Notes from the Digital First? conference

Today I went to Digital First? the Arts Marketing Association’s conference on marketing, culture, audiences and digital. Here are some notes from the keynote sessions, plus some thoughts…

AMA - Digital First - Peter Bazalgette

Sir Peter Bazalgette, Arts Council England

Three key aspects to his talk:

1. Production
The creative stuff – not the subject of this talk, although he named a few organisations who are doing good with work with digital creativity (including Blast Theory). He also gave a nod to the UK games industry.

2. Distribution
Importance of on-demand video.
The Space had 1.5m million visits, with 43% of visitors coming from overseas.
Working with further aggregators of content – announcements coming soon.
ACE will put seedcorn investment into a multichannel network on YouTube.
Also planning workshops and talks with Google via Creative England and Culture24.

3. Sales/marketing/fundraising
Data is important.
Referenced the Digital Landscape Survey and Audience Finder.
Data should be considered an asset, not a tool for accountability.
Knowledge and skills are required at a more senior level in arts organisations.
There should be greater collaboration and sharing of data. Especially as regards touring organisations.
In the next investment round, NPOs will be told they must share audience data with touring companies.
Also mentioned creating a centralised database of audience details. To be contributed to by public and private organisations.

Jon Drori CBE, Thoughtsmith

Some of the mistakes he’s come across:

  • Confusing project management and editorial leadership. Need people who’ll see a project to completion, but also need people who are able to pull the plug if needed.
  • Short term planning of digital assets – things can have a longer life.
  • Piloting the wrong things. Often forget to pilot whether something is replicable, scalable and sustainable.
  • Not involving technologists from the start.
  • Forced partnerships.
  • Partners wanting the same outcomes – better to split between reach, reputation and revenue.
  • Measuring the wrong things.
  • Having the wrong mindset.

Abhay Adhikary, British Council and Kajsa Hartig, Nordiska museet

The size of your organisation, community and ego doesn’t matter when it comes to online engagement.
Need to be clear about the interaction you want to have with people – let them understand how they can be involved.
Full house at buzzword bingo.
The ‘digital navigator’ is someone who acts as a bridge across the organisation.
Abhay Adhikary’s Prezi presentation.
Kajsa Hartig’s slides.

A few thoughts

There were some interesting things in Sir Peter Bazalgette’s talk. I’d like to see the detail of the YouTube thing – any link with the YouTube Space in London? Also, I’m also not sure what the plan is with this, The Space and the pop-up BBC arts channel(s) on the iPlayer that Tony Hall recently talked about.

My gripe would be that it’s all very TV-heavy. What about artforms that don’t lend themselves to the TV treatment so well? Maybe the plan is just to double down on a format that works.

I’m really not keen on this idea for a database of audience data/contact details. Maybe I totally misunderstood what was being proposed but, if it’s what it sounded like, it sounds like a logistical nightmare.

Is it going to apply to existing email lists? Will NPO’s be forced to participate? What details will be stored? If my details get in there, will I be told who else gets hold of them? Who’s going to pay for this? Am I going to be emailed by touring organisations and the venues they’re touring to next time they come round? Has anyone mentioned this to someone who knows anything about data protection?

More widely, regarding the theme of the day, I’m not sure I learned much about what it takes to be a digital organisation (although, hands-up, I didn’t go to all the sessions I could’ve – the perils of the office being so close by). All the speakers seemed to be from organisations where digital activity is part of what they do, rather than being all that integral – turn off the electricity and the odd project might come to an end but the organisations would endure.

I didn’t get the sense from anyone that they were on a path to a point where they could pack up the ‘real world’ stuff and continue online/digitally. Maybe I’m taking it all too literally and it’s not about throwing all your eggs into a digital basket. It might just be because of what I was thinking in the recent post ‘What should an arts organisation’s website do?‘. In fact, the more I think of it, that sort of organisational change stuff probably wouldn’t be hugely relevant for a marketing-focussed conference where most of the attendees are at the junior end of the scale. It’d be interesting though.

What should an arts organisation’s website do?

Ash Mann has written a post called ‘Digital’ in the arts where he gets a few things off his chest with regard to arts organisations’ digital activity in general and their websites in particular.

I thought this was well observed:

Everyone sort of grudgingly accepts that ‘digital’ is something you need to at least pretend to be doing but the situation hasn’t quite reached the point where reality has caught up, we can still kid ourselves that having a website and ‘doing Twitter and Facebook’ is enough.

Uh huh. There’s also the best description of the ubiquitous ‘Support Us’ section I’ve seen to date (not that I agree 100% with it):

a load of tedious information that serves no purpose than to be some sort of odd, permanent funding application

The bulk of the post is about approaches taken to websites. I have to tiptoe a bit here because Ash names a couple of Made Media‘s clients and I have confidentiality agreements to abide by. Still, there’s a whole train of thought set up by this:

What should the website of an arts organisation do? What should it look like? What function should it serve?

You should read the whole post. It doesn’t pretend to offer solutions but it’s one of the better (and impassioned) ‘something must be done’ posts I’ve seen lately.

For my own part, I’m not going to offer any solutions here. I recognise what Ash is talking about, strongly agree with many things and mildly disagree with others. What I’d like to do is pick out a couple of things and layer some further thoughts on top.

Suppose that the website is intended to support the organisation’s offline activities

Firstly, I’d argue that a lot of arts organisations are fairly well-represented by their websites. The sites support messy, real-world organisations that are the result of vision and compromise while constantly being pulled in 101 directions (with the resources to satisfactorily serve about a quarter of those).

They don’t have the luxury of presenting a very clear offer and have to present as much as they can coherently. Part of that involves taking input from people who are very skilled in their areas of expertise but often not so much when it comes to what can be done online.

When Ash complains that:

There is no desire for – say – the programming or education teams to embrace the possibilities of digital and use that to represent their activities online in any meaningful way

I totally see where he’s coming from, although it might not really be a lack of desire. Who knows? Maybe it is. Thing is, organisations tend to be built for the the creative stuff to happen in the studios, rehearsal rooms and on the stages. Not online. As Ash’s points out, there’s a lack of digital capacity. But then it goes both ways – I know my digital stuff pretty well, I’d be lost trying to run a workshop for schoolkids.

I also think there’s nothing much wrong with trying to reduce a website’s purpose down to ‘selling some products’. I’m full of admiration for the people who are able to take a website design project by the scruff of the neck, deal with internal pressures and avoid design by committee by saying ‘Above everything, our website needs to sell tickets’.

I think there’s an element of comparative advantage that applies here. Of all the functions that an arts organisation’s website could fulfil (and you’ll have to excuse me if my thinking skews towards venues – they account for the majority of my clients), selling tickets is something that can be done vastly better online.

Why not put as much of your budget into doing that one thing excellently (giving a nod to other departments, of course) to increase income and cut operational costs. The resulting (hopefully higher) income can then go into further website enhancements – either to bring in further income or fleshing out the departments that had been deprioritised on the website first time round. Or the money can just be used for supporting the organisation’s core activities.

It’s not the only approach, but when funding is being cut you can see how it might be a compelling one. Related: I’ve argued for digital capital funding before.

Of course, Ash’s point that all this could always be done with more flair and imagination (while preserving usability) still stands.

Suppose that the website is intended to support the organisation’s overall mission

Of course, this applies to the extent that a website is subservient to the offline activities of the organisation. When the whole ‘digital’ thing kicked off it made absolute sense for things to be that way round, and it’ll remain a very important part of what an organisation’s website will do (especially for a venue).

However, I think what Ash is hinting at in places is the potential for an organisation’s digital presence to eclipse the organisation’s ‘traditional’ reach, or achieve the organisation’s overall mission in very different ways.

I think things will evolve that way. That’s something that we’re just starting to see (to greater and lesser extents) from the larger incumbents, with things like BFI Player, NT Live, Walker Art Center, Curzon Home Cinema, The Berliner Philharmoniker’s Digital Concert Hall, Be A Playwright and the like.

Here’s an article that just cropped up in my feed – MoMA Seeks an Audience Beyond Its Walls. Ignore the project itself – it’s the sentiment and overall context that’s starting to prevail. There’s more and more of this stuff about.

The question is how you get to the point where you can dedicate resources to this kind of project. I suspect the majority of organisations are faced with a classic case of The Innovator’s Dilemma:

First published in 1997, Christensen suggests that successful companies can put too much emphasis on customers’ current needs, and fail to adopt new technology or business models that will meet customers’ unstated or future needs; he argues that such companies will eventually fall behind.

Not tackling this is what Ash calls this ‘storing up a whole world of woe for the medium term’. Tied into that is the idea that feisty upstarts who do have their heads wrapped around what can be achieved online will supplant some (or some of the roles of) existing organisations.

Like I say, I’m not offering solutions here (that’s the day job) but it’s a good conversation to have.

Digital trends in the arts: suggestions wanted

This weekend I’m giving a talk called ‘Digital trends the arts can’t afford to ignore‘. I’ve been given half an hour and the audience will be people who work in marketing and PR at large theatres across Europe.

I’ve been asked to give my perspective on wider digital trends, seeing as how I’m someone who works predominantly with arts organisations but with a vantage point from just outside the cultural sector. I’ve also been asked to pose some provocative questions about how organisations use or misuse digital, with examples if at all possible (not that I generally need much encouragement to do that).

Unless something comes along between now and then that totally derails my train of thought, here’s what I’m planning to talk about:

  • Innovation v competency
  • Increasingly digital mindsets and toolkits
  • The new competition
  • Pure play digital expansion

Apologies if those titles are a little vague. I’m hoping to be able to post the talk here afterwards, so all should become clearer.

However, I thought it’d be interesting to throw the question out there and see what others think are the trends that can’t be ignored (seeking wider input in a thing’s development via crowdsourcing, maybe?).

It might be a little late to totally rejig my talk but if I get enough good suggestions then there might be time to add some comments and tweets into my presentation as part of a quick-fire round (with credit duly given, of course). Either way I’d be fascinated to see what sort of things, big or small, people are keeping an eye on. So here you go…

What digital trends do you think the arts can’t afford to ignore?

Thoughts in the comments or tweet in my direction @chrisunitt.