Locke: Commissioning for attention

I don’t call it commissioning multi-platform or transmedia. For me it’s all about attention. Because I wanted to talk about the audience in a way that wasn’t based around platforms. Because I think what happens, the technology moves so quickly that you have to come up with a new phrase every year. Which is why we’ve had cross-platform commissioning, interactive commissioning, multi-platform, 360 degree commissioning, transmedia... For me right now I say I commission for attention.So when somebody comes to me with an idea, my first question is ‘How do we get attention for this?’. And that could mean building a website or building a project on Facebook or creating a game and distributing on Miniclip or, you know, tieing it to a peak time show on Channel 4 in the evening or whatever. So how do you get attention? And frankly I’ll do anything if I thought it was going to work. I always joke that I’d fly a plane across a city with a banner behind it if I thought that was a good way to get attention, but... to be honest I would. You know, if somebody proved to me that it was actually the best way to get people to hear about a project, I would do it. So there’s no boundary for me between marketing and content. It’s all part of, you know... We are in a world right now where there’s more content than we can possibly give our attention to. So your first challenge is, how do you get attention? Some companies have monopolies already: they have a big TV channel or they have a newspaper or they have a book or they have a record label, whatever. But increasingly it’s about going out to those partners. So it is about YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Miniclip for games, you know, all those kinds of partners. And using their platforms to get the first bit of attention to your project.Then it’s about keeping that attention, so how do you actually get people to build a relationship with your project? And that’s often about getting them to leave a footprint. So if they leave a comment or if they sign up or if they friend you on a social network or whatever. If you can do something that actually means that they’ve given something of themselves, if they’ve somehow knitted you in their network online, if they’ve made you part of their world online, then you’ve got more opportunity to go back and get more of their attention and build a relationship with them.And then finally it’s about turning that attention into value, which for us as an education department is about basically understanding that you’ve learned something from a project, you’ve actually... And that might mean getting you to contribute, participate, to comment, whatever. For more commercial projects it might mean actually leading towards a transaction and, you know, buying a game, upselling into a kind of, you know, pro user contract or whatever.But for me I don’t really think it’s about transmedia or multi-platform commissioning, it’s about attention now. You know, our audiences... the scarcity is attention, the scarcity is not platforms, it’s not band width, it’s not content. The scarcity is attention.