Hugh Garry

The Power of Choice

A great talk from Alex Carloss from Youtube on the difference between an audience and a fanbase. I particularly like this:

"An audience tunes in when they're told to. A fanbase chooses when and what to watch... An audience changes the channel when their show is over. A fanbase shares, it comments, it curates and it creates. An audience lives within your borders. A fanbase breaks those borders down".

He went on to highlight four things Youtube has enabled sans to do. Fans ignore timeslots (on demand), fans become talent (Youtube stars), fans pay tribute (parody videos) and fans blur borders (K-Pop explosion). When talking about how fans blur borders he makes the point that the most interesting thing about Gangnam Style is not the video itself but its legacy. Before Gangnam Style K-Pop produced 2 billion Youtube views. Post Gangnam Style it has 7 billion. 91% of K-Pop videos are now watch outside of Asia. 

The latenight US chatshows get this and Youtube has become the new battlefield between Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien with all shows seeing a boost in TV ratings as a result of their efforts on Youtube. 

100 Unread Messages

We made an app for Gruff Rhys called 100 Unread Messages and we kinda love it. You can download it to your choice of reading device here. Go on... It's great.

100 Unread Messages accompanies the American Interior book, film and album by former Super Furry Animals frontman. It tells the incredible story of John Evans, a distant relative of Gruff, who travelled across America in the 18th century looking for a mythical tribe of Welsh speaking Native Americans.

The idea for the app comes from a song Gruff wrote about the family of John Evans sat at home waiting for news that never came. With such a rich array of content to pick from we loved the idea of telling the story in 100 messages. The messages are distributed across a map following John's journey and are delivered in the form of film, music, photos, drawings, text, spoken word and gifs. All artwork was done by the brilliant Pete Fowler. 

There's lots to say about why we like this app but I thought I'd pull out three things that are noteworthy. 

1. The smart stuff in this app is hidden. Like everything else we do we look at the story first and decide on the best way of telling it. It was app of the week in The Guardian and Stuart Dredge clearly got the experience we were hoping for:

"As a technology writer who’s spent a lot of time covering apps in the last five years, my favourite thing about the American Interior app is the way it helped me get lost (again) in the John Evans story rather than thinking too much about the format in which it’s being delivered. It’s not a whizzy app: it’s a great story."

2. Every message is a Twitter card which means it can be shared as an individual piece of content embedded in a tweet. Twitter now does deep linking, which means that you can link to messages deep within the app. So if you click on a link in Twitter and already have the app and it will fire it up and bring you to that message. If you don't have the app it will fire it up in the store for you to buy. 

3. There is something really interesting in the snack sized portions and physical gesture required to open each message that fires off a shot of dopamine in the brain. The first time I tested it with all the content in was on a 2 hour flight. I planned to test the first few messages but before I knew it the plane was landing and I'd pretty much been through most of them. It's incredibly addictive and a behaviour we're certain to do more research on for future projects.  

Tonight (Wednesday) Gruff is performing at the Apple Store on Regent Street. He'll be telling the story and live tweeting it via the messages built into the app. So people at home will be able to follow the story Gruff tells in the store via a selection of cards embedded in Twitter. 

Credits should go to everyone at Storythings for the work that went into making such a thing of beauty, Nathan Hull at Penguin for generally being ace. And the lovely Cat and Gruff and their team in Wales for their spirit of adventure. 

If you want to speak to us about working on a project get in touch here.

Global memes as tools for political activism and supression

A brilliant talk from Austin Kleon on Creativity

The Content, the Container and the Consumer.

I've been asked to deliver a keynote at Film4's Innovation Summit later this month, which is I'm really excited about. 

When you do things like this you always get a call asking for the title of your talk weeks or sometimes months before the event. This is so that organisers can get their publicity out. The thing is I never give the same talk twice and usually end up preparing something close to the day. For years I got away with it by calling all my talks 'Everything is Amazing' because no matter what, I could always swing the conversation around to this. I stopped doing it about a year ago when I was convinced everyone on the planet had seen that video. 

I really like talking at events like this because preparing really forces you to think hard about what it is you do. It gets you to collect all the thinking you've been doing and to make some sort of sense of it all. It requires you to take all those noodly, random and often fleeting thoughts or bits of conversation you've been having and combine them into something coherent and of value to yourself as well as the collected audience.  

So the title I gave Film4 when asked was 'Nothing Dies, Everything Changes'. But after a chat with Matt yesterday about formats, and having thought a bit more about what I'm going to talk about I'm beginning to think 'The Content, the Container and the Consumer' might have been a better title. Until recently content was made to fit a limited number of containers and just a handful of consumer behaviours. Now, the smart creators think not just about the content but are also designing for a multitude of containers and consumer behaviours.

So there are a few of my thought's that may or may not shape what I talk about. 

The sharpest creators are those who know that teetering on the edge of tomorrow is a much healthier place to be than just worrying about their industry in five or ten years time. I think 'noticing' is something we need to get better at as behaviours become more subtle. And I don't care what Bill Carr, Amazon's VP of Music and Video says about preferring the algorithm over the human tastemaker in the development of TV shows, humans understanding humans behaviour is as important as computers understanding data in our new world. A world of content created by algorithm alone scares me a little.

Nothing Dies, Everything Changes.

Where Ideas Come From - Cornerhouse Manchester

I'm going to be running a six week course at the Cornerhouse in Manchester on Where Ideas Come From. I've been running it at Shoreditch House in London over the last year and it's been great fun to be a part of. Wonderful conversations follow and people from all sorts of creative industries attend. If your job is about coming up with ideas there will be something in it for you. 

We were never taught about ideas in school, we were just expected to have them without any guidance as to where they come from. Once I begain studying ideas I naturally got better at producing them. Seems obvious I know but schools, collleges and workplaces rarely teach you about ideas. They just drop you in a brainstorm with a few bogus rules and expect you to know how to do it. Personally, I don't think this is the best way of getting good ideas out of your teams. Give them the right tools and they'll be generating ideas 24/7. 

The feedback I get after each session is almost always the same - "Why did nobody tell me this sooner?" and all I can answer is that I think it's because of the old myth that there are people who are good at ideas and people who are bad and that the bad ones can't become good. Which is total rubbish of course. 

If you want a place on the course you can sign up here. It's for people of all ages and abilities. The lessons will be a mixture of light lectures, videos and conversations. If you can't get to the course but would like to me run a workshop for your company do get in touch. 

Perfecion

A Brilliant Talk on Attention

If you're a cultural entrepreneur then Matt Locke's talk on Empires of Attention for Radio 4's Four Thought show is one of the the most important listens this year. 

Attention defines our culture and as Matt points out the great cultural entrepreneurs have been the ones that know how to listen to, understand and measure attention.

From BuzzFeed all the way back to the 18th century taverns and pleasure gardens Matt tells the story of how the interaction between artists and audiences has moved from 'visceral participation to abstract measurement and back again via the birth of musical halls, cinema, TV and the internet'.

Building for new paterns of attention is one of the cornerstones of how we work at Storythings. Paying attention to how audiences are consuming, sharing and behaving around culture is something we obsess over. As a spectator sport there has never been a better time to be a fan.

The rigid cultural attention patterns of my childhood (music was split into 3 minute singles and 45 minute albums whilst TV was mostly 30 or 60 minute episodes or 90 minute films) seemed to hang around for what seemed like decades. Now our attenion is spread anywhere between a 6 second vine, glance up glance down reality TV and weekend long Netflix binges. The pace of change in audience behavior is so rapid one dare not take ones eye off them in fear they'll vanish quicker than a snapchat photo.

Empires of Attention is the book Matt is always threatening to write and the book I desperately want to read. I really hope he gets it written soon.

Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art

Like this quote from Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit...

Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them. What we're talking about here is metaphor. Metaphor is the lifeblood of all art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we are experiencing now with what we have experienced before. It's not only how we express what we remember , it's how we interpret it — for ourselves and others.