Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Digital Works Podcast
Episode 016 - Matt Locke (Storythings) on remote audiences, attention patterns, formats, and shifts in behaviour
A conversation with one of the Directors of Storythings, Matt Locke. We discuss digital audiences, attention patterns, formats, shifts in behaviour, and loads more.
Matt has held senior positions at Channel 4 and the BBC, been a curator of a gallery, set up and run digital art programmes, and attend Glasgow School of Art in the early 90s. He has a fascinating perspective on content and audiences and his blog is well worth a read https://howtomeasureghosts.substack.com/
Hello,
Speaker 2:And welcome to the digital works podcast cast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and today's episode, episode 16 features a conversation with Matt Locke. Matt is a director at story things, which is a strategy and content company, uh, with a simple mission, they help good people tell important stories in fascinating ways prior to setting up story things. Matt held senior roles at channel four and the BBC. And prior to that was a curator at the impressions gallery in Yorkshire. Matt and I talked about formats about audiences, about shifts in behavior brought about by the pandemic about Matt's time art school in Glasgow in the early nineties. And lots more. Oh, I should say that Matt uses an acronym that you may not be familiar with. Uh, the acronym is S Fahd and that stands for subscription video on demand. Matt has actually featured as part of digital works before he was one of our speakers at digital works. 10, his session is still available for free on our YouTube channel. So check that out if you can. Okay.
Speaker 1:Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Thanks for joining me. Hello.
Speaker 1:Um, so
Speaker 2:Sort of our chat today, I mean, there's a whole bunch of stuff I want to talk to you about, but for people who maybe haven't come across you and your work, I'd be really interested to hear where did, where did the life and times of Matlock start? Cause you have your finger in so many pies these days, and it feels like you have such an interesting and varied background, but where did you start out?
Speaker 3:Um, so I started probably for the sake of this conversation, probably closer school of art in the nineties. I went up to Glasgow in 1990 and did the fine art photography course there for four years. Um, but I was actually a geek. I had home computers in the eighties and actually had a modem on my Amstrad four 64 in 1988. So I used to dial into multi-user Dungeons and things like that. So I was online gaming in 1988, which was ruinous for the family phone bill. But, um, so I kind of went to college and really loved guys go guys go was kind of happening as a creative city then. So being in Glasgow in 1990, it was incredible because it was an example of what I think Brian Eno is term seniors, uh, which is this idea that actually moments of genius aren't about individuals, but about communities and collectives and Glasgow in 1990, definitely felt like a senior. So I wasn't by any means a major player in it, but just being around there while places like the transmission gallery were going and the tramway was starting up with Charles Escher. Um, the third I was turning into the CCA, but there was just a movement in a similar way to the young British artists movement in Goldsmiths, but just with less money, which actually made it a lot more interesting. So it was a great place to be. Uh, we put on loads of kinds of, you know, like you have to just, I had just the best art school experience. We just put on shows in derelict spaces all the time and kind of ran parties and just did stuff. Um, and it was awesome, but what I did creatively as I started making work, using computers, my degree show, I did entirely using, um, Photoshop and macro mind director. And I made animations, which I then had to copy onto VHS tape. And our, from our degree show actually rented. I actually got them to donate radio rentals, donated me these kinds of all-in-one units of monitors with VHS players kind of built into them that auto rewound. So I could like start it in the morning and then kind of not have to go back every hour and a half and rewind the tapes. So my degree show was a computer based installation. I got a two, two for it, which there was a guy called Charles, um, Charles Sanderson. I want to say he was a Glasgow artist who was doing work with computer code at the time. And we had chatted a few times. He did a lot of work using PVC bees. Um, and he came up to me while I was preparing for my final show and said, you do realize you're going to get a terrible Mark if you do this because the head of photography, Thomas Joshua Cooper is very old school and does like platinum platinum printing alternative processes. He carries these eight by 10 cameras to the top of mountains at the edge of every country. You know, he's really old school, black and white photography. And there was about five or six of us that were all doing stuff on computers. And we all got terrible degree shows, uh, Jeff degree marks, but, um, but careers because it turned out that actually, if you were mucking around on computers with are in the 1990s in the early nineties, it was a really good time to do it. So I did that, um, spent a year or so, uh, kind of informally curating and making stuff happen in Glasgow and then Brighton and then got a job at impressions gallery, which was in New York at the time. Now in Bradford, I'm running, they're kind of immersed, uh, program of exhibitions. A lot of which involved, we had an ICN line on the computer. So again, got involved in some digital art there. And then Huddersfield Kirklees media center got a lottery grant and they needed somebody to set up an artistic program there. So I basically got this kind of blank sheet of paper and about 3 million pounds to set up a digital arts project. So had loads of fun doing that, um, in the late nineties. And part of it was, it was nearly all capital because that was a lottery. And I had this big argument with the arts council that spending like 3 million quid on tech when we had no way of earning enough money to kind of keep it like upgraded was a total waste of time and that they should give me some money instead to give to artists, to make work using the tech. And I managed to get them to give me a couple of hundred grand out of the budget. And so most of the money went on a whole suite of kit, which basically just sat in rooms, getting dusty because, you know, we ended up working with a union. I was to use it cause it, it just didn't get used. Meanwhile, every single team in Huddersfield was on the streets. We have a Nakia sending text messages. So I started approaching some artists to see if we can make work with text messages. Um, so we did a piece with unlimited theater at the end of our festival, where we did a, a play that was delivered via SMS. We did a piece with Tim metros. Um, we did a big installation where we had with a Dutch artist who after young could speak as corner where we had a big 60 meter long led screen on the outside, like thin red led text display, and you could send text messages to the building and they would kind of appear on the building and we have to set up all the swear word filters and stuff like that, which was very good fun. So basically I spent most of the nineties kind of exploring digital art, um, both in my, uh, education at Harsco and then as a curator. Um, so I was part of networks like net, net time and rhizome and the backspace kind of groups down in London. Um, just as people, you know, new magazine and all that was happening there. And it was just as the kind of early days of NetApp as it became known, um, started, uh, and in particular I was really interested in mobile because it just felt like I was always very interested in public and community-based practice. And mobile felt like a way of actually talking to people in really interesting social contexts. So then basically someone from the BBC came up and said, actually, we're interested in mobile for what we do with the Beeb. And we've got this job going as the head of this department, do you want to apply for it? So I applied for it, had two interviews and then suddenly got a senior management job at the BBC, which was just unbelievably weird. Um, and we'd never happened to somebody like me from my kind of background in any other kind of era. I don't think, cause I didn't have any track record in broadcasting, but I've been working with like digital culture and digital content for about six or seven years by then, which in the late nineties was still quite rare CS. And I went to BBC, spent seven years there running their innovation team, um, and then got headhunted by channel four to go and run their education team when they were commissioning for 14 to 19 year olds. Um, had a brilliant couple of years there, um, ended up being had a multi-platform for the last year covering, uh, for Louise Brown, uh, when she was on maternity leave. So I working on things like the last big brother, um, schemes and miss VIPs, when, you know, I had a team that was doing all of these things in the different departments, um, a lot of the kind of huge phoning, which in store in Jamie campaign shows and things aren't billion pound drop, JD Smith. And my team kind of worked on that, which was this kind of interactive game show. So basically from about 1990 to about 2010, I had 20 years of having the great fortune to be in places where people were trying to work out what an earth people were going to do using digital tech, like, you know, what are people going to do with mobile phones? What are we going to do with the internet? You know, when everyone gets broadband, what will that make? Um, so yeah, and you know, just working out ways of telling stories, digital technology. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, and hearing all of that, suddenly your perspectives, which I really enjoy hearing from, and, and reading make a lot more sense, you know, that, that arc of being an artist, a curator, and then a producer and a programmer, I think must equip you with a really good understanding of how work is made, but also how work is promoted and then consumed, um, by audiences. And I think some of your writing on the shift in how audiences find, consume and enjoy content is some really, really insightful work. Um, and maybe if we zoom in from 20 years of experience that you've just described there to 2020, which has been, you know, some people have described it as 10 years worth of advancement in terms of digital thinking and activity. And in 10 months, um, my perspective is that it's probably advancement that the culture of sector needed to make at some point or another. And it, there was going to be, uh, a trigger for that. And it just so happened that a global pandemic was the trigger for, for everyone moving a lot of artistic activity online for engaging with digital audiences in a really meaningful way. For many, for the first time. I wonder if you have any sort of broad observations or thoughts about how you think audience behavior in particular has maybe shifted or evolved over 2020, you know, given the fact that we have all been confined to our homes for, for much of the time only able to engage with large parts of life through digital platforms and services, do you think that has triggered a change in audience behavior? And do you think those shifts will persist beyond the pandemic?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I mean actually if I started in 1990, it's actually 30 years of a career cause I kind of stopped that story and at the end of channel floor and missed the last decade of running story things. So, so I think the thing I've really learned from, you know, 30 years of working in digital is actually the audience behavior does take a long time to change. And if I look back at the period from 1990 to 2020, there's probably been, you know, three really significant shift in audience behavior over that time. Um, the first one was the adoption of broadband. So, you know, when I was working in new media in the nineties, a lot of people didn't have, and I didn't have like broadband in the home. Um, so that was why I kind of dialed up here. I still, for a lot of people. And so internet use was, was mainly in the workplace, um, that shifted in the two thousands. Um, but people did have mobiles. So, you know, that, that kind of growth in the late nineties of text messaging was really significant, but actually the real mobile breakthrough was in like the mid two thousands. And obviously with the iPhone in 2007 and the social media that kind of piggybacked the form factor of the iPhone too, to just kind of massively take over the world. So, but again, that's, you know, that was, that took a decade. Um, the first kind of social networks and blogs started in the late nineties, early two thousands. So, you know, you can look at 2007 and think, well, everything changed. The iPhone came along, Twitter launch, you know, Facebook was launched a couple of years before, but actually it took probably until 2011, 2012, for those things to really go mainstream, um, you know, Instagram wasn't launched until, uh, until after, you know what, I can't remember. It was 2010 or so, so we've really only seen like the last decade of, of really significant mass culture change because of, of the mobile internet. So there's a kind of period of like the late nineties to the mid two thousands, which is like the rise of broadband internet. And then the period from like 2007 to about now, which is the rise of mobile internet. And it just takes a long time. And then I think what's happened this year has felt like I don't have, it feels like 10 years. It may feels like five. Um, and the things that have really changed this year have broadly been about asphalt, which was already getting very strong, but it's just tipped this year. So we've been looking in detail at a lot of the stats from off calm and a few of the other, uh, kind of industry bodies around how our viewing has changed over 2020. And it is viewing like we are watching way more TV, way more video than we ever have. It's just astonishing, like the really big winner of COVID this year has been, has been video, uh, just lots and lots and lots and lots of video. Um, but actually the real, you know, everything has gone up. So use of YouTube has gone up, schedule TV has gone up, um, S VOD services have gone up, but the asphalt services have gone up more. And for the very first time this year, the average UK, uh, video viewing habits under 50% was linear scheduled television for the first time. And whilst that isn't like a cliff, it's definitely like a key point on a downward slope. And it's not that the schedule is going to disappear as a means of organizing content. It just means that, you know, it's been a really hard year and it's been really hard for people who have to feel it's, this is, this is not so much an audience change as a business model change in that when you are watching, when you're staying at home and you're filling the time that you would normally be listening to a radio on your commute or listening to podcasts on your commute or whatever, when you're feeding that with watching more video, you're not always next. The schedule was, um, organized for that. You know, TV schedules are organized for an ordinary day where most people aren't at home during the day and the people that are home during the day want very different things and the people that will work during the day. And so, and in the evening, you know, you, you want to switch off, you know, you've gone from looking at the medium screen to looking at a big screen and you want something that feels more immersive. So, you know, Queens gambit tiger King, all these kind of big rich immersive stories are kicking off. So I think the really big shift this this year has been about people watching more video and as a result, making S VODs the first port of call for choosing what to watch rather than necessarily. And that includes, you know, I say the word eSports, I mean, it includes AIPLA and includes all four. It's not just a subscription services. What's really interesting is how the broadcasters now are saying that they're starting to commission, um, VOD first. So there are rumors that the BBC is about to actually kill the channel controller posts, the people who used to be the really powerful people in the organization who used to commission for BBC one or BBC three or BBC four. And then now focusing more on WRA and then thinking about scheduling those shows on the channels. And I think that's a shift that's going to happen in the next five years. You know, broadcasters behavior is going to have to catch up with the audience behavior, which is now more that people want to sit down and watch what they want to watch. Um, probably over a kind of odd service. There are still things that work in the schedule, but they are shows that require that kind of liveliness around them. Uh, so live sports one, there are certain other factual formats that require liveliness. Um, but in the first six months of this year, um, the most watched shows where the news and ant and DEC and the queen. And I think that's a really interesting portrait of what the first six months of this year felt like in the UK.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And I wonder, you know, something that I've noticed is that suddenly, you know, people like my parents, people in their late sixties, you know, who, who previously wouldn't, you know, my parents aren't necessarily digital that digitally comfortable is certainly not their first port of call. You know, that scheduled live TV was the TV that they would watch. Whereas I recently bought them and helped them set up, uh, a Roku device, you know, with all of the apps on it. And they're now consuming most of their content through that. And I wonder, you know, how, how broadly is that true that actually 2020 has made a section of the demographic who were previously maybe less confident, comfortable, interested in consuming and engaging with content through, you know, inverted, commerce, digital channels. Um, the fact that so much of life has suddenly pitched it pivoted to being experienced digitally has meant, you know, grandparents, zoom calling with members of the family. Um, everyone doing that shopping online first and then doing click and collect, um, how has that shift sort of impacted the whole demographic range, uh, so that there has been a whole population shift in behavior rather than something that previously was maybe led by younger, more digitally confident audiences.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I, I don't think it's about demographics and age. I think it's about, um, we did a fair amount of work on, on what the drivers were for digital and broadband adoption, both when I was at BBC and channel four. And what's interesting is the context in which you learn. So you just described a context there, you bought your parents a Raku. We bought my mum an iPad, fortunately at the end of last year. And I finally got her to have, you know, I run a lot of her utilities now cause I help her switch every year and stuff. And after a couple of years of resistance, I finally said, by the way, I'm about to upgrade your phone package. You might as well get broadband because it's actually cheaper and then your grandkids can come along. And so we finally got to the internet and an iPad and she's just taken to it like a duck to water because, you know, the context has been the social context of the family and my God, it's been amazing over lockdown. She lives in Milton Keynes. You know, I live in Brighton. My one of my brothers is in Milton Keynes, the other one's in Surrey. So, you know, we've just managed to see each other, which is just brilliant. So it's those social contexts. So back in the early two thousands, one of the real drivers for things like webcam and Skype was actually grandparents wanting to see their grandkids. So there were always these social triggers that drive adoption. It's never a kind of the trigger is never from the service provider and the individual really. It's always, there's a social reason why we want to do that. And for a lot of people, the internet, you know, that, that learning context came through work, you know, you're in an office and then one day the typewriter was replaced with a PC and then the PC was connected to the internet and you were using email. And then you found out that in your lunch break, you could look for holidays and shopping online, and then you decided, well, this is quite useful. I could do one at home. And you know, it's always interesting to think when audience behaviors change is what is the context and what's the driver for them to learn a new skill. And it's never because someone just decided that this is a year that Facebook's going to win, or this is a year of VR or whatever. That always has to be a very, very close social driver for changing behaviors. So I think this year they, social drivers have been definitely online retail. I mean, that's massive, you know, the figures of online retail, I think I've read something recently, like 40% of all retail this year in the UK has been online, which is just crazy. Um, I definitely think one of the drivers has been, you know, eSports services and escapism, like wanting to not look at the news all the time. Um, and I think the other driver has been yes, social connection over, over zoom and FaceTime and stuff like that. So I think those are the three social drivers, you know, the need to order stuff online because the shops are sharp. You know, that's an insane, I mean, that's, that's just such a gift to online retailers. Like, you know, what would be the thing that would genuinely drive the population to move to online retail, who haven't already closed the high street. It's just incredible. But I think you've got to look at those social drivers rather than that, the technology,
Speaker 2:And maybe zooming in once again, sort of specifically at the cultural sector, which you work in, um, with, with some organizations. I wonder if you have a perspective of which cultural brands, um, sort of internationally, I guess, feel like they are doing good work around meeting the shift specifically in 2020, um, of, of being able to move online of being able to meet those digital audiences with interesting, impactful, successful, uh, digital initiatives around sort of content.
Speaker 3:I, I'm not sure a lot have. And I think that's, for two reasons, I think one, it's just been an extraordinarily difficult time for them as organizations. So, you know, full disclosure, I'm on the digital advisory board of the science museum group. So I've been very aware of the challenges that those guys have been under. I think they've done really well. Um, but you know, they are museums and although the digital estate is amazing, the primary delivery of their services is physical, physical museums. And I think that that's been really tough for them, obviously national theater have done really well, but I think that's because they had, uh, you know, they had auntie life, they had experience of doing that. They, you know, they had enough in their in house knowledge to know what it felt like to deliver services remotely. And I think they obviously, you know, worked really well for them. And a few other people have done that. Well, Soho fair too. I think a good bit again, they did a lot of, they were selling online concerts in advance of COVID and then they're taking that shift to move online and think about the comedy that they were selling. They've just done a deal with Netflix, which I think is brilliant, you know, uh, to, to basically sell some of their comedy formats, um, to Netflix and, and, you know, develop them for the platform. And I'm not sure, I think that's really, really smart. So I think there were a few, there are a few cultural organizations who had already thought about remote delivery, not necessarily digital cause NT live was obviously based in cinemas. And although obviously the technology is digital, it wasn't what you would think of as a digital experience that thought about remote delivery of their services. And I think that's the key in the key word to use. I think so theater have thought about that. Um, and I think a few others, but for many that that's never been a big part of what they do. You know, thinking about a remote audience, an audience at home consuming, what they do other than, you know, membership flyers or maybe a magazine, uh, that's not been a part of their offer. And I think that actually thinking about remoteness at the remote audiences is more important than thinking about digital audiences. So I think the ones that have succeeded have done that have been the ones who have considered remote audiences in the past and, and, and managed to do that quite well. Now, I think it's just been very tough because for so many organizations just literal survival has been the key rather than rethinking. I think the ones who have thought about it, who are starting to think about it in an interesting way, are the ones who have significant member programs and are thinking about how do you drive value remotely, um, to those audiences, if they can't come in for opening events, they can't come in for lectures. I can't come in for that kind of stuff. But again, I think that the phrase to think about is remote rather than digital
Speaker 2:And the word you used there, the word format, I think is a really interesting framework to think about all of this activity within. I think, you know, even if fingers crossed a vaccine becomes available early next year, it's going to take a while until that vaccine has been delivered widespread enough for us to stop worrying about COVID. And then probably another while beyond that, before everyone feels comfortable to resume attending cultural experiences in the same way that they did before. So I would expect, you know, remote delivery, digital delivery is going to remain Nita, remain a part of how organizations serve audiences, certainly for the next 12 months. Um, and when you joined us in April, uh, for our digital works 10 event, you spoke very specifically about formats. And I wonder if we could look at that idea a bit now, um, maybe for people who didn't tune in, when, when we spoken in April, you gave us, you gave us a 20 minute talk, then maybe you can try and condense that. But the idea of formats, the particularly in the context of, I guess, digital content, could you just give us the Matlock perspective on that?
Speaker 3:So formats are something which if you work in TV or radio, is, is just the most important thing. So a format is basically a structure for storytelling, um, that is repeatable and that the audience can build habits around. And I think that's really important, you know, when you're talking about remote delivery, um, so delivering into people's homes, there are so many things that anyone could be doing at any one time that you need to think, how do you build habits around the behaviors of consuming this content? You know, whether it's a podcast you listened to in the morning, whether it's a TV show that you've been done, you know, when you're eating dinner in the evening, whether it's, you know, bargain hunt that you watch, where you're having a sandwich at lunch, whatever it is, you know, people build habits around formats because formats basically give us a kind of structure to a story, which we become compelled to over time say, you know, desert Island discs is the format. You listen to the format, you know, you, you might be interested in the speaker that, that the guests that week, but actually it's a format, which is the kind of magic that you keep coming back to. So we've, I don't think we realized for quite a while, a story things, when we were talking to clients about digital content strategies, and we talked about formats, I don't think we've realized how understood, you know, how misunderstood that was as a concept outside of TV and radio, because of the free directors of story things. Me, you, Gary, and Angela Ramachandran. Two of us come from like BBC in broadcasting. And, um, it's so much, it's so much kind of the focus of all of the creative decision making in those industries. That it's really hard to imagine that it's not in others. So we actually started a newsletter called formats unpacked to try and explain what we mean where every week we just very quickly Enlightly, you know, pick apart, uh, a book format or a podcast format or a TV show or a game or whatever. And that's partly just to try and get people to understand what makes a good format, you know, a good format has a structure. Um, and the one-liner for us is a format is a way of both helping the audience structure their attention, but also helping the storyteller structure, the story, you know, it helps you structure the story by giving you a set of rules and a set of rhythms, which you will play along with every time in every episode. So we have a kind of, you know, we believe that more people should be thinking about building and investing in the value of formats because ultimately that's what helps people build habits around your content. You know, that's what they want to come back to. They want to come back to the next episode, uh, the next issue, the next version of your format. Um, and you don't have to win their attention again because they, like, if they liked the format, they'll want more of it and they'll come back to it. So formats are effectively exactly that they're a way of structuring stories so that you can build a longer term relationship with your audience.
Speaker 2:And I mean, the huge, huge newsletter is, is fantastic and fascinating and a great read every week. So I would encourage people to sign up to that whet whether or not you think you're interested in formats, when you see a joke being deconstructed, or you see a TV program that you like being deconstructed suddenly, it's, it becomes very, very fascinating. And you start thinking about and looking at all of these things in quite a different way. Um, what are a few of your favorite formats and, and why maybe I know you've, you've, um, discuss this a bit in Houston newsletter, but what are your favorite two or three formats and what do you think makes them work?
Speaker 3:I think, you know, because this is an area of working for a long time. I kind of, whenever I see something I like my first instinct is, you know, what's the format, like, what is it in this that's kind of appealing to me? What is it in the way that they're telling the story and structuring this? So, I mean, this, I wrote the last newsletter this week about, we are the champions, which is a phenomenal Netflix show about something seemingly really trivial. It's this it's six half hour shows following like really obscure, inverted quotes, sporting competitions around the world. So the first episode is on the cheese riding competition in, in Southwest England that I can't remember the name of the town, but these people roll the cheese down a steep Hill. And it's just, it's like genuinely one of the best half hours of TV you're going to watch this year. Like hands down, it's just brilliant. And the characters in it are great, but they're doing something very specific. And I kind of, when I was writing it, I went and looked at the production company that made it a us company called dirty robber. And they do a lot of sports documentary. And that's what makes it work is they take these really obscure, seemingly trivial things. I mean, dog, dancing's another, there's one on frog jumping that I haven't watched yet, which I think we might watch tonight. Cause it's just sounds too excellent. A mess. Um, and they kind of do that classic thing in American sports documentaries of like bringing to the surface of the story, the humans and their backstory. So, you know, rather than just saying, we're going to talk about cheese, rolling, and we're going to have a presenter and they're going to talk about the history of it. And they're going to meet people and be like, Oh, look at these weird people doing cheese rolling. They get rid of all of that in the middle and they bring the characters to the front. So in the cheese writing episode, it's about this woman called Florence early. Who's this incredible cat. I mean, genuinely like the internet has fallen in love with flow early. And if you watch the show, you'll understand why, who just like chucks herself down this Hill to chase this cheese. And it's like broken a shoulder. It's just, it's just everything's nuts. But they do this very American kind of thing of really kind of setting up the characters. The narration is like Rainn Wilson, who was in the American version of the office and he's got this Epic movie guy voice, but you know, Epic trailer, movie trailer, guy voice. Um, and so it's got this very American style. It's got that very high end, like ESPN ESPN did a series of docs called 30 for 30 to celebrate their 30th anniversary, uh, which really created this kind of benchmark of sports documentary. They were very visually large. They were beautifully researched and written really strong documentary. They gave sports this kind of really hardcore documentary approach that previously people are given to like news and current affairs and social issues. So it took sports really seriously. And that style, that ESPN style is absolutely what they're doing with. Um, we are the champions, you know, they, they, they get that tone of like knowing it's ridiculous, but also taking it really seriously just right. And so I was looking at all of these formats and this is all part of, um, this feels like it's coming back from podcasting as well. And the thing that's really worked in podcasting in the last few years has been something that the podcast, uh, journalist Caroline Crampton has called kind of inconsequential investigations. So shows like a heavyweight, which is produced by Gimlet. Um, the brilliant, uh, and uh, much missed a mystery show by star the client, which was also very early on Gimlet, uh, kind of thing is really Epic investigations where people take seemingly stupid, trivial little ideas and just go after them as if it's like a giant detective story. So there's this thing about taking the kind of structure pacing and storytelling skills of like big documentary and applying it to seemingly trivial things that just feels really lovely. Um, so there is this, this kind of form of documentary storytelling that's emerged from podcasting. You know, we are the champions, it's very high glasses, very great production values. And I mean, it's Caroline Crampton rightly called out as being quite privileged because you need to be in an environment where you've got a lot of resources. You know, if one of your journalist is basically gonna spend six months following up a story about, uh, a song that someone wants misheard and wants to know who wrote it, you know, if you've got the resources to do that kind of storytelling, you're in a pretty privileged position. So there's lots of questions about the privilege of it, but, but that is a format that feels really interesting. And it just seems to trigger this kind of curiosity bug in us, which is really compelling. And so I think there's something about that kind of slightly detective story structure, um, but applied to everyday things, which is really interesting. And it's very different from the way that British TV would traditionally have studied those subjects. It feels like it feels a bit American and it feels a bit podcasty, it feels like it's come out of NPR and Gimlet and those American studios. So I've heard a couple of people in the UK working at BBC and channel four, say that they want to see that kind of storytelling applied to traditional public sector broadcast subjects. And that we need to be looking at the emerging aesthetic of these kinds of eSports shows because that's what the audience is, is responding to and learning to love. So I think probably the, um, the missing crypto queen, the Jamie Bartlett podcast for BBC sounds was one of the first kind of BBC podcasts to be really successful that took that kind of American detective story kind of investigation format and apply it to a subject, which, you know, you would really struggle to get the audience to basically listen to an incredibly complex story about Bitcoin, basically about blockchain and all these cryptocurrencies, unless it had that pace and urgency of the kind of detective story to it. So I think there's something in there which I'm seeing in lots of different places. And it's going to be interesting to see how that grows and spreads over the next few years.
Speaker 2:And I mean, as I said, I find this idea of format so interesting, but I wonder if in performing arts or sort of, you know, the cultural sector, people may struggle to, to see the applicability of sort of format centric thinking on, in inverted commerce, the art, do you think those sorts of structures and approaches are applicable in that context?
Speaker 3:I mean, everything has a format, even if it's just that some of that has become so ingrained into the delivery of culture that you don't think of them as format, but yeah, opera has a format. Theater has a format, exhibitions have a thought format. You know, there are, there are a number of walls in a building that you walk through. So, you know, I went to take modern to see the order for Eliasson retrospective twice. And you know, there's a definite format of that. There's a very strong narrative. You know, there, there are formats around exhibition design, all of these things are formats. Actually, one of the speakers we had at the story, uh, many years ago, the conference we ran for 10 years was a Fiona Romeo, uh, talking about the format for an exhibition. So you had at the science museum around spying and she was talking about all the decisions she made. She used to call it plus wanting that when she was doing exhibition design, she would ask her team, how can we kind of plus one this, how can we add something that's going to be surprising or whatever. So she was thinking a lot about the design of the experience and that's effectively what a format is. It's designing the experience to make it even more compelling and joyful for your audience. So, you know, theater, isn't just putting a bunch of people on a playing on a, on a stage and get them to speak. It's it's setting the ticket, says carrying the drink beforehand, it's kind of getting everyone settled. It's, you know, all of those things are part of a format. The challenge is with digital is that you're thinking about them in environments, where you have a lot less control. So, you know, you are not coordinating when people come into the space, you're not coordinating them to all give you their attention. At the same time, there are lots of things that you don't have control over. So what formats do in remote, in remote culture like broadcast television, like digital is they structure the experience where you don't have the usual kind of physical structure that culture gives you like the building of the gallery and the, the, the seating and the lighting in a, in a theater. They, they are the tools, the format structure points that you do, the beeps of the storytelling, the kind of way that you go into TV breaks and come out of them. The cliff hangers, you leave at the end of an episode, these are all the things that give the experience structure in exactly the same way that your buildings give you structure to your, to your performances and your exhibitions.
Speaker 2:It's a really interesting point actually sort of expanding the scope of my question might, you know, my question was very much about, I guess, the art, but thinking about format as the entire experience, suddenly for me, that just clicked into place about why absolutely. It's an appropriate structure to think about things with them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. W w when I first, when I first started working in digital arts, I was always aware of, you know, we did a lot of digital public art because I liked thinking about the physical space in which digital experiences live. And I still do, I think about the living room. And I think about the day and I, I always kind of try and look outside of the tech and the platform and think about the broader context of the audience around, because that's actually what makes a difference to whether your format works or not, not whether you've you tech talk in the right way, but where, if you've really thought, where does this fit in? Like where, you know, where if we're not in control of, of, of when and how they see it, if they're looking at this remotely, you're already abnegating control of the context. So your first question should be, what do we understand about the context and how do we understand all of the reasons why somebody might not want to do this? And then how do you come up with a format that solves that when I was first doing a lot of mobile work, I remember reading a book called the space as the machine, which was by an architect. And he was talking about the way in which space, physical space created stories through the kind of flow. And he actually, one of the examples it gives them the book is, is his tape written. And he talks about the architecture and the flows of the room and how it creates expectations in the audiences that frame, the work that they're seeing. And as somebody that kind of went to Glasgow, and this goes right back to the work of the installation, uh, course in Glasgow, which was, you know, around the time that people like Douglas Gordon and David Shrigley and Christine Borland rulemaking work. And a lot of them were making work in public because the installation course at Glasgow was very much getting the students to think about the public social kind of environmental contexts of the work that they were making. So I think I've always come up to it with that thinking, you know, even when I curated for the brief period of time at impressions, I was curating work for physical spaces. I was always trying to think beyond that and think about the kind of broader physical social, and kind of story context of the work.
Speaker 2:And just with half an eye on the clock. Um, I, I I've, what's my question, how best to turn this, but I guess, you know, I, I've been observing and engaging with lots and lots of different digital cultural content this year and for many years prior. And it feels like often, I mean, especially this year, the people and organizations that were most quickly able to make a pivot to do digital stuff that felt good and successful were often sort of performance and technique driven art forms. Whereas some of the experiences or content that perhaps felt a little flat or a little less successful or a little less well considered seemed to be the sort of more narrative or story driven forms such as theater, for example. And I wonder whether, um, you know, D do you, do you agree with that? And what's your perspective on why that might be, is it, does it come back to that question of format, you know, theater is designed to be delivered to a physically co-present audience. And as soon as when you sort of break that format and you're delivering it to a screen, it's, it's suddenly a different thing that theater in its traditional form wasn't designed to do that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think a lot of it, I, I put it this way. I think organizations which have for which the, the format of the experience for the audience is influenced in a very large degree by the physical architecture of the buildings are the ones that struggle, um, like full-stop. So, because that's, what's gone when you're talking about remote delivery, you know, you don't have the building. So if you're a building based organization and always liked the fact that the word building based is used sometimes in the arts, because I think people use it to mean things like capital investments and costs, but actually I think culturally, it has a bigger role to play in their commissioning choices. You know, definitely with the few years I was at impressions gallery, I felt very constrained as a curator by the fact that every six weeks we had to fill the walls with something new. Um, and I know that sometimes we made decisions, which weren't optimum in terms of cultural decisions, because we just had something fell through and we have to fill the slot a bit like when you're scheduled media, you know, broadcasting is overwhelmingly dominated by the needs of a schedule. Um, and that's what they're starting to unpick now, as the audience is saying, well, actually what's really important to us is not the fact that it's going out at 9:00 PM, but that I can watch it one-on-one too. So, you know, if you're building based, I think the really big question now is what aspects of the building really, really need to influence your delivery and what does your delivery look like when it's not in the building? You know, and I think museums have really struggled with that. Um, generally I think other than collections, which is a kind of separate academic thing, I think a lot of museums have really struggled to imagine what their experiences are outside of the building, because the buildings dominate everything that they do, they are so big and so old and so expensive to run and, you know, so grand and all of that. So I think there is something about building based organizations that needs unpacking in the, in the context of COVID. Um, and I think that's going to have a bigger impact than non building or less building influenced organizations, because actually, particularly if you're based in London and other places, an awful lot of your audience are not UK based. So, you know, up to two thirds of them can come from abroad. And I do think that's going to take, you know, that's not all going to come back a hundred percent in 2021. That's going to be at least 2022, if not longer until you pick up that audience again. So there's still gonna be a, probably like 50, 60, 70% capacity, even as late as this time, next year, maybe even spring 20, 22. So they've got a much longer, you know, the return to the building is going to take awhile. So there's, there's a really big question to be asked about what do we look like when we're not focused on a building? And I think that's the question to ask rather than what's the optimum digital strategy, because really it's, it forces you to unpick a lot of things that you do because you have a building that have probably become invisible to you, like assumptions you make about who your audience is, or how you structure your, your experiences or what your audiences want. Because a lot of what your audience is currently, one is they want to go and visit a building as part of a day out. Um, and you know, that's why I go to the tape or I go to the theater or something like that is part of that whole thing of like, let's go to a building that happens to have these people in there doing these incredible things, but it's the whole kind of drama of going into a building. That's a really big part of the experience. So I, I think for a lot of organizations, the of questions need to be asking themselves now are about, you know, what do we do just because we've got a building and what do we look like when we're delivering remotely and digital in a way shouldn't be the kind of start of that conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. And it has been really interesting to see the, the type of work that audiences have engaged with, you know, you've seen surprisingly huge levels of engagement with sort of workshops classes, um, sort of more interactive participatory things, which I know a lot of organizations have been pleasantly surprised by. Um, organizations have been surprised by the audiences that they're seeing online don't necessarily map directly onto, you know, those, those physical building visitors, as you just said, it frees you up to reach different people in different ways. And so I think that is an interesting set of considerations.
Speaker 3:I think the building based challenge for us organizations is similar to the building based challenge for companies that have headquarters in cities. Um, you know, we're all learning post. COVID a bit about, you know, how much we do need to travel to do things. And I do think, you know, travel will come back and we'll want to go back into big cities for experiences that absolutely will come back, but there's also going to be a lot more people, I think, staying more local to where they actually live and people wanting to move out to cities and get a better quality of life because actually our work might not bring us into big cities nearly as much as we used to. So I do think this is going to be at least like 20 to 30% of the behaviors that we've seen under COVID or probably stick. So I had a call with a client, um, based in London the other week, and we had a zoom call and it was great. And afterwards I was kind of reflecting with my, with my co-directors and I was thinking if we have that meeting again in say, March, April, next year, after the vaccine, when I could have traveled into London, it would actually feel a bit of an imposition for him to insist that I travel up to London for an hour long, you know, kind of like basically go see call. We were, it was a very informal call about potential new work. It wasn't a workshop. It wasn't something where we had to work together in the room. It was just a chat. It would feel a bit rich for him to say, yeah, I want you to spend 60 quid and basically four hours traveling two hours each way so that we can have this one hour chat. Um, when we know now that we could just do it on zoom and I can stay in bright and he can stay in London. So I think this whole question of how much COVID affects our everyday travel plans. That's going to be a really interesting question for particularly building based organizations in big towns and cities. I think it's going to be a real boon for a lot of local providers around the country. Um, but I think this question of what does remote provision of your services look like? That's a question that every single industry is asking themselves now. And that, again, it comes back to that question of remoteness. Again, can you be a remote organization is a really interesting question.
Speaker 2:Maybe just to finish, we can continue this sort of future focus line of thinking. I mean, we've talked quite a lot about the impact of COVID, but more broadly, do you have perspectives on where? I mean, I know I've, I've read, I've read articles of yours, which are really, really interesting about, um, attention patterns. And I wonder where you see sort of audience attention pattern is moving. Does that shift, or is that shift going to require new and different formats of storytelling, different ways of engaging with those attention patterns, sort of what else, what other things are there that you think are worth considering when we're looking one to three years into the future?
Speaker 3:So in the last, uh, the, the, the very, very occasional newsletter, I write, uh, how to measure ghosts, which is kind of like research for a book I'm writing. The last post I wrote was called wherever schedulers now. And it was basically reflecting on that when you look over the last 30 years, the rise of, of, of the internet in everyday life has effectively given us two skills as audiences. The first one, the rise of broadband and Google in the nineties and early two thousands taught us all to be researchers, you know, up until people adopting broadband and browsers with search engines, built into them. We generally didn't spend a lot of time doing quite complex taxonomical searches, which is what we will do now. Every day, you go to Google, you type in a phrase, you get a bunch of results. You kind of look through them and evaluate them. You, you know, you're basically doing the work of a researcher or a librarian, and that used to be a relatively rare task. Like I definitely didn't go into the library 20 times a day when I was growing up in the eighties and to look for information. Um, so the first phase of internet adoption taught us all to be researchers and taught us all to be librarians. It gave us those skills. It taught us how to do that work because we needed to, to, to access the information. My argument now is that the last five to 10 years in particular has taught us all to be schedulers. Uh, the rise of mobile devices has taken digital content into every waking minute of our lives. So the challenge we have now as audiences is, is how do we decide how to manage our attention and how do we self-schedule. And I think the tools that are gonna be really interesting and the platforms that are going to be really in the next 10 years are going to be ones that deal with that challenge of helping us schedule our digital experiences in more satisfying ways as audiences. Um, I don't really know what that looks like. We've we've when I was back at the BBC in the mid two thousands, we were doing, uh, a few projects around recommendation and stuff like that, but I don't, I don't think it's all about that. I've been looking at the EPG design of, of VOD services like prime and Netflix, and looking for some clues because everyone's been focusing on the stream products for the last 10 years. So looking at Facebook and looking at Twitter and Instagram and looking at how that, that idea of the stream, that new concept that basically atomized content from around the web and pulled it all together into an algorithmic list. That's constantly updated. That was a new frame for the world, which was launched in the last 10, 15 years. That genuinely has shifted the way in which we create public space and the way in which we understand the world. We now understand the world through these algorithmic extremes in a way that was just unimaginable 15 years ago. I think we're going to see similar product inventions around VOD services and around video. That's going to change the way that we decide what to watch. Um, and I don't think it's going to be as, as kind of a breakthrough moment where a new way of, of organizing attention comes along. I think there's going to be lots of little nips and tucks, but the challenge to solve now is when every single minute of every day can be a media experience, how does the audience make a decision about what they're going to do? Is it that that's what their friend, where their friends are? Is it that they have fandoms around the products? Is it a format that they build into part of their day? You know, is it a spectacle that they want to immerse themselves? Is there, you know, these are all kind of drivers for people to choose on either their small, medium, or large screens, what they're giving their attention to. And that is basically the game for the next kind of decade is how do you become one of those things that people look out on their screens? Um, and that sounds quite dystopian when I say like that, but actually I think it's, it's a lot more creatively and socially important than that, because actually these are now windows on the world and a big Fred of the work that I've been doing in my whole career has been about public media and public value. And I desperately trying to make sure that the values that I kind of grew up with in public media as a kid preserve into this new environment. And so I'm not just looking at that and thinking, how do we make content that basically fills up your eyeballs regardless of its value? My question is how do you make sure that genuinely socially valuable work has a space in these new kinds of interfaces and products in the next 10, 20 years? Um, because we're in, we're in a fight at the moment to, to do that. And the platforms that have dominated in the last 20 years have come from a nakedly commercial perspective and do not have public value at their core. And I want to make sure that that public value institutions of the 20th century are reinvented in the 21st and that the arts organizations and the media organizations that stand for more than just making money off our eyeballs. I want them to be just as important in the next 50 years as they happened in the last 50. So for me, that's the mission that I'm really interested in is not just how do we understand attention and how do we understand the context of attention and the way in which audiences make decision. But how can we use that to make sure that the stories we put out into the world actually
Speaker 1:[inaudible].
