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
Emma Keith (National Theatre) on NT Live, remote audiences, experimentation, learning, thinking about value, leadership, and the importance of pilots
A great chat with the National Theatre's outgoing Managing Director - Digital, Emma Keith.
We talked about how digital practice has developed at the NT and how that differs from other performing arts organisations. The history of the NT Live programme, and the importance of pilots and testing ideas. The hidden value of digital infrastructure, remote audiences, thinking about outcomes rather than outputs, leadership, creating a culture of learning, and loads more.
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. I'm Ash, your host, and each episode we explore how people and organisations in the cultural world and beyond are using digital to create, connect and adapt. And if you need a hand with your own digital work, I'm also a consultant who helps cultural organisations make the most of all this stuff. Today's episode features a conversation with Emma Keith. Emma, until very recently, was the Managing Director of Digital at the National Theatre in the UK. In Emma's 15 years at the NT, she oversaw the enormous growth and success of the NT Live Cinema programme and, in 2020, launched the NT at Home video on demand platform.
Ash:Emma has lots of really interesting things to say about audiences, experimentation, innovation, learning and leadership. I really love this conversation, Enjoy. Thanks so much for joining us today, Emma. I'm really really looking forward to our conversation. You're someone I've wanted to sit down with since before recording the first episode of this podcast, so we're now on episode 60, something I'm glad we're getting the opportunity. But before we dive into my very long list of questions that I want to pepper you with, I'm really intrigued to hear the Emma Keith story. How have you arrived at where you currently are today at the National Theatre.
Emma:Well, thank you so much for inviting me on, ash. I wondered why it had taken you so long, to be honest, so I'm just really pleased that I'm finally here. So my background is actually in dance. I studied it at university and originally I thought I was going to go into academia. What could be better than becoming a doctor of dance? That was the dream when I was younger. But it became quite clear that wasn't the path for me and instead I moved into art strategy and worked first at the Arts Council, which gave me a really good and broad understanding of the arts landscape in the UK. I then joined what was the UK Film Council at the time in government relations, and that was working really closely with the DCMS, providing insight on the film, its impact, but also policy and funding. On the film, its impact, but also policy and funding, and again, another great overview of that industry.
Emma:But I realised my passion lay in digital. My role at the Film Council wasn't the most challenging and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. So I read a lot and I read a lot about digital and I became fascinated with how people could connect, how they could create community and how they could collaborate together digitally. Bear in mind, though, this was back in 2008. So pre-Instagram, pre-snapchat, digital was very much in its early days. Twitter had just launched MySpace was the dominant social media platform, believe it or not, and YouTube was just starting to emerge as a video platform. But I think what I saw then, kind of with hindsight looking back, was the power of digital to transform how people could engage with culture and with the arts, and I knew I kind of wanted to be part of that, but I didn't really know what shape that would take. So I went back to university and I got a master's degree in digital culture and technology from King's College London.
Emma:Back to university, and I got a master's degree in digital culture and technology from King's College London. It was a bit of a peculiar degree because it mixes part of their cultural policy and management course with a digital humanities course, so at the time I was learning about things like ebooks and digital preservation, as well as cultural management and managing an arts organisation, and from there I took a punt on a job at the National Theatre. I didn't really know what I was stepping into and I definitely didn't expect to be there as long as I was. So I joined quite at the beginning of National Theatre Live, which at the time, was pioneering and groundbreaking a fantastic way in which to bring productions from the National Theatre to cinema audiences around the world and I led that team and it grew the NT Live offering and I just loved it and enjoyed it so much. It was thrilling and inspiring.
Emma:And then, like everybody else, in 2020, we just had massive challenges and we launched NT at Home and that really, again, was another opportunity for me to learn something new, to be challenged and to grow, and that's kind of been the common thread, I would say, through all of the things that I've done, particularly from a digital perspective, is really looking at how that can break down barriers for people, whether that's accessibility or location or price and really ensuring that people can engage with culture and with the arts and as many people as possible can be reached. Because of my background, because I grew up dancing and I had those opportunities to do something that was and is my passion, I realised how profound an impact that could have on somebody, and so I wanted to make sure that my career involved giving that opportunity to as many people as possible.
Ash:I'm really interested in sort of digging into a bit more about what digital means at the National Theatre, or perhaps sort of how the institution understands that you know very stretchy and nebulous word digital, because it feels like at the National Theatre digital has developed and evolved in quite a different way and with a different focus compared to many other performing arts organizations. Typically, in archetypal performing arts organization, digital will have grown out of a sales or marketing need and then maybe got attached as one of the responsibilities of you know, chief marketing officer or director of communications or commercial director, Whereas in the national theatre it feels that it's got a much more to use a horrible word content focus around making content to be delivered digitally to audiences that are not in the building at the National Theatre. Could you tell us a bit more about that and sort of what the digital conversation at the NT looks like?
Emma:Absolutely Full disclosure. The bit I missed in my background is that I have recently left the National Theatre, so able to talk with a small amount of hindsight on that perspective. But definitely when I joined and when National Theatre Live was being launched, like I say, digital was such a nascent concept and we didn't really think about what we were doing necessarily as being digital. What we knew we were benefiting from was the Digital Cinema Network, which was an initiative the UK Film Council did in 2007, 2008, to digitise cinemas, ie to make it possible to distribute content to cinemas without having to send film reels around the country. And that was how it used to work, and NT Live wouldn't have existed without that digitisation of cinema. But we didn't really think about what we were doing as being a digital project. We absolutely thought about it as being a content project. It was very much driven from how do we engage audiences that we wouldn't otherwise be able to reach? How do we take the first show that National Theatre Live did Fedra with Helen Mirren to as many people as possible? Because that production was going to be limited by the number of performances that we could put on and the number of seats in the house. So it was driven by that content and at the time when NT Live launched as well Nicholas Heitner was the artistic director of the National Theatre at the time and it was very much part of the conversation.
Emma:Part of the consideration was how do we make the experience for audiences watching in the cinema as good as the experience of audiences watching in the theatre Different, but still good and still valuable. And so we gave the cameras a freedom that they don't have in other places. We treated the theatre like a TV studio. We would sometimes take out two or three hundred seats to accommodate the cameras, and that was about saying that what we're doing is we're trying to make these audiences that are watching remotely have an emotional connection with the work that they're watching. We often say it's akin to a football match or a sports match. You get to see things you wouldn't otherwise be able to see if you were in the theatre and hopefully what that gives you is a deeper emotional engagement, and we undertook some research with Nesta at the start of NT Live which bore that out. People were having a strong emotional connection with this work.
Emma:So that's kind of the background of the context from which the digital department and the digital function within the National Theatre emerged. It wasn't how can we make the ticket purchase pathway easier and quicker for people. It wasn't driven by how can we sell through social media channels. It was very much driven by that desire to engage audiences with the work that we were making. That being said, what we very quickly realised within the digital team was that there was an. That being said, what we very quickly realised within the digital team was that there was an expertise there being built up on how to engage people with content digitally. So, within what my role previously looked after at National Theatre, there was NT Live, there was NT at Home, so we had our cinema platform, our streaming platform. We also had our education offer, so making our productions available to schools across the UK and internationally, and we also had a content production studio. So, again because of the size and the scale of the National Theatre, we were able to have our own in-house producers, camera operators, editors. Now, 15 years ago, it wasn't that big, it was one person in a cupboard under a staircase, but it was very much about saying what we've got, the skills we're building as an organisation, is how to engage people with digital content, and so that content production studio grew to serve the organisation. Now, a lot of that service was marketing, sales, fundraising, but that team was specialists in translating a stage production, whether it be creating trailers or going behind the scenes or showcasing the work of the organisation. So digital did take on a very different shape. That being said, we still have a website. There's still a huge amount of the more traditional things that might be covered within digital, and I think that's the thing is. Digital is a term that we use and it means so many different things and it means something different to everybody. We used to joke in the National Theatre we'd never have a head of paper. Why would we have a head of digital? I think that's a really important thing as well is that digital now isn't what digital was in 2008, 2010, when I started at the National Theatre, and so, in a way, it has permeated and become part of so many things that we do. What we continue to do at the National Theatre, and what they're doing since I've left, is continuing to say there's a really important way in which we can engage audiences with our content remote audiences, whether that's through cinema or through streaming or in education, and then that ability to reach audiences and take what is a live performance art into a remote, distributed digital offering is a really important way in which to grow the brand, build audiences, generate income and profile work, and ultimately those are all things that the organisation wants to do, and digital is a way in which they can do that.
Ash:And it feels like there are maybe two sort of really key things that strike me in what you said there. Number one is that, absolutely as you said, the digital conversation seemed to grow out of a focus on outcomes and a focus on impact and, as you've said, your focus has been on how to make the best work in the best way, delivered in the most engaging form to remote audiences, and it feels like so many organisations could benefit from, you know, not taking exactly the same framework, but by using what is the desired outcome as the starting point and working back from there, and very often the answer to those questions may be simpler lower tech or not digital in any way to sort of achieve whatever your goals might be. So that feels important. And secondly, it was really interesting to hear you say, as the, I suppose, digital content muscles in the organisation have grown bigger and stronger. Actually, they've also been able to serve the organisation in many more ways than was perhaps originally envisaged.
Ash:You know, the studio that you describe isn't just making content for NT Live, they're sort of supporting with their expertise everything that the NT is trying to do, and that again feels like one of those halo benefits from becoming more digitally mature and digitally confident as an organization, however, or wherever that maturity might sort of take root. So that feels exciting and worth talking to, because it feels that so often on that second point, the justification for making digital investment seem to be quite narrowly defined. You know we are spending money on this thing and we want to return direct revenue from that thing and actually it sounds like from what you're saying, the benefits of those investments are actually probably going to be much more widely and more indirectly felt.
Emma:Yeah, absolutely. I mean to your second point. I love that description of the sort of digital content muscles and there was definitely that sense of it growing. There has been a halo benefit from us making content in-house because we're able to, or we've been able to at the national, to build long-term relationships with people as well, and I mean that with the staff base, with the teams, with the freelancers that are coming into work with us to build that trust and to build that understanding.
Emma:I think there's a vulnerability in creating art. Rehearsal rooms are very special places where people are able to try to test, to build relationships, to see what's working and what's not working. And what we've been able to do at the National Theatre is to look at how do we get access to that space in a way that enables an audience to experience some of that process, in a way that also really protects the sanctity of that space for the artists and the performers, and I think that's something that's quite specific to the performing arts. But if people are fascinated I'm still fascinated after spending so many years around it by what goes into making a show and making a production and how does it come together and what are the stages of it and how do you go from writing on a page to a 3d production with design and light and sound and music and performers, and it feels joined up and representative of those words on the page, but it can feel completely new and modern and resonant and like nothing you have ever seen before. So what that content production studio I believe have been able to do and continue to do absolutely amazingly, is showcase all of that stuff that goes on at the National Theatre.
Emma:The National Theatre is a unique organisation. It's one of the only factories left in Zone 1. They have on-site costume workshops and paint frame and an armoury and so many resources. But any organization can still profile what they're doing. They can still give an insight to audiences to what's going on behind the scenes and I think that's what audiences really valued and that's where building that digital content muscle really enabled us to kind of take that to the nth degree and to keep building that and growing that, and that was the halo benefit.
Emma:I think the other thing, sort of coming back to the, the outcomes and the impact perspective you're right, nt Live is quite a complicated way to go about addressing that answer and I'm certainly not advocating that everybody should do that. It's also quite an expensive way to go about addressing that answer and not everybody is going to have that resource available to them. But it was very much driven by the outcomes and the impact it was how can we reach more people? What is the way in which we could do that? And the National Theatre took inspiration from the Metropolitan Opera, which was doing something similar at the time.
Emma:The conversations we were having at the National Theatre just before the pandemic were National Theatre life is great, but there's only certain shows that we can do that on. The costs are high, the capacity can only deliver so many. So we were doing maybe eight or 10 productions of our at that point, 20 to 25 productions a year, and we were wrangling with how do we make something more cost effective? How do we make something that works on a show that's a short run? How do we do something that works for new writing? Nt Live for some reason just never worked really well for new writing, because you don't know what it is until it opens and you don't know how it's going to perform and you don't know what the story is going to be always. So it was tricky to kind of put that amount of money on the table and say we can take that risk with new writing. And we were starting to grapple with these questions in this conversation and it's what bore NT at Home ultimately was again looking at those outcomes and that impact and saying, right, what's the kind of quickest, simplest, easiest way to solve for this problem and start from there and kind of build up. So I think that note of kind of don't overcomplicate things, start from somewhere.
Emma:The other thing that I feel very privileged to have had the experience of the National Theatre is that all of the digital projects that we launched we launched as pilots.
Emma:So we never launched Empty Lives saying this is our 15 year programme and we're going to reach 15 million people and it's going to generate significant royalties for artists, income for the organization. We said we're going to do four and we're going to test and we're going to learn and we're going to do some research and we're going to find out what works and hopefully we'll be able to keep doing it and we'll find a way to make that work. But if we don't, then we've got four great recordings of shows and we'll walk away. Thank you very much. And there's something freeing about it being a pilot, about having the opportunity to test and learn that digital gives you in a way that perhaps other things don't give you. You can just turn the switch off. So, yes, it might be quite scary at that starting point saying what are you going to do, and it can be risky. But equally it can also be quite easy to say this hasn't worked, we're going to walk away.
Ash:I'm really interested to dig a little into that final point that you made that idea of experimentation, because that feels like the common thread in all of the conversations I have with people about successful digital initiatives or sort of digitally confident organisations. They are places where experimentation and testing and learning is the way that they do things. Was NT Live, as far as you're aware, sort of coming out of a practice of experimentation at the National Theatre or was it somewhat novel when it was tried 15 years ago? And how much do you feel that taking a sort of pilot approach to a programme like NT Live has sort of infused the rest of the organisation with the confidence and the willingness to take more of that approach in their own work?
Emma:Really interesting question and perspective. I suppose it would be wrong of me to say there wasn't experimentation before NT Live, because I think theatre is all about experimentation and the performing arts are Like I was talking about that rehearsal room is that really sacred place? And then you have to take it and put it in front of an audience and see how it's going to work. But you get a chance to do it seven or eight times a week. You get an opportunity to refine, to build, to see what's working, what's not working. We have previews what's landing, what's resonating with audiences? Do we need to make cuts or changes to the script? So my kind of counter argument back, I suppose, would be experimentation is in the nature of arts generally. Who picks up a paintbrush and the first thing they paint is perfect? I just don't think that's what happens. I think what's different is that when you then move it over into the digital space is there's kind of a fear that can start to be unhelpful to organisations and start to stifle their ability to experiment and their ability to try things out. It's this counterintuitive thing For me. Digital can be, I want to say, ephemeral in the way a theatre performance is, but I appreciate that we also have that recording and it's here forever, so it's not completely ephemeral. But I suppose what I mean is there is so much content being produced across the world that what resonates today and what lands with audiences and what they're engaging with is not what they're going to be engaging with in two or three or four weeks time. So there's a transient nature to digital content I suppose is what I'm trying to say rather than ephemeral, and I think people should try and embrace some of that transient nature of things. But I also appreciate that once it's recorded, that recording is there and we have got it forever. So it is different to a kind of ephemeral stage performance that's one night only and it's just for that audience in the room. I think, in a long winded way saying experimentation is inherent in the arts. I think sometimes it gets stifled when you move over to digital. I don't know if it's because the risks feel bigger, the investment feels bigger, the exposure feels bigger. Ie, if it goes wrong to 500 people versus 5,000 people, what does that mean?
Emma:I think for me that ability to experiment, to innovate, to test and learn whatever description you want to put around it was essential for all of the digital things we did. It was essential for all of the digital things we did, because the other thing that was really important was we used to operate digital a bit like a startup within the national theatre, so we had our own commercial imperatives and our own audience imperatives and we had the safety net of the national theatre backing us. But at the same time, we didn't go from one to a hundred overnight. We took small steps and made incremental improvement. And that, to me that's why I was there for 15 years is because every time we did something, yes, we could celebrate the success, but we'd also be saying how do we make it better next time? What? What could we have done differently? How could we improve? What are we not doing that we could be doing. So simple things.
Emma:Like when we first did NT Live, we didn't offer any subtitles, so everybody who came had to have a certain level of English language understanding to be able to experience the production. Over time we started to add subtitles, a language at a time. By the end, I think we were doing 12 or 15 translations per empty live. Now we couldn't have gone from no translations to 12 or 15 overnight, but slowly we could and we could test the market. We could say, okay, we're going to pick two or three shows and we're going to put them out with Spanish subtitles and we'll see how we do in the Spanish market and if they do well, then we can start to roll that out.
Emma:And so I think it is necessary for digital to continue to have that test and learn. I think the other thing I would say on this point as well and again I'm thinking particularly about kind of digital distribution and digital content is that the arts aren't necessarily driving that industry forward. Other parts of the ecosystem are, and so if you're not testing and learning, you're falling behind. So Facebook, youtube, snapchat, insta whatever we want to talk about didn't start on day one with the functionality that they have now. They didn't start with the audiences that they've got now. They built and they grew over time, but they're the ones that are driving that content consumption, and the arts can be innovative, it can do things that other people aren't doing, but ultimately it's also engaging in an ecosystem that will move far more quickly and will iterate and will test and learn and will develop.
Ash:So it's necessary for us to continue to look at what that wider ecology is doing and how that can be transferred and translated into the arts and cultural sector yeah, and I think that you know, so often you see digital projects, you know, I'm running some research on digital failure at the moment and it feels like so many digital projects in the cultural sector, you know, they try to climb the mountain in a single step, without the acknowledgement that perhaps the peers or examples outside the sector they're measuring themselves against have been taking a lot of very small steps to get to the point that they're now being evaluated against.
Ash:And that feels like a really, you know, straightforward but simple truth to acknowledge. You know, as you, as you said, on the day you started nt live, you did not say we're going to reach x million people, be in however many hundred countries, and it's going to sustain for 15 years. It was about testing the idea across four shows and it feels like, as you said, there is this either this fear which stifles people ever getting started with digital initiatives or this unrealistic expectation that they're going to be able to make enormous leaps forward with a single, slightly under-resourced project. And actually the most sort of healthiest effective way is, you know, try and overcome your fear and take the first step, but also acknowledge that small steps heading in the right direction is going to probably be more meaningful and useful and impactful and sustainable for your organization than trying to sort of bound that distance in a single leap yeah, absolutely.
Emma:I mean, they're kind of one in the same right.
Emma:If you've got to get to the top of the mountain in one step, of course it's paralyzing with the risk, the jeopardy, the challenge is huge.
Emma:If you've only got to take the first step, you're easing yourself of that burden, and so I think that there's a kind of two sides of the same coin, really, of there's got to be a way to take a first step and learn from that step. Maybe keep going if it feels okay, if it doesn't take a slightly different path. And also, if you're taking the first step, you don't have to go on the path well trodden, so you don't have to follow in someone else's footsteps, whereas if you want to climb Mount Everest, you're probably going to go the way that someone else has been before, whereas if you're doing something new, you can probably just try something and see what happens, and if it fails in inverted commas if it doesn't do what you set it out to do, take the learnings, because then it isn't a failure. You've learned something from it and you can use that in whatever you're looking at to the future.
Ash:We will talk a bit more about NT at Home in a moment. But considering both those projects NT Live and NT at Home are there any quote-unquote failures that you could speak to where they taught you an important lesson, where actually it changed or improved or whatever had an impact on the thinking, the practice of the work you were doing in those programmes?
Emma:A bit of vulnerability here. I'm not very good at failing. I quite like to win. I've got a little bit of a competitive streak in me. So I find it quite difficult to look and say, are there things that failed? Because I think I do what I just advocated people do, which is I see it as a challenge to be overcome and I see it as okay. Something didn't work. What was it that didn't work? How can we improve it? How can we change it? How can we do things differently next time?
Emma:I think the other thing with both NT Live and NT at Home was the freedom that that pilot phrasing put around them to say if something doesn't go right, it's not a failure, it's a learning experience. And also both of those projects had enough latitude within them that in those early days we had a bit of time to find our feet. So NT Live, like I say, was a four-show pilot. We ended up doing five shows in the first season because things went so well but, unbelievably, some of the shows in the first season made money. That was not what we expected them to do. Some of them lost a huge amount of money. So maybe they were failures, but they weren't, because we learned what audiences enjoyed and what they wanted. We started to learn about cadence and frequency of release. We started to learn about what resonated with audiences beyond the South Bank, and so I suppose that's part of my nature is not to look and go. That's a failure, and I think that's part of digital as well. Right, you can't let one failure or one knockback stop you from making progress forward On NT at Home.
Emma:It was born out of necessity, of the pandemic. It was phone calls with the team sitting at my dining table saying we've closed, we've got to do something. What we did was the best pilot I think we could have ever done. Were the things I would have done differently Absolutely. In hindsight are the things I would have approached differently Absolutely. But the reality was we were in a and I know this word is overused unprecedented time doing things that had never been done before, and I suppose that's what I mean as well is like we were walking a path that no one else had walked, so there wasn't a wrong way. We were laying the path as we went, and one of my team calls it we were building the plane as we were flying it. So there wasn't a blueprint, there wasn't tick boxes to make sure we'd done all the things on the checklist. That's what I find personally really exciting and engaging and challenging about. Digital is the opportunity to lay your own path, to build your own plane and to see where it takes you.
Emma:Yeah, sure, there was probably what people would call failure in there. There's shows that didn't make money, there's relationships that weren't always handled in the best way, or people who were involved in productions that felt unhappy about the result. Yeah, that's all in there too. But ultimately, what I tried to do and in a leadership position, I think what you've got to do is take the macro picture right. Yes, there were challenges, possibly failures. There were shows we never managed to film but we spent hours trying to make them work.
Emma:There were times very early in the NT Live days, in one of our broadcasts and out of a hundred that I was involved in it only happened once we fell off air, but we got back on air and we carried on. The spirit of theatre kind of really rang true. So I think that's probably my mindset is to not see those things as failures and complete setbacks. But I think also, as a leader of a team, it's important to take that macro picture and say, okay, that felt like something big in and of that moment itself, but when we zoom out and we look at the initiative as a whole, we can take the learnings from that experience. Okay, we need to have conversations earlier with people. We need to make sure we're addressing concerns. We need to build a bit more contingency into the budget. There's things you can then do and learn from that perspective, and so my kind of positive, optimistic nature is to see it as a way for us to improve and to get better next time, rather than as a failure or what do they say?
Ash:experience is the best teacher. Yeah, and I think you know the mindset and the attitude that you've described there feels really effective. And you know something I would hope people can sort of steal, to be honest, and I want to talk a bit about audiences now and maybe we'll sort of squash the nt live and nt at home conversations together, although please do flag where there are differences, because certainly you know, I remember when I worked in for my arts organizations and you know there were conversations about whether we should try and do something similar to NT Live or, as you say, the Met Opera or the Berlin Phil making high quality multi-camera capture of performance available to remote audiences. However that might happen. And one thing that came up numerous times in numerous different conversations across many years was this worry about cannibalisation, this worry that, well, if someone can go to their local cinema to see an opera or a play or an orchestral performance, they're not going to get on the train. Come to London, buy a ticket at the National Theatre, buy their interval drink, etc. Etc. So we are cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Ash:Now I read some research that your colleague, david Sable, was involved with with the University of Cambridge Business School back in 2012,. I think that sort of disproved this notion. Now, we've both been in this game a long time. Disprove this notion. Now, we've both been in this game a long time. That was 13 years ago. How true has that proven to be? That that worry that you know, if you make this stuff available to people in their local cinema or on their laptop, they're not going to attend the venue, your venue, in the ways that they might in the past.
Emma:So bear with me, I'm just going to go somewhere and then I'll come back to answer the question properly. I'm not a big Swifty, but my six-year-old daughter is Taylor Swift, has just completed recently the biggest world tour ever, grossing however many billions in dollars in ticket sales. And do you know what she did halfway through that live tour? She filmed it and she put it into cinemas around the world, and more audiences were able to see that concert performance in cinemas during the world tour and feel part of that experience than if it had never been filmed or if it had been filmed and released after she'd completed the tour. Now, at the point they put it into cinemas, she was probably in a very fortunate position that you couldn't buy tour tickets anyway, so there was never going to be any kind of cannibalisation.
Emma:One of the other big and again I'm going to talk about an outlier and then I'll come to talk about the sort of more mainstream is Hamilton In the pandemic. It got released onto Disney+. They had been intending a cinema release for it but because of the closures of cinemas they put it onto Disney Plus. I think from memory it was something like $75 million that that production cost. Again, it's an outlier, but it's very much credited with Disney Plus's success in building audiences during the pandemic was making that sort of content available. I think there's a number of things here. So during the pandemic and as we've emerged from that, audience behaviour and consumption patterns have changed. My concern and nervousness is that some of that is attributed to the fact that content is now available for people to access digitally in a way it never was five or ten years ago. All the research that we ever undertook at the National Theatre continually disproved this thesis, and just as I was leaving, we were about to get the results of our latest piece of research looking at theatrical and cinema release streaming and education use impacting people's attendance of live performances. Unfortunately, I wasn't there to get the final results, but I think the team probably would have let me know if we were cannibalising audiences, and I haven't heard that.
Emma:What it does is it gives audiences choice. So often what we would see is people would go to the theatre let's just take an example two or three times a year. They would continue to go to the theatre two or three times a year, but now they might also go to the cinema once or twice a year. It was additive, it wasn't taking away, and actually in the research that we undertook as well, they didn't see digital consumption of art in the same as they saw live consumption of art. They actually put it in a different place.
Emma:So a trip to London with a theatre ticket and dinner beforehand and maybe an overnight stay, was considered a very special and important experience. Going to the cinema was more like should we go out for dinner tonight or should we go and watch NT Live? Oh, maybe we could do both. That's quite nice and it was. Shall we go to and see Hollywood film or shall we go and see a piece of cultural content? It was like a different decision-making criteria.
Emma:The other thing that I always found quite interesting that bore out through a lot of the research that we did was there were really practical considerations for people. So NT Live is in cinemas in the UK. You're never more than 12 minutes drive away from a cinema that shows NT Live. So sometimes that convenience was really really important for people because it meant they could go after work and they could be back home at a reasonable time without travel. It was things like NT Live, because at the beginning days it was live and we were going live across Europe as well.
Emma:We did a slightly earlier show time so we did a seven o'clock start. Things like that people said were really important because it meant there was enough time to finish work, have some food, go to the cinema and get back home. And the time they needed a babysitter for was reduced because they didn't have the travel and it was earlier start time and these were things that we weren't considering. Travel and it was earlier start time and these were things that we weren't considering. We weren't saying let's make it seven o'clock because that will reduce the babysitting time. We were saying let's make it seven o'clock because it will work better for distribution across Europe.
Emma:These were kind of incidental benefits we'd never really considered, but I think it was just a reminder that actually once you get yourself out of the theatre attending London bubble, we're in that industry, we're surrounded by people that are in that industry, and you start to meet and talk to people across the country and across the world. Their decisions and their reasons for coming to see shows are quite different and so that was really what the research bore out is audience behaviour and audience choices are motivated by those things and the fact that it's available at home or in the cinema isn't stopping them from having those live engagements. They're doing them both. Yes, audience behavior and consumption has changed, but it's not because things are now more available to them.
Ash:That was just going to happen anyway that's the observation that I've had through the conversations that I have had around this sort of stuff and the research that I've seen is that, as you say, it's additive.
Ash:It is a way in to experiencing this work for people who would never have made the trip to your venue. It is a way of seeing shows that you maybe didn't feel confident or able to buy tickets for and it sort of complements in-person attendance rather than replacing. It would be my perspective, based on anecdote and some light reading around the subject. I guess maybe it's an obvious next step from audiences, but I'm intrigued now. You know, at the National Theatre it's a large organisation that does a lot of different things. There's hundreds, if not thousands, of people that work there. It is an established organisation with established ways of working and NT Live and then NT at Home were disruptors to that and disruptors to the sort of traditional hierarchies and structures of the organization. And it does feel that. You know, I saw someone quoting a conference keynote last week saying you know, our organisational structures were invented around the same time as the fax machine and they haven't really changed. And yet the world has changed in so many ways.
Ash:I guess what was your experience at the National Theatre in becoming, you know, very senior? You were Managing Director of Digital at the National Theatre. You know very senior, you were managing director of digital at the national theater, doing a job that maybe no one else in your leadership team fully understood or had had experiences of working with before, and in an organization where you were the first iteration. You were version 1.0 of the nt studio of the, the NT digital team. At times was that challenging, you know, because it feels that so many people in digital roles and you know, I've had this experience is you're often the first or second role holder. You're maybe the first person with a digital responsibility at that level of seniority. You're maybe the first person with your particular skill set. So it can sometimes be difficult to find common ground, you know, with your colleagues and with the institution. I'd be fascinated to hear your thoughts on that so, were there challenges?
Emma:absolutely. Did it feel at times like we were talking different languages? Yeah, were we disrupted from probably annoying sometimes the organization? I'm sure we were, but I think what I really try to do, and what I think the team are probably still trying to do, is to build trust, build transparency, and when we started nt live, I think what was a really important thing was the national said we've got to do this ourselves. This can't be an external production company that comes in and does this. We can, can't have this done to us. We're going to take responsibility for this and we're going to have a team of people inside the organisation who are responsible for doing this. Now, do we bring in a huge number of freelancers to support us on each of these endeavours? Absolutely, but there is still a core team and that team now, when I left, is over 60 people. It's a significant, it's one of the largest departments in the organization now.
Emma:But what we did at the National again, which I think is very specific to the National Theatre, and I referenced this a little bit before was we treated digital like a startup and so it had many functions within its own remit. So we looked after everything from programming what we were filming, production, how we were going to film it, post-production, editing it, distribution, how we were going to get out to people, marketing and sales, press, publicity. We had our own websites, our own social channels. So we were kind of like a microcosm within the organisation. I loved it at times because we got that whole value chain and that all sat within the digital department and so there was a sense that we were all pulling in the same direction. What was challenging sometimes about that was the direction that we were pulling in may not have always aligned with the direction the main organisation was pulling in. The National has a bit of a history and a pedigree of doing this. It does it also with National Theatre Productions, which is a separate company within the organisation which looks after tours, transfers, west End and Broadway. So commercial I hate this word exploitation of the productions the National Theatre produces, and so digital sort of operated in a similar way.
Emma:I wish things could have been better and could have been more synergist and could have been more aligned, but equally, sometimes we needed to throw away some of that hierarchy and structure. We needed to find different ways of working to make the digital stuff happen, and so digital was given a degree of freedom because it operated in this way that it wouldn't have had if it was integrated into that structure from the very beginning. I think now digital has got so big, the remit has really grown the need for the organisation to be thinking across digital, across so many different areas. There is bound to be shift and change. So I suppose what I'm not saying is I left it all in perfect shape and no one never needs to touch it again. It's right that digital continues to evolve and change. So I suppose what I'm not saying is I left it all in perfect shape and no one needs to touch it again. It's right that digital continues to evolve and change and what the organisation needs will shift and change over time. I think your analogy of organisational structures being invented with the package machine is fantastic.
Emma:Our organisational structure at the NT was based on kind of how we organised ourselves rather than how audiences experienced us, and I think at times that's where a challenge would come is audiences didn't know we had a learning department and a marketing department and a fundraising department and a digital department, and that they all sat separately with their own objectives and their own teams. Audiences just knew the national theatre, and I think that's really interesting to think about for the future is how a more matrixed structure could work in the arts that is more audience centric, which feels quite weird when you're talking about an internal organisational structure. But I think the opportunity and the challenge that digital presents is that our audiences weren't coming saying, right, I want to find out about National Theatre Live or National Theatre at Home or National Theatre Collection. They were coming saying I want to find out about the National Theatre, and it was up to us to use the technology available to say, ok, you live in Australia, you're probably not that interested in our South Bank productions, you probably want to see something else from us. Okay, you look like you might be a teacher or a young person, you're probably going to want something else from us. And so that's where there's a kind of part of digital that's less my remit and moves over into the sort of marketing sales perspective is about saying, okay, what do audiences want and how do we best serve the choices and the options that we have available?
Emma:And we've chosen to organize in a particular way to those audiences, and it always used to interest me that the best performing activity on our social media channels was content about NT Live and NT at Home, and everybody was, oh why did this perform? Really well? And I'd be like, because it's available to the entire world and because people want to engage with it, because it might be a clip from a show or a writer talking about their process, but they can then go on like there's a really clear call to action, there's a clear next step for audiences to take, which there's a really clear call to action, there's a clear next step for audiences to take which gives them a genuine engagement with the thing that they've had a snippet of in social media. And so a lot of the national theatres social channels talk about National Theatre at Home, national Theatre Live, the NT Collection, more than they talk about our work in London at the South Bank. But that's kind of right because audiences can engage with us in a different way.
Emma:So it's a peculiar one and I've slightly lost my train of thought on this, but I think what my main thing is is, yes, organisational structure works in a particular way, but audience discoverability doesn't match up with our organisational structure, and so it's really important that we think about our audiences and that might mean that change needs to happen.
Emma:It might mean that people feel like they've got to give up power or control. But ultimately I think if what you can do is drive your audiences to your content and to engage with you and to do the thing that you want them to do, kind of doesn't matter whether it's driven by the marketing department or the fundraising department or the digital department, because ultimately, what we should all be pulling towards is the organizational aims and objectives, and these are just sort of prisms to look through those objectives within a structure. They're not the prisms that the audience use to look at how they're going to engage with you. So there's a tension there between the internal structures and the audiences and it's important to kind of be aware of those tensions. And digital, I think, sometimes shines a spotlight on some of those tensions.
Ash:And maybe to finish, you know you've mentioned this idea of evolution, whether that's audience expectations or technology that the work you have done over the past decade and a half is not the same in 2025 as it was in 2010. Now that you have left the organization, what are you intrigued, worried about, in terms of those shifts, in terms of audience expectations, technology, funding, distribution patterns, whatever it might be, looking forward at the next I don't know three, five years? Where do you think the big shifts might come from?
Emma:massive question there, so I'll try to answer it succinctly. I think yes, yes, audience behavior has changed, but I think what that presents, particularly when you look at it through a digital lens, is a real opportunity, because there's now more ways to engage with audiences than there ever has been before. So, yes, it's about prioritization, and arts organizations aren't going to be able to do everything all at once, like let's not jump to the top of the mountain. Let's take that first step, able to do everything all at once, like let's not jump to the top of the mountain, let's take that first step, thinking about who your audience is, knowing your audience. And the catchphrase used to be content is king, content is not king, audiences are king. And what we as arts organizations need to be able to do is know who our audiences are and know where they are and how to find them. And I think that's what's different now is that sort of need to be able to discover your audiences and to engage with them where they are. Then you're able to kind of drive them back or engage with them back on your own platforms or in your own way. I think there's quite an interesting thing from a sort of content distribution perspective. There's two perspectives here. One is the sort of aggregation of content.
Emma:There's quite a lot of talk about this within the TV sector, and Channel 4 are doing this really well, putting full-length programming onto YouTube. And again, they iterated, they tested and learned. They did it with some sort of low-profile content, but what they've done is built a really strong YouTube following. Now the challenge there is first-party data. They only get the information that YouTube will provide to them. Are they again cannibalization? Are they moving people off of all four onto YouTube? What they're actually doing and saying is well, no, that's where the audience is. So we're meeting the audience where they are. If, as a result of that, we're then able to bounce them back over to our own channels, that's a great thing. But ultimately they're experiencing our content, and that's the main thing. It kind of doesn't matter what platform they're experiencing on, as long as they're getting access to the content. So I think that's an interesting thing there about how we engage audiences and not just if you build it, they will come perspective, but really thinking about where they are and how you get to them. I think that also then lowers the risk, the barriers to entry and the cost, because you're working on a platform that's already there rather than trying to build something yourself, I think and I'm not an expert in this area but AI is hugely going to disrupt things.
Emma:But I think what there's an opportunity for the arts to do particularly is to look at ways in which they can use AI, or automation, that's another way to put it. How do you look at your business systems and your processes and your operations and try to automate it? What can technology do to speed things up and to reduce the human labor necessary to do things? Because ultimately, for the arts, capacity is always going to be a challenge. So the more you're able to kind of free your human capacity and your people to do the things that really matter and that things only people can do, I think is going to be really important. But that means there is an opportunity for technology to support that and for the arts to engage with that in a meaningful way. And I think the funding landscape continues to be challenging.
Emma:I think that's another thing from a digital perspective and, again, a real privilege I feel like I was afforded at the National Theatre was when we launched both NT Live, nt at Home, well, actually and NT Collection. I wasn't required to make money straight away. There was always an ambition that they would generate revenue. There was an ambition with NT Live that it would wash its face, it would cover its costs. It was never anticipated that it would be a commercial offering NT at Home. When we first launched, we gave it away for free. We weren't making any money and we weren't paying anybody any money and what we were able to do was build a commercial streaming platform that makes money. Now that is unheard of within the streaming platform world that within two or three years of launch or even within a year of launch, you're generating profit and surplus. The great thing about it being part of the National Theatre is a big chunk of that goes back to the artists who are making the work, work back into the sector, back into the industry. So I think that's the challenge with digital is finding that investment pot at the top, finding the funds, the trust, the foundations, the corporate partners, the individuals, the state funders that will go on that journey with you and take that risk with you.
Emma:The thing I would say again about the projects we've done at the National Theatre is they have all been sponsored in some way, shape or form in terms of NT Live is sponsored by Sky Arts in the UK. Bloomberg Philanthropies came onto NT at Home right at the very early days of it and the collection has trusts and foundations attached to it. So we've always had to work in a kind of mixed funding model, and that's what I think is also really important from a digital perspective is it's very hard to say, right, we're going to give you this seed funding to do this project, but you've got to make it make money in six months, 12 months time. You've got to think about the funding ecology. And again back to what we talked about a little bit earlier that muscle that the organization builds, that halo effect the organization builds of being able to say you're reaching more countries, you're reaching more people, you're building your brand.
Emma:I would contend that at times the national has been able to leverage different partnerships that have had nothing to do with the digital projects, because of the digital project and the brand association and the profile and the recognition that has come from us playing above and beyond the sort of scale of the organization in itself. So it's a different way of thinking sometimes, but I think having that sort of broader mixed funding model is really important for digital and where you can, trying to ease the commercial imperatives, because I think that's the other thing around. Experimentation is it's much harder when there's genuine financial risk associated. And so, again, that startup model. It's quite a nice way to wrap up that startup model that I talked about as well.
Emma:We always had the cushion and the safety net that we were part of the national theatre and we were part of an organization that had much bigger financial resources. So I appreciate I talk from a very privileged position on this, but I just think there's huge opportunities ahead and it would be completely wrong if in 10 years time, things look the same as they do now. That's the great opportunity about digital. That's why I love it, because it does allow people to connect, it does allow people to build community, it allows people to have experiences they wouldn't otherwise be able to have. But it is constantly changing, it is constantly evolving and there is always something new to try and do, and that is exciting.
Ash:And that, Emma, is a brilliant note to end on. Thank you so much for giving up so much of your morning today. I mean, it's been an absolutely fascinating conversation. I could have carried on chatting with you for hours.
Emma:Thank you so much, ash. A real privilege to speak to you as well, so thank you.
Ash:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on the digital dot works, and if your organization needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at ashmanco. That's man with two n's. See you next time.
