Hugh Garry

Why I'm leaving the BBC

So, that was it. My last ever Radio 1 Big Weekend. It was good to go out on Gaga too. I couldn't have planned it any better. If you don't already know, after 15 years in the best job on the planet I've decided it's time to move on. From September 1st I'll be handing in my BBC badge and saying 'so long' to the greatest broadcasting company in the world.

As a senior digital producer at Radio 1, whose responsibilities include mucking around with social media, fiddling with innovation and help others across the Audio and Music department think creatively around projects, I've been lucky enough to occupy a position that was built around my skills - and it's been great. Such is the respect I have for the BBC there isn't a morning that I don't wake up and wonder 'how the hell did I get here?' - I'll never work that one out.

Despite being here for so long I still get excited when I walk through the door like it's my first day every day. And why shouldn't I? It's one of the most famous radio stations in the world thanks to its ability to break new music for young people like no other. From Glasto to Big Weekends to Ibiza and Miami I've watched so many DJs and bands make their first appearance on the BBC Introducing stage and followed their progress to headliners years later.

I started working at Radio 1 in 1996 when Britpop was at it's peak and Chris Evans was at his most exciting and dangerous. It was also the beginning of the digital era for the BBC with the launch of a handful of websites - including Radio 1's. Being honest it was quite a terrible site at first, but it was a start - the start of a digital journey none of us could have ever imagined. It was also the start of a personal journey I've feel privileged to have been on.

Working in digitial at the BBC from the early days of the world wide web enabled me to experiment with every new web development or web related technology that has surfaced over the years. From webcasting and making online films in the mid-nineties, to experimenting with mobile early in the last decade, then alternate reality games, augmented reality, data visualisation, gaming, social media and the real time web, it's been amazing having the freedom to experiment without any pressure. I owe that to Chris Kimber, Dan Heaf and Ben Chapman, brilliant bosses over the years who trusted in me to try out new things with a simple brief to be creative and share the learnings. Amazing!!! Of course it's not just bosses I have to thank. I've always been surrounded by incredibly talented team members who never get the true credit they deserve, especially as they were doing all the hard stuff whilst I was fiddling around at the fun end of things.

So why am I leaving?

That's not so easy to answer. I don't really have a career plan. I'm rubbish at that sort of thing. I just know it's time to go and I know I want to do some other interesting things I've never done before. The first thing I plan to do is take a leaf out of Stefan Sagmeister's book and spend some time doing creative projects that I wouldn't be able to do if I had a 9-5 job. I kinda see it as my career's 20% time. I'm hoping these projects will lead me in the direction of my next career and feed my head with inspiration for future projects or roles. Though I'm really sad to be leaving I'm incredibly excited about what I may end up doing in this time.

I do have a few things planned. I've got a book to finish writing, a module based around a game to design for Media Students at Salford Uni, and some unfinished business in Africa. Oh yes, I'll be traveling around the world too. Apart from that I'm up for collaborating on some interesting projects. Storytelling using new technologies is what interests me most so if you have a project in mind that we can work together on just drop me a line.

I've still got a few months left at the BBC and some work that needs wrapping up. As well as managing my team I'm doing some work around creative process for the department, organising a TEDx day and attempting to bring a dead star back to life as a hologram for a live event later in the year - what an amazing job!!! Why would anyone want to walk away from that?

Rewarding the Love Pt. 2

Earlier this summer I blogged about 'Rewarding the Love' of your audience. As a broadcaster one of the best things about the emergence of social media is that it allows us to find what is being said about our output and respond. Our audience have grown up listening to us via a box formerly know as 'The Radio'. Now we can listen back to them and when we respond the results can be amazing.

And sometimes dangerous.

At this weekend's Reading Festival we delivered some 'Reading Presents' for our followers on Facebook and Twitter. We wanted to connect our listeners who didn't get tickets for Reading with the bands that they love. The idea was that we'd give them a present to make up for them not being there. More often than not the present would involve their favourite band carrying out a request they made to us via Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes we'd just surprise them by giving them a present for just tweeting about us.

You can see the kind of requests we got in the video featuring Fred Durst, Biffy Clyro, Arcade Fire, Paramore, Klaxons, Frank Turner, Paramore and a shed load of others.

In the last post I described it as being like a digital autograph, but having given it more thought these have much more personal value than a scribble on some paper. To begin with they are shareable and not confined to a dusty book you bring out once a year. They have much more kudos because they are 'real', they're pictures or videos that are connected as part of a bigger conversation, not just paper memory. Also, there is the WTF factor; that is actually your hero in that film/photo doing exactly what you asked BBC Radio 1 to get him/her to do via Twitter/Facebook. How does that happen from a bedroom in Bristol?

As you can imagine people's heads were exploding when they got their's whilst some people retweeted and retweeted and retweeted when they worked out what was going on. Their thinking being that the more they talked about us the more chance they had of being picked. Jealousy is a powerful tool.

Finally, the bands themselves retweeted what we were doing to their fanbases, which is not far of 2 million followers in the case of Fred Durst. Thanks Fred

Well done to Kate Lawrence, Laura-May Coope and Will Kinder who worked their socks off this weekend delivering these presents to our followers. You made a smaller group of people happier than we ever could have imagined in the days before social media.

SMS, Bluetooth and QR Codes

My thinking behind this year's mobile offering for Radio 1's Big Weekend was 'How do we make it spreadable?'. Of course we'd deliver a wap site as usual. This year we also offered some nice and shiny mobile sites for the N95 and iPhone. These are both examples of listeners coming to the BBC to access our content. But what I really wanted was to deliver the content to audiences. I wanted our mobile offering to 'explode' with content sprayed everywhere for people to collect and share.

In doing this, I had to consider the technologies we'd used in the past, the type of phones that Radio 1 audiences use, and what new technologies were available to us. So we devised a three-pronged plan to dissipate content in an interesting and effective way.

SMS Club

I recently gave a talk at the Audio & Music Interactive and Mobile departmental in which I talked about 'rethinking deadness'. Inspired by a great talk from the programmer and game developer Kathy Sierra, the idea of rethinking deadness asks us to look at ideas that we may think have had their time and think about ways of breathing life back into them.

The last time I ran an SMS club for Radio 1 was way back in 2001 and as someone with a forward-thinking role, SMS clubs were way behind me, dead and buried. Could or should they be brought back to life for a Radio 1 audience? Of course! Okay, so it doesn't have the sexiness of an iPhone app, but SMS is still a brilliant and simple way of getting content onto the phones of our audiences. SMS is pretty much the only mobile technology that every one understands - we shouldn't dismiss it - it's powerful! It's a way of easing people into mobile stuff; deadness awaiting a rethink.

So an SMS club was set up to deliver video, wallpapers and audio downloads, not forgetting show reminders pushing people to BBC Radio, Red Button and BBC Three coverage. The challenge was to make SMS clubs a bit more sexy for our audiences. I had an idea for a secret dress code. We spread the word that there would be a secret dress code for the weekend that would be announced via the SMS club on the Friday night. It was a way of tapping into the excitement of flashmobs without actually creating a flashmob.

Bluetooth Loo

I've been doing Bluetooth at events for four years and it's one of the most frustrating technologies out there. Bluetooth is free, relatively easy to distribute, our audience use it regularly and it's on almost every handset. So if we have 40,000 people gathered in one place waiting to receive Bluetooth, then it has to be a winner right? Wrong. Here are the problems I've faced year after years of trying:

• the music is too loud to hear the Bluetooth arrive
• when you are watching your favourite band you won't be checking your phone
• audience are wary of what is being sent
• Bluetooth doesn't really like huge crowds. Small groups, yes. But big crowds, no

So, late last year I put a nail in the coffin of Bluetooth at Radio 1 events consigning it to the bin of things I would never waste my time on again... forever. Then in March I had a Eureka moment, quite literally whilst jumping into a hot bath. If we could provide a place that audiences would hear Bluetooth arrive, where we could prepare them to engage with their phone, let them know what they were about to receive and do this in a place that the transmitters could handle, then perhaps Bluetooth might be worth another try.

The Bluetooth Loo was the answer to all these problems. Everyone knows toilets are a low point at festival, so the idea was to offer a nice clean toilet for festival-goers to use on the condition that you switched on your Bluetooth. It was a really silly idea... but great. It was branded really well and being blue stood out from all the green toilets. It really caught people's attention and the huge queues allowed us the time to engage with the audience about our mobile offering.

Designer QR Codes

An important part of what I do is introducing new technologies to our audiences. So in 2008, I added QR codes to the Big Weekend mobile offering. QR codes are two-dimensional barcodes that can take you directly to a website - the barcode is decoded by taking a photo with specific software on your mobile .

This year, we added a design element to the QR codes. There is a small percentage for error permitted within each code, this allows us to add a design element without interfering with the coded message. The idea was to produce individual codes incorporating images of headliners such as Lily Allen and Dizzee Rascal. 'Get Lily on your mobile' posters were spread around the site with instructions on how to use the technology. I'm not sure if it's the true geek inside of me, but I find them fascinating and adding the design element opened them up to non-geeks who wanted to find out more.

A key target for the 2009 Big Weekend was to make Radio 1 content shareable. Our three-pronged mobile strategy not only served this purpose but added an extra fun element to the weekend. It also gave us a mobile package well worth marketing via radio and TV trails.

The mobile site benefited hugely from this strategy. We saw a 361% increase in UK page impressions to the mobile site on the previous year's festival. More videos were watched on mobile than at any previous music event. The SMS Club had nearly 4000 members helping to push audiences to content across all platforms - that's the most of any SMS Club we've ever run. Over 800 videos, audio clips and wallpapers were distributed via the Bluetooth Loo that we hope will have been passed on by the user again and again and again.