What Does the Audience Want?

The question comes from Konstantin Stanislavski who cofounded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898 and spent the rest of his life working out why some performances land while others merely happen The acting of his era was optimized on externals projection gesture spectacle the grand effects that carried to the back row It worked in the sense that it produced reactions Stanislavskiamp8217s heresy was to insist that the audience is not responding to the gesture It is responding to the motive underneath the gesture An action without a believable inner reason reads as false no matter how skillfully it is executedSo he rebuilt the craft around the why Every action on stage had to be grounded in a psychological need every scene gave the character an objective in service of that need every play gave the character a superobjective the spine of wanting that runs through the whole story Plot stopped being a sequence of events the characters marched through and became the collision of people fighting for what they wantThe influence of that idea is hard to state precisely because it is total it is invisible the way winning ideas become invisible His students and interpreters Strasberg Adler Meisner built the American acting schools on it and the Actors Studio institutionalized it When Brando walked onto the screen in 1951 audiences watched everyone around him suddenly look like they were signaling instead of behaving Then the idea jumped media The screenwriting note that has launched a million rewrites amp8220I donamp8217t buy it whatamp8217s her motivationamp8221 is Stanislavskiamp8217s system laundered into the writersamp8217 room The whole vocabulary of characterdriven versus plotdriven storytelling is his Pixaramp8217s story rules are steeped in it The prestigetelevision era that has held the culture for twentyfive years is at bottom a machine for making us care what damaged people want When we say a piece of content resonates this is almost always what we mean we recognize the wantingNow hold that history up next to our businessAdvertising over the same hundred years professionalized the other half of the stage We became magnificently good at the externals who saw the message where they saw it for how long in what context and what they did afterward Audience context attention outcomes These are our projection and our gesture and I do not diminish them I have spent a fair part of my career helping to measure several of them But they are all descriptions of what happened They tell you the audience reacted They do not tell you why and the why is where the response actually lives The theatre learned this in 1898 the audience is not moved by the stimulus it is moved by the meeting between the stimulus and its own motivations A century later most of our optimization still behaves as if better staging were the whole game We have been producing melodrama with progressively better lightingThe creative community to its credit has always halfknown this Good creatives talk about insight about tension about the truth of a human want that a brand can honestly attach itself to What we lacked was any way to operationalize that knowledge on the planning buying and measurement side Motivation was the province of the brief not the algorithm That is the part that has changedMotivation is now measurable My own company RMT Labs works in this area so discount my enthusiasm accordingly but the science stands on its own feet In an EEG study by Wharton Neuroscience motivational resonance between an ad and its audience was the only statistically significant predictor of the brain response associated with effective advertising not attention not recall but resonance Validations by the ARF Nielsen NCS MRI Simmons and iSpot 605 point in the same direction and in TransUnionamp8217s validation matching ads to the motivations of the people seeing them lifted ROAS by double digits and New To Brand by triple digits Stanislavski asserted from a rehearsal room what the instruments are now confirming the response happens where the message meets the wantingReaders of this column will notice the rhyme with what I wrote recently about the black boxes now spending our money that we should insist the machines tell us why This is the mirror image of the same demand The why we should be extracting from the algorithms and the why we should be measuring in the audience are the two halves of one discipline and the industry that masters both will not merely report resonance after the fact it will plan for itA hundred years ago a director in Moscow stopped asking his actors to be louder and started asking them what they wanted and every form of storytelling that touched the idea became more powerful Our craft is persuasion we have been louder for a centuryThe next era of this business belongs to whoever finally turns Stanislavskiamp8217s question on the audience itself and builds the capacity to hear the answer What do you wantamp160Building HighPerforming TeamsNEWamp160 Attachment ampamp growth why we hold on ampamp how we move forwardamp160This podcast explores the role attachment plays in our lives and why letting go can feel so difficult even when we know it39s necessary for growth Natalie and Bill discuss why we form attachments the purpose they serve and how learning to release what no longer aligns can create space for new opportunities deeper fulfilment and continued growthamp160 amp160 amp160 amp160From relationships careers and environments to identities expectations and memories attachment is part of what makes us human But as we evolve some of the things we39ve loved relied on or identified with may no longer support the person we39re becomingamp160 amp160 amp160 Whether you39re navigating a career change the end of a relationship or simply feeling called towards a new chapter this conversation offers a compassionate perspective on why growth often asks us to let go before we can move forwardamp160Podcast length 44 minutesamp160Watch the VideoPosted at MediaVillage through the Thought Leadership selfpublishing platformClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillageorgMyersBizNet

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