William Gibson, and the lack of verbs in multimedia production

I am currently making my way through the essays in Distrust That Particular Flavour, the first anthology of William Gibson's non-fiction. The opening piece is the classic 1989 Rolling Stone essay "Rocket Radio". It's rightly famed for the observation that "The Street finds its own uses for things", but I was struck, on re-reading it, by this passage:

A BBC executive working on another vision of "interactive television" offered me a tour of a small research facility in San Francisco. He was interested in having me "do" something with this new technology: The lab we visited was devoted to…. well, there weren't verbs. I looked at things, watched consoles as they were poked and prodded, and nobody there, it seemed, could even begin to explain what it was I might be doing if I were to, uh, do one of these projects, whatever it was. It wasn't writing, and it wasn't directing. It was definitely something, though, and they were certainly keen to do it, but they needed those verbs.

It's over twenty years since Gibson wrote that, and for sure, some kind of consensus around interactive media has surely emerged in the intervening time, but in truth, how much? I'm minded of our Group Think session last year on multiplatform production, and the general feeling around the table that no-one, from commissioners through to producers, really knew what this stuff was all about, that everyone was still making it up as they went along: " …there were no verbs". Indeed, and we couldn't even come to much of an agreement about the nouns.

Serious Monkey Business with MiniMonos

MiniMonos is a virtual world for kids who love to play and love the planet. Originally from New Zealand, MiniMonos (which means little monkeys in Spanish) joined the Springboard accelerator programme and “flipped” to the UK when it became obvious most of their players were from the US and UK. Silicon Valley was always an option of course, especially since one of the founders is American, but the team liked the Springboard offer and picked Blighty. 9 months on and a roller-coaster ride later, do they still think they made the right decision?

My first meeting with the team was last May and only a 20 minute session – 1 of 10 quick fire mentoring sessions I did that day with each of the early stage businesses in the first Springboard in Cambridge – but I liked them immediately. As did many of the other mentors.

Melissa Clark-Reynolds, CEO and “AlphaMonkey”, is a well-known environmentalist and entrepreneur in native New Zealand. MiniMonos has enabled her to combine her experience of scaling startups with her passion for sustainability. CTO Greg Montgomery, aka “Monty”, has spent over 20 years in the software and games industry and “MissDawg”, CMO Kaila Colbin, is a prolific writer, internet veteran and climate change advocate. They were all seasoned entrepreneurs, about my age (that helps!) and convinced me entirely that they knew what they were doing.

Their business was further ahead than the other Springboard teams, so there was less opportunity to help them shape and build their proposition – something many mentors really enjoy - but with a beta launched and over 200,000 registered users, they had “traction”, ie some proof of concept demonstrated by a significant number of regular players and revenue, albeit small. Their need was help growing the user-base and revenue here through strategic partnerships, advertising and promotion as well as practical support getting their business up and running in the UK. All on a miniscule start-up budget.

So how have they done? A speaking slot at The Children’s Media Conference last July led to a major breakthrough: licensing deals with not just one, but two national kids magazines, Toxic and National Geographic Kids. They’ve also run a national advertising campaign on CITV and have MiniMonos gift cards (basically pre-paid membership) on sale in every branch of Sainsbury’s. From almost nowhere, they’re now the 4th most popular kids virtual world after illustrious and long-running competitors Club Penguin, Moshi Monsters and Bin Weevils. As of February 2012, they had 800,000 registered users with approximately 60,000 new sign-ups per month and monthly revenues of $20,000. Far from profitable but more than enough to cover marketing costs as well as funding projects which provide clean drinking water to kids in India and others that protect endangered animals. And with lots more licensing deals (including a trading card game, books, magazines, modeling kits and ethical merchandising) in the pipeline, user numbers and revenue will continue to grow.

Just as important in start-up land, what have they learnt? For one, most of their new users are Brits and they’ve found that the UK “monetizes” better than other markets. 2.5% of users are now spending money in the game compared to 0.57% this time last year. Melissa believes that their competitors have “trained UK players to pay”. But while Club Penguin and Moshi Monsters only charge for membership, effectively capping their average revenue per user (ARPU) at $6/month, MiniMonos has achieved an ARPU of $11/month through a combination of membership and micro-transactions.

They’ve also learnt how to do things cheap. They were able to create a TV advert using internal resources and use it to reach their exact target audience across the whole UK for only a few thousand pounds. Now they have some scale, they can use their muscle to negotiate even better rates.

Last but not least, they’ve found their niche. While Moshi Monsters tilts towards girls, MiniMonos are targeting boys aged 8 and older. They say girls will play boys games, but not vice-versa. There are also many licensees that missed out on a deal with Moshi Monsters and are hungry to work with alternatives.

So now they know how to grow, they need additional finance (or banana-chips!) to help them do it faster. Rupert Cook, corporate finance specialist, joined the company as Chairman and has been helping with fund raising activity. Stay tuned for news on that.

I’ll leave it to Melissa to answer my original question, “The UK has absolutely been the right place for us to get our business to the next level. We now know the product is a good fit for the UK market which tells us it will work well in other territories. Thanks to the great connections we’ve made here, we’re confident we’ll be able to keep progressing really fast and feel ready to take on the world!”

An Unthinkable Manifesto

Well, here we are at the beginning of our third year. It's been a great couple of years for us, but like any new business, we acted with a mixture of instinct and opportunism, hunches, idealism and realism. In the background, though, we've been quietly building an understanding of our shared goals and passions, of our complementary skills and of our strengths and genuine points of uniqueness. An understanding is one thing, of course; an articulation is another. Never afraid of stridency, we've synthesised these goals into an Unthinkable manifesto. So here it is. As ever, all thoughts welcome!

Justin, Matthew, Sarah, Simon

Four Unthinkable Positions

One: It's all about people
Technology doesn’t exist without people. Technology is something that people and organisations make, use, adapt and subvert constantly. Sometimes it breaks.

Two: Better connections, not more
Digital technology, more than anything else, is about connections - between people, things, companies and information. And it is better connections, not more, that can make everything we do fuller, more productive, more enjoyable and more likely to surprise.

Three: Remember your own agency
There is a tremendous pressure to keep up with the next big thing. Simply responding to that pressure means letting technological change happen to you. It’s all too easy to forget that you are making the decisions.

Four: Don't fear complexity
Human life consists of a set of interlocking technological, social, corporate, political and cultural systems of astonishing complexity. If we don't confront that complexity, we will remain its slave (which is never a good thing - unless you’re into that).

How we work
Unthinkable offer deep and careful analysis of the problems we are set by our clients, in the light of these beliefs, and based on decades of collective experience of the digital economy. We know that only by taking human culture, motivation, frailties and processes as seriously as we take technology can we hope to reach fresh insights.

Working with us is sometimes tough, but it's always exhilarating. We bring serious, rigorous, straightforward and cross-disciplinary thinking to our work - and seek to inculcate it in our clients' work, too. We enjoy getting to know our clients, in large and small organisations, as individuals and as businesses. We never want to stop learning. And we never want our clients to stop learning either. We believe that good things happen when smart people listen to each other. Even if we wind you up a lot on the way there.

By working together to understand your needs, and those of your customers, we can help you define what you need to do and we can help you do it: quickly, cost-effectively and with less pain than on your own.

What we do
We help you take better informed risks that will set you apart from the competition. We help you form stronger digital processes that suit your organisation. We help you find the right agency, the right funding opportunity and the right audience. But we are also honest about what we don’t know and can’t do, and can make an introduction to people who do and can from our networks of contacts across the worlds of media, culture and technology. We like making these connections.

These beliefs and these opportunities are what get us out of bed in the morning. That and the kids and the alarm clock.

The ongoing development of our Creating Great Digital Experiences course

Regular readers will know that Justin and I have been delivering the bespoke, UC-developed course “Creating Great Digital Experiences” all around the country on behalf of the BBC Academy – principally their College of Production.

We’re about six months in, and last week I was back at Broadcasting House in Bristol, working with the production team behind the daytime hit that is Bargain Hunt.

It’s interesting how the course has shaped up and, indeed, shape-shifted over the last half year. Anyone who’s been in one of our sessions will know that there’s always a spirit of improvisation in our workshops. But in many ways, the presentation Justin put together with the Academy has become little more than a framework for a highly interactive three to four hour session (five hours in Evesham – that nearly killed me).

For various practical reasons I’ve pretty much lost the online demos. Instead, the session is a series of discussions and group exercises that run broadly thus:

Audience understanding
- Develop one, or, time depending, a series of user personas, either a core audience member or someone you’re “after”
- What do they want from your brand/show/talent?
- How are you not serving them?

Idea generation
- Think about your programme assets and attributes or themes
- Quickly brainstorm a bunch of ideas bringing together these assets and themes with your persona's personal interests and motivations. Don’t worry that most of these ideas suck! We’re going to improve them.

Idea development
- Throw out the especially bad ideas!  Get down to one or two.
- Now start thinking about them through two “lenses”: scale or ambition; usefulness vs. delight.
- You should have four versions of each idea now: useful and ambitious, useful and ‘modest’; delightful and modest (much like myself), delightful and ambitious.

Platform Choice
- Back to your user(s); think about their tech usage, think about their “situation”.
- Now start to think about what digital platforms would work best for the ideas you’ve developed.

Now you’ll note that only towards the end of the session do we much consider digital technology at all (although we will have considered the user’s tech use in building a persona of course). This is no accident – nor is it that we open the session by holding up the Spring Watch postcard as a great example of interactivity. These sessions were originally commissioned as multi-platform training. But we firmly believe that, when it comes to creating great ideas, technology – and specifically platform choice – should follow audience and user understanding.

If the exercises outlined above sound woolly I should emphasise that we’ve got tightly structured templates for them, and will happily share them if you get in touch. As for the team in Bristol? Well, they sure were young! Seriously, many were on their first or second full time job in TV. Whether we developed any ideas for Bargain Hunt in the session remains to be seen, but in any case I hope that some of the attendees take away a way of thinking, and some actual mechanisms for doing so, which will help them in their developing career.

Another GA event in London: London Founder Exchange 2

Hot on the heels of last week's General Assembly event looking at start-up culture and techniques, Sarah and I popped into another GA event yesterday evening. Held at Dreamstake's excellent space in Clerkenwell, and again chaired by the highly energetic and ferociously smart Rob Fitzpatrick, London Founder Exchange 2 featured six brief presentations from founders of UK start-ups, a bit of a Q&A and a lot of networking over wine and beer. The talkers included Ed Cooke of Memrise, Will Orr-Ewing of Keystone Tutors, Roly Allen of Lyceum Partners, Alex O'Byrne of We Make Websites, Rob Welch of Small Car Big City and Fletcher Bowley of FoodieKiwi.

The business sectors discussed were highly diverse, from language learning to minicab hire, but I was struck by two overarching observations. Firstly, every speaker was highly articulate - and funny. I realise this shouldn't come as a surprise, but I think this is a relatively new thing for Brits. I've spent over two decades at conferences generally marvelling at what great communicators Americans are and slightly disappointed at my compatriots. I think the new generation of British entrepreneurs has definitely turned that around. And alongside that what really got to me was everyone's infectious enthusiasm and pretty boundless optimism, even when talking about serial failures on the way to eventual success.

I took some pretty rough notes during the evening, and thought I might share some choice quotes from the session. So, in no particular order, and strictly unattributed (and in at at least one case, a little at odds with each other):

"going from one failure to the next with the same level of enthusiasm"

"the only metric is retention"

"have a simple story"

"marketing is everything"

"tolerate mistakes"

"don't just work: go for a run, learn a language and play the guitar more" (That was my favourite, of course, and rather reflects my current obsession with Timothy Ferriss' 4 Hour Work Week.) 

"deep down people prefer to do things they're not paid for"

"what's the most fun you can have without having a proper job?"

"the camaraderie of a partner is seductive"

"you have a huge network at your disposal"

"don't listen to someone who says it can't be done"

"your business plan will change the minute you go into business"

"making peace with your business model"

"opening an office in Paris, by the way, is impossible"

"the most important thing about business is being honest with yourself"

"prove it works in your domestic markets"