I had the honor to be among the speakers of the Cartoon Digital conference in Luxembourg last week. Here’s my presentation:
My presentation at Cartoon Digital
Strategy by design
There is a very popular quote by Maslow that cautions you not to over-rely on a single tool or skill:
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow 1966
But what if you find yourself in a leadership position, attempting to drive change in your organisation? If you are trying to establish a uniform approach to the situation your company is in, because you might have found out that torx screws and staples will not get you where you need to go?
Then it might actually make sense to hide the screwdrivers, rivet guns and glue tubes. If all you leave your team with is a hammer, they’ll start treating most problems like nails – and all you need to do is be sure that you have picked a winning strategy.
Put the audience first
With the release of iOS 9 there’s quite a buzz around Apple enabling content blocking in Safari. Many media companies are concerned about the future, but John Gruber says it quite well when he writes:
It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy.
The pursuit of short term gains has put an entire industry in a predicament, now that the audience is fed up with how they are being treated. A good lesson for any kind of business.
You shouldn’t think about trends. Except when you should.
Recently I was part of a discussion around how to best bring the products of Finland’s creative industries to the global market. One issue we discussed were trends and their impact on success. In my opinion, you should not follow trends, but you need to be aware of them and exploit them if it is in your best interest.
A simple example from our discussion was Nordic Breads. As it says on their web page, the founder’s “passion for bread baking extends beyond his dreams.” This is a guy who would never give up making bread, no matter the trends. However, the company has been able to really capitalize on the ‘local food’ trend in New York by using locally grown rye. Now, you need flour to make bread anyway, but if you can pivot your idea to align with a trend… you might have a winner!
To make it in the entertainment world, you need to believe in your product with an intensity bordering on insanity, in order to plow through all of the obstacles you will face. You cannot change your product to fit every passing fad, as it might extinguish that belief. But can you look at it through a new perspective and align it with a trend?
Why truths are dangerous
We all operate under a set of assumptions and think of certain realities as pretty much self-evident. Imagine an investor: In their world some assets are considered ‘safer’ than others. State securities by large developed nations are considered to be among the safest investments you can make. Their reputation is based on past performance, and the idea that these states will never default on their loans.
Now, this might be true for the short and even medium term, but for how long can the investor afford to just check the mental box and say ” this truth will not changethis security will never default”? This is of course the reason that a prudent investor will adjust their portfolio when there are shifts in the economy that can be seen as impactful to the investments.
And in exactly the same fashion we should always examine our business models, our products and the ways we work. How long will the growth of mobile last? Will Youtube ‘always’ be the video site with the most traffic? Did you know that the iPad has only been around for 4 years? What will come after it? If you are not alert, you might be left with a ‘bad security’…
Why multitasking is bad for you
I’m currently reading ‘Critical Chain‘ by Eli Goldratt, which is a book on project management disguised as a business novel. It is interesting enough to warrant its own blog post later, but I couldn’t keep myself from citing it on this particular subject right away. I’m an opponent of multitasking (although I don’t always manage to practice what I preach), and here’s another reason why (images adapted from the book):
Suppose you are working on three things A, B and C, and each takes 10 days (or hours, or minutes) to complete. Your lead time for each task is 10 days, right?
Now, what happens to the time you need to check these tasks off your to do list, if you interrupt each task when you’re half way through?
It doubles!
So here you go, another good reason to stay focused, demand prioritization and stop multitasking.
Is your scale big enough?
Back in school, my arts teachers often said that the things I drew were on too small a scale. In hindsight I think I was probably too shy to commit to a larger drawing on a big piece of paper. Fiddling away on a tiny picture felt safer.
About a month ago I signed up for a course in clay sculpting, and the first assignment was to model a bit of popcorn, but on a hugely magnified scale (see the picture on the left for a work-in-progress shot). I couldn’t believe the fun I had and the insights I got into three dimensional sculpting, all of which would have been lost if I’d started on too small a scale.
The reason I’m writing about this here is that in my opinion this translates well into the content develper’s world. Please note that big doesn’t have to mean size or budget. Here I mean big in terms of ambition level and disruptiveness. These are some of the benefits from setting your project’s ambition scale big enough:
1.) You plan big enough. It is a simple truth, that if your ambition level is low, your project will only ever reach moderate success at best. Dream big, plan big and then go for an ambitious execution. Your chances of succeeding will be that much greater.
2.) You see the interrelationships more clearly. Just as with the different masses on a sculpture, by doing things big enough you realise how the different parts of your project fit or don’t fit together, what needs emphasizing more and what can be trimmed. If your development approach is too small, fewer of the problems inherent in creating any successful big property will become apparent.
3.) Others will notice what you did. If you create something big, you’ll make a splash that people will notice. You don’t have to launch your project from space, but doing something ambitiously disruptive is sure to get you noticed!
Why production people make kick-ass project managers
Are filmmakers (in the broadest sense of the word) just particularly pragmatic, or why do I get a sense that many of the issues discussed in project management research are basics 101 stuff for production people?
As part of my current studies I just read an article from the MIT Sloan Management Review called ‘What Great Projects Have in Common’ (online version here). It struck me, that any decent film or TV show production has to tick all the seven boxes to succeed – and projects like that are completed daily around the world!
The common factors according to the article are:
1.) That the project involves a unique competitive advantage (read: compelling plot and characters).
2.) That it starts with a long period of project definition, including a powerful vision, clear need and defining the best approach (development, anyone?).
3.) That what the authors call ‘great projects’ also create a revolutionary project culture (happens in most assembled-for-this-project-only productions).
4.) That a ‘great project’ needs a highly qualified project leader who is unconditionally supporteded by top management (read: producer and director).
5.) That ‘great projects’ maximize use of existing knowledge (animation productions re-using assets, plug-ins etc all the time).
6.) That project teams have fast problem-solving capability and the ability to adapt to changes (any production team that does not fit this bill is dead in the water).
7.) That a team of a ‘great project’ has a strong sense of partnership and pride (even the smallest audiovisual productions are made by teams that take great pride in their handiwork. Which is exactly why I love this industry).
It all kind of reminded me of this Steven Soderbergh interview with Vulture, where he talks about how the US government should have given the job of handling the hurricane Katrina evacuations to a movie studio.
Are you scared once every day?
I like the saying “Do one thing every day that scares you”. It is a great reminder to keep pushing yourself to do things that are outside your comfort zone. The rewarding rush you get after facing a fear is almost addictive.
But what would that saying mean in relation to digital content? It would seem that any producer or creative, especially in this realm, is constantly pushing themselves. But are we really?
Is coming up with another episode script all that scary? Is developing one more pre-school live-action IP all that radical? Sure, we need to do the more familiar work as well, but can we include one thing in there that scares us? Every day?
How about pitching an animated show for senior citizens? Or a kids IP with the plan to never have a 360 strategy around it, and make that the unique selling proposition? Ideas that scare us might lead to answers; answers to questions we didn’t even know to ask!
A prototype app is cheaper than a pilot
Two weeks ago at Kidscreen I met a producer who pitched me her project in form of an app. The interesting thing about this was, that the heart of the IP would be an animated series – but she said herself that “it is cheaper to make a prototype app than a pilot”.
For her project the approach actually worked, as the app related a lot of the look and feel of the idea, and included action elements that would occur in the series as well. I doubt that this approach can be employed for most projects, as it does not do justice to a deeper storyline, but found it a great fresh approach to pitching a series.