 I'm very pleased now to welcome Andrew Caspari, who glories in the title of Head and Speech Radio and Classical Music, Interactive BBC. But he is known to me because many years ago he was a commissioning editor for English and actually commissioned the World Service programmes on which I did such dirty radio. So we have a history, we've forgiven each other. And now he's here to talk to us about History of the World in 100 Objects, the groundbreaking project collaboration between the BBC and the British Museum, Andrew. Thank you, they do have a saying in the BBC that the longer your job title gets the nearer you get to the exit door, but let's hope that's not true at least for now. What I thought I would try to do is talk about history of the world in 100 objects, but try and set it in the context of how that might work in the digital space as we see it and what lessons we could learn for arts organisations going forward. I could actually start with a treatise about this, which is the logo, and actually just how to describe visually the partnership. And even that in terms of working in partnership, the BBC's logo, the British Museum's logo, how do they sit together? How do we come up with a typeface that isn't either BBC nor British Museum? How do we come up with a selection of British Museum objects and then change their colours in order to make this work effectively as a piece of marketing? This actually was as a piece of work that we did together, and I think actually came up with an agency with something that was fantastic and worked on every incarnation of the project. From the smallest museum to those huge pull-ups across the Great Court of the British Museum to the entrance of the BBC, but actually working together to bring all the different interests of that all in itself was interesting. So who's this? This is a difficult man, it was Lord Wreath, described by many as an extremely difficult, even at times unpleasant man, who had one stupendously good idea, which was the BBC, and he described its purpose as to inform, educate and entertain, and however hard people like me and Peter and others in the BBC tried to come up with something to replace it, they have failed to come up with anything better in describing the purpose of the BBC than to inform, educate and entertain. And none of what we're talking about this afternoon in terms of the BBC or in terms of many of your organisations gets us away from that purpose. The fact you have different technologies, the fact that you have different places to put your programmes or your things doesn't change your purpose. The point about entertain is important. Some people would try to devalw the word entertainment because, you know, we're publicly funded public service and all the rest of it. Just remember that when you go out and survey the Radio 4 audience and you say, why do you listen to Radio 4? The thing they put on top of the list is entertain. The good news is that for 10 million people a week listening to Melvin Bragg talking about string theory at 9 o'clock on a Thursday morning constitutes entertainment. Do not limit your view as to what entertainment might be. One of the things we've been able to do in the digital space is find out ways of putting our programmes into spaces where people might not otherwise consume them. So this is the New Desert Island Discs website. This has got the data for 2,800 castaways so far and 500 programmes that you can download and take away. Three million programmes have been downloaded in the first six weeks. The power of this is the power of the programmes. Yes, it looks nice, it's quite easy to get around, but it's the programmes that people really want. We've done something very simple with the rethlectures. So you can't just listen to Aung San Suu Chi. You can download at least one rethlecture of everyone since 1948 and the entire series from 1970 onwards. And again, putting the programmes into different places is really what we're about and making them findable. Arts organisations, this is the PROMS website for this year. And again, there's a section there under the grizzly bit about buying some tickets, which again is about where can we put our programmes? How can we make the basics for any arts organisation which we are when we're doing the PROMS? What's on, where's it on, how can I find it, where do I get a ticket? How can we make that a bit more stickable and a bit more engaging? How can we help that decision? Well, the thing that we've got is programmes. It is possible to make pieces of audio or video about your thing. And hopefully in the skills that we're able to transfer, learn how to make that just a bit more interesting than this is what's on and this is where you can get to it. The other thing that I think we should all bear in mind, each of us, when we talk about our digital proposition, we get very, very excited about our site, about our URL. The BBC site is huge, bbc.co.uk. It's vast. Actually, it's very small, really, in terms of the rest of the internet. So we're all tiny. So the crucial lesson from history of the world and from what we're doing with all these is where else do you put it? So there is Aung San Suu Chi's wreath lecture on iTunes and you find it next to Ibiza or Made in Chelsea or under a television programme about coast. The thing is that taking that material and putting it in places where people might be most likely to consume it is in some ways even more important than what you do in your own space. Whilst remembering the material you're creating, whatever space you're creating it in, you're still creating it with your audience in mind. So not forgetting that actually these Radio 4 people are sort of perfectly normal Radio 4 shaped people who go to stately homes, who read Saga magazine, who like university challenges. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with targeting that. Just the fact you're putting it in the digital space doesn't mean that you don't do that with some sense of what do they do. And remember they're probably not going to find it just by going to your URL. Google, Facebook, Amazon, these places are probably more important than some. So we did a little bit of research just to find out about our audience in the Royal Wedding. We're looking into what might we be able to do around history in our future projects thinking about history of the world. So in looking, asking people about what they wanted from the Royal Wedding coverage, we also asked them about how they saw this as a historic event. The men have a slightly stronger interest in history, might be of use, particularly older men. He has an interest in history, also has an interest there in a younger woman. What an extraordinary, what does the telephoto lens do? And children. And one of the things we did with history of the world was try and appeal across the ranges. Having got this delicious idea of 100 programs about 100 objects presented in a very simple way by a rather brilliant man in his museum, how could we take that further? And the first other organization in the BBC on board were children's when they created Relic. So really trying to appeal with the content to the sort of basic things that everybody wants. What's it to do with me? Who do you think you are changed the way in which quite a lot of people look to personality and history? Trying to appeal on an emotional level. So that was Warhorse. But also the boldness and the scale of the proposition of history of the world. Everybody sort of knew, well yeah, they're serious about that. We had a long debate about whether it was a history of the world or the history of the world. And I'm pleased that we did settle on the indefinite article. But nevertheless it was a big statement and I think we need that in a crowded media world. And certainly when we're working in partnership together, working together on something that in the end is going to be quite small, is going to struggle to cut through. Now I'm going to try technologically to find a video just to give you a bit more of a sense of what history of the world was about. Because it was a lot more once we got the original idea than just 100 programs about 100 objects. So this is just a little bit of history of the world adding hundreds of objects to the website and playing host to thousands of people who want to share their objects and their stories. BBC teams have joined forces with these museums running events across Britain. We're going to be talking to some people who earlier on today went down to Northampton Museum and Art Gallery to go and find out during the half term what a history of the world is all about. Notes and loads of people on the bus, as you can probably hear in the background, it's quite a hubbub going on here today. I'm making my way up to the… Over 500 other museums are now partners in a history of the world, adding hundreds of objects to the website and playing host to thousands of people who want to share their objects and their stories. BBC teams have joined forces with these museums running events across Britain. We are going to be talking to some people earlier on today went down to the north Hampton Museum and Art Gallery to go and find out during the half term what a history of the world is all about. Loads and loads of people on the bus as you can probably hear in the backgrounds is quite a hubbub going on here today, I am making my way up to the rear of the bus, where the computer downloading section is, where people are actually downloading their objects. And Russell Cains is with us and he is the director of Saxons Estate Agency. Felly, we've been able to come up with the old leases, dating back as early as 1745, relating to 106 High Street, which is quite fascinating. I thought we'd bring them along for you guys to have a look at. Over 120 history of the world public events were held over the past year, and BBC Suffolk was just one of the places that played host to the project. Hello and welcome to BBC Radio Suffolk's A History of the World Day at Ipswich Museum. Throughout the day, the BBC Radio Suffolk team helped people upload their objects onto the history of the world website. There was all sorts of things, there was cups and sauces, there was a toilet roll holder, crew-its and many more things. The curators from Ipswich Museum were on hand to give people expert advice, including David Jones, who was fascinated by an old timer. A gentleman who brought it in knew where it came from exactly. It came from a factory called Beats or Factory. It's not just about interesting objects, it's very much about great stories. Like this, perhaps seemingly unremarkable programme for an athletics event that turned out to be just that little bit special. My late husband got hold of it because he was a member of the Oxford University Athletics Squad. He was helping with the field organisation. It contains the autographs of Chris Chatterway, Chris Bracia and Roger Bannister himself. Local BBC teams have made documentaries revealing what their region has given the world. Archrides was clearly a very enlightened and liberal kind of guy because he wouldn't employ kids well under the age of six, would he? Now this is the first ever blueprint of a jet engine. And this was it, Thomas Newcommon and Manga from Dartmouth, who started the Industrial Revolution. We've been taken to the highways and byways in Northern Ireland. I took a bus from Derry to Belfast, gathering the stories and the crack along the way and our journey to the Ulster Museum. There, the objects were examined by museum experts and uploaded onto the website. Johnny, first of all, how old do you think it is? I think it is over 200 years. Children have been enjoying their own history of the world on television as they attempt to crack the challenges of relic, the guardians of the museum, in class using a history of the world lesson plan. Choose one of the objects to go onto the history of the world website. Yeah, you've got like this shift so you can like do the capsules. And as soon as I saw it I thought it was an artillery show. Each number is embroidered with a national flag. And what if they're flying in day or night? I think they've really enjoyed it. It's interesting they chose the object which had a personal story. And the museums across the country following hundreds of unique relic trails. She had to run around the museum trying to find these objects all these different places. And it was like so much fun. Our partnership with Antiques Roadshow was a particular success with thousands of people taking part, uploading their objects, and enjoying the shared sense of ownership of a project that's touched every corner of the land. On TV, on radio, online and on the road. A history of the world has been a journey of discovery, helping us learn about people, places and things. And we've learned that sometimes it's the most ordinary objects that can tell the most extraordinary stories. So did anybody go there? If you do all that work, you hope that people do. Well fortunately to date because it's all still there, all the programs are still there, more than 2.6 million visits. Referals from outside, we really wanted this project to take us to beyond the sort of standard radio for audience. So the number of referrals from outside was important. And actually five minutes ago is pretty good going. And six pages means six objects and we were trying to make objects, the heroes here. This is a boring old BBC graph. The only thing it really tells you is that the project went on for a long time. The bits at the top tell you that you need peaks. You've got to have some kind of big peak activity to get the interest. But the thing that really excited me was that we were bubbling along at 50,000 to 60,000 unique users every week in the UK, even when the programs were not on air. And the message I would give out of this is if you're doing big partnerships, either together or with the BBC, make sure they've got some kind of longevity to them. A big hit over one weekend may be more work than you want. Fortunately people quite liked it. The third one I put up there, we made a big change to the homepage. We created some lovely flash technology because we thought this was a lovely flash project so we needed to do something very flash. Actually the audience didn't like that. It was just something that just tells you very simply, what is it? Where do I go to find out more? So we ripped that up and started again. Actually it saved us a bit of money. But the important thing was to make that change really quickly and actually to change for something simpler. The permanence, the ability to make that material that people wanted, those programs portable. We thought at the beginning people would get the podcasts and then they'd get a bit bored. And actually what they did was they kept collecting more and more and doubtless filling themselves with what I call podcast guilt. I've got 85 on my iPod and I've only heard 35 of them and I'm feeling really bad about it. But what's good is that people are still downloading them now. So permanence and portability of the content. We got other people involved as you saw in the film, uploading their object. But perhaps one of the lessons is once you go into the public realm and ask people to take part in your project the things might not happen the way you want them to or the way you expect them to. We wouldn't have expected Mike Halewood's motorbike to be the most popular object on the site. Neither would we have expected the silk princess painting for the British Museum to be the most popular object. However, this one I could have predicted. Edith Bowman, Radio One presenter, uploaded her grandfather's flat cap and that was the most popular personal object on the site. It actually had a great story to it but what we were able to do was again to try to take this project to places to Radio One and other networks where you might not have expected it to go. We kept the British Museum right at the heart of it. You've got to start off somewhere and we started off with the 100 programs. The on-time bit I put up in there there's nothing like a broadcast deadline to focus the minds of the BBC, particularly our technologists and that's no disrespect to them but any technical people will always want to make it a little bit better and sometimes you've got to give it a deadline. The desire of people to participate and I think also working out in the partnership what do we each bring? They were about objects, we were about programs. We weren't about to tell them which objects or how to deal with the objects, how to present the objects but similarly we were able to work together with the museum to make the programs. And the realization that once you set this thing up once you put several thousand other objects people would go on journeys of their own. You can't define what people are going to do in the digital space. However, we thought we were going to struggle to get 60 museums involved. We actually ended up with 550 museums involved many after we launched. So we learnt quite a lot about museums and about arts organisations, about the enthusiasm to join in about the desire to find other platforms for their expertise but we also learned that we overestimated the digital capacity. The BBC is huge and sometimes quite intimidating I think at times we overestimate what other people can do. So it was important for us to learn that and it was also important for us to learn about the time needed. So I asked my colleague at the British Museum to ask what did they learn about the BBC. So these are things worth bearing in mind when you work with us. We're very good at talking, we're not very good at writing things down. This feels like my appraisal. We leave things quite late. Basically the BBC is driven by journalism and journalism is about the next bulletin for a lot of people and so there's a whole culture of us have grown up waiting for the next programme and not worrying about the one after that. But I'm pleased to be told that we did listen and we did respond but partnership within the BBC is much harder than you think. We bought together children's and nations and regions of the BBC and news and the web and so on and so forth. But actually the BBC is huge and sometimes you know that thing in the life of Brian about the people's front of Judea and the Judean people's front. There are times when the BBC can appear like that. When I worked on the today programme the biggest enemy was the world at one. We didn't mind what ITV were doing and the world service was tricky. We perhaps didn't go as global as we thought we would though about 11 million of the downloads are outside the UK. But the world service is going through a lot of changes at the moment for the BM. They had expectations that we couldn't fulfil. We really did want people to participate in this project and we worried hugely about what would be the quality of what we got. What would happen if we didn't get good objects? What would happen if we got lots of grandfather's toothbrushes from the First World War and nothing really interesting? Don't underestimate your audience's ability to come up with things that are really good. So it was unique and we did get a variety. We didn't get the quantity of participation. I think if you're driving at a participation project and your target is large numbers of people ask yourself really, really tough questions about how difficult will it be for people to participate. And certainly with this project it was probably more difficult for people to participate than we realised. But the degree to which people's participation can drive your core material, can make content for your organisation. We ended up making programmes about and we still are making programmes about objects that people uploaded to a history of the world. But the simplest participation, is to comment. If you think about your own participation, your own use of the internet, particularly in social media, it's about commenting and having conversations and arguing. And sometimes we create very flat things where we say, here, look at this. Here's a piece of marketing. Here's a nice picture of one of our nice objects in our nice museum. Here's a little piece about our theatre show. And actually people want to comment. They want to debate. That's what the space is increasingly being used for. So we ended up with a history of the world in 100 sheds. We have worried that that was somehow devaluing the glory of our British Museum Radio 4 participation. Fortunately not. Unfortunately it led to people taking the idea and interpreting it their own way. And similarly having conversations about it, the nature of which we couldn't control. Sometimes we tend in large organisations to want to control. And in this space you have to cede some of that control. I would say in social media we did less than we could have done and certainly all this is here. Nobody visits your Facebook page per se. What they do is they like your page and the material that is on your page appears for them. If you simply set your metric as how many people will go to my Facebook page you've sort of missed the point to Facebook. But we would have done and should have done more. And when you think we started scoping this project in 2008, 2009, we would do more now. Twitter by the way is not a marketing tool. It may be helpful to part of your marketing. But it's a conversation and an example of what we're doing. It gives people lots of organisations the chance to take part at once. But don't be afraid of controversy in these spaces. Controversy gets you noticed. And when we came to the 100th object I think we had learned some of those lessons through the year. By asking a really simple question what object would you put in a museum to represent today, we were able to get actually much higher levels of participation by making the question and the participation really simple. And the conversation we had about Didier Drogba's football shirt again took us into spaces we didn't expect to get to. So who ate all the pies? There's a Chelsea. Well you can't have everything right, can you? Is one of the biggest Chelsea fan sites. So did we change as a result? Well that's really for you to judge I think. But certainly a lot of thinking I'm just going to give you a hint to some of the thinking in the BBC. Partnerships defined by mutual benefit tended to be defined by rather simple metrics like we come in, we make something about your thing, your event. It goes out on our television or radio station and hopefully you get some visitors. Actually trying to make a deeper relationship and about the shared benefit. What do we bring to each other is probably a better way of going. The need to spend more time on these things. And real challenges for the BBC which guards its editorial control we must have editorial control. So how do you do that when you're working partnership with somebody else? Where do you have to loosen up and where do you draw your lines? And the history of the world started purely as a public service partnership. Nobody was making any money out of this. That really helped. And certainly as we all move forward and we're all shorter of money how we balance the public service with the commercial relationship. I think it's a challenge for all of us in this room and beyond. The British Museum said they changed the way we were to participate was new. And the fact that the people who were dealing with the stuff that's in the museum were actually now also the people who were engaging directly with the public was a new thing. And I think we can probably see that where with the marketing or digital communications people we think we sit there and some people over here sort of create events or create stuff. And now we're much, much closer together in this space. And they really started to look at some of the tools some of the infrastructure as a result of doing this. So very quickly I want to give you five things that I bet on going forward. I think there are five. The first one is the content. The C word which we prefer not to use really. People go to supermarkets to buy bananas not to look at nice shelves. What is there that people want? What have I got that people might want to consume? That people might want to watch? People might want to listen to? People might want to read? Sometimes we get very excited about the interface. They don't so. But in the end the interface is a means to consuming the stuff. The second one is navigation an aggregation which is what a Bill's favourite subjects is much better at talking about it than I am. But this is what I call content glut. This happens to be a reading room. How you find your way through it? How you find that stuff? How do we make programs our material findable by anybody and everybody and aggregatable by them? What spaces will they draw them together in? Working out what that is simply how you are going to label your material may be more important than the glory of your particular site interface or design. Definitely take a bet on social. In two or three years time we may all scratch our heads and say remember that Twitter thing? What a lark that was? Blimey whatever happened to that. But the notion that people will communicate in the digital space in real time on things and to the people they want to and to the wider world won't go away I would guess. And remember everybody's got a voice not just you. What I would say to young media students who say I want to get into the media they say how do I do it? I say we're going to create some. It's so much easier. So everybody has a voice. Definitely bet on mobile. We didn't do history of the world very well on mobile but if we did it again in future things we will need to. I'm not going to read all those facts out to you but I just bring this one out. Your iPhone is only 3.9% of the UK mobile market. So don't obsess about your iPhone app. Even if it might please your trustees. I'll probably get terrible trouble. You may well need something that works on an iPhone. You need something that works on mobile devices more broadly. This is a punt of mine about location. That device in your pocket can tell you where you are, knows where you are and you can be served the stuff that you want to find or the stuff you want to find out about according to where you are. I don't think we're particularly good at this yet but I think if you take a 5 year view this will become more and more important as a means of cutting through content glut. Definitely take a bet on multi-screen. Again we pretty much created history of the world around the desktop website. Now I think that we need to think about all our screens radio screens now. Radios will have far more pictures on them in future. Whether it's a tablet or whether it's a television or whether it's a phone doesn't really matter. But you need to try to create things such that they'll work on whatever piece of kit people like this have got. I showed this to some students the other day and they said, yeah we know who that is. But this is the way they live. And finally do bet on partnership. This is the man Sakiri lovers figurine. It's the oldest known representation of a couple making love. It was one of the more popular objects on the history of the world website. But definitely work on the basis of the more people you can work with the better chance you have of being bigger and more successful in this space. I hope some of that's helpful. Please ask Ann Barwick as time moves on. The other thing is have fun doing it. We did have an enormous amount of fun presenting 100 programs about 100 objects in the British Museum. Probably more fun and more entertainment that we thought we would have when we started. Thank you.