Hugh Garry

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.

Listening Differently

"But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this." 

I spent all of my 30's working at Radio 1, a radio station aimed at 15-25 year olds. At the time I was working in the media, referring to large coffees as 'Venti' and hanging out in wanky East London. Little has changed to be honest.

When you're producing content for people from a different generation you have to quickly learn how to stop being you. You have to step out of your bubble and become a 15 year old school boy from Derry, an 18 year old MC from Dundee or a 21 year old single mum from Hackney. You have to break out of your default setting.

My eldest son was recently training to be a coach and mentor. I talked to him about the importance of empathy and a little thing I do when I'm on a train in the morning, or in a cafe waiting for someone. I look at the people around and build the stories of their lives based on whatever clues I can grab. It's not enough to form opinions based on the easy clues. You have to look for the hard ones. 

Yesterday I came across this. It's a wonderfully visualised version of a commencement speech given by novelist David Foster Wallace. It's a brilliant essay on empathy and living compassionately. Everyone should hear it. If you work with audiences or customers then you have to listen to them. Hearing is not enough. You have to build the story that lies behind the data rather than just acting on the data. You have to understand people and the only way to do that is by listening differently.

THIS IS WATER - By David Foster Wallace from The Glossary on Vimeo.

To make ideas stick...

...we need to make human personal connections. So much of what Rohit talks about here is what I’ve found myself talking about quite a bit recently. Give it a watch, it’s only 8 minutes long.

Rohit makes reference to what has been described as ‘the most unlikely political seduction ever’. He talks about how Nelson Mandela would invite his enemies for tea. Over that tea he would talk to them and listen to them. These moments are widely regarded as the reasons he managed to avoid violent confrontations. I like the idea of the simple act of having a brew with someone as ‘seduction’. Quite powerful when you think of it that way. I know I’ve had many innocent chats with people over a cup of tea that changed my life.

We appear to be living in an increasingly binary world. Just think how much time we spend making judgements on people whilst sat in front of a screen. A piece of glass between us and them. That judgement might be based on big data or small actions on social media. From Facebook ‘Likes’ to the bile you often see in the comments on Youtube, thanks to the new social norms we are encouraged to love or hate based on very little information.

It’s easy to hate someone on the other side of border, whether that border is a screen or an ideology as in the case of Madela. It’s much harder to hate someone when they are sat facing you over a cup of tea having a conversation.

As I said here I worry about over reliance of big data and the disappearance of the ‘human’ behind the numbers. The two worlds need to collide to give us strong insights that will help us tell great stories. Charities get this. They have the data but spend a long time on the ground making human connections. Then when it comes to telling their story they’ve realised that telling the story of an individual gives the audience a greater insight (and therefore more likely to put their hand in their pocket) than just giving big numbers.

Next time Comic Relief comes around take note of how they use those human stories alongside the numbers. The story of a thousand people dying is often less effective than telling the story of an individual. It give the audience a chance to make a personal connection.

Mandela made his ideas stick through human connection. Comic Relief make their ideas stick through human connections To make ideas stick we need to make human personal connections. That means more cups of tea to go with the data, which is fine by me.

A tool for listening to culture

When hip hop broke in the mid 70's Levis, not recognising the full cultural impact, chose to ignore it. The cost of the company's culture not being aligned with that of its audience is alleged to be somewhere in the region of $1 billion. US electronics store Best Buy stumped up $700 million for music retailer Musicland in 2001 failing to recognise that the teens with Best Buy Saturday jobs were using Kazaa and then Limewire to get their music. Best Buy ended up giving it away years later. The lesson here being that you have to spot shifts in culture as they happen and adapt your company's culture to fit.

Listening to your audience isn't something that started when digital culture exploded, it's just been made easier thanks to the vapour trails of data left by people using digital products and the rise of analytic tools. Good analytic tools have become an essential part of the kit for trying to understand your audience - they are great at what they are made for - that being analysing data that will enable you to look for patterns. The problem is that they're deaf to culture and won't help you build an algorithm for curiosity. Spotting trends is different from understanding culture. If you don't understand the culture of your audience then you'll have problems slipping seamlessly into their lives.

To understand an audience you must go beyond hearing a really start listening, a differentiation many struggle to grasp. Hearing is simply taking stuff in whereas listening is processing and knowing how to act on the information once you have it. I recently heard someone describe a good listener as someone who doesn't need to be given a christmas present list from their partner, they just know what to buy and why their partner wants it. There is a difference between knowing someone and knowing about someone. 

The question most people want answering is how do you listen to culture when there isn't an app for that? Paying attention to curators is a good starting point. I spent 15 years working at Radio 1, a network whose culture is perfectly matched with that of its audience. How do they achieve this? Easy. Management constantly surrounds itself with curators. The DJs are curators. Many of the networks producers are either DJs or club promoters. Some run their own music websites and many blog about their culture. There are curators at every level. The audience culture runs through every corridor and office in the building. 

In an information age curators are a great filter to help us make sense of culture. They enable serendipity, can find usefulness in useless knowledge and point us to the stuff we didn't know that we needed to know. They are not just aggregators. Over time they have built up a set of tools for unearthing the things that make life interesting and developed a tone that is both inviting an reassuring. These are skills not acquired easily or quickly.

The rise of tools like Tumblr and Posterous are behind the much talked about 'rise of the curator', which has muddied the water a little. Having a Tumblr does not make one a curator. Pointing at new things does not make one a curator. Pick your creators wisely and recognise the difference between curators and those who label themselves coolhunters or trend forcasters.  This is not a judgement, simply a differentiation. Curation is a skill that is journalistic and editorial, creating a frame around the content they share, adding depth and understanding. They add context and a point of view.

So if you want to build a toolbox for listening to culture, which you really should, start by adding a few good curators.