In this episode, co-hosts Lydia Chan and Olly Atkinson recaps his talk at AdFest 2026 in Thailand titled "Making People Care: Storytelling in the Age of AI,” where he strapped biometric trackers on 50 unsuspecting audience members and measured their brain activity in real time. What happened next revealed something most marketers don't want to admit: the content we think is working, often isn't.

From a curiosity gap that spikes immersion in 30 seconds flat, to corporate messaging that tanks it just as fast, Olly unpacks what the neuroscience actually says about why some content sticks and most gets filtered out. Plus, a whiskey brand that ditched their assumptions, rewrote their entire creative strategy, and saw a 56% revenue jump in three months with no extra media spend.

If you create content, brief it, approve it, or sit in rooms talking about it, this one will change how you think about all of it.

• 00:00:46 - Making People Care in the Age of AI: Why producing more content isn't the answer - producing more resonance is, and how to connect with audiences on a subconscious level
  
  
• 00:03:55 - Live Biometric Testing on a Live Audience: What happened when Olly measured 50 people's immersion in real time during his AdFest talk and what the data revealed
  
  
• 00:05:23 - The Curiosity Gap: How opening a question at the start of your content spikes immersion, and why messaging-heavy endings cause it to flatline
  
  
• 00:07:24 - The Reticular Activating System: Why our brains are hardwired to filter out irrelevant content, and how resonance is the only tool that gets past that blocker
  
  
• 00:15:36 - A Framework for Building Immersion: The practical questions every content creator should ask, from where it becomes human, to protecting the peak and working backwards from behavior change