Picture This: a cross-platfrom success?

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 by Andy Bell

31 January, 2008

I’ve just returned from Crossing the Void in Bristol. There was an interesting session on Picture This, a cross-platform photography project.

The discussion was between Preloaded (the web producer) Renegade Productions (the TV producer) and Channel 4 (the commissioner). Here’s some notes:

  • “I had hoped the web and the TV would be more integrated” said Alan Hayling from Renegade. This frustration was echoed throughout the team. He said that budget had been part of the problem but also there had been a conservatism on the part of the TV production crew. He would fight that harder next time.
  • 11.4% of web sessions are 30 minutes or longer. The average session includes 14 page views. These stats are helping when Channel 4 considers whether to recommission.
  • A community web site is a supportive environment. A modern TV show is conflict driven. It was hard to reconcile this tension. Flickr, who provided the web infrastructure, had to be handled with care. The TV show ran counter to their corporate belief that “no photo is better than another”.
  • Flickr were keen to keep all branding and traffic off their core site. They care passionately about their community and wanted their members to have to deliberately opt-in.
  • Preloaded repeatedly iterated designs with target users (in “lab conditions”). One surprising discovery is that many potential users were intimidated by Flickr and felt their work is somehow “not worthy”. Armed with this insight, Preloaded focused on making the website approachable, constructive and friendly.
  • The plan for one sequence was to film the judges and the mentors reviewing web photos, and to incorporate this footage into the TV show. This didn’t work well in the edit. So it evolved into this budget being spent paying those people to comment directly on photos on the website. This proved popular.

On the train home everyone agreed that Katz, the organiser, is a great “curator of people”. In particular, it was inspiring to meet Monterosa (mass-participation TV) and Team Rubber (viral marketing).