The Mission That’s Sparking an Entertainment Revolution: Meet Narrative Muse

There are defining moments in history when there are two possible actions: keep going as we were or build a new path forward. The Great Global Lockdown is one of these moments for entertainment media.

Before the Lockdown, our entertainment landscape was in a state of flux. Audiences were using streaming platforms to reshape how they consumed movies and TV. Viewers were voting with clicks rather than time spent on network and cable TV or money spent on cinema tickets. Readers were most often forgoing e-books in favor of good old fashioned paper. And book-lovers were driving an entirely new marketplace, as they voraciously consumed audiobooks.

Just as audiences had shaped how society consumed media, they’d shaped their expectations of what should be available to them. More than ever, audiences demanded to find stories that not only reflected who they were but were created by people like themselves. And just as they insisted on seeing their own narratives, they became more and more outspoken when they weren’t able to find them and cried out when their stories were being told by people who hadn’t lived the stories themselves.

Change was coming. That much was obvious. But the shape of that change was still unclear.

Where are we headed?

Fast forward to today. The screen and book sectors have been rocked by the Lockdown. Those like myself in the media space are asking ourselves, given the trajectory that we were on before, what’s likely to come out of this global shakeup? Could it be one where more and more audiences finally see themselves in the content they consume?

It would be easy to continue to ignore the calls of hungry audiences, to leave underrepresented groups out of our media narratives, to continue as so many were before. But that would be a mistake. The majority of audiences are people from marginalized communities. We know that when content is created by and for these communities, audiences turn up. The awesome folks already doing this work have shown this again and again. And not only that, this kind of content returns on investment.

Now is the time to dramatically increase this investment. The change is long overdue, no question about it. This pivotal moment, this global re-design can be the catalyst that the entertainment industry needs to take bigger strides in reflecting underrepresented audiences on screen and on the page.

The question then becomes: What can we do to help make this happen?

Narrative Muse’s mission is to spark a gender representation revolution in entertainment.

At Narrative Muse, we’ve built a ‘matchmaker’ that functions like a dating app, but instead of human dates, we match audiences with perfectly personalized book, movie, and (soon) TV recommendations. All of the content we recommend is by and about women and non-binary folk. We ask questions about a person’s identity, taste, and how they want to feel. So, for example, if someone’s big into moving dramas that feature Black women, we’ll make some great recommendations.

But we don’t stop there. We also use AI and our anonymized psychometric data to support publishers and producers to create even more content for these audiences by giving them the data they need to know what audiences want and to help them feel confident these stories will succeed. And by looping these newly created stories back into our great recommendations, we help them become best-sellers.

In a post-Covid world, this is particularly important. As we collectively look at our economies and the failing social structures inside of them, Narrative Muse makes sure that underrepresented audiences are at the center of the media economy re-build.

By delivering audiences content by and about women and non-binary folk from a wide range of backgrounds and identities, Narrative Muse works to:

• amplify the voices of underrepresented and marginalized content creators;
• support underserved audiences to find more diverse stories;
• enable audiences to see themselves in a wider range of stories; and
• through all of this, create a more inclusive and equitable world.

Our book-and-movie matchmaker is our audience’s megaphone. This is our version of digital organizing. Our matchmaker gives audiences with intersectional tastes and identities a way to tell the powers-that-be what kinds of stories they want to read and watch. It’s a chance for them to have their book-loving, movie-geeking say.

There’s a problem with most predictive analytic content data.

Others in the content-prediction space use ‘backward-facing’ data. This is data based on what’s already in the market. It’s data based on what people watched, read, or bought. This has the real-world, negative impact of enforcing data models that suggest that audiences want more of the same monocultural content. Not only that, but this backward-facing pre-Covid data is no longer relevant in a post-Covid world. It’s becoming apparent that training data collected before Covid is creating false AI predictions of human needs. We can’t plan for the future while looking backward.

Narrative Muse uses ‘forward-looking’ data. This is data based on what audiences are actively seeking today, not what stories they clicked on or purchased in the past. As the media environment picks itself up after this shattering moment in history, Narrative Muse will help publishers and producers understand what audiences need in this radically new environment.

Change is created by the small efforts of many.

This new world can only be created by an army of many. Narrative Muse and our team of over 50 visionaries from around the globe are joining with the amazing storytellers and decision-makers who are doing this work. But if this revolution is going to succeed, we need you too.

If we’re going to create big change, we need big audiences using the Narrative Muse matchmaker to discover, watch, and read great stories by and about women and non-binary people.

Authors, filmmakers, and actors can help by encouraging their communities to use Narrative Muse to support underrepresented creators and advocate for the stories they want to see.

And most importantly, we need publishers and studios to listen to the demands of their audiences.

An incredible shift in the stories we consume is coming. And it won’t come from the efforts of a few, it’ll come from the collective efforts of millions. Join us.