BBC bares all for Skillset Media Academies
Today we facilitated one of our first industry engagement initiatives for the Skillset Media Academies.
It was a hastily arranged affair (harnessing BBC’s enthusiasm to meet the academy network) and with about two weeks notice we had a packed council chamber in Broadcasting House and an excellent line up of presentations from the key people driving BBCs interactive strategy ( big thanks to John Denton, Managing Editor, TV Platforms, for facilitating the event).
It was also the start of a dialogue between the Academies and the BBC to look at potential future collaborative opportunities and an opportunity to learn more about BBC’s approach to interactive content development and distribution (alongside the skills they required from the workforce in order to do so).
Richard Williams - BBC Multiplatform, Vibeke Hansen - Creative Director UXD, Ian Hunter - Managing Editor iPlayer, Jason Daponte - Managing Editor Mobile and Michael Gray - Lead Producer A&Mi were just some of the people in the line up.
The reoccurring theme of the day was without a shadow of a doubt the importance of having access to people with the ability to understand and think about audiences ( a need also supported by CH4).
There was encouragement not to place the emphasis on technology or the channels, an understanding of technology and how to apply it is equally as important, and access to technology certainly should not hamper creative development.
The development of multi-disciplinary skills is crucial now more than ever.
Understanding format and technology, encouraging creativity and ideas an understanding how the audience wants to consume information is key.
Industry requires extroverts, people who can stand up and pitch, sell a concept and team work.
What was particularly impressive was BBC’s understanding of the need to position and integrate BBC content with related content within the marketplace, according to audience needs. The aggregation of BBC content and services, personalising how we access information from the BBC brand and other sources is high on the list of priorities, expect personalised dashboards allowing users to check football results, weather forecasts, local news alongside streaming audio or video from their favourite bands. Along with the iPlayer, the long tail of BBC output is really being tried and tested with some interesting results.
A possible outcome of today is the development of a BBC roadshow to go through all of this in more detail with the academies. Some of the speakers today have already offered to give lectures and presentations. I think there is also scope to get them directly involved in curriculum development.
It was also a really good opportunity to learn more about where there are fantastic models of best practice in the Academy network already exploring cross disciplinary approaches.
And at the end of the day, it left me cornering some CPD providers present to see what we can do rather quickly to create modules around understanding audiences, how they process information and the context in which content is consumed……….
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