We’re growing rapidly at Storythings right now, and will soon be announcing some exciting news about a new partnership, and what this will mean for the work we do. At the moment we’re working on two production projects – one for a major global charity, and one for an equally famous fashion brand – and also doing some really interesting development work for two UK broadcasters.
We’ll publish some more info on these projects as they emerge, but we can say that we’re working with a roster of awesome talent on these projects. The Storythings core team now includes Kim Plowright and Andrew Birley, and on these projects we’re working with Dan Catt, Chris Thorpe, Hugh Garry, Layla West, Pete Fairhurst, Natalia Buckley, Adrian Bigland and Dean Vipond. It’s fantastic having so many incredible creative brains around the office.
Secondly, our annual event – The Story – will be happening next year on Friday, February 22nd 2013, at The Conway Hall, London. As usual, it will be an eclectic and inspiring collection of artists, scientists, directors, writers and others talking about their work and what inspires them. We’ll be announcing the speakers over the next few weeks – the first speakers are economist Diane Coyle, co-founder of B3ta.comRob Manuel, and theatre director Alecky Blythe. Tickets for The Story 2013 go on sale on Monday, 1st October at noon. Be quick – the first batch went in under 5mins last year…
Finally, Storythings is very proud to announce its first publication – an art book edition of Vacuum Days, an online project by Tim Etchells, the renowned artist, writer and theatre director who spoke at the very first The Story in 2010. That year, we published a newspaper that Tim contributed to, creating imaginary posters for bizarre events/performances. He developed the format in Vacuum Days – a year-long online text-based project which ran live from 1 January till 31 December 2011.
Comprising a series of one-per-day posters reminiscent of live show lineup announcements, Vacuum Days proposed a rolling daily programme of imaginary events that responded to, reworked and distorted real-life events. Inhabiting and extending the zone of sensationalist media, news as pornography, hyped up current affairs, Internet spam, twitter-gossip and tabloid headlines, the project mixed reality, political and theatrical spectacle and in a stark combination of overzealous capitals and small-print conjured a set of unlikely, absurd and uncomfortable performances, lectures, contests, fights, film screenings and other kinds of public display.
We’re very pleased that the book version of Vacuum Days will be published by Storythings, on 5th November 2012. Buying a ticket for The Story on Eventbrite will give you the opportunity to get a copy at a special pre-launch price of £15, plus P&P (although you can choose to pick it up in person at The Story in February, and avoid paying any P&P at all!). One final note – as a comical and bitterly mischievous parody of sometimes shocking news events, Vacuum Days is only suitable for mature readers, and should not be purchased by the easily-offended. Any of you who saw Tim perform his monologue Star-Fucker at The Story in 2010 will know the power of his writing already.
Sometimes, the most important sign that an industry is being disrupted is that no-one can agree on exactly what is changing, where things are going next, or in fact whether anything is changing at all. Like the music and publishing industries before them, the TV industry is currently working itself up into a storm of comment, analysis and denial about how the internet is changing its industry. Unlike music and publishing, TV has been experimenting with digital strategies for over a decade, but its only recently that mainstream audiences have started to change their behaviours at scale.
There are so many ways that disruption could play out in the TV market that its foolhardy to make predictions. There could be an orderly transition as broadcasters move the bulk of their commercial income from display ads measured by BARB/Nielsen to digital metrics measured by authentication. We could see a shift to new gatekeepers if Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook ever manage to transfer their huge networks of authenticated users into the living room. Or we could see a crazy hotch-potch of services delivering genre-specific services, like MLB.tv or Youtube’s new Original Content Channels.
The drivers behind any disruption over the next five years are very complex – from emerging patterns of user behaviour to product/device innovation, the growth of talent as networks and the unpacking of existing rights models. So rather than make any predictions, here’s three things that are pointers for the ways things are going. They aren’t the destinations, but they’re worth pointing out on the journey.
Josh Sapan’s Keynote at MIPTV
Thanks to Jody Smith from Channel 4 for pointing this out to me – an excellent keynote from Josh Sapan , President and CEO of AMC, on how they see this emerging landscape. There’s lots of great stuff in here, from a recognition of emerging ‘binge-watching’ patterns around drama, to the shift from ‘appointment TV’ (driven by scheduling) to ‘connection TV’ (driven by fans desire to watch the shows they love when *they* want to) and the role of Netflix in driving interest in new seasons by letting people binge-watch past episodes. Well worth 30 minutes of your time:
Sky Now launches in the UK
The UK payTV market is very different from the US, where the success of a range of cable and satellite companies created competition that Sky has never really faced over here. In the States, all the talk is of ‘cable cutting’, and users moving to streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Sky’s announcement of Sky Now is a remarkable pre-emptive strike against Netflix and LoveFilm in the UK, which have barely even got started over here.
They don’t face anything like the competition that the cable/satellite companies have in the US, and have a near-monopoly of premium TV, Sports and Film content, yet they’re voluntarily undercutting their premium satellite service by offering an online pay-as-you-go deal for non-subscribers. This seems like a brave move, but if you see the coming battle as a fight for customer acquisition and retention, then the opportunity cost of a non-Sky subscriber building a relationship with Netflix or LoveFilm is much greater than any potential loss by undercutting your own products. And once they’re in the family, its easier to scale users up to other products, such as broadband, phone and finally the full triple-play package. This is a very, very smart move from Sky.
Kickstarter launches in the UK
This is my favourite chart at the moment (and yes, I do have favourite charts):
The chart shows the effect that the game project Double Fine Adventure had when it raised over $3.3m on Kickstarter.The green line shows the point when Double Fine ended, and the bars show the number of other video game projects *not including Double Fine* that were supported on Kickstarter. In other words, this chart shows around 67,000 new people coming to Kickstarter, learning how to support a video game project, and then deciding to support other projects. Once they’d learnt the behaviour and created an account, it was easier for them to support other projects, and the huge bars on the right are a sign that they did this in large numbers.
This is important for two reasons. First, it’s an illustration that behaviours are one of the most important things to track in this fast-changing environment. If you don’t look for new things your audience are learning to do – like contributing to hashtag memes on Twitter, joining campaigns on Facebook, playing online games synced to live broadcasts, or funding projects they love on Kickstarter – then you won’t be able to see how this affects their ‘traditional’ relationship with your tv programme/film/book. Until someone else comes along with a product that ties these new behaviours to your content, and suddenly you’re out of the loop (as the Kindle did for publishers).
Secondly, Kickstarter is a really fascinating experiment in defraying risk in cultural production. When people are in denial that their industry is being disrupted, they usually go through a series of reasons why their position in the production/distribution of culture cannot be challenged. It normally starts with scale (“We’re the big company in this industry – these upstarts are *tiny*”) and when that isn’t true, it moves to a dogged belief that audiences never change their behaviours (“People are happy with how they currently buy records/read books/watch TV – only a minority will change”). Finally, the last position of denial is that making content is so expensive and specialist a task, and so risky, that only huge companies can make it financially viable.
It’s this last problem that Kickstarter solves so effectively. When you have to make something and put it out there before you know if its a hit, then this it’s true – only a big studio or TV network can possibly be in the game. But when you can put an idea out there, and get audiences to give you a firm commitment to buy (and the start of a relationship that you can use again in the future) then the amount of risk involved is trivial. More than anything, Kickstarter is disruptive because it radically shifts the risk of making and distributing culture, and very few networks or publishers have come up with a response to that yet. If I was at a company like Sky, or Channel 4, or even the BFI, who have recently taken on the task of investing in UK film that the Film Council used to own, then I’d be looking at creating a ‘follow-on’ fund for Kickstarter projects, and using that platform to take out some of the risk of investing in new talent. Sundance are already doing it, and I can see more and more companies using Kickstarter or similar tools to defray risk in the future. Of the three things here, I think this is the one that could potentially have the most disruptive effect in the next 10 years.
Netflix have just released their most recent shareholder report, and in amongst the good news on international growth and conversion from DVD to streaming customers, there’s a very interesting section on their approach to original programming.
Another way to think of originals is vertical integration; can we remove enough inefficiency from the show launch process that we can acquire content more cheaply through licensing shows directly rather than going through distributors who have already launched a show? Our on-demand and personalized platform means that we don’t have to assemble a mass audience at say, 8pm on Sunday, to watch the first episode. Instead, we can give producers the opportunity to deliver us great serialized shows and we can cost-efficiently build demand over time, with members discovering these new franchises much in the same way they’ve discovered and come to love shows like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”
The highlighted section is most interesting – Netflix are plainly stating the difference between themselves and traditional broadcasters. Because they aren’t reliant on spot advertising, they don’t have to worry about delivering a live, synchronous attention pattern around their shows. Their subscription model means that long-term engagement is more important to them than overnights; data is more important than ratings. Over the last few years timeshifting attention has become increasingly common for certain kinds of genres, particularly comedy and drama. This is a real problem for broadcasters reliant on ad breaks for their income, which is why ‘live’ event formats are becoming increasingly important to schedulers, and are moving on from reality/entertainment/sport to new genres like specialist factual (the BBC announced Planet Earth Live only this week).
If Netflix and other VOD platforms can follow HBO and build strong brands for drama and other high-value content that is not reliant on a strict schedule, where will that leave the traditional broadcasters? Will the live event pattern be the only way they can guarantee an audience for their advertisers? Or is their future to join Netflix et al in building more income from direct subscriptions, and become less reliant on 30sec spot ads? That would be a long and painful pivot for pretty much all commercial broadcasters, as their income from online platforms is generally less than 10% of total income.
As new attention patterns develop and mature in audiences, we’ll see more and more examples of companies making major content investments based on these new patterns. Netflix’s original investment is one, Youtube’s Original Channels is another. Expect this to be a major growth area over the next 5 years.
Storythings started as a company on March 18th 2011, so we’re just over a year old.
Its been a fascinating year, working with some brilliant people and clients, and developing from a bunch of ideas and contacts into a real pipeline of work and a clear sense of what the company does, and how it can grow. Talking to friends who have started companies, the constant piece of advice was to find the work you want to do, and build your company around that, rather than the other way round. Its good advice – companies are rarely forged in a single strike, but instead accrue like coral, taking shape with every decision, conversation and piece of work they put into the world.
One of the things that has refined a lot over the year is the one line pitch about what Storythings does. Our work this year has been about 50% strategy and R&D projects, and 50% making stuff (like Pepys Rd for Faber & Faber – go and play it now if you haven’t had a chance yet). This balance is important – in an age of agile and iterative culture, the lines between research, strategy and product are blurry and often irrelevant.
What unites everything is an interest in Digital Attention – the way that digital networks change the way people find, share and engage with culture. We’ve been interested in attention and culture for a long time, but this year has focused our thinking away from the debate about digital cultural products – ebooks, online video, apps, games, etc – onto digital attention – the patterns and behaviours that we use to find and share culture.
Over the last five years, digital networks have become the default way of finding cultural products for nearly all culture industries, regardless of whether the product itself is digital or not. Even if the end result is not digital, a digital network will have been involved at some point in the discovery, research, sharing, buying or remembering of that cultural experience.
Most media and culture businesses have waited until the format of their industry turns digital, but really, this is far too late. Way before then, people will have been using digital networks to find and share information about what you make. The cultural object itself is often the very last thing to turn digital.
At Storythings, we’re helping clients understand recognise these new patterns. We can already see reasonably mature patterns of digital attention in most cultural sectors, and help companies think about what this means for their cultural products and business models. We can also develop new products that take advantage of these patterns, or that encourage new patterns of digital attention to achieve specific goals.
This is a more sustainable long-term strategy than focusing on specific platforms. Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest may or may not exist in the same way in five years time, but the patterns of digital attention that your audiences are using now will have become deeply engrained habits, regardless of whatever platforms happen to be popular. Understanding these patterns and designing for them is what Storythings is passionate about, and what we’re focusing on as we enter our second year.
We’re developing a fantastic roster of clients and work – if you’d like to talk to us about working with you, please get in touch. Its going to be a very exciting second year, and it would be great to find some new clients who are as curious about digital attention as we are.
The fourth Storythings Podcast features Tom Watson MP and Emily Bell, Professor of Journalism and Director of the Tow Center at Columbia University, New York. Tom Watson has been a key figure in the Hackgate scandal, and interviewed James and Rupert Murdoch as a member of the Commons Select Committe on Culture and Media. Before moving to Columbia University, Emily Bell was Head of Digital at The Guardian, where she covered the emerging Hackgate story as it happened. In this frank and candid discussion, Watson and Bell talk about their personal experience of the scandal and what it means for Politics and Journalism in the UK. Recorded at The Story conference on Friday, February 17th, 2012.
Tom Watson’s book about his experiences of the Hackgate scandal – Dial M for Murdoch
- is available to buy from April 19th.
If you want to hear about other Storythings Podcasts, events, or The Story conference, you can sign up to our newsletter here.
Play the Podcast (25.07)
Download the podcast here. Subscribe via itunes here.
We’ve just launched Pepys Road, the first live project from Storythings. Its an online story to support the brilliant Capital, by John Lanchester, an epic tale of post-crash London recently published by Faber & Faber. Storythings was asked to come up with a way of keeping a conversation going around the book after the initial burst of attention from the traditional book launch. As we’re fascinated by attention patterns and how they’re changing, it was a great brief for our first project.
First of all – a huge thanks to the team who did such a brilliant job of bring the project to life. Thanks to James Bridle for co-developing the idea from the very first meeting, and for building some lovely data illustrations. Thanks to Chris Thorpe and Phil Gyford for their epic coding skills and for gluing it all together. Dean Vipond did a great job of making it look elegant and beautiful, and Kim Plowright is the best cat-herder I’ve ever met, and made sure we actually launched something.
Pepys Rd tells the story of the next ten years – the so-called Lost Decade – a period of uncertainty, economic crisis and public sector cuts. Over 10 days, we send 10 emails asking questions about your attitudes to things like health policy, immigration, travel and culture, and send you to 10 new mini-stories written by John Lanchester, one for every year of the coming decade. Along the way, data illustrations by James Bridle position you within the flows of live data that increasingly organise our lives.
During the development, there were a number of ideas that shaped the project:
Reading The first and most important goal in Pepys Road is that we wanted people to read. This might seem obvious for a book project, but it’s surprising how many marketing projects try to get your attention with one action or behaviour, when the end goal is completely different. It’s hard enough to get audiences’ attention in the first place, let alone shift them from one behaviour to another. The aim of Pepys Road was to get people reading John Lanchester’s brilliant book, so the behaviour we wanted to base the project around was reading. We wanted to get people to read a lot, and to really feel like they were starting to enter the world of Capital and Pepys Road, so hopefully they’d want to buy the book. Its a simple maxim, but you should always design projects that introduce users to the behaviours you’re looking for at the end. If you’re marketing a game, introduce them to the game mechanics in the marketing. If you’re marketing a film, get them involved in the story and characters. If you’re marketing a book, find a way to get people to read.
Repetition
The second idea we discussed in the project was about repetition. Faber wanted us to create something that would have a long attention span, and get people thinking about the issues in the book. In an age of spiky digital attention, its hard to get audiences’ to return to a project after the initial rush of attention. We wanted to design something with a long attention pattern, based on small, repetitive actions. A huge influence on this was OhLife, one of the few services that has really got under my skin and become a habit in the last year. OhLife is a private diary-writing service that you engage with almost entirely over email. When you set up an account, you choose a time of day to receive the email, and you get a daily message from OhLife asking what you were up to that day. Writing your entry is as simple as replying to the email. Its one of the most satisfying things I do, and the daily repetition of it heavily influenced Pepys Road – we wanted to drop something small in your inbox for a run of 10 days, so that the project would gradually build over time, and perhaps become part of your routine. Its something I’ve explored before on SMS with projects like Surrender Control and IVY4EVR, but I think it works better over email than it does on SMS.
Reflection
The third idea was also triggered by OhLife. One of the loveliest parts of the service is that in each email, they remind you of something you did a week, a month or a year ago. This moment of reflection is a huge spur to writing a diary, and creates a link with the past, asking you to assess how you were feeling, and your progress since then. There are a few services out now that give you little echoes of your online history, including PhotoJoJo’s TimeCapsule, Twitshift and, of course, Facebook’s Timeline redesign. As we develop longer data trails online, more and more services are going to reflect back your past activity. In Pepys Road, we don’t have a long history of your actions, but we’ve created a number of ways to tell mini-stories about your activity, the decisions you make, and the decisions of the crowd reading the same project as you. I think using little data-stories – prompts of narrative about your activity – will be increasingly important in our online social services. The enormity of our data-trails are almost impossible to understand as huge, complex illustrations. Finding small story elements that help us reflect on what we’ve done – little moments of poetry amongst the data – will be a far more effective way of telling the story of our data trails.
Of course, there is a fourth ‘r’ in this list, which is Results – we were commissioned by Faber to actually sell books. This is the hardest goal of all, but hopefully creating an experience that is fundamentally about reading, creates a usage pattern based on repetition, and gets people to reflect on their stories will lead to people wanting to continue their journeys through Pepys Road and buy the book.
In this month’s Wired UK there is a short article by us about TV & Data, building on some of the observations about attention and audiences in articles on this blog. It was good fun to write, and hopefully we’ll have future pieces in Wired UK about changing attention patterns, and how to create culture for audiences in spiky networks. Underneath all the writing is a structure for a book looking at the History of Attention over the last few hundred years, and how the way we measure attention affects the economics, creative and ethical aspects of making content. If anyone can suggest a good publisher/agent, let us know…
Workwise, Storythings has just had sign-off for its first product development project, with Faber & Faber, to deliver an online product around one of their key fiction titles for 2012. The team working on the project with us is very impressive – James Bridle, Chris Thorpe & Kim Plowright – so a lot of the next few months are going to spent with vastly more intelligent people, building what we hope will be a very cool thing indeed.
In other projects, we’re developing more consultancy gigs, including some work for CNN and a big event in Geneva for Procter & Gamble before Christmas. For the Procter & Gamble event, we’re producing a Newspaper Club newspaper, so that we don’t have to spend the day looking at powerpoint. The event is about storytelling, and its been good fun pulling together resources and case studies for the newspaper, so that it can act as a working document during the event, but also a very valuable resource afterwards. The brilliant Alex Parrot has designed it, and it looks gorgeous, so I’ll post some photos when they’re back from the printers.
Lots of other exciting projects emerging, hopefully to be signed off before Xmas – we’ll be able to talk about them in the next worknote. In the meantime – the last 100 tickets for The Story 2012 go on sale on Monday 5th Dec at noon GMT – get one whilst you still can!
After a brief glut of speaking at events in early October, we’re focusing back on projects for current and new clients. Storythings has just signed up some new clients for short pieces of consultancy, including an event for a major FMCG brand in Geneva, and a London workshop for a global broadcaster. Meanwhile, we’re in early conversations with a major UK broadcaster for a project in 2012 that is, very, very exciting indeed. Getting the balance between short consultancy and bigger ‘making’ projects is important, as you can’t talk about stuff if you’re not doing it as well, but the balance seems to be about right so far.
Storythings is returning to the US in November, first to New York for two days working with a new client on a long-term project, then to Boston to talk at the Futures Of Entertainment conference at MIT, then to Toronto to talk at DocShift. We’re also talking at the Get Together conference, alongside such luminaries as Ben Hammersley from Wired and Tom Uglow from Google Creative Labs. Talking of Wired, we’ve also got an article in the Ideas Bank section of the December Wired UK, about TV and data.
Finally, tickets for The Story in Feb 2012 are selling well. The first two batches of tickets went in 15mins and 5mins, and the current batch of 200 is selling well, so go to our eventbrite site if you want to buy a ticket.
I’m not a big user of Facebook. Not because of its ubiquity, or because of the privacy issues, but because I never really found a way of using it that stuck for me. A few years ago, I was playing around with Nicholas Feltron’s Daytum, and wrote a little piece about why Facebook felt like constantly being in the present, and was unsatisfying as a result. I suggested, slightly flippantly, that nostalgia is a fundamental element of storytelling, and personal data services need to remember that Data+Time=Story. The ever-brilliant Matt Jones included this in a talk he gave about designing with time as a material called ‘We Have All The Time In The World‘.
Two years later, and Nicholas Feltron has joined Facebook, and they’ve launched the Timeline feature, which is a retrospective tool to join together the little vernacular moments in your life into one story. Its the first time I’ve really got excited about Facebook, and wanted to play with a feature on the service, and the first time it feels like Facebook is something you can use to tell a story, not just ping around in a constant now. Of course, its yet another trigger for us all to give Facebook more and more of our data, but this time it feels like there’s something more valuable, more tangible, in return. Facebook always felt like a ‘chugger‘ – stopping you in the street and asking for your personal data with no real sense of reward. Timeline feels like something I’d like to play around with, something that could reward me with the slow pleasure of nostalgia.
The video on the Facebook page introducing Timeline reminds me a lot of the classic scene in Mad Men when Don Draper pitches Kodak a campaign for their new slide projector. Over a series of slides of his family life, he says there are two ways of connecting with people in advertising. One is to be constantly new, to promise the audience that your product is the next thing they can’t live without – to create an itch, and then be the calamine that soothes it. The other is to appeal at a deeper level, to appeal to our nostalgia, which Don describes as “the pain from an old wound; a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone”. He finishes the pitch by saying the new feature of Kodak’s slide projector “is not a wheel, but a carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels, round and round, and back home again, to a place where we know we were loved.”
It strikes me that with Timeline, Facebook just built its first carousel, and moved from creating itches to provoking deeper, more powerful emotions. Its not just data anymore, but stories.
(Worknotes are a bit like weeknotes, but not as regular. We’ll publish them when the stuff we’re doing seems to coalesce into thoughts worth sharing)
The Faber & Faber project is halfway through, with an interim presentation of ideas to the Faber team last thursday. I’ve been working with a glittering array of talent on developing ideas for three Faber fiction titles, and the different ideas we’re coming up with for the titles is very interesting, and very surprising. They range from physical objects (there is a tantalising possibility we might press some records, which would please this vinyl junkie no end), audio environments, iterative content distribution strategies, and things that could almost resemble bits of traditional marketing campaigns, if looked at from the right angle.
The first phase of work with the Cashback team has ended, and we now have a much more detailed plan and strategy for how their campaign will work across different platforms. Working on a project about the financial crisis over the last few months has been fascinating, but a bit frustrating, as the news cycle moves quicker than the funding and production of the film itself. This is one of the issue we’re tackling in the Cashback project – how can documentary film move as quickly as the news cycle, and yet still be a coherent story in itself? Documentary and current affairs are not the same as news – they are slower, more reflective forms of storytelling, so a lot of the discussion has been about how the production team can release content regularly, and in response to breaking stories, whilst still focusing on the final cinema film as well.
Storythings has also recently starting working with the brilliant Pulse Films on a music documentary for TV broadcast and possibly cinema release. The challenge with this project is how to create an event around the broadcast/release of the documentary, and engage the artist’s fan base in the project. This involves two current obsessions that emerge in a lot of Storythings’ projects – new attention patterns around content, and the emergence of ‘talent’ as owners of their own networks. It’ll be good to have a live project to explore some of these ideas further.
One of the great things about working across Film, TV, music, web and publishing is seeing that all media companies are dealing with the same problem – attention. This problem has been coming for ages, as digital technologies have eroded previous production and distribution monopolies across these sectors, but its only been in the last few years that all these sectors have had new behaviours emerging at a large enough scale across their markets to see enough data.
So the most important thing Storythings is doing for its clients at the moment is solving attention problems. None of the problems are unique (there’s too much competition for attention, and the patterns of attention are not as predictable as they once were) but all of the potential solutions are very, very different. The only constant is this – nothing will ever be simple again. There will never be a silver bullet platform or strategy that will return us to the stable media environment of the last 50 years – it will only ever get stranger, richer and more complex than it is now, as the shifting patterns of attention around content, talent, social networks and brands continue to combine and feed off each other.
The projects Storythings are making are attention probes – projects that test ideas we have about how people find, engage with and share content, and then give us the data and feedback we need to better understand these behaviours, and make even better products as a result.
