Landshare wins RTS Innovation Award

Can you spot which one is the award?

Last night Landshare won the RTS Innovation Award for User-generated Content. It was one of only six such awards given out (other winners included BBC iPlayer at over 100 times the budget of littl’ ol’ Landshare).

This is the 2nd of these annual awards. Last time out it was even better – Big Art Mob won the Mobile category, an inaugural winner alongside Flash Video (yes, the whole darn technology).

This year Landshare was nominated alongside Sexperience (in the same category), so I liked them 66% odds.

What the judges said: “The judges felt that the award should go to a project that they feel reinvents the viewer/user/programme maker relationship and which is making a fundamental difference to the way key issues of the moment can be addressed. A project whose success demonstrates as one judge put it “how television can make a difference”.”

Straying away from my own oeuvre, another very worthy winner was BBC Children’s marvellous Bugbears – think Monsters Inc meets Creature Comforts, used as a way to help children address&express difficult emotional subjects. It’s the work of Marc Goodchild (who was at our table – the Table of Triumph with its unique double gong status) and my old muckers Joe Elliot and Anthony Lilley of Magic Lantern (among others). I first saw it this time last year at Sheffield DocFest when I was doing a speaking gig on interactive documentary chaired by Paula LeDieu. Japhet (whose second name slips my ravaged mind) from Marc’s team at cBBC demoed it and I was instantly charmed.

Other awards went to the amazing BBC R&D bods who have such a world class heritage in broadcasting/media innovation, pretty much second to none. An honour to be among them.

 

Update 19.xi.09 BIMAs

Tonight Landshare won the BIMA (British Interactive Media Award) for Community Social Media (as well as being nominated in the Special Achievement Award: Viral Spread category). It follows in the footsteps of MindGym (97) and Embarrassing Bodies (08).

Adoption Experience

Britain's Forgotten Children

Yesterday afternoon saw the launch of my latest project – Adoption Experience www.channel4.com/adopt – this is the thinking behind it:

“Adoption is an area of childcare and family life shrouded in misconception, myth and confusion. The best way to untangle the realities from the rumours and hearsay is to focus on real people’s real experiences.

Adoption Experience shares valuable first-hand experience of Adoption from every perspective – people who have been adopted, adopters, social workers, siblings, people left in the system, potential adopters, every viewpoint that helps give insight into the realities of Adoption.”

Now those of you familiar with the peripatetic, seemingly random wanderings of my oeuvre will notice distinct similarities between Adoption Experience and Sexperience. Here was the thinking behind Sexperience:

“Sexperience enables people to share their first-hand experiences (as opposed to opinion or theory) of a broad range of sexual issues, problems and solutions in video and text form, thereby recognising the complexity and individuality of the subject through multiple perspectives and transcending the easy, often over-simplified answers of self-help manuals.”

When it came to the subject of Adoption, it struck me that the same grounded insight brought by a focus on direct experience to the realm of sex and relationships might really help to shed light through the fog of preconceptions obscuring my understanding of this other subject. For me what first sprung to mind was a nightmarish, intrusive process; social workers telling you you have too many books in your house or are too pale for your own good; a recent tale of an adoption imploding and tearing apart the family and marriage of my friend’s sister; compelling tales of retracing birth families; happy sorties filming childcare projects with Emerald Productions and ArkAngel Productions for Barnardo’s; various celebrity stories headed up by Mia Farrow (recently on hunger strike over Dafur – good on her), Angelina Jolie and Madonna; and a few lovely, sometimes quiet kids at my sons’ schools. So what I decided to do was to lift the infrastructure of Sexperience wholesale and reapply it to the subject of Adoption.

The production company/digital indie, Mint Digital, said it would probably work but they’ll be a 5% difference in the structures. I stuck to my guns that it could work as a pretty much 1-to-1 match and that’s what we went with. So, in effect, it’s my first attempt at an online format. (Another class implementation by Mint in the wake of Sexperience and Osama Loves. Video content by Betty TV. Reminds me, Sexperience has just been nominated for a Broadcast Digital Award [Best use of Interactive] and the Osama Loves documentary, Osama Bin Everywhere, is up for a Rockie Award at the Banff TV Awards in Canada.)

Now Sex is of universal relevance whereas Adoption is something of a niche concern, so I wasn’t sure what kind of take-up to expect. The signs so far are good and I feel like we’ve found our clear blue water. There’s little out there on the Web which captures first-hand experience of Adoption issues in a non-textual, engaging form. The first two hours, from a standing start, saw:

• 29,448 pageviews
• 5,578 visits
• 5.3 pageviews/visit (promising since the user-created content which drives the creative concept was very limited, starting empty that very afternoon)
• 170 experiences and questions were posted by viewers, many very illuminating and detailed

This came in unsolicited from a recent adopter today: “I think the site’s great – fantastic that it’s open to the public to post questions and responses about their experiences. This is what the adoptive and adopted audiences really need I think!”

The site was created out of the Channel 4 Cross-platform dept. as part of the Channel’s Britain’s Forgotten Children season broadcasting all this week. It springs from the themes of the documentary series Find Me a Family, commissioned by my equally mad-haired colleague Dominique Walker. This is the striking trail created by Brett Foraker of 4Creative to communicate the thrust of the season.

Word Up

The current favourite with the enfants terribles:

At the inaugural Media Guardian Innovation Awards the other evening a fellow shortlistee was sitting at the adjacent table – he was black, hairy and even more simian than me. Sadly he didn’t have any reward for sweating the night away and drinking through a straw. Fallon, creators of the Cadbury Gorilla, lost out to my esteemed colleagues from Skins (E4/Holler). And Big Art Mob brought home a pile of metallic twiglets by virtue of winning the Community Engagement category. I was so excited it was as if my humble white wine had been spiked with a good dose of lithium…

Giving me excitations

What an exciting day! I get in to work this morning and this plops on the electronic doormat:

“Dear Adam,
I’m delighted to inform you that your entry ‘Big Art Mob‘ has been short-listed in the Community Engagement category of the inaugural MediaGuardian Innovation Awards. The shortlist will be formerly announced in MediaGuardian on 28 January and the winner at the awards ceremony and dinner on 6 March at Indigo2, O2, Greenwich. The debate at the judging day was lively and hard fought, so congratulations on reaching the shortlist stage of an event which we hope will become a benchmark for innovation in media in the UK.”

Next up a message from the fellas at LG15 that they’re coming a’visitin’.

Then a note from the boys at Preloaded that Picture This has 11.4% of its audience staying for over 30 minutes at a time and 4.7% over an hour.

Then the gorgeous Slugger O’Toole over in Beal Feirste points his dedicated audience in the direction of the excellent ‘3 Minute Wonder’ tomorrow night on Channel4 (at 19.55) complementing the Picture This series. It looks at the disappearance of the fortified RUC police stations in Northern Ireland. As someone who got married in Derry, I’ve a certain familiarity with these particular architectural fantasias. I remember sitting in a pub in Forkhill in South Armagh and admiring the painting on the wall of the locality from which the police station had already been disappeared, years before the Good Friday Agreement.

Finally a lovely young laydee comes up to introduce herself at the climax of the Cultural and Creative Leadership Mentoring Programme at the ICA (on which I have been mentoring Caroline Bottomley of the Radar Festival). Said laydee is none other than Zoe Margolis aka Abby Lee, the Girl with the One-track Mind, in the flesh.

Now that’s a good day by anyone’s standards.

But not as good as yesterday when I found out my mum’s cancer had not come back. Now there’s really good vibrations.