What the Risk Was Holding Up

The Room Used to Feel Alive

There was a stretch of years when a company launch meant a real person standing on a stage, live, in front of a crowd. Not a recording of them. Them.

Present, thinking on their feet, reading the room and answering it in real time. Anything could happen, not because anyone wanted it to go wrong, but because a live person is never fully predictable, and everybody in the room could feel that.

I want to be clear about something, because it's my actual job. We do everything we can to keep things from going wrong. That's most of what production is. But no matter how well you prepare, a live person brings a kind of unpredictability you can't engineer out, and you wouldn't want to.

That unpredictability is where the excitement lives. It can break either way, and the audience knows it, and that knowing is what makes them lean in.

I've spent a lot of years backstage for these, close enough to watch the audience as much as the stage. People rarely remember the parts that ran exactly to plan. They remember the moments that could only have happened live, the aside that wasn't scripted, the answer to a room that was clearly being felt out in real time.

You can see the difference on YouTube right now. There are countless clips of Steve Jobs on stage, reading the room and adjusting to it as he went, working his timing off the crowd in front of him. You find almost none of that from the era that followed. Tim Cook is a brilliant operator, maybe a better manager of the company than Jobs ever was, but he never had the same command of a stage, and I think Apple knew it.

Recording him was a way to protect him, to keep a live room from ever catching him flat. It's understandable. But the more they smoothed the live element out of his appearances, the more distant and rehearsed he came across. The caution meant to protect him is part of what made him hard to warm to.

What a Recording Says

Somewhere along the way, most of the live element went away. The launches became prerecorded. The demo became a video.

And I understand every reason. A recorded piece is cleaner and more predictable, and a lot easier to control.

But here's what I don't think gets considered enough. Recording a message to an audience sends its own signal, whether anyone means it to or not. It tells people that no one was willing to be in the room with them. That the moment wasn't worth showing up for in person.

Audiences feel that, even if they never put words to it. They can tell the difference between someone standing in front of them, taking the moment as it comes, and a polished file being played at them. One says you matter enough for me to be here. The other, however unintentionally, says you don't.

That's the separation. It isn't only that recording removes the spark of a live person. It's that recording tells the audience something about how much care went into them, and the answer it gives is not the one anyone intends.

What Left With It

There used to be a kind of belief in the room that's hard to describe now. People lined up overnight, not really for the product, for the chance to be there when it happened. That belief was a little irrational, and it forgave a lot. It gave a company room to be imperfect, because the audience had already decided to be on its side.

Take the live person out of it and you don't just lose a format. You lose the sense that anyone cared enough to be there, and you're left with a transaction, which no one has ever lined up overnight for.

I don't think the answer is to put everyone back on stage. Some launches should be recorded, and plenty of companies have real reasons to be careful. But it's worth being honest about what the caution costs.

A live person, present and unscripted, was never getting in the way of belief. Most of the time, it was holding belief up.