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Getting to Know you - presentation by Will Berryman AUSTRALIAN CULTURAL CONFERENCE - 14 JUNE 2001 Ladies and gentlemen: thankyou very much for the opportunity to address this forum today. Partnership between cultural institutions and information technology organisations is a particularly relevant topic of discussion - not only for the Special Broadcasting Service, for whom I work, but also for all cultural institutions and IT companies as both types of organisations navigate difficult times. I would currently go as far to say partnership has become the most recent "dot com" buzz word. It comes at a time where support of cultural programs becomes more difficult - where a cultural institution needs to offer more to an information technology organisation than something or resources to feed the hype of a recent float or rapidly expanding share price. It will be a pity if the concept of partnership between cultural organisations and information technology companies becomes as glib and disposable as many other concepts that have arisen in "dot com" times. These partnerships will allow both types of organisations to share those things they have in common - the need to innovate, the need to continually reinvent and the ability to deliver an edginess and freshness to their consumer in times of continual change. The mutual needs of both types of organisations lead me to state an obvious tenet of my view of partnerships. Partnership is a program of mutual advantage. It will usually be executed over a period of time and it will cover several executions. It may or may not involve money changing hands (and this is important - I'll discuss it later). It will, however, reinforce certain strengths between the two organisations - or pinpoint certain weaknesses. And in any good partnership, these will be clearly identified as the partnership is formed. All good partnerships have a formality to them and this formality is important to derive maximum gain. So while I'm being obvious I'll mention a few things partnership is not. Firstly, partnership is not sponsorship, nor is it advertising, although the possibility of sponsorship or marketing opportunities maybe included as part of the parcel of strengths and weaknesses formulated at the commencement of a partnership. Some cultural organisations view IT companies as perfect sponsorship or marketing opportunities - the IT company pays money and puts a banner ad on its website, and the cultural institution hangs a poster for it's audience to see. It may seem obvious to a cultural institution - however it's a little confusing to many IT companies. Take Cliff's company Novell. Each morning in offices around Australia, Cliff's brand gets more solid exposure as a brand than most music recitals, museums and may I regretfully note, many SBS TV and radio programs. Each time the punters log into a Novell network and the Novell logo pops up and the network works, Cliff has had a positive branding experience. However, targeted branding - where a certain audience is the focus of a message being pushed by an IT company - may form part of a partnership. But audience matching is only part of the strengths and weaknesses outlined in going into a partnership. For example, more IT executives watch SBS TV than any other network, so if that sounds like a strength Cliff, we should talk later. Some information technology organisations aren't really interested in advertising at all. Hewlett Packard, an organisation who have partnered with SBS on many occasions don't do TV advertising and rarely do any mainstream advertising. For an organisation like SBS - where advertising opportunities and audiences are a bread and butter commodity - the strengths and weaknesses analysis revealed are a non-competitive media organisation creating high quality media content. HP needed greater exposure to a high quality media environment to learn. SBS needed to keep its staff abreast of the latest developments in IT and digital production. Immediately there are clear things we can form a partnership around. The cultural output of SBS is enhanced, money is saved and redirected and HP is innovating with information technology. This partnership has allowed SBS to be among the first media organisations in the world to use a HP Storage Area Network as a live media production environment, rather than basic storage. During our partnership we have produced broadband programs of the AFI Awards, the Walkey Awards, live production of video for our online youth program "whatever" and created an environment where we can regularly put over 50 languages online as audio-on-demand programming. Hewlett Packard were surprised and delighted when we decided to put their logo on one of our broadband video displays. For some companies formal branding and marketing would be important for such activities - but not always. Direct commerce or financial translations are very similar to advertising. Many years ago I put together a multimedia display of children's work. Compaq supported this activity by supplying the PCs. I remember when making my pitch to Compaq creating some model where by I proved that Compaq would sell a few home PC's out of the exercise. I was embarrassed the moment I said it - Compaq were a company selling billions of computers each year and I was offering to sell a couple of computers for them. There were other things gained -things not obvious to me before research. Australia has a poor notion of corporate philanthropy. Most sponsorship comes at the direction of a business plan where notional or real monies must be generated or saved as part of the program. This can be dangerous for a cultural organisation. We may, if we place commerce at the centre of what we are doing, find the cost outweighs the benefits. Consideration of the benefits to an IT company through driving sales or eyeballs to promotions takes the eye off what we are doing -creating cultural output. Say our partnership extends to pushing hits to a website of educational material for a museum. In return, we will get a value of equipment or support. If we tie our hits to value we will spend our time driving hits and producing nothing of value to either party of the partnership. We are better off producing a basket of value and offering that to the organisation to extract the value. They have expertise in their marketing and promotion far beyond what we could offer ourselves. I think you will find that as a lot of the larger IT organisations were founded in the USA, they will have a different concept of corporate philanthropy - where philanthropy adds to the metal that positions a business firmly as being at the centre of the social good rather than drive some short-term marketing goal. Many Australian businesses are starting to grasp this concept. A great example of how this corporate philanthropy can come into being and work well in a web environment is into public broadcasting in the USA www.pbs.org is nearly entirely funded through partnership support. It is a great comprehensive web site that fortunately does not waste its resources on measuring hits at $40 cpm. The point is if you intend to make the partnership based on an exchange of commercial value, you have to think long and hard about it. In a lot of cases it is suitable - in a lot it is not. But whether money is generated directly through the partnership or not there needs to be value. The value has to be calculated and made clear. It must be continually readdressed and assessed. All partnerships require resources and management if the value is not clear and does not transpire - it will all become too difficult. Finally what to do if companies and cultural institutions have to contribute to each other? At a place in each type of organisation there are innovations - the inventors. There is a spirit of social investment, whether it be to move the world along through computing or reflect, record and stimulate our society through cultural exchange. I would suggest that when we sit down and consider these strengths and what tangibles we can extract and offer in partnership, we look towards these things. That's why there will be a connection. If an IT company wants to divert business opportunities from an organisation, it can deal with other, purely commercial, operations. Clear planning for partnerships before actually engaging in the relationship will make it far more successful. But it is still early days. Cultural institutions may only involve one organization, but you may start by talking to dozens. With the growth of technology and the growing needs of cultural institutions the time for these conversations is now. |