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.

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.

Our inaugural Group Think on multiplatform

Yesterday, in the leather-lined splendour of the Aston Webb room at RIBA in London we held the first in a series of events we're calling "Group Think". As part of our client work we run a huge number of workshops and seminars and we've been thinking for some time about hosting some of our own. So this was the first in an ongoing series and we decided to look at "The Business of Multiplatform".

We brought together about twenty practitioners and business people from a wide variety of disciplines and sectors, very much reflecting the kinds of people we work with between the four of us: TV, Radio, games development, software engineering, the arts, advertising and the charity sector. We set out to address three overarching themes or questions:

• How can we better serve our audiences with multiplatform?
• How do our businesses need to change to accommodate multiplatform production?
• What are the kinds of ROI we can expect from multiplatform?

We'd rather hoped that these questions would be no more than a framing device for an open conversation, and as it turned out our expectations were hugely exceeded: the afternoon was, from the get go, full on and raucous - and at times pretty disputatious. The session certainly bore out our belief that this is a highly contentious area.

Over the next few weeks we'll report back specific thoughts and themes from the day, but in the meantime I'd like to thank everyone who could make it along and give special thanks to our two guest speakers: Kaila Colbin, who talked us through the eco-centred kids' virtual world MiniMonos, and Amy Taylor from ad agency AMV BBDO, who demonstrated the multiplatform campaigns the agency had delivered for two very different clients: the Metropolitan Police and Aviva.