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.
