Be like Rick Astley (and other sticky advice from reality TV queen Maz Farrelly)

Dull costs money – that was the top line and the takeaway from a breakfast talk by Maz Farrelly, the woman whose TV shows have been watched 8 billion times.

If you don’t know her name, you’ll have seen something made by the TV producer extraordinaire: she’s behind The X Factor, Dancing With The Stars, Big Brother, Celebrity Apprentice, The Farmer Wants A Wife. Her loo houses many awards.

On Wednesday morning, over coffee and sausage rolls, Farrelly spoke to a packed room at dentsu’s Auckland CBD office on ‘White Noise, Red Buzzers and Orange Road Cones’.

“The brain has one job,” Farrelly begins, “to keep you alive.” And that’s why we tune out white noise – the stuff we see and hear every day – so we can concentrate on the things that stand out.

It’s your job to be interesting

Farrelly’s point is that your message will be filtered out if it’s humdrum. Her background is in television, but her lessons apply equally to marketing, business and your LinkedIn profile.

“It’s forensically about the audience,” she says. Think about the audience all the time, she urges – noting that people are often in ‘transmit’ mode rather than paying attention to those they’re addressing.

From the audience point of view: “It’s your job to be interesting. It’s not my job to be interested in you.”

On paper, Farrelly’s achievements are impressive. In person she is dazzling, funny, inspirational. Also practical. She runs the room through 12 ways not to be dull, starting with the idea of a Netflix ad.

Engaging content works like a series of rooms, she says. If the first room is interesting, you might go into the next one. But if you open the first door and decide what you see is boring, you won’t go any further.

“I write 30 words for a Netflix ad and they give me $ 30 million,” she says. Not a brag, just fact. “So I sweat every word. The first sentence buys you the next sentence.”

It’s the same for your pitch, your company mission statement, your LinkedIn bio, she says. When everyone uses the same buzzwords – passionate, authentic, people person – the audience glazes over and you’re not memorable.

Never gonna let you down

Tip number five involves Rick Astley. It’s not yet 9am and she has us all up dancing to his most famous tune. You know the chorus, and so does everyone there. Which is her point: we know what Rick Astley is about in that song, even those who weren’t born when it was released 37 years ago.

His messaging is clear, it sticks in your head. “Be like Rick Astley,” says Farrelly.

Some of her advice you’ll have heard before – number 10, for example is ‘Have a USP’.

“It might sound obvious,” she says as we chat after the event, “but people don’t do it.”

People often equate being professional with being dull, but she points out that any company’s audience is also her reality TV audience.

“Nobody has ever asked for a TV show to be more boring. Nobody has ever said, ‘Oh I wish that meeting was more boring.’ So don’t make it boring.”

Even a small improvement compared to the rest of the field makes a difference, she says. “Be 1% better and you’ll win.”

Emotion = engagement

As a producer, Farrelly is constantly thinking about how to create the outcomes she wants. For her, it’s more viewers, hit shows – and in the end it comes down to engagement. That’s why she was always delighted to hear someone “hated” Big Brother.

“Brilliant or terrible, we don’t do middle of the road,” she says. An emotional reaction from your audience proves the content isn’t dull.

“If you don’t feel something, I’m not doing my job properly.”

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