Andrew Caspari Transcript
Andrew Caspari Transcript
Bill Thompson, chair:
I am very pleased now to welcome Andrew Caspari who glories in the title of ‘Head
of Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive BBC’, and is known to me
because many years ago he was Commissioning Editor for English and actually
commissioned the World Service programmes on which I did such ‘dirty radio’, so
we have a history - we have forgiven each other - and now he is here to talk to us
about A History of the World in One Hundred Objects, the ground breaking project
collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum.
Andrew:
Thank you. Yes – they do have a saying in the BBC that the longer your job title
gets, the nearer you get to the exit door. But let’s hope that that’s not true, at least
for now. What I thought I would try to do is talk about A History of the World in
One Hundred Objects but try and set it in the context of how that might work in the
digital space as we see it and what lessons we could learn for arts organisations
going forward. I could actually start with a treatise about this, which is the logo,
and actually just how to describe visually the partnership and even that in terms of
working in partnership: the BBC’s logo, the British Museum’s logo, how do they sit
together, how do we come up with the typeface that is neither BBC nor British
Museum and how do we come up with a selection of British Museum objects and
then change their colours in order to make this work effectively as a piece of
marketing?
This actually as a piece of work that we did together- and I think we actually came
up with an agency with something that was fantastic and worked on every
incarnation of the project, from the smallest museum to those huge pull-ups across
the great courts of the British Museum, to the entrance of the BBC - actually
working together to bring all the different interests of that all in itself was
interesting. So who’s this? This is a difficult man – it’s Lord Reef; described by
many as an extremely difficult, even at times unpleasant man who had one
stupendously good idea which was the BBC and he described its purpose as ‘to
inform, educate, and entertain’. However hard people like me and Peter and others
in the BBC try to come up with something to replace it, they have failed to come up
with anything better in describing the purposes of the BBC than ‘to inform, educate
and entertain’.
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
None of what we are talking about this afternoon in terms of the BBC or in terms of
many of your organisations gets us away from that purpose. The fact you have
different technologies, the fact that you have different places to put your
programmes or your things doesn’t change the purpose, and the point about
entertainment is important - some people would try to devalue the word
entertainment because we are a publicly funded, public service and all the rest of
it; just remember that when you go out and survey the Radio 4 audience and you
say “Why do you listen to Radio 4?” – the thing they put on top of the list is ‘to
entertain’. The good news is that for 10 million people a week listening to Melvyn
Bragg talking about String Theory at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning constitutes
entertainment. Do not limit your view as to what entertainment might be.
One of the things we have been able to do in the digital space is to find out ways
of putting our programmes into spaces where people might not otherwise consume
them. This is the new Desert Island Discs website which has got the data for 2,800
castaways so far and 500 programmes that you can download and take away - 3
million programmes have been downloaded in the first six weeks. The power of
this is the power of the programmes. Yes, it looks nice and it’s quite easy to get
around but it’s the programmes that people really want.
We’ve done something very simple with the Reef Lectures - so you can’t just
listen to Aung San Suu Kyi, you can download at least one Reef Lecture of
everyone since 1948 and the entire series from 1970 onwards. Again, putting the
programmes into different places is really what we are about and making them
findable. As arts organisations, this is the Proms website for this year and again
there is a section there under the grizzly bit about buying some tickets which again
is about where can we put our programmes? How can we make the basics for any
arts organisation - which we are when we’re doing the Proms – you know, “What’s
on, where is it on, how can I find it, where do I get a ticket?” How can we make
that a bit more stickable and a bit more engaging - how can we help that decision?
Well, the thing that we’ve got is programmes: it is possible to make pieces of audio
or video about your thing and hopefully, with the skills we are able to transfer,
learn how to make that just a bit more interesting than “This is what’s on and this is
where you can get it”.
The other thing that I think we should all bear in mind: when we talk about our
digital proposition each of us gets very, very excited about our site, our URL. “The
BBC site is huge, bbc.co.uk is vast” – actually it’s very small really, in terms of the
rest of the Internet. We are all tiny; so the crucial lesson from A History of the
World and from what we are doing with all of these is where else do you put it? So
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
there is Aung San Suu Kyi’s Reef Lecture on iTunes and you find it next to Ibiza or
Made in Chelsea or under a television programme about the coast. The thing is
that by taking that material and putting it in places where people might be most
likely to consume it is in some ways even more important than what you do in your
own space... whilst remembering that the material you are creating - whatever
space you’re creating it in - you’re still creating it with your audience in mind . So
not forgetting that actually these Radio 4 people are sort of perfectly normal Radio
4 people who go to stately homes, who read Saga magazine, who like University
Challenge – nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with targeting that. Just the
fact that you’re putting it in a digital space doesn’t mean that you don’t do that with
some sense of who they are and what they do. Remember they’re probably not
going to find it just by going to your URL; Google, Facebook, Amazon - these
places are probably more important.
So we did a little bit of research to find out about our audience in the Royal
Wedding. We were looking into what we might be able to do around history in our
future projects thinking about the history of the world. So in looking and asking
people about what they wanted from the Royal Wedding coverage we also asked
them about how they saw this as a historic event – the men have a slightly
stronger interest in history – that might be of use - particularly older men...
[indicates footage on screen] He has an interest in history... he also has an interest
in a younger woman [audience laughter]. That’s extraordinary! What can the
telephoto lens do(!) --- and children [have an interest in history].
One of the things we did with A History of the World was try to appeal across the
ranges having got this delicious idea of one hundred programmes about one
hundred objects presented in a very simple way by a rather brilliant man in his
museum - how could we take that further? The first other organisation in the BBC
on board were Childrens, when they created Relic. So really trying to appeal with
the content - the basic things that everyone wants: “What’s it got to do with me?”
Who do you think you are? changed the way in which quite a lot of people looked
at personality in history, trying to appeal on an emotional level... [indicates screen]
that’s War Horse.
But also the boldness and the scale of the proposition of A History of the World:
everyone knew “Well yeah, they’re serious about that”. We had a long debate
about whether it was A History of the World or The History of the World - and I am
pleased that we did settle on the indefinite article – nevertheless, it was a big
statement and I think we need that in a crowded media world and certainly when
we’re working in partnership together, working together on something that in the
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end is going to be quite small - it’s going to struggle to cut through. Now I’m going
to try technologically to find a video, just to give you a bit more of a sense of what
A History of the World was about. Because it was a lot more once we’d got the
original idea than just one hundred programmes about one hundred objects.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Over five hundred other museums are now partners in A History of the World,
adding hundreds of objects to the website, playing host to thousands of people
who want to share their objects, and their stories. BBC teams have joined forces
with these museums running events across Britain. We’re going to be talking to
some people who earlier on today went down to Northampton Museum and Art
Gallery to go and find out during half-term what A History of the World is all about.
[presenter on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Loads and loads of people on the buses, as you can probably hear in the
background – there’s quite a hubbub going on here today. I’m making my way up
to the rear of the bus where the computer downloading section is, where people
are actually downloading their objects. And Russell Kanes is with us – he’s the
director of Saxon Estate Agents.
[member of the public contributor on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
We’ve been able to come up with the old leases dating back as early as 1745,
relating to 106 High St which is quite fascinating. I thought we’d bring them along
for you guys to have a look at.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Over 120 History of the World public events were held over the past year, and
BBC Suffolk was just one of the places that played host to the project.
[presenter on BBC Radio Suffolk]
Hello and welcome to BBC Radio Suffolk’s A History of the World day at Ipswich
Museum. Throughout the day the BBC Radio Suffolk team helped people upload
their object onto the History of the World website.
[member of the public contributor on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
There were all sorts of things: there were cups and saucers, there was a toilet roll
holder and many more things.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
The curators from Ipswich Museum were on hand to give people expert advice,
including David Jones, who was fascinated by an old timer.
[David Jones, contributor on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
The gentleman who brought it in knew where it came from exactly: it came from a
factory called Beatsall Factory.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
It’s not just about interesting objects; it’s very much about great stories. Like this
seemingly unremarkable program for an athletics event that turned out to be just
that little bit special.
[member of the public contributor to A History of the World in 100 Objects]
[indicating athletics event program] My late husband got hold of it because he was
a member of the Oxford University Athletics Squad. He was helping with the field
organization. It contains the autographs of Chris Chataway, Chris Brasher and
Roger Bannister himself.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Local BBC teams have made documentaries revealing what their region has given
the world.
[various contributors to A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Arkwright was clearly a very enlightened and liberal kind of guy because he
wouldn’t employ kids – well, under the age of six.
And this is the first ever blueprint of a jet engine.
And this is it – Thomas Newcomen – ironmonger from Dartmouth, who started the
Industrial Revolution.
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
[presenter on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
We’ve been taking to the highways and byways of Northern Ireland. I took a bus
from Derry to Belfast gathering the stories and the craic along the way, on our
journey to the Ulster Museum. There, the objects were examined by museum
experts and uploaded onto the websites.
Johnny, first of all, how old do you think it is?
[member of the public contributor to A History of the World in 100 Objects]
I think it had been there for well over two hundred years.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Children have been enjoying their own History of the World: on television, as they
try to crack the challenges of Relic: Guardians of the Museum; in class, using A
History of the World lesson plans.
[teacher]
Choose one of the objects to go onto the History of the World website.
[various children]
As soon as I saw it, I thought it was an artillery shell.
Each number is embroidered with a national flag.
[teacher]
I think they’ve really enjoyed it, and they chose the object that had a personal
story.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
And in museums across the country, following hundreds of unique Relic trails.
[child]
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We had to run around the museum trying to find these objects in all these different
places. It was so much fun.
[voiceover on A History of the World in 100 Objects]
Our partnership with Antiques Roadshow was a particular success with thousands
of people taking part, uploading their objects and enjoying the shared sense of
ownership of a project that’s touched every corner of the land.
On TV, on radio, online and on the road - A History of the World has been a
journey of discovery, helping us learn about people, places and things, and we’ve
learned that sometimes it’s the most ordinary objects that can tell the most
extraordinary stories.
Andrew Caspari
Marvellous. So did everyone go there? You do all that work, you hope that they do.
Well fortunately, to date – because it’s all still there, all the programmes are still
there – more than 2.6million visits. Referrals from outside the BBC - we really
wanted this project to take us beyond the standard Radio 4 audience – so the
number of referrals from outside was important. So actually five minutes ago is
pretty good going, and six pages means six objects, and we were trying to make
objects the heroes here. This is a boring old BBC graph – the only thing it really
tells you is that the project went on for a long time; the bits at the top tell you that
you need peaks – you’ve got to have some kind of big peak activity to get the
interest. But the thing that really excited me was that we were bobbling along at
50-60,000 unique users every week in the UK, even when the programmes were
not on air.
And the message I would give out of this is – if you’re doing big partnerships,
either together or with the BBC, make sure they’ve got some longevity to them.
You know, a big hit over one weekend may be more work than you want.
Fortunately, people quite liked it, and the third one I’ve put up there... we made a
big change to the homepage – we created some lovely flash technology, because
we thought this was a lovely flash project so we needed to do something very flash
– actually, the audience didn’t like that; what they wanted was just something that
tells you very simply “What is it? Where do I go to find out more?” So we ripped
that up and started again and it saved us a bit of money, but... The important thing
was to make that change really quickly and actually to change it for something
simpler.
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
The permanence, the ability to make the material that people wanted, those
programmes, portable. And we thought at the beginning that people would get the
podcasts and then get a bit bored. But actually what they did was they kept
collecting more and more and doubtless filling themselves with what I call ‘podcast
guilt’ – “I’ve got 85 on my iPod and I’ve only heard 35 and I’m feeling really bad
about it!” – but what’s good is that people are still downloading them now. So
permanence and portability of the content.
We got other people involved as you saw in the film, uploading their object. But
perhaps one of the lessons is: once you go into the public realm and ask people to
take part in your project, things might not happen the way you want them to or the
way you expect them to. So we wouldn’t have expected Mike Hailwood’s
motorbike to be the most popular object on the site, neither would we have
expected the Silk Princess painting from the British Museum to be the most
popular object. However, this one I could have predicted – Edith Bowman, Radio 1
presenter – uploading her grandfather’s flat cap, and that one was the most
popular personal object on the site. It actually had a great story to it, but what we
were able to do was actually again to try to take this project to places, to Radio 1,
to other networks where you might not have expected it to go.
We kept the British Museum right at the heart of it; you’ve got to start somewhere
and we started off with the one hundred programmes. The On Time bit I’ve put up
there [indicates] there’s nothing like a broadcast deadline to focus the minds of
BBC, particular our technologists – and that’s no disrespect to them. But all
technology people will always want to make it a little bit better, and sometimes
you’ve got to give it a deadline.
The desire of people to participate, and I think also working out in the partnership
“What do we each bring?” – They were about objects; we were about programmes
– we weren’t about to tell them which objects, or how to deal with the object, how
to present the objects – but similarly, we were able to work together with the
museum to make the programmes. And the realisation that once you set this thing
up, once you put up several other thousand objects, people will go on journeys of
their own. You can’t define what people are going to do in the digital space. They
will define that for themselves.
However, we thought that we were going to struggle to get sixty museums
involved; we actually ended up with five hundred museums involved, many after
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we launched. So we learned quite a lot about museums and about arts
organisations, about the enthusiasm to join in, about the desire to find other
platforms for their expertise. But we also learned that we overestimated the digital
capacity – the BBC is huge, and sometimes quite intimidating I think. I think at
times we overestimate what other people can do. So it was important for us to
learn that, and it was also important for us to learn about the time needed.
So I asked my colleague at the British Museum what learned about the BBC, so
these are things worth bearing in mind when you work with us: we’re very good at
talking, not very good at writing things down – this feels like my appraisal! We
leave things quite late. Basically the BBC is driven by journalism, and journalism is
about the next bulletin for a lot of people, so there is a whole culture of us who
have grown up waiting for the next programme, and not worrying about the one
after that. But I’m pleased to have been told that we did listen, and we did respond.
But partnership within the BBC is much harder than you think – we brought
together Childrens and Nations and Regions of the BBC and News and the Web
and so on and so forth. But actually the BBC is huge and sometimes - you know
that thing in the Life of Brian about The People’s Front of Judea and the Judean
People’s Front – there are times when the BBC can appear like that. When I
worked on the Today programme our biggest enemy was The World at One. We
didn’t mind what ITV were doing. And the World Service was tricky. We perhaps
didn’t go as global as we thought we did, though about 11million of the downloads
are outside the UK. But the World Service is going through a lot of changes at the
moment for the BM: they had expectations that we couldn’t fulfil.
We really did want people to participate in this project and we worried hugely
about what would be the quality of what we got, what would happen if we didn’t get
good objects, what would happen if we got lots of grandfathers’ toothbrushes from
the First World War and nothing really interesting – don’t underestimate your
audience’s ability to come up with things that are really good! So it was unique,
and we did get variety. We didn’t get the quantity of participation. I think that if
you’re trying to get a participation project and your target is large numbers of
people, ask yourself really, really tough questions about how difficult will it be for
people to participate. And certainly with this project it was probably more difficult
for people to participate than we realised.
But the degree to which people’s participation can drive your core material, can
make content for your organisation – we ended up making programmes, and we
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still are making programmes, about objects that people uploaded to A History of
the World. But the simplest participation, the ability to comment – if you think about
your own participation, your own use of the Internet, particularly in social media –
it’s about commenting and having conversations, and arguing. And sometimes we
create very flat things where we say “Here! Look at this! Here’s a piece of
marketing! Here’s a nice picture of one of our objects in our nice museum! Here’s
a little piece about our theatre show!” And actually people want to comment, they
want to debate, that’s what the space is increasingly being used for. That takes
you into a whole world which goes off your site, as I was saying about iTunes.
So we ended up with A History of the World in 100 Sheds – might we have worried
that that was somehow devaluing the glory of our British Museum Radio 4
participation? Fortunately not; and fortunately it led to people taking the idea and
interpreting it their own way. And similarly having conversations about it, the
nature of which we couldn’t control. Sometimes we tend as large organisations to
want to control, and in this space you have to cede some of that control. I have to
say that in social media we did less than we could have done, and certainly all this
is here. Nobody visits your Facebook page per se. What they do is they ‘Like’ your
page, and the material that is on your page appears for them. If you simply set
your metric as ‘How many people will go to my Facebook page’ you’ve sort of
missed the point of Facebook.
But we would have done and should have done more. When you think we started
scoping this project in 2008/9, we would do more now. Twitter, by the way, is not a
marketing tool. It may be helpful as part of your marketing, but it’s a conversation
and an engagement tool. It gives people and lots of organisations the chance to
take part at once. Don’t be afraid of controversy in these spaces. Controversy gets
you noticed. When we came to the 100th object I think we had learned some of
those lessons through the year, and by asking a really simple question – what
object would you put in a museum to represent today? – we were able to get
actually much higher levels of participation by making the question and the
participation really simple. And the conversation we had about Didier Drogba’s
football shirt again took us into spaces we didn’t expect to get to. So Who Ate All
the Pies? is a Chelsea – well you can’t have everything right can you - it’s one of
the biggest Chelsea fan sites.
So did we change as a result? Well, that’s really for you to judge I think. But
certainly a lot of thinking – I’m just going to give you a hint about some of the
thinking at the BBC. Partnership defined by mutual benefit tended to be defined by
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Andrew Caspari Transcript
rather simple metrics like “We come in, we make something about your thing, your
event. It goes out on our television or radio station. Hopefully you get some
visitors”, as you try to make a deeper relationship.
About the shared benefit – “What do we bring to each other?” is probably a better
way of going. There is a need to spend more time on these things. Real
challenges for the BBC - which guards its editorial control, as you know - “We must
have editorial control”. How do you do that when you’re working in partnership with
someone else? Where do you loosen up, and where do you draw your lines? And
History of the World started out as a purely public service partnership: no one was
making any money out of this. And that really helped. Certainly, as we all move
forward and we’re all shorter of money, how we balance the public service with the
commercial relationship is going to be a challenge for all of us in this room and
beyond.
The British Museum said they changed: the nature of people being able to
participate was new, and the fact that the people who were dealing with the stuff
that’s in the museum were actually now the people who were directly engaging
with the public – that was a new thing. I think we can probably see that whether
we’re Marketing or Digital Communications people – we think we sit there and
people sitting here create events or create stuff. And now we’re much, much closer
together in this space. And they started looking at some of the tools, some of the
infrastructure, some of the nature of their site as a result of doing this.
So very quickly I want to give you five things I bet on going forward, I think there
are five. The first one is the content. The ‘c-word’ which we prefer not to use really.
People go to supermarkets to buy bananas, not to look at nice shelves. What is
there that people want? What have I got that people might want to consume, that
people might want to watch, to listen to, to read? Sometimes we get very excited
about the interface. In the end, the interface is a means to consuming the stuff.
The second one is navigation and aggregation, which is one of Bill’s favourite
subjects – he’s much better at talking about it than I am. But this is what I call
content glut, this happens to be a reading room. How you find your way through it,
how you find that stuff - how do we make our programmes, our material, findable
by everybody and anybody, and aggregate-able – where will they draw them
together, what spaces will they draw them together in? And working out what that
is, working out simply how you’re going to label your material may be more
important than the glory of your particular site interface or design.
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Definitely take a bet on social. Yeah it’s short - in two or three years time we may
all scratch our heads and say “Remember that Twitter thing? What a lark that was!
Blimey, whatever happened to that”? But the notion that people will communicate
in the digital space in real time, around things and to the people they want to and
to the wider world won’t go away, I would guess. Remember, everybody’s got a
voice, not just you. What I always say to young media students who say “I want to
get into the media, how do I do it?” I say “Well go and create some.” It’s so much
easier. Everybody has a voice.
Definitely bet on mobile. We didn’t do History of the World very well on mobile, but
if we did it again, and on future things we will need to. I’m not going to read all
those facts out to you [indicates on screen] but I’m just going to bring this one out:
the iPhone is only 3.9% of the UK mobile market. So don’t obsess about your
iPhone App, even if it might please your trustees. I’ll probably get in terrible
trouble. But all I’ll say is you may well need something that works on an iPhone,
but you need something that works on mobile devices more broadly.
This is a punt of mine about location. That device in your pocket knows where you
are, can tell you where you, can tell other people where you are, and you can be
served the stuff that you want to find or the stuff you want to find out about
according to where you are. I don’t think we’re particularly good at this yet, but I
think if you take a five year view this will become more and more important as a
means to cutting through content glut.
Definitely take a bet on multiscreen. Again, we pretty much created History of the
World around the desktop website. Now I think that we need to think about all our
screens – radio screens now, radios will have far more pictures on them in the
future, and whether it’s a tablet or whether it’s a television or a phone doesn’t
really matter. You need to try to create things so they’ll work on whatever piece of
kit. People like this have got... [indicates on screen] I showed this to some
students the other day and they said “Yeah we know who that is”. But, this is the
way they live.
And finally, do bet on partnership. This is the Ain Sakhri Lovers figurine – it’s the
oldest known representation of a couple making love; it was one of the more
popular objects on the History of the World website. But definitely work on the
basis of the more people you can work with, the better chance you have of being
bigger and more successful in this space. I hope some of that’s helpful, please ask
and barrack as time moves on.
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The other thing is have fun as time moves on. We did have an enormous amount
of fun presenting one hundred programmes about one hundred objects in the
British Museum. Probably more fun and more entertainment than we thought we’d
have when we started. Thank you.
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