death deep in cavern or freeze to death while trying to capture a Yeti. The books never told me a story. It gave me the pen.

Believe me, I’m not dismissing storytellers. I treasure great storytellers. Storytelling is the real work underneath every experience worth anyone’s time. A great story is how you make a stranger care in the ninety seconds you actually have them. It’s the thing that creates the connection. The thing they actually feel. The thing they remember. Story creates the experience. Take it away and it’s just another marketing tactic.

The best stories aren’t told at you. The best stories give you a role to play. That’s the difference between a storyteller and a story engine.

When stories are told at you from a stage, you take it in, you applaud, and a week later the only thing left is the photo. Don’t get me wrong. Incredible story tellers know how to immerse you and connect from the stage. And that’s an art all to itself. But a story engine? It’s an entirely different experience. A story engine runs on you. You are part of the story. Change the input. Change the ending. No participation. No story? You just have a very expensive set. And it won’t be remembered.

I have a complicated relationship with “engagement.”

Engagement is a KPI. We count it. Reach, dwell time, scans, how many people stopped vs. kept on walking? Those numbers matter. And I put quite a bit of focus on engagement. It was even part of my title and a differentiator for a time. But these things measure attention. Attention is not the point. Do I have your attention? (See what I did there?) What we really seek is to create a connection. To share something meaningful. To create a moment. That’s the real point. That’s the thing that sticks.

I am a data guy at heart. And the reality is that I don’t care about the metrics. I care about the experience we create for the person in front of us right now. Is it meaningful? Does it satisfy a need? Have we created a story together? Have we shared a moment? Get that right and align the story to what’s important about the brand or the product or the feature or whatever…that’s the metric.

That’s the experience you remember, the one you helped write. And you remember it for the most human reason there is; you were in it. Who doesn’t want to be in the story?

And this is where technology gets its 15 minutes of…standing in the wings waiting to call out a line, if needed. In a story engine, the better the job we do putting technology to work, the less we should actually notice it. It should sense who you are, react to what you do, keep the story moving under you. Most of all, it should disappear. Insert Homer Simpson disappearing into the bushes meme here.

It might actually be the shiny thing that lured you in. But as soon as you start creating the story, it should vanish. As soon as the tech gets noticed, it’s failed. It’s quit being an engine and gone back to being a stage.

We built something at SXSW this year with our partners at Eventbase called Find Your Flock. The premise was incredibly simple: help one person find the few others in a group of strangers that they’d actually want to meet. We took a tongue-in-cheek approach to the tired birds of a feather story. It was a simple mechanic that I’ve seen more times than I can count. The difference here was that we removed the friction. We learned something about you and actually did something meaningful with it. We used the technology to push people more fully into the IRL world rather than to distract them from it. We didn’t want your attention. We wanted you to take something with you when you left. We had plenty of metrics. That’s one of the many benefits of a tech stack. But for me, the real metric was the smiles. The real metric was the people that walked in on their own and walked out an hour later with a few new friends.

While the experience was pretty simple, the technology isn’t. But the Eventbase ‘Activate’ platform, that we were there to help launch, connected just the right dots. Nobody using it was thinking about the technology. They were thinking about the person in front of them. And that was the point. And yes, it was the technology that brought them together. And it was the technology we wanted them to remember. But to do that, first they had to forget it was there. They can’t notice it while it’s working. That’s failure. But that disappearing act is exactly why they trust it afterward. And that’s a tiny needle to thread.

When it works, the story people carry out the door isn’t about what we made. It’s about what they did. And we were just there to put the story in motion. We built the engine, and then, if we got it right, we got out of their way and let the humans be humans.