Your audience is bored. That’s a PR problem.
What entertainment can teach communicators about writing people actually want to read
By Matthew Celestial
I have spent a lot of my career trying to convince people to watch things: films, television shows, animated series, games, characters you have never met and stories you did not know existed until someone decided they were worth putting in front of you. It is one of the things I have always loved about working in entertainment: you can spend months building a campaign, perfecting the messaging and arguing over precisely how something should be introduced to the world, but eventually it reaches an audience that was not in any of those meetings and has no obligation to care about how hard you worked on it.
They either pay attention or they don’t.
Entertainment teaches you that lesson quickly, and sometimes brutally. Nobody owes you the next episode. Nobody has to finish the trailer. Nobody is required to understand why your film matters, fall in love with your character or read the interview you worked incredibly hard to place. There is always another show, another creator, another notification, another story and, increasingly, an entire internet waiting one thumb movement away.
Which is why I have been thinking about something happening in professional communications.
Our writing is getting flat.
Not necessarily bad. In fact, much of it is technically very good. It is grammatically correct. “Strategically aligned.” Appropriately punctuated. The key messages are there, the executive quote has been approved really quickly and everyone who needed to see it has seen it.
Open LinkedIn on almost any morning and you will find organizations thrilled to announce something, executives excited to share something else and companies proud to partner with another company that is, presumably, equally proud to partner with them.
“The Great Flattening”
Naturally, it would be convenient to blame artificial intelligence for all of this. However, corporate writing has always been interchangeable even before we started integrating ChatGPT within our communications plans.
There have always been forces pulling professional language toward the middle. Legal needs to review it. Marketing has terminology it wants included. Leadership has preferences. Someone wants another key message in the second paragraph. Someone else thinks a sentence sounds too strong. The writer changes it, sends it back, changes it again and, after enough rounds of revisions, the final version arrives at that magical place where nobody is particularly offended by it.
Nobody is particularly moved by it either.
Generative AI didn’t create that instinct, but it has made the conversation much more interesting because we can now produce an astonishing amount of perfectly acceptable language almost instantly. A reasonably good prompt can produce a respectable news release, executive quote, newsletter introduction, LinkedIn post or corporate statement before most of us have finished making coffee.
For communicators, that should be both exciting and slightly terrifying.
Because if competent writing becomes abundant, competence alone becomes less valuable. The differentiators start becoming the things that are considerably harder to manufacture at scale: a surprising observation, a distinctive voice, cultural literacy, humour, judgment, specificity, curiosity, reporting, taste and the ability to recognize when something technically works but simply isn’t interesting. Above all, there is the increasingly rare quality of actually having something to say.
DOES ANYONE CARE?
One of the reasons I have loved working across animation, film, television and games is that entertainment operates under an unusually unforgiving condition: the audience can leave whenever it wants.
Think about how much information a trailer is expected to communicate in a matter of minutes. It has to introduce a world, establish tone, give us characters worth following, create an emotional response and leave enough unanswered that we want more. A poster might get a few seconds of someone’s attention. A show’s premise needs to survive being reduced to a sentence.
Behind all of those decisions is essentially the same question:
Why would anyone care?
It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious, but it is a ruthless editorial test. What’s the hook? Who is this actually for? What haven’t they seen before? Where is the tension? What should they feel? What might they remember tomorrow? Why would they tell someone else about it? These aren’t exclusively entertainment questions. They’re questions communications professionals must face.
ATTENTION IS FADING
This is where I think communications has to become much more realistic about the environment in which our work actually exists.
We might categorize a CEO announcement as executive communications, a news release as media relations, an annual report as corporate communications and a LinkedIn post as social content, but the person encountering those things does not organize their attention according to our communications plans.
Their LinkedIn feed contains your carefully approved executive statement beside someone’s promotion, a creator’s video, an advertisement, a former colleague’s career announcement and a post they profoundly disagree with. Their phone contains your newsletter beside Netflix, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, sports highlights, breaking news, text messages and the group chat they would almost certainly rather be reading. That is the actual competitive environment.
Your annual report is probably not competing with another annual report for someone’s attention.
That doesn’t mean the annual report should suddenly have a cliffhanger, or that every CEO needs to become a content creator, or that a serious piece of public-interest communication should be rewritten like the season finale of Succession. There are moments when communications should be deliberately straightforward, restrained and even boring. But we should be much more respectful of what we are asking from people when we ask them to pay attention.
When you think about it, attention is not the final outcome of communication. Typically, it is the admission price. Before somebody can understand our message, trust our organization, reconsider an issue, remember a fact or take action, something considerably more basic has to happen first. They have to keep reading.
WE NEED TO BORROW THE WRITERS’ ROOM TEST
I don’t think communicators need to turn every communications department into a writers’ room, but I do think we could borrow some of its instincts. The next time something is almost ready to leave your desk, forget for a moment how difficult it was to get approved and read the opening again.
Would you keep watching? Does the first paragraph genuinely earn the second, or does it spend 150 words clearing its throat before getting to the interesting part? Then ask the question entertainment people are almost annoyingly obsessed with: what’s the hook?
Not the key message, not the organizational objective and not the thing leadership most wants included. What is the idea that makes another human being lean forward rather than move on?
A hook does not have to be sensational. It can be a surprising fact, a useful insight, an unresolved problem, a contradiction, a human story or simply a genuinely important piece of information presented clearly. What matters is that there is a reason for someone to continue.
Then ask who you are actually talking to.
“Stakeholders” is not a person. Neither is “the general public.”
What does this particular reader already know? What are they doing when they encounter this? What might they misunderstand? What do they care about that has absolutely nothing to do with your organization?
Entertainment companies can become almost obsessive about audiences because their survival depends on understanding them. Communications professionals should probably be just as obsessive.
And then there is the test I have increasingly come to love: Could anyone else have written this?
Take the company name out of the announcement and replace it with its closest competitor. Change the executive’s name. Leave everything else untouched. Does it still work?
If the answer is yes, you may not have a writing problem so much as a specificity problem.
Words like innovative, transformative, authentic, purpose-driven and industry-leading are not inherently meaningless, but they become close to meaningless when everyone can plausibly use them. Specificity is harder. Specificity requires knowing what is actually different, finding the detail that proves it and trusting the audience enough to let that detail do some of the work.
Finally, ask the question that the entertainment industry ultimately lives or dies by: Will anyone talk about this afterwards?
Not necessarily online. Not necessarily publicly. But is there a fact, an idea, a sentence or a story worth carrying into another conversation? Because being read is good, yes. However, we want to be remembered considerably.
WRITING ISN’T THE DECORATION AT THE END OF THE STRATEGY
There is a tendency in communications to treat writing as the final layer of the work. The strategy happens first. Objectives are established, stakeholders are mapped, messages are developed, risks are considered and approvals begin moving through the organization. Somewhere toward the end, a writer is handed all of this and asked to make it sound good.
But writing isn’t the wrapping paper around communications strategy. Writing is part of the strategy.
The strongest key message in the world has limited value if nobody reaches the paragraph containing it, just as the most carefully developed organizational narrative cannot do much if it sounds indistinguishable from the narrative of every other organization in the category.
And this is where I think generative AI ultimately makes the future of writing much more interesting rather than less.
For years, one of the practical challenges facing communications teams was production: How do we make enough content? How do we feed all of these channels? How do we write another version of this? How do we turn this announcement into five other things?
Technology is rapidly making that problem easier. The challenge is that we have to ask ourselves if our content is worth someone’s attention. We, now, must become editorial directors of our own work.
MAYBE WE NEED TO ENTERTAIN A LITTLE MORE
I can already imagine the objection to all of this: public relations isn’t entertainment. It isn’t.
A crisis statement is not a screenplay. A public-health advisory does not need a plot twist. An employee who needs information about their benefits should not have to make it through three acts to find it. Sometimes the best writing is simply clear.
But I think entertainment understands something about communication that becomes more valuable with every additional thing fighting for our attention: you cannot force an audience to care. But you can give them a reason to.
I’ve spent years around people trying to make audiences care about characters that don’t actually exist. When you think about it, that is a fairly extraordinary communications challenge. Somehow, a collection of drawings, pixels, performances or words can become meaningful enough that someone quotes a character twenty years later, buys something with their face on it, makes art inspired by them, travels to a convention to celebrate them or introduces that same story to their children.
That kind of connection isn’t created because somebody found the perfect synonym for innovative. It comes from specificity, character, emotion, surprise and craft. An understanding of the audience and, perhaps most importantly, respect for the fact that their attention has to be earned.
Public relations does not need to become entertainment, and every organization certainly does not need to start behaving like a media company. But our profession could borrow some of entertainment’s respect for the person sitting on the other side of the screen.
They can scroll past. They can close the tab. They can delete the email. They can stop watching. They can stop reading. And in a world where producing more words has never been easier, perhaps our job isn’t simply to produce more of them. Maybe, just maybe, it is to give people a reason to stay.
So before we ask whether the next piece of communication is approved, optimized, aligned and on-brand, I think there is one more question worth asking.
Would I keep reading?
Matthew Celestial is a Toronto-based writer and communications professional covering media, culture, entertainment and the ideas shaping how we communicate. He has spent more than a decade working across animation, film, technology and consumer brands, and is Managing Partner at Rhetor.