Spotify is not Radio. It replaces the Jukebox

UK Radio futurologist James Cridland is right to remind us that Pandora (and music services like it) are not Radio.

Three cheers to the stations using radio creatively, developing new formats and thinking broader that traditional broadcast. I found a few in speech radio - but we desperately need more - or more stations will fail. Those who disrupt have a path to growth. Those who just do more of the same are rearranging the deckchairs on a sinking ship. They will be replaced by those who disrupt.

Boo to those who are simply assembling audio (usually music) and trying to push it across the airwaves. For they give radio a bad name across the industry.

Spotify and Pandora are examples of algorithm-driven audio, void of surprise and serendipity. It's stuff that cleverly programmed in series. But we easily get bored because the brain is a great parallel processor. I don't believe Spotify is disrupting creative radio, it's more akin to a jukebox. Radio stations that just became on-air jukeboxes are in serious trouble though. Creative Radio draws you in. Jukebox radio shuts you out. I inherited a radio show once called DX Jukebox. I realised very quickly that it was the wrong name for what we were doing. And good radio was made for doing something else, paying attention when something catches your attention.

I think people are tiring of living in a world driven purely by algorithms. We live for the surprises.

Samara Shortwave Crashes to the Ground

Photo Andre Tan

I remember when Radio Netherlands, Holland's external broadcasting service, used to hire airtime from a transmitter site in Samara, in what was then the former Soviet Union. We used it to get a stronger signal from the Netherlands into South Asia. 

According to reports, (via Ian Baxter) those shortwave antennas were recently pulled down in preparation for a new football stadium.

Samara turned out to be a leading industrial center in the Volga region and is among the top ten Russian cities in terms of national income and industrial production volume. It had a reputation as an aerospace centre. In my circles it was known as having very powerful shortwave transmitters. They used to be part of the Russian external broadcasting network known (in English) as Radio Moscow World Service. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the transmitters were hired out to anyone who was willing to hire them. Apparently those numbers have dwindled so much that the owners of the transmission site shut things down and sold the property for redevelopment. The local news broadcast says the shortwave transmitter site will be redeveloped this year in order to build a soccer stadium for the World Cup to be held in 2018.

Photo Andre Tan

Samara is one of the first cities to begin the real construction work for the World Cup. A decision was taken a year ago to locate the a new stadium on the 240 acre site of the old shortwave radio centre. The stadium has a capacity of 45,000 seats, of which 3500 thousand places are designated for the media (!). The cost of design work is estimated at 835 million rubles or 18.2 million Euro.

Photo Andre Tan

Wake Up Rosetta - and she did today

And the same story for kids.... Chasing the comet!

Mars One - Ripe for Pivoting - But when?

I didn't realise until now that I live near a town which now hosts a new space agency. In Amersfoort you'll find the team from Mars One, who I saw present their dream at a recent Club of Amsterdam event. They want to establish a human colony on Mars by 2025. They're raising money to build a proof-of-concept for launch in 2018. The organisers believe that media companies will foot the 6 billion dollars needed, in the same way the Olympics are financed.

I like much of the disruptive thinking behind the project. How do we get public support in all kinds of way to back a dream? How do we rekindle the passion to explore other worlds? In terms of grabbing attention it's already a success. A low cost Indigogo campaign has already got them feature articles all over the place. And it has triggered discussions about space explorations and space. They are building an interesting innovation filter which may well discover brilliant minds. Note that the Lockheed isn't contracted to send people to Mars. They are talking about a public financed feasibility study using an unmanned vehicle in 2018. 

May be the science will work. Who knows? But as a social experiment I believe its doomed before it starts. We need contact with other humans in order to survive. Solitary confinement is the worst form of punishment you can imagine. Isolation kills. Assuming they get there safely, the team of four will die of loneliness as the full impact of their decision becomes apparent. They're are global stars at first. But then the media moves on to news from home. And Mars isn't home to much to write home about. There are not enough stories on the red planet.

So my expectation is that this start-up will pivot.    

Why Audio Never Goes Viral

Why Audio Never Goes Viral:

Great piece worth exploring further. 

Profit without Purpose is a recipe for disaster - III

                   
                   
                   
                   

Starting to connect the dots. Remember Elisabeth Murdoch's speech at the Edinburgh TV festival in 2012? Clearly very difficult for her to write. But she was crystal clear - "Profit without Purpose is a recipe for disaster".

Now skip through to this talk by Clayton Christensen, and watch what he says at 34'14.

You are captive to your customers (read audiences if you're in media). If  you develop products that your customers buy, they will provide you with the money to stay in that business. If they don't buy, you will fail.

Rod Adner wrote a mathematical model on theory of disruption in which he concluded: The pursuit of profit causes the leaders in the industry to get out and the disruptors to get in. Christensen took this theory and test it to see if it could predict the future of six different sectors of industry. By projecting what happens they could see if they were right or wrong. In their book Seeing What's Next (2004) they got it right with telecoms, semiconductors and emerging economies. But they got it spectacularly wrong with aviation and education. In the case of aviation they didn't see that established airlines would add more profitable long-haul routes and leave the short-haul flights to the budget airlines like RyanAir.

Since the book was written, exactly the same thing has happened to high street banks. In the pursuit of profit they have focussed on the big corporate deals and given away the consumer banking market to others. But the problem is that there are not enough of the big-spending clients to go around.

Christensen says that there are a few industries where we have not seen disruption. The hotel industry for example. Howard Johnsons and Holiday Inn are low-priced chains. For them to go upmarket they have the emulate what Four Seasons offers. They can't disrupt them.

This view was helpful when looking at the future of higher education. Until now, there hasn't been much disruption of colleges and universities. There have just been more and more of them. But now on-line courses like Coursera brings a way for small companies to disrupt traditional universities. The example shown below is from the University of Copenhagen about the history of Scandinavian Film and Television.




Ron Adner warns that a wider perspective is essential for disruptive thinking, which I interpret for broadcasters is that they have to think broader than broadcasting. It's a bit like trying to understand the future of radio and only thinking about DAB versus FM. The bigger picture is that you're trying to deliver audio to an audience. Sometimes it has to be in real time. But quite often the audience would like to decide when they listen to it.


Ron Adner Interview from TheWideLensBook on Vimeo.


               

In Search of Disruptive Innovation - II

First, thanks for your input, ideas and suggestions as a result of recent blogposts here. Just like the radio shows I used to present, I always appreciate constructive feedback. I'm doing this because I want a conversation. Either post below or get back to me directly.

A start-up at last Friday's Startupbootcamp DemoDay Amsterdam that has defined who they're disrupting

Together with colleagues in the Critical Distance guild, I'm currently using disruptive innovation to tackle a number of challenges for both clients and to make pivotal decisions for our own company.

We're currently focussed on helping young companies progress at a very specific point in their development. In Lean Start-up jargon, it's that period after Demo Day when the founders are in search of strategic partners to take their dream to the next stage. The small companies don't have the cash to get there themselves. So selecting the right partners is often crucial to success.

Remember that Geoffrey Moore's tech adoption bell curve is still valid. He wrote the book Crossing the Chasm in 1990. It was one of the first to explain why the market development problem was so difficult. That gap between the early adopters and the early majority can be disastrous if you are not ready for it. That chasm that most companies have to cross to get accepted has not gone away. My experience is that it's nine months wide around here (Western Europe).

For the last two years I have intensively worked with several young companies watching how they grow, learning as much from them as they for people. It's been a practical partnership. Several of these companies have taken the route of being part of an accelerator program. This is a 3 month organised program where, basically, teams gets access to a mentor network. If there's a good match, then they are able to speed up development, achieving in three months what would normally take a year. In this highly competitive world it can mean the difference between getting funded to progressing further or sinking into despair and ruin. There's a fine line between success and failure. I'm delighted that some accelerators are now being transparent with their results.

Everything old is new again

I learned by attending countless pitchdays and new tech conferences that original ideas are few and far between. So what? The real geniuses are the ones that seize an idea - no matter where it came from-, understand and test its potential, then turn it into something that's perceived as "essential" in the lives of other people. It may entertain them. It may inform them. It could ultimately change those peoples' lives.

Here is cash-strapped Western Europe, large corporations are obsessed with "innovation", without really defining which sort of innovation they mean. In practice, I conclude that the incumbents are usually searching for someone who can do more, cheaper. Profits may even return, for a while, but it's just re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. That's a shame because it creates false hope. And yet there is another path.

So what to do?

I believe in the process that others have called disruptive innovation. It is certainly working for what we're doing in these cash-strapped times in Europe. Perhaps the reason why so many companies flounder is that they haven't defined which business they are disrupting. Or they may be busy with the other two types of innovation : sustained innovation ("Lets Make Things Better", e.g. the old Philips slogan) or efficiency innovation (devise a process that's produces the same result but a lot cheaper, e.g. what Walmart did for consumer retail or Amazon did for book distribution). As we've discussed previously on this blog, only disruptive innovation creates growth in society. The other innovation simply makes the most of ultimate decline.

We're seeing disruption in publishing, broadcasting, healthcare, high-tech, local government; in fact please show me a sector where disruptive companies are not active and I'll believe you'll find an industry sector which is about to enter a new era. - history. Mechanical clock makers, International Radio Broadcasting, Floppy Disc manufacturers. Without disruptors there is no a chance to reinvent, change and adapt to a market. And, believe me, you don't want to invest a single second in managing decline!

BBC presenter Komla Dumor suddenly passes

Extremely sad to note on the BBC News site the sudden passing of Ghanaian journalist and news presenter Komla Dumor. He died suddenly at his home in London at the age of just 41. He was one of the first of a new generation of cross-media journalists, starting out with radio only and then being one of the main faces to the BBC's adventure into television broadcasting for the African continent.

Unlike many others, he understood how to tell an engaging story on both. I'll remember him for his work on the World today programme on BBC World Service. You could hear him smile - and yet he could get to the heart of a story in way you didn't expect. He made a brilliant contribution to the World Service at a time when it needed it most. What a tragedy that he was taken so soon. The BBC should open a condolences register. 

When Efficiency Innovation Fails

A colleague at a TV station in San Francisco asked me for an example of efficiency innovation as related to broadcasting. I can think of three.

1. Netherlands Public Broadcasting believes that even more integration of staff from radio, TV and online is going to make more efficient use of reduced public funding. I happen to think that it tends to mean less of the same spread out all over the place. The morning Radio 1 news programme has become unlistenable because of music fills... It's a late night format plonked into an early morning time slot.

2. Newsday on BBC World Service. They are still in denial in London about this one. Classic mistake of putting a TV format onto radio and mixing two target areas, (North America and Africa) when one target is already a day ahead.

3. And what is happening to the automated cameras in the new BBC studios? The Christmas tape for BBC staff is funny for insiders, but isn't it also also a cry for help from the gallery? Efficiency got too far? Clearly someone cut too deeply somewhere, either in the technology or in training staff.

Jim's Flakey Video

Snow Here 2014-01-18 from Jim Cutler on Vimeo.

We're getting a sort of early spring in the Netherlands - no doubt something cold and horrible is around the corner. But Jim's view from this window in Long Island is magic.

Get your neighbours to temper their power consumption

Found this comment from former Apple CEO John Sculley more than a little spooky. I have a smart meter installed for both gas and electricity. There is a night and day tariff for electricity. Sculley hints that the Internet of Everything might mean a pricing model based on scarcity rather like UBER provides a taxi service. So when electricity is plentiful it's cheap, but during peak periods the price rises dynamically. Sounds like my thermostat is going to be controlled by the utilities company.

Dutch Railways Melts Down Yet Again

9292.nl. Not to be trusted again

The sheer incompetence of NS and its failure to run a railway system on time beggars belief. A derailment on the line between Hilversum and Naarden Bussum on Wednesday of this week has meant a fleet of busses is used between the two stations since then. NS advises you to check train times before departure. I stupidly trusted the combined travel service called 9292.nl. At 0730 today they were still showing this as an option.

Sheer chaos at 0814 in Hilversum station. No information. Just touring buses outside.  No information in the bus - just a request to take newspapers with you ! No announcements in Naarden station either. No coffee. Not a word of apology for inconvenience caused.

Reminds me of travelling in the German Democratic Republic....

I'm afraid this is another in the long line of stories. Dutch railways seem to be totally absorbed with expanding and refurbishing their empire of railway stations. They spare no expense installing useless creature comforts (the outdoor electric heating on station platforms is my favorite. A tower with 5 volt USB sockets to charge an empty phone would be far more useful).

Outdoor heating on the platforms. Now that's a great idea! Not.

Meanwhile the trains themselves are overcrowded, cancelled at short notice and expensive for the service offered. It has reached a point where I avoid them, if at all possible. It's becoming a national disgrace!

End of rant. You can now resume what you were doing earlier.

NS are masters of mystery - especially when something disrupts their timetable. 

Creating Tech Hubs to Attract World Class Talent

Found an excellent analysis of the entrepreneurial climate here in the Netherlands. I believe Robert is right about the importance of social capital. I am Brit who has been embedded in several accelerator programs as well as talking with many start-ups who have chosen The Netherlands as their base to accelerate. Talking with international teams has been very rewarding - learning about what's right and what urgently needs to be improved. He writes, in part

Much has been written about the secret sauce for dynamic innovation clusters. I leave it to academics to spell out all the precise mechanisms, but think of institutions such as top-level universities, multi-nationals and R&D centers in close proximity of each other supporting entrepreneurial activity (exchange of knowledge, pools of talent, supply chains etc.). The advantages of spatial clustering go under the name “agglomeration economies” and the Netherlands has one very big one called the 'Randstad'. Most of ICT related activities are concentrated in the northern part of Randstad in the areas of Amsterdam and Utrecht. In addition we have the Eindhoven area (traditional home ground of Royal Dutch Philips) where the likes of Shapeway and Liquavista come from.

.......

With a 'best in class' digital infrastructure, a highly educated workforce and a solid business environment we have the fundamentals in place to be among the best settling grounds for start ups and technology firms.

However we lack some prerequisites for a great ecosystem. I have been fairly brutal with generalizations in this post (which easily happens when describing cultural attitudes), but I think the Netherlands has too little anchor points, a mentality that doesn't always help and a real need for more effective social capital.

I don’t think there are any quick fixes. But I believe that with collective consciousness and effort we can achieve a lot. This shouldn't take a whole generation. In fact we have made quite some progress over the last 5 years. Today we have lots of promising tech companies, several accelerator programs (e.g. Rockstart, Startupbootcamp) larger and smaller VCs (e.g. Prime Ventures, Endeit, Newion and HenQ), great events and publications (eg. the Next Web and the Next Women) and several government backed initiatives. There is an eco-system and it is slowly evolving into maturity.


The culture of not sticking "one's head above the cornfield" is killing when compared to some other European hubs. But the way to change it is not by complaining. I believe it is by forming can-do clusters who filter the talent upfront before investing in disruptive young companies to help them over Moore's funding chasm. I see this happening as some realise that everything else is in place.

I find too many corporates are confusing efficiency innovation (lets make it cheaper, faster) with disruptive innovation (lets challenge the incumbents, create new markets, train ourselves to do those different jobs).

Social, Digital & Mobile in APAC from We Are Social Singapore

Dutch society does indeed contain world class talent, especially when it comes to design, architecture, management and several aspects of marketing. But there are weaknesses too - like engaging storytelling for one. Silicon Valley was successful because 37% of its inhabitants were born outside the country. They built the best teams, built by mixing the best talents into a collaborative ecosystem. They broke down hierarchy. They celebrated successful local heroes. They learned from others failures. And they created a destination where others head for.

Several cities in The Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Eindhoven have the potential to turn themselves into world-class entrepreneurial hubs. They are on their way, but they need to speed up. Other European centres with far more money are starting to awake from their slumber. It will take a genuine team effort in the Netherlands to stay ahead of the competition. And just like football, it needs to professionalise the process. Great talent will follow the money. There are limits to what people can do for free. Holland needs an answer to pull talent the opposite way across the Atlantic. I see too many hubs in the US simply using Europe as a forest for hunting, selecting and attracting talent. Put me on the list of people who want to do something about it.

Lots of things I won't be doing

I am a good person - or at least I think I am. But, indeed, I won't be doing this. See a lot of similarities with some of the media NGO's in the world, bless their hearts.

Transformation almost complete - a new sign of the times

Life is slowly returning to Witte Kruislaan 55. The refurbishment of the old Radio Netherlands building in Hilversum is complete and the new tenants - the AVROTROS are moving in. Looks quite homely. All traces of RNW are gone. Tons more parking space on the premises, so they seem to be expecting a full house.

The Facebook Filter Syndrome

Facebook is a bit like buying batteries. You can see the outside, but you never know how much charge is really in them. This video explains the current problem with Facebook is that you don't know who you're reaching. If you're friends don't like you posts that often, there's a chance you will disappear off their horizons. Of course you could pay Facebook to interrupt and restore the conversation. But that seems to me to defeat the object of my being on the platform. Looks to me like Facebook is past its prime. Thanks to Jim Cutler for spotting the video. And to Derek Muller (who I guess is currently in Montreal) for making the video! He also has some thoughts about quality versus quantity on YouTube.



I believe the Facebook Likes Syndrome to be complete bonkers. I am not going to conduct a "please like me" campaign to try and find out some statistics about myself. Sheer lunacy.

The audience numbers mystery

Twenty years ago, while leading the strategic reorganisation of content at Radio Netherlands, we were faced with the challenge of trying to set a list of priorities. Everyone could see the arrival of the Internet was already changing the way listeners communicated with the station. We had no WWW, but emails via MCI mail were flooding in. We were running bulletin boards like FIDO as part of experiments to understand our audience better. Unlike fan letters, listeners were giving us a clear insight into the topics that interested them and discussions that couldn't or were not happening on their local media.

We could also see the growth of satellite television, delivering a crystal clear picture into the living room using equipment priced similar to a good shortwave receiver. Could the existing station pivot in time to find new audiences?

We estimated that changes would take at least three years to implement. And we knew that any changes would be very painful to the whole organisation. because the station was operating in 9 languages. At that time, the station transmitted daily programmes in 7 languages (English, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, French for Africa, and Dutch (World & a separate Caribbean service). There was also an extensive transcription service with excellent quality classical music, jazz as well as drama productions for Latin America and Africa.

Although it seems incredible today, measuring the audience feedback in 1994 was extremely hard. And how on earth could you begin a discussion about what audiences were expecting from a broadcaster in Western Europe if you didn't have accurate audience data? 

Annual reports from international broadcasters always quoted "Audience figures" - the cursed "weekly reach" used by larger broadcasters like BBC, Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe. We didn't dispute their figures. But we saw glaring mistakes when these colleagues tried to compare what they were doing with us. They were pushing radio programmes out via their own facilities in competition to local broadcasters. We were building partnerships WITH stations. Something completely different. But many of these local broadcasters didn't have any audience data, nor were they planning to start collecting it. They got huge reactions to live call-in shows though, which indicated that someone was listening. But for the most part, it was guesswork. Remember that the Internet in 1994 was in its infancy.

International broadcast colleagues were also focussed on building a brand name for their network. The name of the station was as important to get in the minds of listeners as the programme content. Why? Because if audience didn't remember the name of the station, you wouldn't show up in surveys. We were more interested in getting ideas across, so programme brands were more important than the network name - just as people remembered the names of compelling TV soap operas but never knew who produced it.

Once local/regional radio took off in Francophone Africa and Latin America, shortwave audiences plummeted. Brazil led the way, with television taking away almost all the international radio audiences. No-one really knew what was happening in the Amazon rain forest, but they weren't waiting for a daily hour broadcast from across the Atlantic. And in the Middle East or North Africa, we could see that unless you were on a powerful mediumwave sender (like the BBC had in Cyprus) there wasn't much hope of building measurable audiences if shortwave was all you had. We were working in markets where FM radio was already stealing audiences away from AM (medium and shortwave). FM sounded better and there were few car radios with reliable shortwave reception.

Big Numbers Today

Fast forward to the 2013 annual report of the US BBG, the body that coordinated US International government funded broadcasting. The BBG broadcasters claim that together they reached an estimated 206 million people each week in 2013, up from 175 million in 2012. Providing news and information in 61 languages across more than 100 countries, the audience estimate is an all time high — and represents a more than doubling of the 100 million people the broadcasters reached in 2000. 

The year-over-year increase of 31 million was fueled largely by increases in Latin America, where Voice of America adopted a new strategy of bascially being a free Washington news bureaux for selected stations in Latin America, and in Pakistan, where VOA’s Urdu service successfully launched new programming initiatives. But the increases also came as a result of BBG broadcasters offering content on more platforms. For the first time, the BBG’s television audience outweighed its radio audience – 110 million and 109 million, respectively. Further, the BBG’s digital and mobile audience increased to 22 million, up from approximately 12 million in 2012.

These weekly reach figures sound impressive. But remember that just under 7 billion people are not being reached by any of these stations. So there is plenty to do. I am also fascinated by this upward trend at BBG when audience ratings for TV news in the US are so abysmally low. What program formula has VOA or RFE discovered?

Affiliations and syndication continue to play a major role in reaching audiences worldwide. 65% of the BBG’s television audience and 45% of it’s radio audience is reached via affiliates. Not sure what proportion of the direct audience is thanks to shortwave radio. In countries like Somalia, Sudan and Nigeria I'm sure it's still important. But elsewhere, shortwave is increasingly irrelevant. It may deliver a clear signal - but no-one's listening up on that part of the dial.



BBG Broadcasters include Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting Networks’ Alhurra and Radio Sawa, Radio Free Asia, Radio and TV Marti, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

In terms of regional composition, 28% of the BBG’s audience comes from sub-Saharan Africa, with Europe/South-Central Asia next at 24%, South East Asia at 19%, Middle East/North Africa at 15% and Latin America at 14%.

Each estimate features year-over-year gains and losses in various countries as conditions change in the local market. For example, audiences have slid somewhat in Afghanistan and throughout much of the Middle East as the media market has become more crowded and competitive. Elsewhere, political turmoil can result in the loss of BBG affiliates or the ability to measure audiences altogether. It is, for example, not possible to research in Cuba, and some Central and South East Asia countries at the level needed to provide statistically sound audience estimates.

Largest Audiences by Country

Largest Audiences as a Percentage of Population

The data for the 2013 audience estimate come from surveys of adult (age 15+) populations in more than 90 countries conducted around the world over the past 5 years. More than 80% of these surveys were conducted with the previous two years. Additional information available at BBG.gov.

Insights on Disruptive Innovation 20 Years Ago

Jonathan Marks

It is exactly 20 years ago to the month when, as Programme Director at Radio Netherlands, I worked with interim Director General Bart Gribnau on a drastic re-organisation of Holland's external services.

In today's terminology we would call it a pivot. In those days it was called a re-organisation. I believe the reason it worked against all odds is because it was an example of disruptive innovation. In 2014 I keep seeing other industries who urgently need an impulse of this type if they are not going to go the failed route of Blackberry, Nintendo.

Mission Impossible

Being Programme Director at an international radio station is an impossible job by definition. You're always going to take the wrong decision for someone. Because of your heritage, there is always at least one culture that "you don't understand". I believe the reason the process succeeded is because we saw that risk-taking disruptive innovation was the only way forward. And that in The Netherlands which seems to have the highest number of insurance companies per capita.

Radio Netherlands broadcast centre in Hilversum (in 2000)

In 1992, Radio Netherlands went through a top management crisis. Two directors had completely different visions on the way forward. They stopped talking to each other and the rest of the company. An alarming note appeared on the company noticeboard outside the canteen announcing the problem. It was really a cry for help. The Chairman of the Board of Governors, Hans Hoefnagels, stepped in when he saw this very public disagreement was opening a wide door to the wolves outside just waiting to grab the station's operating budget for other purposes.

He appointed interim director Bart Gribnau to lead the process. He spotted me as someone passionate about effective broadcasting and eager to develop a different path to benefit as many as possible.

Bart Gribnau at Radio Netherlands 1993 (photo Mieke Hoek)

They took an enormous risk. I wasn't a Dutch national. I spoke a form of Dutch that others could understand but my written communication was always in English. No other international broadcaster in the world had a foreigner in charge of content. But I did know how the system worked and I'd made several documentaries investigating the rise of Dutch international broadcasting in the 1960's. I knew the company's strengths and weaknesses from the inside. The weekly Media Network show gave us an overview of what others were doing. But perhaps, most of all, I believed there were enough raw talent still on board to ensure a tipping point. And besides, there wasn't a Plan B. Calling in McKinsey would be like waving a white flag and waiting for the wolves.

Discussion with local station editors in Benin

Deliberately Do Things Differently

What we did was analyse the big picture. What were the other players doing? (They were stations like BBC World Service, Radio France Internationale, VOA, Radio Liberty, Radio Beijing (now China Radio International), and Radio Moscow World Service. We mapped out what each were doing into a large table, point by point. And then we made a conscious decision to do completely the reverse.

We took a long hard critical look at the assets we had on board. We assumed the worst case scenario; that we had lost most of our shortwave audience to competing technologies like FM local radio, satellite TV - in-fact anything that took away people's time. So we had an opportunity to reboot under the radar.

I'm grateful that we didn't try to make things "better". Incremental innovation only works to a point. Then others come along and take everything away. Fortunately, we didn't have the resources to make a better product than our colleagues. We were already operating on very thin production budgets. People couldn't do more, faster.

We needed to look well outside our own building for inspiration. We needed to rediscover areas of the world where we could make the biggest difference.

Building relevant media

We found it first in places like Latin America and Francophone Africa. Timing was everything. We anticipated the boom in independent local radio and what it would mean to local communities. We partnered immediately, discovering we had already established a reputation for being different. We weren't like the "big guys" looking for local stations to simply relay their message from a long way away. The Dutch were not the former colonial power in these regions, there were no plans to teach languages or spread a particular way of thinking. Then, back inside the broadcast centre in Hilversum, we looked at how we could do something completely different.

Some found it curious that we were not trying to identify people in the building who "made the best programmes". The truth is, discussions about quality are meaningless unless they involve listeners. I was looking for disruptive thinkers and doers. I found allies by watching them work in their own context.

Soulé Issiaka in Hilversum

Soulé Issiaka was a young influential intellectual from Benin. A radio man through and through, he was creative, chaotic, but razor sharp in knowing how to better the lives of his people. A born networker, he could and did open doors across the African continent. I had every reason to trust him.

Get out of the building and discuss your ideas with others

We could see that other international broadcasters were working in competition with local stations. So was there another way?

Aimé Béhanzin

We talked with hundreds of local FM stations to understand their role in society. One station operator from Northern Benin inspired me in particular. At the time, Aimé Béhanzin was managing Nanto FM, a community station on a hill with a commanding view overlooking Natitingou.
"We've seen horrific use of radio in Rwanda (1994). An estimated 800,000 people have been killed through hatred broadcast by stations like Radio Milles Collines in Kigali. The perpetrators knew exactly how to manipulate the medium. They didn't use bullets. They isolated communities by using FM radio and only local languages. In effect, they put a community into solitary confinement - the worst form of punishment you could think of. Of course people look to violence as a means of escape".

Crafting programmes in West Africa exclusively for women

The station manager then explained their approach was to do exactly the opposite. "We're using radio to build a dialogue. As long as there is conversation between people there is hope that we can live in peace, build businesses and prosper. Community radio crosses political boundaries that we didn't put there - Our FM transmitter can reach people with the same cultural background in Nigeria. This area of Africa has hundreds of languages. Radio is the most effective way of building conversations that bridge societies. We can change more by being relevant than by simply being powerful. You call us "community radio" in the West because of our size. In fact we've discovered that community radio is far more influential than any voice that comes from the capital. It's in a context that people can understand."

Lessons Learned

Radio Netherlands closed French shortwave broadcasts to West and Central Africa in September 1994. It was a tearful farewell. But it liberated resources and new ideas blossomed fast. It took us two years to open a production office in Cotonou, Benin. By that time we'd turned everything around. Hilversum was contributing to a local network of 39 stations. We focused on programmes about women's issues, (cooking, entrepreneurship, social issues). We had a great set of science programmes that had been dramatized. Our goal was simple: we wanted to be a catalyst for a conversation. We cherry-picked relevant resources from Europe and across Africa, and we made it easy for local stations to adapt our content (in French) into far more popular local languages. We didn't need to control - we needed to make more effort in making valuable contributions.

Members of the Radio Netherlands Latin American team on a brainstorming session at the pyramids

It was a similar story for Latin America, who infact had a head start on our African colleagues. They were already feeding several hundred stations across Spanish speaking parts of Latin America. The concept was similar. Understand the audience of the local station. Work out how our work could contribute to a better informed audience. The fact that a foreign broadcaster was interested in how local communities in Latin America were tackling health issues like AIDs often made taboo subjects into discussion points. Always ensure the partnership is a win-win for both sides. We made short series with active partners. We had the most success in live programming. Shortwave was retained for Cuba, but in fact we knew that the reach by working with partners was far more effective that shouting on crackly shortwave wireless.

Working with a community station in La Plata, Argentina

Twenty years later, I see the Voice of America has recently discovered our strategy was right. I would argue today that we were doing an early version of the Lean Startup Methodology, exchanging the word "customers" for "audiences".

This disruptive approach created different jobs and certainly a new meaning in what we were trying to do. Two decades later I see similar processes as being the only way forward for clever tech companies who want to game change a different market. Media platforms are vastly different. But the process is as robust as ever. Want to know more? Then get in touch. There are plenty of insights we can share.

Quiz: Three years after cuts, will BBC World Service continue to innovate?

You have to be in international broadcasting to understand who is in the picture above. This photo was taken in Paris at the studios of Radio France Internationale. It shows the leaders of 7 international broadcast operations: BBC World Service, Deutsche Welle, Radio France Internationale, NHK Radio Japan, Radio Netherlands Worldwide, US International broadcasting ( which includes VOA, RFE, RL, RFA, Radio Marti, Al Hurrah). Yesterday I asked who was the odd one out.

I think it is the BBC World Service - or soon to be. All the rest are government-funded international broadcasters. BBC World Service will soon be part of the BBC Licence Fee funding. Those of us watching this part of the industry are very curious to see what changes are on the horizon as result. This moment is both a big opportunity as well as huge threat to the station's existence.

Legacy Distribution Networks Kill Innovation

In general, international government broadcasting is slow to keep pace with change. That's partly because these stations have huge legacy audio distribution systems which are expensive to maintain, as well as being difficult and slow to refocus when war, genocide or a natural disaster occurs breaks out. They are famous for setting up services after the disaster has happened rather than anticipating what information is going to needed next (look at what international broadcasting did just after the fall of Baghdad, or in Rwanda immediately after the genocide).

The US, in particular, still has a complex collection of government broadcast brands and is still wondering whether or not to keep shortwave as a distribution method incase firewalls prove to be effective. Ironically the US Broadcasting Board of Governors is financing the development of the TOR Project to provide anonymity online (read in countries like Iran, Ethiopia and China). And yet the NSA is busy trying to compromise the technology - looks increasingly likely that TOR has been broken. But I digress. But take it from me - it's a mess.

The BBC World Service has always robustly defended its editorial independence from government.



In 1982 this documentary about the service includes an interview with the Director General of the BBC World Service, Douglas Muggeridge. He points out that they got 70 million pounds a year and claimed the largest global audience.

The British foreign office was mean with its funding in recent years. But will the scandal-damaged BBC be much better as from April? 

BBC World Service has reached a point when it needs to do some clear disruptive innovation with its audiences to adapt to a world that hates being shouted at. As we predicted, the BBC World Service is strong and fiercely independent at heart, which helped it survive an awfully painful re-organisation this time three years ago. But the signs leaking into the UK press would indicate they are now busy with purely economic innovation - still trying to do more with less. And that could be fatal in the long run. 

Economic Innovation doesn't work

It is tempting to dumb down or try and seek funding from commercial sources. The problem is that it's too much late for international radio. Radio Luxembourg, Atlantic 252, Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation All Asia Service, KYOI - there have been several attempts in the last century to sustain a service by advertising revenue from the target country. It worked well until satellite television killed it stone dead. 

The BBC has tried inserting very short advertising blocks on its FM transmitter in Berlin, following a model that worked for a private group relaying the BBC in Auckland, New Zealand. But the advertising income from speech radio is never going to support editorial production costs. The sums just don't work out.  

For the most part, BBC is unlikely to get funding from advertisers in its services to difficult countries. If the UK, as a nation, wants to share an audio message with audiences in Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, etc, it is going to have to foot the bill itself. Business in the target area isn't going to pay. Commercial radio exists to deliver audiences to advertisers. 

BBC World Service has built its reputation in many target areas on its independence from funders. For me, it's strength has always been in its investigative reporting and analysis. Radio can often go where cameras fear to tread - people in many cultures open up when there's no danger of them being seen by nasty governments on Facebook.  

But I am worried. The Independent reported on January 5th that  

In a letter sent to a member of the House of Lords, the Director of the World Service, Peter Horrocks, has also revealed plans to use private funding to support the prestigious radio network which began as the British Empire Service in 1932. "The BBC Trust is considering proposals for a wider commercialisation of World Service, which might involve launching new language services, if they could be commercially self-sustaining," he told Lord Alton of Liverpool.

In a different part of the BBC empire, The Independent on Sunday has seen an internal BBC communication which encourages journalists working on the BBC World News global television operation to follow a supposedly more female-friendly news agenda, with more stories on "fashion" and fewer on "politics".  The newspaper quotes from a newsletter to staff in which Mr Horrocks said: "This is not just about stories about women and for women. There are also many men who don't always fully connect with an agenda that can sometimes be too dominated by conflict or politics."

Staff believe that the shift in emphasis is partly designed to attract more advertising clients to the BBC, which relies on commercials on its television channel and website outside the UK. Latest accounts show that BBC Global News Ltd made an overall loss of £800,000 last year, with £21 million of costs incurred by the UK operation being mostly offset by advertising and sponsorship revenues made overseas.

The BBC has been experimenting with advertising on the Berlin FM radio output of the World Service. It said it had not received complaints from that network's audience that the commercials impinged on the quality of the output. Advertising has also been introduced into the Spanish, Arabic and Russian language editions of the BBC website.

In the window of Bush House, there used to be a poster saying that audiences were at the heart of everything the BBC did. That was the most powerful statement the station could make. Because government broadcasters listen to the politicians that fund them - never the audience they are set up to serve. But direct broadcasting to overseas audiences is phased out and replaced by co-productions with local partners, there's a danger that the voice of the audience is being filtered out.

I personally hope that BBC World Service decides to engage much more with its overseas audience in this crucial period of change. Radio 4 has the Feedback programme. There has been useful debate on other UK sites where the future of the BBC has been discussed at length.

Despite its change to more of a production house model, BBC World Service is still very much a broadcast service, doing things for listeners rather than with them. As a listener, there is not much I feel I can do to influence what it does as a station. They only have a 9 minute "Feedback-like" show called Over to You. It is so condensed that it sounds more like the old BBC's TV Points of View. A listener makes a point, BBC producer defends the position, balance is restored, end of conversation.

Jewels in the BBC World Service crown have been replaced by audio versions of BBC Breakfast Time (at least that's what NewsDay has sounded like to me from Day 1).  They made the classic mistake of trying to combine programmes across a dateline and target areas that have vastly different broadcast cultures. The faint calls of criticism from the audience are quickly extinguished.

I feel the audience research panel is being managed by people who don't listen to BBC World Service radio output themselves. And if they don't ask the right questions, they will never be able to innovate and adjust for the next set of changes. So will those in the audience who care about the service get to have our say? Does World Service want to listen? And when will the disruptive innovation resume?

MN.05.11.1992. Vatican Radio Remembered

Found this Media Network edition from November 1992 in which we incorporated a story from Rosella Strom who'd been visiting Vatican Radio. I will always remember the bumper sticker slogan at that time - Vatican Radio - Listen for Heaven's Sake.