Fresh off a trip to Denver, Matt opens on a Guardian story: a growing list of hotels, restaurants, and beauty spots are restricting photography and filming, not just because creators are there, but because content production wrecks the experience for everyone else. The Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc now requires permission for photo shoots after guests booked meals mainly to stage elaborate multi-outfit sessions. A Cheshire farm shop, The Hollies, banned filming during its busiest hours after going viral. As Beaumier’s marketing chief puts it, hospitality exists to provide memorable experiences, not to serve as content-production locations. Matt knows the feeling, he treats his gym as a refuge, and a space that feels like a production studio is genuinely irritating. Businesses are caught between a rock and a hard place: social media is great publicity, but you can’t let it ruin the room.
Then the report back, and the real point. At the Denver pilot of Your New Opening Line with Mark DeCarlo, they recorded each participant’s three rounds primarily for the participants, as a feedback loop to see their progress, and had someone capturing selective footage for future promotion. But Matt was deliberate about not letting the filming interfere with the intention of the experience. His stance, against the marketing chorus of “always be creating content,” is that he just doesn’t agree. The mindset you’re in when you’re creating content destroys the integrity of your intention, because you can’t be truly present with someone while thinking about how it’ll look on TikTok. He points at the Kardashians as the tell: those shows have filming schedules and designed controversies, a facsimile of reality, and being on camera all the time (especially for kids on reality shows) isn’t healthy. So in Denver, he and Mark stayed 100% zeroed in on serving the participants, asked the videographer to grab just a taste rather than everything, and the only thing Matt tracked about the camera was getting out of its way. Yes, we need good content, he’s making it right now, but it has to be thoughtful and well-placed, not grist for the mill. Creating experiences is a different form of creation than creating content, and filming everything is not how you get the best result. His takeaway for anyone anxious about always posting: spend the majority of your time truly present, then figure out how to make content that matters.
