Marieke Hermans discusses how public broadcasters can better support creative ideas and attract new talent. As innovation manager at a Dutch public broadcaster, she sees brilliant ideas that struggle to make it to air due to slow processes and focus on low budgets. However, the digital age demands speed, audience focus, and high-impact content. Younger audiences and creators now use diverse online platforms. Hermans argues broadcasters must open up, focus on impact over cost, and attract these new "2.0" storytellers by becoming less institutional and more responsive to their pace. She profiles 149 young content creators under age 45 in a book to convince bosses to take ownership of needed changes to connect with audiences and talent now creating content outside

1. OUT OF THE BOX
PUSHING CREATIVITY FORWARD
Marieke Hermans (NPO) | TEDx Transmedia
Rome | September 30th 2011

2. I dont know if there is such a thing as an innovational gene
but I was born with it.
I’m always improving and making things better.
As innovation manager at the Dutch Public Broadcasting
Company
I work as an intermediate between creatives and
decisionmakers.
Everyday I am confronted with the happy creative power of
media professionals
and the difficulties they face trying to get their brilliant ideas
to be taken into production.

4. I am fascinated with these dynamics of the creative process
Why are ok ideas taken into production and brilliant ones not?
How do you get the best idea to win?
Off course the competitive rules of evolution also apply to this
creative process.
But I want to share with you my vision on why and how we
can become better at helping the brilliant ideas to win.
Storytellers look for a stage and in the past they chose us

6. For prime time was the place to be if you wanted to catch a
big audience
But now the web is the stage to reach and interact with that
same audience

8. Today’s storytellers are not only depending on Public
Broadcasting any more.
And I wonder if we are reacting in the right way to this effect
of the digital revolution

10. This is what we do:
1. we explore new technologies
2. we try to understand audience on line behaviour
3. teach ourselves to extend our narratives
4. And we tell our decisionmakers to catch up:

12. So the good news is we’re moving.
But we need to speed up
For the next generation media consumers is quickly gaining
control over the remote
Here come’s Nafiesa…

14. we work in the interest of the public

16. The public, that’s our audience
in this confusing digital age, we need to realise impact
with journalistic, cultural and educational public content or
else we’re done for.
So not only do we need to speed up to catch up with our
young audience
We also need to focus on impact

17. For impact we need content,
For content we need storytellers
Therefore storytellers are the core value of Public
broadcasting
We need to invest in this value
We need content creators with high credibility and mad
convincing personalities

19. We need to attract this 2.0 talent now for they already
started without us:
Using facebook, twitter and youtube as their platform
switching between tv, radio, audio, video, public and
commercial content
Easily connecting with their audience
They play with it and even make money doing so
For them media are the means to an end.
So, how do we get them
to choose us public broadcasting as their stage?

20. Imagine yourself being a young creative with the enormous
drive to tell a compelling story.
No, even better imagine yourself being the piece of paper
with his brilliant idea on it.
You try to get in the Walhalla of storytellers then this is what
your up against:

22. Yes, we have become big institutions
stuck in matrix like structures and low cost production
methods
That’s the change we need now
that’s the box we got stuck in
and let me tell you these young ones don’t have the patience
for the elevator to come all the way down
We need to get ‘unstuck’…quickly

23. I try to convince my bosses to take ownership of this change:
speed up, open up
focus on impact
attract 2.0 storytelling talent
for starters I made this book for them
this off line succesful formula on paper
And in this book:

25. we connect and acknowledge 149 content creators all 2.0 and
under the age of 45 it
Why 149?
Dunbar, scientist who found out that we operate best in
groups of 150, without too much hassle or procedures
Tribes, army troops and factories like Gore Tex are based on
this principle.
We chose one less cause it’s always good to have room for
one more

26. I am convinced that without this creative 2.0 media talent
we cannot take public content into the next phase of the
digital revolution.
Therefore I want to leave you with a question to ask yourselves
and to take home and ask your chief or boss:

28. Marieke Hermans (NPO)
marieke.hermans@omroep.nl
www.tvlab.nl | www.npox.nl