Bob Rogers: The Power of Deep Story

Additional Links

• • Get your copy of DEEP STORY here.
  • Learn more about BRC Imagination Arts here.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher. Welcome to the FoST Podcast. Today, we’re joined by Bob Rogers, a true pioneer of immersive storytelling. Bob is the founder of BRC Imagination Arts, the renowned strategic design and production agency considered one of the world’s leading creators of content-based visitor experiences for companies, cultural institutions, and theme parks. They’re the ones who created the Johnny Walker Princess Street Experience, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, and the Las Vegas Raiders Allegiant Stadium Tour to name just a few, earning more than 400 international awards for creative excellence along the way. Bob himself has been inducted into the IAAPA Theme Park Hall of Fame, received the Themed Entertainment Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, earned two Oscar nominations, and serves on the board of directors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He’s also the author of the newly released Deep Story: A Complete Guide to Creating Transformational Visitor Experiences.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading the book, and I can say that it is truly a masterclass in creating experiential stories that are powerful and memorable. In it, Bob shares decades of industry knowledge revealing how leaders and creators can move the hearts and minds of visitors through experiences. It’s my great pleasure that this podcast provides me the opportunity to sit down and speak with legends such as Bob Rogers. Please join me in welcoming Bob Rogers to the FoST Podcast.

Bob, welcome to the Future of StoryTelling Podcast. It’s such an honor to have you on.

BOB ROGERS:

It’s an honor for me to be on. This is a wonderful chance. I’m really looking forward to talking with you.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Well, me too. I mean, you are one of the OGs in our field, somebody who’s been doing this for a long time and has done such extraordinary work for so many years. How did you get started in the world of immersive entertainment?

BOB ROGERS:

Well, my first job in entertainment was as a magician in the magic shop at Disneyland. And in many ways, it was the perfect introduction to show business because it was my job to demonstrate the trick. That was the show part. And then while the guest was still dazed and amazed, take them over to the cash register and sell them the trick. So that was the business part. So it was show business. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that there was a third thing going on that in the process I needed to slightly change the guest’s identity. By the end of my demonstration, they needed to think of themselves as being personally, possibly a magician. If they didn’t think they were capable of being a magician, what’s the point of buying the magic? So it was those three things. It was show, business, and a change of identity.

And so much of what happened to me that summer and what I experienced in the magic shop became the foundation for 45 years in this business and also for the book DEEP STORY.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Congratulations on the book, by the way. I have now had a chance to read it and was very excited. There’s so many things you talk about that resonate for me that ring true to the kinds of things that we do at Future of StoryTelling, things that I’ve written about in my book. One of those is having come from that early experience as a magician at Disney, you understood that the trick wasn’t so much about you showing off your skills, but about the guest. It was about empowering the guest in some way.

BOB ROGERS:

Completely about the guest. One of the hazards of working in a magic shop is that the guest can buy the trick that you’re demonstrating, take it around the corner, read the instructions and come back and expose you and embarrass you in front of the next group. And I was complaining about this to one of the senior magicians in the shop and he stopped me cold and he said, “Well, first of all, who cares? It’s not about you. It’s about them. People don’t come here to admire how magical you are. They come here hoping that you will help them discover some magic within themselves.” What a great piece of advice. What a great insight. That is the heart of all hospitality. That is the heart of all entertainment. You really want to cause the guest to discover something magical about themselves.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Let’s take a moment and share some more stories around this because we both have dealt with a lot of clients over the years. And often, at least I found that the corporate clients we work with, they think the hero of the story is their product or their service. It’s all about them, their company. And I’m always the one who’s trying to convince them it’s not about you. It’s not about your wonderful object that you’re selling here. It’s about your customer and trying to help them on their journey. Have you had similar kinds of struggles with clients to get them to think that way?

BOB ROGERS:

Of course. Clients always become preoccupied with means when they should be preoccupied with ends. What is the end? What is the desired result? It’s a change in behavior. It’s a change in outcome. It’s a change in what people do or study. It’s a change in action, and that’s the thing they should be preoccupied with. They fall in love with a piece of technology. Ooh, look at this shiny piece of new high technology. Let’s do that. And it also tends to be what they want to say and without first stopping and thinking about what the guest wants to hear, you need to stop and define the exact change that you want to make before you start picking the tool to achieve it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So in your book, and first of all, it’s based on so many years of experience working with so many different kinds of clients. Share a little bit about the range of work that you’ve been involved in through BRC.

BOB ROGERS:

We’ve done things for the space program. We’ve done things on First Nation culture, the Museum of the Bible. The range is just amazing, and the people we’ve met are just incredible. When we were working for NASA to create a diorama of what it was like to stand on the moon, we weren’t looking at pictures. We weren’t talking with professors. We weren’t talking with engineers or historians. We were sitting at a table with people who had actually walked on the moon with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Young, Gene Cernan, and they told us things that weren’t in any of the books. Having that kind of access to primary sources has been one of the real privileges of working here at BRC.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Such a range of clients, and yet you’ve developed a kind of framework, a methodology or a set of tools to be able to approach all of these different types of businesses and institutions and subject matters and bring a kind of consistent approach to creating transformative stories, powerful, immersive experiences to them. Tell me a little bit about how you developed this tool set.

BOB ROGERS:

We developed the idea of deep story, and this idea is that you go deep, deep, deep, deep, deep into the audience and you simultaneously go deep into the academic subject, if it’s a museum or the brand or whatever it is that is the subject of your project. You’re looking for emotional triggers. And when you finally find that, you make the entire experience about that one idea. I’ll give you a concrete example. We were asked by the Milwaukee Brewers, the professional baseball team. Their founder was retiring from baseball, Bud Selig, and they wanted to do something that would be a tribute to Bud Selig. They wanted to do it at their stadium. And there’s something about a location-based audience. You know where they are, they’re at a baseball stadium, you know what they’re probably doing. They’re watching a baseball game today. You know who they’re with, probably family or friends, and now you’re looking for the emotional triggers that they will respond to.

And within the case of Bud Selig, what stood out to us was the fact that Bud had fallen in love with baseball because his mother loved baseball and she took him to games trying to get her love of baseball to rub off on him. Well, guess what everybody in the audience is doing today? They all have that experience in common. That idea brings up misty-eyed memories of games long ago and relatives fondly remembered. So we made the whole story, the whole experience is based on the idea Bud Selig fell in love with baseball because his mother took him to games and ever since then, he’s been trying to make everyone in the world fall in love with baseball. That’s taking what’s deep in the heart of the audience, connecting it with what’s something deep in the heart of the brand, and that creates a lasting connection.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

And to understand that you establish that upfront after you’ve done that research, after you’ve talked to all the key people in your process, if I recall from the book, you then establish agreed set of objectives for any project and that becomes the roadmap or filter through which you judge all of your ideas and all of your decisions.

BOB ROGERS:

Ideally, one objective, just one objective. You can have a number of KPIs, meaning indicators that you’re accomplishing the objective, but a KPI is a key performance indicator. It is not the objective. Getting people to test drive Volvo cars might be an indicator, but it is not the objective. The objective is selling Volvo cars. You can have as many KPIs as you want, as long as they’re pointing to one objective. If you split your attention between multiple objectives, you’re less likely to achieve any of them. The other secret is to speak to the heart, not the head. You’ll notice that all of these things I’m talking about emotional things, emotional logic. I believe that people make up their minds with their hearts and subsequently try to organize the facts to match the opinion that they’ve already reached with their heart. That doesn’t mean you can’t lead people afterwards to the logic behind it, but start with the heart because that’s how you change the world.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I couldn’t agree more. And this points to the important role of storytelling. How essential is storytelling in your process and what role does it play?

BOB ROGERS:

Story is the most powerful force on earth. Even the scientific method itself starts off with a thesis, which is a story, and the investigator tries to match the facts up to prove that the thesis is true. And if the facts don’t support it, they’re actually very unlikely to give up on their thesis. They’ll change their thesis a little bit and go at it again. If you go back 3000 years, the armies of ancient Egypt are all gone. The armies of World War I and World War II, long gone. What force has been controlling actions of human beings all during those periods? It’s story. Story is the tool of the Torah, the Bible, the Quran. Story was the tool of Shakespeare and Spielberg. Story was the tool of Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump. It is the most powerful force on earth, and it has always had as one of its primary uses, altering behavior.

And storytellers have a responsibility to use that awesome power responsibly and with love to make the world a better place. The book DEEP STORY is a toolkit. The tool, if used correctly, makes life better for the audience, makes life better for the brand or the people running the museum, and makes life better also for the creative people who feel more fulfilled with their life if they know that they’re achieving something worthwhile and that they’re effective at it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

You and I are both lovers of story and storytellers, but we haven’t devoted our careers to the more traditional forms of storytelling, right? You’re not making movies all day long or writing children’s books. You’re making a kind of experiential story. Can you talk about why the experiential is different or more powerful than say a traditional linear form and why you chose to devote your career to it?

BOB ROGERS:

I don’t see them as distinctly, sharply different. Remember, I’ve been making films since I was 12. I’ve got two Oscar nominations and a couple hundred awards for some of the films that we’ve made. By the way, I’m also a member of the board of directors of the Academy of Motion, Picture, Arts and Sciences, so I’m very involved in the film business. But at the same time, I see experiential storytelling as being sort of a natural extension of what you do with a film. With a film, you build sets, you hire actors. In experiential, you build sets, you don’t tear them down and throw them away. Instead, you open them up and instead of hiring actors, you put the audience into this story and let them experience it as one of the participants.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I’m a big believer that one of the fundamental shifts of storytelling in the 21st century is from a world where the audience is a passive consumer of their stories to where they’re an active participant in them. It becomes something where the people formerly known as the audience, which in my book I call the actions because I believe that it’s no longer based in that tradition of orality where we’re just listening as an audience, but where we actually have to take action, we have to have agency, we’re drawing from the same root as that of an actor. And also with that comes choice, creativity, and in most cases for the kinds of things you and I love to make and do, a kind of embodied experience too. If you look at the science, shows that it’s a much more emotionally powerful because emotions are reinforced by all of our senses and originate, as you said, more in the body or in the heart than in the intellect in the brain and really learn a language to tell stories to the body and enable and invite the audience in.

BOB ROGERS:

I would agree with everything you’d say, and I would give you the same idea in a small capsule. It’s a quote from the cowboy humorist from the 20s and 30s, Will Rogers. He once said, and I’m going to get the quote not quite right, “Some men learn by reading, some men learn by observation. The rest of us have to pee on the electric fence for ourselves.” And I’ll share with you a mystery that we’ve seen a number of times. When we first opened our Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, when we would stand at the exit asking people the same question, we would say, “Hey, you just came out of there with a big smile on your face. What’s in there?” And one of the things they said over and over again was they loved the way it was interactive. This was a big mystery to us because there was nothing interactive in there.

There was one thing where there was a screen where they could choose which question to ask Mr. Lincoln, but for the most part, there was nothing interactive. And what we finally figured out was what interactive meant from the audience in this case was not that they touched something in the show, but that the show had touched them. And it’s up to us as storytellers to make sure that we are playing all the notes, that we aren’t just relying on part of our toolkit, but that we are engaging people simultaneously as many ways as we can.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

One of my favorite corporate examples of a company doing an experiential, it’s not just a tour, but sort of company-driven experience is the Johnnie Walker Prince Street in Edinburgh, which you guys did. I think it’s just a spectacular job. Not only is it beautiful and so well thought through, but the way that your company thought about accomplishing the goal, which I believe the objective was to convert people to being scotch drinkers, to being people who saw themselves as enjoying that kind of alcohol, those kinds of drinks, and realizing where the problem was, there was misperception or people maybe don’t like it straight up and it’s too harsh, but the importance of that first sip was so big and figuring out a way to understand and identify people’s palates and then be able to make sure that the first drink that touched their lips would be one that they would go like, “This is really good,” with right there you had them.

It was so brilliant. Would you talk a little bit about it or share some of the process?

BOB ROGERS:

Well, sure. And again, a whiskey tasting experience, a whiskey center tends to attract employees who consider themselves whiskey experts and give their own opinions about which whiskeys are the best and what is the best way to drink it. The audience that walks in the front door at the Johnnie Walker experience in Edinburgh is over 50% female and over 50% of that arriving audience thinks they either do not like whiskey or will tell you that they are not a whiskey drinker. And by the time they come out, the net promoter score, which is a score of a measure that agencies use to measure how likely the visitor is to recommend the product, a net promoter score, a good score is somewhere in the 70 range, maybe 75. The Johnny Walker experience gets a net promoter score between 82 and 85%, which is really great. We did that by starting out not with where the aficionado thinks which whiskey they ought to drink or how they ought to drink it, but by asking them through an AI program, asking them what are their favorite flavors?

Do they like spicy? Do they like sweet? And as a result, the AI figures out it’s called flavor print technology and gives them a wristband that corresponds to their palate. So again, deep story, go deep into the heart of the guests, figure out what’s in their heart, go deep into the brand, find the thing that matches the two. That’s what will cause the heart of the guest to become permanently attached to the heart of the brand or the subject. That’s deep story.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

It’s so beautifully illustrated with this example, and in the book you have a saying, you say, “Be the audience, don’t become the expert.” And this is a perfect example where you’re really trying to understand what the audience wants versus trying to show off that you’re the expert. We have the same exact experience sometimes when we’re working with the experts who we have tremendous respect for and rely on their knowledge. But sometimes when you then try to get them to share or explain their subject, they don’t have the ability to translate that to a young person, to a general audience because they have too much knowledge or the things that they focus on are just so much deeper down in the minutiae than what the general person wants, particularly given in a museum design where you only have a few words really to write a label with.

You can’t write a long label. No one’s going to read that. So how do you tell these stories or communicate this piece of history in a way that can be absorbed and enjoyed? And sometimes you really need a storyteller to interpret or edit the expert to be able to make it popular. Yeah.

BOB ROGERS:

One of the things that we forget very often when we design museums is we forget that something like 60% of the population of the United States doesn’t read much beyond a fifth grade level, maybe less. The 60% does not have a college degree, and yet the people who are designing museums are usually highly verbally skilled. They are voracious readers. They probably have an advanced degree of some kind of, at least a master’s, maybe a PhD. So there’s this natural mismatch. A wall of text to them is a turn on, but to the kid that doesn’t read beyond a fifth grade level, it’s a massive turnoff. You don’t have to give your audience a PhD. What you have to do is convince them that they’re interested in the subject.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

So Bob, after 45 years or however many years it is of building this business, you have passed it on. You managed to do something that’s very difficult, which was to create a succession plan and execute it. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how that aligns with the values of the company?

BOB ROGERS:

When it came time to think about how I would protect the people who had taken me on this great journey, how would I protect them? Because we wouldn’t have a BRC if it wasn’t for them. And I watched a number of other companies. The owner would sell out to venture capital and venture capital would come in and essentially dismantle the company. And I felt that I owe to my team the best chance to carry forward. So we created a plan that I’m not out of the company. I’m sitting in BRC today talking to you. I work six days a week. I come to the office every day.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Old school. Old school.

BOB ROGERS:

Yeah. But I get to work on all the fun stuff now and the briefcase full of trouble goes home with them. They have the ownership. Part of the reason I wrote Deep Story was to make sure that they had a guidebook to remember why we’ve been successful for the first 45 years, because much of what made us successful for the first 45, some of that will become obsolete, but some of it will still be true 45 years from now. And so now they’ve got it as a guide. So does anybody that decides to go look it up and get it.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Bob, for our listeners, where can they get your book, DEEP STORY?

BOB ROGERS:

On Amazon and look for DEEP STORY and my name, Bob Rogers. It’s R-O-G-E-R-S. Or you can find it by coming to the company website, which is brcweb.com. That’s for BRC Imagination Arts. That’ll take you right to the book.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

As we’re talking about the role that we play in terms of making these sometimes very interesting and deep subjects accessible and interesting to people, are you a grownup kid in your work? Is that what makes you good at it?

BOB ROGERS:

Yeah, my wife would immediately agree to that. Yeah, there’s a part of me that’s still about 11. The great animator, Chuck Jones, once said when he was in his 80s, he said, “I don’t feel like an old man. I feel like a 17-year-old who has something terrible, the matter with him.” And I think that’s how I feel. I feel like I look at my chronological age and I think, “How the hell did that happen?”

CHARLIE MELCHER:

I appreciate so much everything that you’ve contributed to our field, the extraordinary work that you’ve done for so many years. You are one of the pioneers in this space, there’s no question. You’ve built so many amazing experiences, but more than that, you’ve inspired and trained so many people over the years too, who’ve come either through your company or through your experiences. So thank you for everything that you’ve contributed over all these years and continue to give back in so many ways. And you do bring magic into so many people’s lives and make them feel that their life is a little more magical. So thank you for that.

BOB ROGERS:

Coming from the master, this is very kind. Thank you. By the way, I want to, just for a moment, I want to turn the tables and I want to make sure that the people who listen to your podcasts understand what you do. I want to thank you for all that you have done to advance storytelling, the future of storytelling, the events that you put on, the podcast and the work that you’ve done in this area and your book. I want to thank you for doing it because I have learned so much from you and from the things that you’ve done. And I just want to take a moment and say thank you for that and thank you for putting on this podcast to accelerate the sharing of knowledge about what great storytelling means and what it can do to improve the world.

CHARLIE MELCHER:

Thank you so much, Bob. It means a tremendous amount coming from you, so thank you. I really appreciate that. Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher and this has been the FoST Podcast. My thanks to Bob Rogers and to you, our listeners, for tuning in today. For more opportunities to learn directly from creative studio leaders who are shaping the future of storytelling, check out the FoST Explorers Club. We have an upcoming trip from September 25th to 27th in London where we’ll be offering a curated itinerary with special access to the creators behind innovative studios and cutting edge immersive works. Check out the show notes for a link or visit our website at fost.org. The FoST Podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.