Reflection on action – Interview with Manager, BBC Creativity & Learning (Part Two)

Page 171 of 258 In the second part of this interview, Frank explains how and why the focus of the moo website shifted from pure knowledge sharing, to supporting a competition, run

in conjunction with BBC3:

“The starting point was to say, we have a fantastic facility that no other internal site on BBC has. You can actually upload and download videos as a central feature. Because the idea then was that people would start sharing, and swapping ideas. However, it wasn't in the first nine months being used as much as we would have liked. So what we decided to do was run a competition.” (Frank Ash)

As the site’s target audience was younger programme-makers, Frank decided that:

“We would try to run it on BBC3. So the key plan with this was to get Danny Cohen (then BBC 3 Controller) on side. Now, Danny effectively overlapped generations, he's only about 32 as far as I know. He was absolutely the right person to go to.” (Frank Ash)

“Also because BBC3 was an innovative channel, it dared to do stuff differently. It was for younger people and seemed to be the most creative of all the channels that we could go to. So it was kind of a perfect fit for us and we were delighted that Danny immediately saw the merits and benefits of the site and competition.” (Frank Ash)

In an interview with Danny Cohen later in this section, his interest in the project, and the reason behind that interest, will be examined in greater detail. Frank

summarized his interest as follows:

“He saw this as being really good for him because he also absolutely got that the idea, the philosophy, of competition was essentially for

everyone.” (Frank Ash)

“Once Danny was on board, we designed a home page for the

competition, and we announced it, it was quite well publicised, which we were pleased about. Then we sat back and worried, "Is anyone going to actually dare to put up their videos?” (Frank Ash)

I asked Frank why he thought this might be:

“The risk was, "Would anybody actually dare to put their video up into the public domain? Where it could be shot down in flames, by people making negative comments." (Frank Ash)

This doubt led to Frank questioning the appeal of the competition and taking a pessimistic view of how many entrants would upload a pitch video:

“Our expectations on how many entries would we get kept being revised downwards, I think we got down to about 30… We thought 30 would be good.” (Frank Ash)

However, this view did prove to be unnecessarily pessimistic:

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“On the last Friday before the entries were closed, we started to see a huge amount of activity on the site. And by the end of that day, we got 100 videos on that site, which I thought was... I mean that was actually one of the most exciting days, I was proud of the site.” (Frank Ash) At the time, the audience of BBC staff outside of the regular TV commissioning channels was of the order of 10,000. To get 100 entries seems broadly in line with 2009 levels of participation inequality, what was known as the “1-9-90 rule” (Nielsen 2006), i.e. out of a user-generated content-based online community of 10,000 one might expect 9,000 ‘lurkers’, 900 ‘intermittent contributors’ (or commenters) and 100

‘heavy contributors’ (or content creators). So at first glance, 100 entries might not seem like a huge number, but it was in line with frequently observed behaviour across the Internet.

Frank was very pleased with this result, and in subsequent comments, you get a sense of his underlying utopianism and the emancipatory way in which he viewed the aims of the moo project. He believed the project clearly demonstrated

colleagues outside of the programme making were capable of generating programme ideas, and wanted to do so:

“It said, "There are a lot of us out there who would dare to do this." And the most gratifying thing was that a lot of it came from non-programme-making areas. It's not just about the so-called ‘creatives’.” (Frank Ash) And that through the moo website and the competition online, social technology would afford them access to the ‘great and the good’ – the channel controllers – a view echoed by Danny Cohen in an interview later in this chapter:

“One of the things that excited Danny was that via this competition, he would see or, at the very least, get to know the creative people that he would never ever otherwise meet because the protocol and process that who actually gets to talk to the commissioners, let alone the controllers, is so difficult and is so constrained. Only the most senior people are allowed access into the controllers’ lives.” (Frank Ash)

So, the site and the competition held the potential to increase the network or social capital of successful participants which, according to Bourdieu, plays a significant part in shaping the habitus of an individual. Thus, it can be argued that the moo site might enable entrants to redefine their habitus in a way that was more favourable in terms of realising their programme-making ambitions.

“Danny discovered that the people at a very junior level not only had creative ideas, but actually when it came, when we did a short listing to pitch them, were brilliant at pitching as well and I think that he got really excited by that.” (Frank Ash)

Page 173 of 258 In this comment we can see how Frank is confirming how the competition

demonstrated a belief in ‘ubiquitous creativity’ (one of Banaji et al.’s ‘Rhetorics of Creativity (Banaji, Burn, and Buckingham 2006)) to be correct.

He then went on to explain how the competition would allow participants to develop knowledge of, and experience in, ‘the rules of the game’, which are an essential part of appearing to fit into a particular habitus:

“What we've replicated in terms of competition was that first meeting that everyone should have, to say to the controller or whoever it is, "Listen, I've got the germ of an idea. Do you think it is worth my while developing it?" (Frank Ash)

At the same time, the participants’ absence of knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’

meant that, in Frank’s opinion, their ideas were constrained by preconceived ideas of what can and cannot be done:

“What I think was really interesting was just how off the wall some of these ideas were. I think it's a danger that the programme makers in this organisation are playing safe. They're very, very much aware of, "Well we never do that. They have said they want ideas within this particular genre and that's what we'll concentrate on." (Frank Ash)

This was an absence he appeared to find quite refreshing:

“The good people who entered the competition had no idea of this way of working. So as far as they were concerned, any idea, however crazy or off the wall it was, was worth submitting and I think that was the beauty of the competition. You got real originality, some wonderfully

idiosyncratic, sometimes quite crazy ideas.” (Frank Ash)

A key feature of the moo project, in addition, to the ability to post and share videos and promos, was the ability for BBC colleagues to comment on those posts and shares. The stakeholders had the digitally utopian ambition, or vision, that

colleagues would offer constructive criticism of each other’s ideas and may even go on to build on them together and ultimately collaborate on programme making both online and offline.

“One of the really heartening things about the competition is just how much support those ideas got. There was a facility so that they could look at an idea and make comments, and a lot of the comments were incredibility positive and incredibility supportive. I think that was actually wonderful because that very much went back to what we had hoped right in the beginning of this project, the idea of people supporting each other.”

(Frank Ash)

Page 174 of 258 We then spoke about what had happened to the finalists in the competition (six competitors got the chance to pitch to Danny Cohen, BBC3 Controller):

“I have to say this is slightly disappointing to me and in a way harks back to some of the worst aspects of the BBC. That Danny picked three of the ideas and wanted them to be further developed. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of those ideas has really, really moved on that much.” (Frank Ash)

At the time of this interview, it was the case that there had not been much progress, however subsequently, two of the finalists were able to progress their ideas

significantly, and they are interviewed later in this chapter. However, this part of the interview is nevertheless interesting as shows how Frank realised that the finalists needed practical support on every step of their journey:

“And I think there was a slight sadness that perhaps the people that Danny went to felt that this was a sort of duty that they were doing, rather than really giving it support that I would have wanted. I do get a sense that Danny wasn't, unfortunately, able to manage that process. He was very busy and quite frankly, he handed on those three people to the people that he thought might be interested in having to develop those ideas.” (Frank Ash)

And perhaps more tellingly, he hints at the ‘habitus with habitus’ of BBC television programme-makers within the wider BBC:

“Maybe a lack of time, but it may also, who knows, but slightly perhaps this idea of, "Why should I, an exalted program maker, worry about somebody from financial services. He's got this idea which I'm not really keen on myself. Therefore, why should I bother?"

A channel controller saying, "This is good," doesn't necessarily get through that.” (Frank Ash)

(My emphasis). Here we can clearly see how organisational and hierarchical power are insufficient to push through an idea on their own. Ideas need active promotion and the buy-in of staff at all levels in order to proceed. This resistance here was not active or overt, but a more passive form, exercised through a reluctance to engage with the idea using accepted forms of organizational discourse and process.

Later interviews in this case study will demonstrate how this view was held more widely in the BBC, and how it felt for two of the successful finalists to experience this passive resistance first hand.

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12.4.1 Interview Summary – Frank Ash part two

12.4.1.1 How has this interview helped answer the research question?

This interview explained how a competition with access to advice from BBC commissioners and the opportunity to pitch to a channel controller was devised in response to research into usage of moo. The competition was run on BBC3 as that was considered more relevant to the younger staff using moo, and Danny Cohen, BBC 3 Controllers was keen to use social media to broaden his network and reach.

This competition was considered a success and attracted participation in line with that expected on the Internet at large. Entrants from outside traditional programme-making areas also contributed ideas, and many of these were of a high quality, including a finalist.

12.4.1.2 Is there any further original contribution?

Over and above the research questions, the interview also showed how just opening a channel to commissioners through social media was not enough to ensure access.

Inexperienced participants needed help navigating the BBC’s power structures. A Channel Controller saying “This is good.” Is not sufficient to cut through that.

12.4.1.3 My Reflections

This interview considered the decision to run a programme ideas competition with BBC3 to drive up the usage of the site, and demonstrated how the competition was successful in so far as participation was similar to what might be expected based on the 1:9:90 ‘rule’ for the ratio of contributors to ‘lurkers’ on social platforms (Nielsen 2006). A possible explanation for this success in increasing contribution could be that the prize in the competition – an opportunity to pitch to a channel controller with the possibility for a programme idea taken into development was directly aligned with the everyday lives (de Certeau 1984) and career aspirations of the junior BBC staff it was aimed at.

The interview then provided evidence of stakeholders’ desire for an emancipatory effect from the project – namely increasing the cultural and network capital of the competition participants.

However, Frank also started to provide a feel for the habitus within habitus of BBC programme-making and how a lack of knowledge of the ‘rules of the game’

(Bourdieu 1984) or what de Certeau would call ‘implicit principles’ (de Certeau 1984, p.53) could stand in the way of the success of the competition winners.

Page 176 of 258 This will be considered in more detail in the interviews with the competition winner and runner up which follow the interviews with other senior BBC stakeholders in the project.

12.5 Reflection on action – Interview with BBC Creative