Reframing the conversation around content | WE ARE Pi & Boiler Room | OnBrand '18

[Music] hello everybody lovely to see you all today today so we're talking about the c-word content which we all overuse but often don't think about necessarily what we mean when we say that and for Stephen and I as publishers and perhaps not straight marketing people it's come to represent a very different word for us so we're going to talk about project that we did together they kind of reframed the word content and kind of approached it from an audience fest kind of model so to start off with it's probably worth talking about content in general and how it's used and perhaps asking a few home truths about it we're living in an era not just a fake news but I think fake views as well often we judge our content just by the visa it's had but don't really question what that means or the emotional impact that has on an audience itself as opposed to where it fits in the Machine you know the reality is we often pray not only do we pay to create content but we actually pay people to view that as well and when they view it they're actually annoyed by it they skip it after five seconds is that kind of the content that we really want to be putting all of our energy behind I'm not entirely sure yet like everything that we do is deemed to be successful we we create our own metrics our own benchmarks and and yeah like we're not actually measuring whether or not a content really resonates or has a lasting effect to our audience or the to the people that we're trying to reach and nothing we can't nothing we create can be a failure at publishers like failures kind of like something that we do a lot because of the consistency of content that we create but it also creates one of biggest opportunities for us to kind of learn derive insights optimize and it's probably one of our best tools it's our greatest asset but what's weird is in an era of adblock our permission to fail especially in the branded space is becoming even less the metrics are going down completion rates are going up because the size of videos are going down and the timings of them are going down so in reality how can we learn anything about the content we make if we're not allowed to fail and the f-word isn't really something that we embrace more regularly shouldn't we balance subjective individual opinions with the desires of our audience of millions from a career I've always worked for brands that kind of drive the cultural narrative through leveraging individuals editors writers music curators brands like boiler and for free advice have this power it's a kind of like really influenced culture but for it to be really successful you have to marry that with insights and the ability to kind of like shape that content to make it relatable to people even outside of your ecosystem and I think making it relatable to the masses is what makes content stick so think for us we just wanted to change the way that perhaps we talked about content but also the model around it maybe we should balance our own subjective opinions with that of our audience and if we put what audiences want to watch first something interesting could come about and that's how kind of Steven and I always based calm conversation since we've known each other you know how about creating stuff that people actually want to watch I mean at the end of the day defiant ones is a strange mixture the dr.dre documentary on Netflix which kind of has a whole episode that talks about his own brand it feels totally genuine and it was marketed at his editorial and it's something that people wanted to watch why not create that rather than create the commercial break why not create that instead of the content that people want to skip that's an annoyance that ad in the days of thumb away from being ignored forever in this era it doesn't really matter where it comes from as brands you guys have a platform you have the funding you have the right to be able to tell stories to drive social movements to create culture in a way that resonates beyond 5 10 15 30 seconds good is good and bad is bad bad is really bad guys and audiences know that so I kind of said this at a start but we should have given you a full disclaimer we're not ad people maybe that makes us a little bit naive in some respects but it also means that we've had careers built on audience's reactions to things perhaps not necessarily clients I began my career at UK broadcaster channel four I programs kind of late-night TV and also launched the Strand called random acts again I was at the kind of mercy of the ratings schedule and then as kind of time moves on I I started a video division of Dazed and Confused and also with a nowness again kind of reacting to metrics and bringing you can I do the curation alongside kind of audience metrics to kind of program a broad range of stuff across arts and culture I met Stephen advice when I moved in kind of ran IDs video channel we grew it to become the biggest youth fashion publisher on YouTube again by listening to our audience and really challenging what content meant for that channel and for that brand before moving to Amsterdam where I've just started PI studios I started my career on television as well at MTV at the time I was in advertising kind of merging advertising and content and reframing in a way that made it relevant to youth audiences then I moved on to vice and ID where I met Ravi where I doubled their audience through kind of using insight absolutely but also discovering that actually all these like stereotypes you hear about what young people will and won't read what they care about etc etc pretty much not true and leveraging their passions are activism so social change to really derive engagement and create narratives that stretch kind of like beyond what you would expect from an ID or a vice then most recently I spent my time at lad Bible transforming it from clickbait social publisher land a little bit with sexism to a platform that has recently created some of the most impactful social change campaigns in the world with you okay mate they change the narrative around mental health and at the same time shifting perception of what a brand like lab Bible could do and most recently with the trash aisles which this year peaked up eight con lions creating real movement around plastics in the ocean and leveraging talent like Al Gore and Judi Dench to make plastic in the ocean in front of mines in front of young people all over the world and now on that boiler room and at boiler room where a live music broadcaster entrenched in underground music culture but music is the foundation for activism for culture for fashion for the arts and we're really excited to kind of leverage our impact in terms of communicating people in real life we throw 400 events every year through broadcast but also through storytelling and redefining what content means because content doesn't necessarily mean one thing it should be consumed wherever people are and creating a platform that can really help facilitate and drive that so we're just two ethnic minorities driven to change the narrative this is us last week so I guess for us like let's be honest like most times and like nine out of ten times or the only colour in a room you look around all these people driving all these big media narratives and a lot of the times are not really reflecting our experience and even when they are trying to sometimes it's not necessarily authentic so we're using our influence to see how we can I guess champion culture in a way and content in a way that is different to all the alternatives totally I think at the end of the day the content that we are making isn't just driven by the brands or their platforms we work for it's driven by a personal desire to actually change you know the way the media landscape is fulstone so for me a boiler room that presents a really interesting opportunity we have access to the super engaged audience entrenched in underground culture actually these are probably the most influential people all over the world creating music and culture but there is a massive opportunity to kind of use that to kind of leverage it to work with brands but also to create our own social movements and narratives so for me I've kind of got like three main goals as chief content officer one is to redefine content and the way people consume it meaning that content doesn't have to be just the film just the TV show it could be something you look at own Instagram stories and it feels genuine and authentic and interesting and not an ad or it could be a real-life installation at a at an institution like Somerset House so basically shifting what content could mean also beyond that I'm looking to kind of like really drive our strong brand equity to create narratives that counteract the things that are happening in media today and we'll talk about that in relation to our campaign and then also as well like really leveraging our engaged ecosystem to create IP franchises and content that then can live elsewhere so stuff that can then sit on a streaming platform in a cinema in a real life situation and I guess taking instead of media brands being tied to a platform what if brands were just brands that reflected a culture and identity of a collective of young people so while Stephens taking over the world in London I moved to Amsterdam to work with we our PI and agency here to start up an entertainment division called PI Studios again driven just like Steven was to kind of reframed and out-of-round content but with brands this time and taking all of our editorial know-how an audience first approach and work authentically with brands to identify the messages they could really tell in a unique way and so far it's been really successful we've worked with wetransfer who we work with artists like Bjork and ASAP rocky to kind of create really authentic original entertainment right through the likes of Nick on and it's been a really interesting journey because you know you have to be trilingual you have to speak the language of editorial the language of brands in terms of strategy but then also the language of insight in terms of the tastemakers too it's been an interesting journey and whilst we've been in London and Amsterdam we hadn't stopped talking at all in fact we kept on you know butting heads and also kind of sharing the same old stories in terms of you know this audience first model isn't happening often enough when it came to brand so we said hell let's just try and show people how that could work and we began to dream up well what would a kind of content campaign look like if we put our to kind of companies together so we started off talking about immigration immigration is kind of Hot Topic all over the world at the moment instigated by things that are happening in politics in countries in Western countries all over the world but I think the interesting thing around that is the media coverage around it's so sensationalists and it just did not feel reflective of the experiences that I have in London the experiences that I had growing up and actually just the impact and the power that make multicultural societies really interesting and great and through this kind of ID we thought wouldn't it be interesting to use music something that our audience is really passionate about really interested in really diverse audience and actually use that as the foundation of all these other narratives to basically champion the idea that like migration has been that has been driving music and culture in the okay especially for last 30 years so whilst we're having this conversation Elliot this year the Windrush scandal really went out of control in the UK for those of you who don't know the Windrush generation were the first Caribbean immigrants to come to post-war Britain on the SS Windrush in the 50s and have been a kind of stalwart of British society over the last four generations yet their position in British society was being challenged and in fact some were being deported based on kind of dodgy paperwork in a in an era where certain documentation wasn't there which is impacting a young generation in real time so we felt with all of that stuff happening in the conversation were we were doing why not create the ultimate show that tackle this topic head-on but not from the mass media narrative but from the people directly affected with it and we came up with an idea called migrant sound a four part series that chartered the four generation journey of wind washed migrants as they changed the face of British music and pop culture internationally here's a quick clip from them the British was ruling the maker we were under colonialization they are the world war two they had a lot of rebuilding to do so they invited West Indian from all the islands to come here and work when they arrived here they saw signs on doors has no block no dogs or Irish there's soldiered food that put their heads down works hard you haven't just come in to do nothing you've come here to build a better life fast forward to 2018 when the scandal broke I remember my mom calling my nanny to make sure that she had her papers in order like a lot of people were scared but it's ongoing people are still being affected by this [Music] being here under sufferation racial discrimination we are to unite to be strong the music is one of the most important thing that could ever happen to this country as far as community relationships are concerned so beyond kind of a four-part documentary series which we activated as platform agnostic meaning that it lived on our YouTube we did Instagram story IG TV Facebook across the platform we wanted to create something that would last a lot longer to create kind of like a movement and to really use our platform and our audience to subvert this media narrative that has been going on in the UK for decades we created a campaign called system and this is a snapshot of what we did [Music] [Music] we did a multi-platform campaign with an installation at Somerset House that lasted a month which was meant to kind of represent like the anti blackness in media we created a series of events each week champion a different type of migrant sound and inviting our whole audience to experience it in real life we created an editorial series that put a counter-narrative around the Windrush conversation having people directly affected writing those stories and giving them a platform to be able to kind of like really tell their stories and and we did this documentary series you know something that we wanted to be bold and honest and we wanted to basically leverage it to really have conversation with our audience to drive a narrative to have people kind of discuss the things that we I knew from like being in the office that people were really interested in and passionate about and but we also wanted to do different to say a traditional broadcast or a traditional linear media channel we wanted to do in a way that was genuinely reflective of the youth we know young people in today's climate are very jaded so we wanted a story that had optimism that felt youthful in bold and was interesting so that we could tell the story in a way that didn't feel preachy but also we kind of wanted people to be inspired as well [Music] you are sequester now tell me about when you first came what brought communities together was the racism because we have to unite to be strong because those days a black man couldn't go out on his own because you'll find a gang of Teddy Boys and trailing with our I expect nothing like that we didn't expect nothing like that because remember you know whether were in Jamaica we never see no poor white man well when we came to England no we realized that there was poor white man poor Ellen even we we disagreed on a veteran shop like mr. Valjean a peaceful guy with a mechanic a la violence this knowledge it was not office wagon innovative shop odd years reward him I'll tell him said well John mr. Wagoner vive aquí blemish races than the Baptist our little shop no no listen sew them up they even go to one night down on the white wire then we are till Papa to us and then when the pub to us no roulade impossible bro kima Marcia this is a large on the two weeks was run planning I made with revenge not because a vengeance is mine secular enlargen get a machete Alicia involves on went back up there with the machete in that Lancome on when the pop close one joins us with fire he damaged our world pattern he was put away for 25 years I'm trying to show you said all racism can create a tree that's why I between the music and culture our history so strong that is the power of Jamaica music so when talking to a young audience you have to make the past feel current but we also wanted to correct the story all the way through right through to now and let young people know that the the music they were creating and the music they listened to had this deep heritage that was rooted in such a newsworthy topic as we really wanted to point to the legacy of the windrows generation and showcase that in a really interesting way and we went all across the UK to find amazing artists who would have they knew it or not were influenced by the contribution of this amazing generation will show a click quick clip of that too [Music] [Music] so when Stephen and I were talking to tell those kind of gnarly stories that go to places that a lot of people are afraid of we had to have a diverse crew a diverse director and then we also have to have the cast that reflected that and I think you can watch the series on YouTube and on boiler room at the moment there's a real gentleness and authenticity to those stories because they allowed the people directly affected by this crisis to tell the story in their own words in the most creative way possible and I think as a result it really resonated with an audience and it it transformed that see content words to mean something much more cultural so for us system was a massive success like we used it as a opportunity to kind of like champion voices within our audience but also to kind of like drive what the boiler room brand should mean to our audience as well we built it around kind of like editorial craft storytelling events music and kind of like took a marketing approach to the content we created content for different platforms and we we wanted to make sure that however we distribute that we would try and do things in kind of like an original way the fact that we would do an installation at somerset house and kind of like had this narrative in kind of a place that you wouldn't really expect it really kind of speaks to like how we wanted to basically subvert all kind of institutions and you know and we and we did everything from even putting our content to like chicken shops in Brixton so it it was kind of like taking the opportunity and finding ways to kind of like tell the stories and take it to the community and through that a new kind of content something that encompasses long-form storytelling social media events installation art music something that we really want to continue doing and it's something that brands can really kind of like help us amplify totally and I think that's what we realized I mean the C word means something different to everyone but for us and from of a deeply emotional place is about those deep stories that are told in innovative ways that have a lasting impact on the audience's that watch them and can actually change people's lives not interrupt their day or their feed in a way that they don't want to so Stephen and I thanks for listening Steve and I are around to chat afterwards love to hear your opinions too thanks to your time thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]