Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Digital Works Podcast
Tim Woodall (Faber & Faber) on what the arts can learn from publishing (and vice-versa), the reality that your audience is not “everyone” (and that’s fine), and the value of brand-building
A conversation with Tim Woodall, the former Director of Marketing at The Philharmonia, and the current Head of Direct to Consumer Marketing at independent publishing house, Faber and Faber.
It was interesting to hear Tim's reflections on what the publishing world could learn from the arts, and vice-versa, the value of clear priorities, the lessons he learned through developing and launching a new subscription product, the importance of brand-building, and loads more.
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works Podcast, a podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. I'm Ash, your host, and each episode we explore how people and organizations in the cultural world and beyond are using digital to create, connect and adapt. And if you need a hand with your own digital work, I'm also a consultant who helps cultural organizations make the most of all this stuff. Today's conversation is a chat with Tim Woodall. Tim is the head of Direct to Consumer Marketing at Independent Publishing House Fabre and Fabre. Prior to that, Tim was marketing director at the Philharmonia Orchestra, which is actually where we first met. We spoke about the differences between the non- and for-profit sectors and how that impacts the conditions that marketing operates within. We also talked about what the arts could learn from the commercial sector and vice versa, the value of understanding impact, the collaboration involved in bringing a new product and service offering to life, and lots more. Enjoy. Good morning, great to be here. And you know, we've known each other for actually quite a while. I was thinking about it. Our paths crossed in the culture sector when you were head of marketing, director of marketing. Marketing director, yeah. Marketing director at the Philharmonia, touring orchestra based in London, resident orchestra at the South Bank, and we worked together quite a lot during that time. Yep. But one of the reasons I sort of got in touch and asked you to come on is because you now don't work in the sort of performing arts sector, you work in publishing, you work in favour and favour. And I'm fascinated to sort of compare and contrast those worlds. Yep. But what does the Tim Woodall story look like? You know, our past crossed in performing arts, you're now in publishing. Yeah. What does that journey look like?
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's been an interesting one for me, that's for sure. My background is in music, in classical music. I studied music at university. I left university wanting to work in the music business. I guess I wanted to work at a record label at a time when that was terribly glamorous. I ended up at a starter job at an artist management agency where I worked for seven years. And I started in a marketing role there, basically by chance, as you do when you're 22. Spent my 20s thinking about what I wanted to do long term. I was thinking about journalism at one point. I did a lot of freelance writing for magazines as a thriving scene at the time. But I enjoyed marketing, and really that switched to something I was thinking about seriously when I moved to the Philomonia where we met. So that was ahead of sales and marketing role, and then I became marketing director there. I was at the Philomonia for six years from 2015. I really, really loved that job. I loved that orchestra. I got a huge amount out of it. But at the same time, I thought that my next role needed to not be in classical music. I wanted to try something else. I always thought it would be in the arts and heritage sector. I was looking at museums and galleries and theatres. I love working with audiences. But then this small thing called the pandemic happened. And I think I speak for quite a few people when I say working at a cultural organization during the pandemic was pretty intense. We shut down the concert hall program first. We started up a digital concert program, all while working remotely, and there was a lot of understandable anxiety right across the organization about what was going to happen. And it definitely made my reserves run low in terms of energy. So in 2021, I was looking for a break and a change, and I sort of broadened my focus to look at a like more commercial sectors. I always wanted to keep it within the creative world. And I was particularly interested in the philomonia about how the orchestra engaged with audiences directly. You know, a lot of what orchestras do, especially London orchestras, is via the venues they work in. But the philonia, as you mentioned at the top, was also a touring orchestra. So really I wanted to forge direct relationships with audiences. And then I saw the role at Faber, which was a new role. It was head of e-commerce. That's the role I was hired for. And it was all about building direct relationships with readers. And I thought, oh, okay, that's transferable. Let's go for that. And that's the role I got.
SPEAKER_00:Amazing. And what would you say the differences and similarities are between, you know, performing arts and then working at an independent publishing house? You know, on day one, did it feel familiar, or were you like, oh, okay, this is quite different?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, I started during lockdown. So new role, new sector remotely. I didn't have a clue what was going on. It was brilliant and interesting. And I think that's one of the things I've enjoyed about it. That I don't want to say I'm an insider in classical music, but that's been my trajectory and my background. And you know, I know the repertoire, I know the you know who the artists are, and obviously my book world knowledge was pretty low. So actually discovering all that anew and playing a slight kind of outsider role is something I've really enjoyed. They are very different places to work. I think the sectors are very, very different, but they are, as you said, adjacent. You know, I'm working on the literary end of publishing. You know, there are publishing organizations that are publicly funded, for example. Faber is a commercial business. But I was thinking on the way here about what makes arts marketing, arts marketing. I came up with two distinctive features, I guess. Let me test these on you. The first is that in a commercial organization, if you launch a lot a line of products, say 10 products, and two do really well and six do okay and and two bomb, you let the two that bomb go. And as we know, that's not the case in the arts. So I think that is a fundamental difference in terms of what makes arts marketing, arts marketing. And I guess the other one is that with sort of complex multi-level cultural organizations where funding is coming from different sources and there's lots of different stakeholders to deliver for, it can pull you in odd directions in terms of what you're doing with marketing and audiences. And in a way, working for a for-profit company is much simpler from a marketing point of view.
SPEAKER_00:I guess that sort of leads me on to the next thing I wanted to ask about, which is, you know, in one of the conversations we had prior to today, you mentioned that priorities are much clearer in your current rollout favour. And that feels like, as you've just sort of alluded to, something that is less consistently present in the performing arts and the sort of cultural world for a variety of good and also perhaps less convincing reasons. Obviously, the sort of profit motive is, I would imagine, quite clarifying in setting priorities. But are there any other structures, practices, cultural things you've noticed that help keep everyone in your current role, pointing in the same direction, understanding what's most important? Because so many of the conversations I have with people working in the cultural sector sort of circle around this issue of, you know, you ask 10 different people, they will each have a completely different hierarchy of priorities. We're not clear about how the thing that the leadership is saying is important actually relates to my work. And I'm just wondering what other than profit there might be from a more commercial organization that cultural organizations could perhaps take inspiration from.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's an interesting one because we only work in the organizations that we work in, and we've got fairly limited examples to draw from in that case. I think the word that springs to mind is leaner. I think that in some ways arts organizations are very lean. Everyone's got way too much work and things are stressful. But in another way, looked at from another angle, sometimes things can look a bit again. I don't want to say flabby, but there's like, why is this there? And I guess just it's really hard in the market. And you know, I guess I'm four years into publishing, but I don't know the that world that well yet. But you know, I think it's fair to say that for publishing, you know, making a profit publishing book is not easy, and it is a very, very competitive marketplace. And I guess just by its nature in the cultural sector, it is a competitive marketplace in one sense, but in another in another sense, it isn't. And that's good, that's how we want things to be. This is not a very coherent answer, but I think that's the thing that it's easy to struggle with, you know. Like going back to you know, my sort of my expertise in reaching and engaging audiences, there are things that arcs organizations do and say, I'm sure I was guilty of this, like what we do is for everyone, you know, that sort of thing. I can tell you it's not. I had a friend group from university went on a WhatsApp group, and some of them are classical music people and some aren't. And we were talking years ago, you know, messaging about some concert we were going to, and one of our friends who, you know, who's not into that said, Take this to another chat, people. And one of my friends replied and said, Oh, yeah, you might enjoy it one day. And he said, I can tell you categorically, absolutely not. And that's absolutely fine. You know, there's another example of that is like there's this great New Yorker cartoon where um it's like a cocktail party, and person A says to person B, What do you do? And person B says, I do great work taking the arts to people who don't want the arts. And I think that's brilliant, and I love doing that, but it does set up some weird ways of doing things. I guess the one thing to answer your question a bit more clearly, what I found interesting about working in publishing is that everyone in the organization slots into the publishing process at a different point. So if you imagine it as a line, at the beginning of the line, you have the editor buying the book, and at the end of the line, you have the book sold and in the customer's hands, and in between there's editing, there's production, there's design, there's marketing and publicity, and you know, lots of other kind of pieces of expertise being slotted in. And I think that it's pretty clear who's doing what for whom. And I think one of the challenges you get in the arts is that there's many more blurred lines. So a classic example is like does our membership program sit with the marketing team or does it sit with the development team? Or is the marketing director and the development director fighting over that? You know, going back to the previous example, so you're doing um a learning project in a new city and the learning team has to deliver it, the marketing team has to engage harder to reach audiences. Now, unless those two teams work together really strongly, that's not going to happen. But it can get a bit territorial, it can get a bit difficult. And I was really lucky at the Philemonia to work with you know really, really brilliant experts in the different fields and we work together really well, but it's not always that way.
SPEAKER_00:It feels like you've described there something that I've noticed more of a conversation starting to happen around, it feels like in 2025. Namely, that the sort of structures, the structure of a traditional performing arts organization, let's say, is almost designed against or in opposition to how successful teams work in 2025, which is interdisciplinary, which is collaborative, which is focusing around the audience or user or customer needs and sort of working back from there. And you know, the sort of membership example you shared there, I think is an excellent one because you know ultimately that's about engaging audiences, and particular audiences want a different type of relationship with you, whether that's to attend shows or to donate money to you, that's sort of an organization priority rather than an individual's priority. And so therefore, I my question is at Fabre, sort of structurally, does the organization exist in a different way, or is it still quite, you know, there's a marketing department and there's an editorial department, and there's a well, I don't know how a publishing house is set up, but or do you find yourself more often in the room or working on projects with lots of different types of people with different disciplines?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think the answer is both. There are you know clear roles that departments or teams within the organization play, but pulling off a piece of publishing will require a lot of different people to work together. It's innately collaborative. And I think this is the this will be the same at many publishing houses, literature organizations. It's very similar. You know, there is a the decision to publish a book, is you know, it's not so far away from programming a show, and the decision that's made how that process unfolds, you know, is not a million miles away at all. I think that so much of what works brilliantly in the arts is where people are collaborating together. There are lots of people who used to do the roles I used to do where you're in the room when you're talking about programming, and something I was always trying to do was shift the conversation or the question from will this sell to who's this for? I still think the people programming their relationship with the artists, I still think that's something that's independent. It's just really good to have that seat at the table and to, you know, pass your expertise back and say, you know, I think the audience for this is this, or are you sure you want to put this piece in there because that's going to affect the bottom line on this event? And then that's, you know, how it all balances, I guess.
SPEAKER_00:That maybe links nicely into the next thing I wanted to ask you about. Because as you've mentioned already, making money from selling books isn't easy. You know, it's not like you've gone into a high margin, easy money sector from the arts. So there's an element of trying to do a lot and make a big impact with relatively limited resources in both spaces. But does that sort of exist? You sort of alluded to the fact it might exist differently because, as you've said, in sort of traditional cultural sector, there's a lot of agendas that are needing to be met from funders, from you know, charitable objectives, from artistic objectives, as well as commercial needs. Is it simply a case that there are fewer agendas that you're needing to serve in the publishing world? Or is it that resources are allocated more thoughtfully or effectively? I think it's a bit of both of that.
SPEAKER_01:I think there's an ultimate simpler aim. But, you know, even a publishing house has, you know, writers that has a board, you know, there are still multiple stakeholders. I guess I come back to that word leaner again. I think it's easier to be leaner at a commercial company. And I think there's a sort of transparency, I guess, we know within a publishing house as to what works and what doesn't, and it's all very sort of transparent. Whereas I think you know, in the arts world, it's not always. And it's tricky because sometimes you put on great work and it loses you an awful lot of money. But even the way I phrase that, it loses you. I don't think that's the right way of saying it, because you know, that's an investment in the artistic product of the house, but it can lose an awful lot of money. You know, if if I was ever very rich and I wanted to very quickly get rid of some money, I'd stage some opera, I'd stage, you know, a concert season. Like that's a surefire way. And I think that does set up some defensiveness, it sets up some, you know, to what extent, how much do we tell this group about that? There's a it's a sort of natural politics, I guess, that emerge out of that, which I think you need really great leadership to overcome and also like set a vision and take people with you. And I think there are some amazing leaders in the arts and culture sector, and I think that those that do well take everyone along with them. I think that's really hard where you've got people from very different walks of life. If you take an average board in the culture sector and then, you know, the group of artist practitioners, there's some very different views there about what's important and why. I wouldn't relish that role, to be honest.
SPEAKER_00:And again, it feels like the idea of clarity, therefore, is is super important. You know, even if you have 20 key objectives, it requires some really clear communication. You shouldn't have 20 key objects. No, of course, you should absolutely shouldn't. But many organizations probably do. You know, if they wrote down at any given moment what are the most important things to us, and you've got a leadership team to fill that in, it probably wouldn't be a particularly short list.
SPEAKER_01:No, and that's and that is a that is a massive, massive problem. So, say if you take the London Orchestral world, which I know quite well, you know, one of your three objectives would definitely, definitely be to provide enough high-quality work for the players of that orchestra so then you can retain and recruit, you know, really good players. You know, that's a really, really obvious one of three. And then the others, you know, less sure on, but I doubt that that's leading the line in arts council documents, for example. But it's really, really important because we have freelance orchestras and you know, that's no work, you know, no orchestra, basically. So yeah, I think there are often 20 plus, you know, bullet points. I remember those documents, and it's really hard to unpick from that. It really is.
SPEAKER_00:And maybe in that mix of sort of everything shouting for attention is this thing that often seems to come up whenever I'm talking with communications or marketing people working, well, in in lots of sectors, but particularly in in the arts and culture sector, is this tension between sort of brand building and just needing to sell tickets to the show that hasn't sold next week. And you know, you've got two people in your marketing team, and do you do the 10-year play or the the 10-day play? And I mean, I'd be fascinated to hear your perspective on that in a cultural context, but also how that plays out at Fabre, because you know, I've heard of Fabre, I have a sort of feeling of what favour and favour is, but do they focus much on that brand building piece, or is it very much about the books?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a really good question. And I the first thing I'd say is that tension is everywhere, it's definitely not just in the cultural sector. I think what makes it particularly acute in the cultural sector is that empty hall syndrome. Like we can't have the empty hall. That's a real challenge. At Faber, I work in the direct to consumer and members team. So we are adjacent to the marketing team, and we have a marketing and brand director, and the marketing team, you know, deliver amazing book campaigns. So, in a way, what my team are doing is you know building uh an audience for Faber, our events, our books, our products over time. There's sort of a natural delineation, I you know, I would say. I think the challenge you outline is something that's talked a lot about in kind of marketing circles generally. I don't want to get into jargon, but there's you know the long and the short of it?
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so 60% roughly of your marketing resource should go towards long-term brown building and 40% to shorter-term sales activation, or you know, thereabouts, different for different, you know, different startups to an established brand, and you know, you get lots of things like Airbnb, did this big pivot where they went from like high-end performance, you know, marketing, which is like digital advertising led, to like brand advertising, and they won big on that, you know. It is a constant tension. But I think in terms of the performing arts and I guess the arts world more widely, I think you have to find a way as much as possible to do both at the same time. The two types of marketing of brand and performance, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, really, in an arts context. The way I would do that is I would rely on so at the Philemonia, for example, we tended to do one big series a year at the Festival Hall, you know, multiple concerts around a big theme, and it was that moment we would do a tube campaign and we would do a lot of more sort of, I guess, brand-led activity. Now, I wouldn't assume that that would drive a return specifically for that series, but it would help. It would help attract the audiences we were targeting who were more in the market for kind of special events, you know, like you know, that that type of very like on it audience members, as opposed to sort of more sort of traditional 730 classical audiences. Um, so you sort of try and get both out of the same hit. What we were never going to do at the Philemonia was pick a time of year. So in the book world, it's Christmas, pick a time of year where you run a brand campaign in and of itself, as a big corporate brand would do, because it would be really, really hard to justify that in front of the board. So I think that's how I would slice it. I think one of the challenges, though, and I think this applies again across the board, is like it's tempting to run meta ads for everything because you can measure the clicks and you can show the chief executive, and you can you can show, you can demonstrate your work. And this is like a massive bugbear of mine that we need to be on all the channels all the time, we need to put 50% of our whatever into meta ads. Do you? I don't think you do. There's often better ways of spending your money that have a longer term benefit, but I think it's a problem because you know, even you know, in big companies, CFOs will say to the marketing director, you know, show me the money, show me what activity you did and what it led to. And short-termism in business or you know, uh selling anything, I think is wrong-headed. I think you should give your marketers a good few years to show what they can do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it comes back to that question you said you were often trying to shift the conversation towards earlier, which was who is this for? Because I think if you have a really clear and good answer to that, then you don't need to be on all the channels because you will be able to build a really deep understanding of who this is for and be present in the spaces and places that they are finding out about things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think the challenge, especially in a city like London, is that you have a lot of different organizations doing a lot of similar things, and without the market there to breathe down your necks, and again, I don't want that for the arts, it does sometimes lead to a lack of distinctiveness. And distinctiveness, I think, is a big problem because if you're not distinctive, it's very hard to sort of position a brand in any way, and I think that pushes you much more towards performance marketing anyway, because it's hard to tell a story about your organization, or if you're doing exactly the same stuff as two or three other galleries or theatres. I think that is a real challenge, and that's a challenge that's way bigger than any marketing team. It's an organizational challenge.
SPEAKER_00:And again, it feels like it comes back to examples of organizations saying this is for everyone. You know, if we make this thing for everyone, it's like, well, no, no, you don't, because everyone is not a market, and specifically you might have your core audience that you're thinking about, and then the one or two degrees away from that who are people that are likely that you might be able to engage, and it feels like a more ruthless is the wrong word, a more honest conversation about that stuff feels like in an increasingly constrained and uncertain funding environment, audience environment, commercial environment is a conversation more cultural organizations should be having. I mean, maybe I'm being unfair and they are having it, but it doesn't feel like that level of honesty is yet woven through everything cultural organizations are thinking about.
SPEAKER_01:If I think in London, think about the National Theatre and the Opera House and the level of work they do and the reach that they have. I'm sure they're not, you know, they're probably tricky organizations to work for and have lots of challenges, but I do see a lot of great, great work. And I think maybe that within those organizations there is a very clear picture of who their audience is, and it may not always render kind of externally, as it were. I think thinking about audiences is it's a weak link. I think it's almost like certainly when I was early in my career, you know, to think about the audience is a bit of a sort of dirty word, almost like no, no, no, like we do art, you know. Whereas I think we all know the audience plays a massive impact on the delivery of the artistic experience, right? And I think that we should absolutely be thinking about it.
SPEAKER_00:And maybe uh my next question is might feel like a bit of a pivot, but I don't think it is as much as it may initially seem. So I think one of the things that you sort of shared somewhere probably on LinkedIn that I spotted, and I was like, oh, that's interesting, I do need to talk to Tim about that, is the Faber and Faber poetry subscription, which is a new product, uh service offering. I don't know the right language that you would use, but it felt, you know, when I had a look at it, it felt really thoughtfully executed. You know, there was a really nice digital layer to it. It felt like the way in which you were communicating value and flexibility to potential subscribers was coming from a place of what seemed like quite significant insight. I know you said this is sort of your baby, so I'd love to hear more about it. You know, what is it, where did it come from, and I guess what role did being more audience-centric play in its inception and how it is ultimately sort of how it exists in the world?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:So Faber is famous for poetry. T. S. Eliot was Faber's first poetry editor and was pushing a hundred years of publishing poetry. So it's an absolutely central part of Faber's story and what it is. And there's an amazing poetry editorial publishing team at Faber. I think the subscriptions conversation had been around for a while. In the book world, there are a huge number of different models of subscription. Certainly, some years ago, book boxes became very popular, sort of, you know, boxes you receive every three months with a sort of beautifully created list of books. And yeah, there are a real kind of wide variety of different models. And I think we were thinking Faber has a members program, we've got a free members program, which is brilliant, it delivers events and you know, content and special editions and things like that for our members. And we we were we're basically thinking about you know how can we add more value for readers, and given that we had, you know, we've got good digital infrastructure, um, subscription seemed an obvious way to go. Um, but then it's sort of how, what, where, why, when. And really what we've launched, which launched in February, is the start, really, I hope. And it really grew out of we knew we wanted to start with the poetry because of the heritage, and it was really, you know, what can we deliver people for readers and and you know, what are they looking for? So we did some surveying, we asked people what sort of, you know, not pain points, but you know, what are the things that would be useful for them? And what came back quite clearly was flexibility, genre choice, and savings on the value of books, which you know, heavy discounting is not something we do, but something that we did alight upon is that you know people don't love paying shipping fees, for example. We all know that. And so those were the three key things that came back from the conversations we had and the surveying we did. And we aim to build a program off the back of that, which was actually way more challenging than it sounds, because for one, flexibility is quite tricky to deliver. And I think we've done it, and we're definitely going to improve it. But you know, when we're working with our agency and you know, we've got multiple packages, you know, being able to pause a subscription, a whole bunch of different delivery elements that were causing headaches. It was really tempting to say, okay, well, let's leave the flexibility. We'll just have fixed subscriptions and focus on the other two key areas. I'm really glad we didn't because people do seem to love it. So you can subscribe for yourself and cancel at any time. You can do a gift subscription for 12 months and pay up front, or you can pay every month. In total, there's about seven or eight different options, which actually works technically, which is brilliant. Um, but also the next step on from that is you know communicating that you know, flexibility can become word salad. So really, really focusing on UX and UI, which our agency did a great job with, but also the user journey through the process. And again, we're still improving that. You know, it's it was not it's not perfect, but the process of signing up confirmation emails, we send everyone a welcome pack, which again I think has worked really well. There's a monthly email from the editor about the book you're going to receive that month. So there's quite a lot of like around it that I'm hoping over time will mean that we grow and grow. And I think other than the kind of audience research, I think the other main thing I try to draw from was subscription programs. Are outside of the books world. So the ones I looked at particularly hard were coffee subscriptions. You can choose how often you know you get your coffee delivered. I go with packed coffee, who are brilliant. But in a way, we were trying to mimic that. So it's not book boxes, it's a book a month. It lands on your doorstep. It's easy. You often get the book publicational just ahead of. And there's supporting materials and it sort of adding all that together seems to have landed for people, which we're delighted with.
SPEAKER_00:And it seems like there's a bunch of stealable ideas in there. You know, that first idea of really understanding what value looks and feels like for the people that this is for. So being clear about who it's for, and then being clear about what they perceive as valuable, and understanding how you could deliver against that. You know, you can't do heavy discountings, but you can take away shipping fees. So you can deliver on that like feeling of value for money. And looking outside of your immediate competition or sector to try and understand what good actually looks like again feels important and feels like something that, you know, the best digital cultural projects I've worked on are the ones where the people I was working with were very comfortable looking wherever for inspiration and examples of good practice. And they weren't just looking at the theatre down the road or the sort of biggest national competitor in their type of organization. And third was something that you mentioned is around that whole, I mean, experience design really and sort of service design from the moment someone finds out about it to the moment the book is in their hands. It feels like you've been quite thoughtful about ensuring A, that's high quality, and B, that you're sort of layering value. You know, you mentioned emails from the editor that are tailored to the thing they're going to get, you know, welcome packs, all of these moments where someone is quite open to being surprised and delighted, and you can deliver something that works in that moment. That feels like not low-hanging fruit, but it's an obvious thing that more cultural organizations, it feels like they could be leaning to that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I love the phrase layering value. I think that's not something I haven't thought of, and I'll steal. That's really nice. And I think that the kind of delivery of that, the idea, something I've been thinking a lot about is like this mixture between see, we got through all this time, we haven't said the word AI yet. It's the layering of automation together with personalization. So it's sort of actual human interaction. So with this, the email that you get, you know, is specially prepared, it's beautifully written, and there's nothing automated at all. Obviously, the people it's sent to, you know, there is automation there. And there is a signed letter in the welcome pack. You know, there's there's human touches, but then as much as possible underneath that, the actual subscription renewals, the process wants to you want it to be as automated as reliably as possible. Whereas I think often you get stuck somewhere in the middle where you're spending hours doing things that could be automated and then the creative stuff's not layered on top. And I think that's really hard, but I think it is important.
SPEAKER_00:And another thing that you've I guess you didn't speak to directly, but you mentioned is this idea that you said you have quite good digital infrastructure. And you know, I've worked with a few publishing news media organizations, and the quality of their internal stuff digitally varies massively. But it sounds like at Fabre it's quite a mature environment when it comes to digital stuff and thinking about products and thinking about infrastructure and being able to deliver to customers, audiences without all of the technology being a real bottleneck. Is that fair?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that's fair. I think we're improving all the time. I think the challenges we have is often with integrations, and you can work on one integration and get it perfectly, and then others fall off, as you know. And I think it's about getting the right number of integrations and not overdoing it and gradually building over time. And I think that is that sense of I think people still think you know, you work on a big digital project, you know, big website development or something, and then you finish and then it's over, and that doesn't exist, that isn't a thing. It's about continuous improvement and then maybe a bigger project to tie it all together. So yeah, I think integrations are the key.
SPEAKER_00:And that idea of continuous improvement as well, you'd sort of said that with the Poetry subscription, that's something you're looking to continually improve. And I mean, I'm guessing you mentioned an agency as well. So it sounds like you've had some support from an external agency. Oh, yeah, we have a web agency who are working on our site and our infrastructure, yeah, who I work with very closely. And is is that sort of alongside an in-house team or is it mostly external support that are working with people?
SPEAKER_01:We're quite lean internally. We have a lot of different suppliers and partners in different areas, and we have, you know, probably a level of in-house expertise that, you know, an arts and culture organization would have. You know, there's a fair amount of technical knowledge internally, but then we're working with external partners a lot. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The sign on the wall says we have nine minutes left. So, you know, I I'd love to sort of we've talked a lot about looking back and looking at what you're currently working on. What's coming down the track that you're intrigued by or excited about, but both sort of in your day job, but maybe also more generally?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's a huge amount of it's such a cliche. There's a huge amount, there's a huge amount of change. I mean, there really is a huge amount of change coming down the track. I think as always, the fundamentals of what it means to reach an audience or do marketing is not going to change. And the fact that people are going to want cultural experiences in their lives and to read great books, which are the sort of two sides of the, you know, my working world. But the speed of change we've seen in the last 20 years in the digital age is going to accelerate and change more quickly. And I think that can feel a bit overwhelming, but I think that's going to unlock a lot of you know opportunities. So I think it's trying to stay on the front foot of that change. I mean, just for example, in the last, you know, four to five months, Google's introduced AI overviews, as we all have all have seen. And that has had an enormous impact on web traffic. And if you work in this space, you need to understand that. You don't know where it's going, but you need to understand why and what that means. So there's lots of short-term things that are going to change really rapidly, but then there's going to be longer-term opportunities to do great work. And I'm definitely looking forward to that. You know, it doesn't fill me with dread or anything. I mean, I'll come back in five years and my job will be done by AI, maybe, but I th I I somehow doubt that at this stage. I mean, that's what I'm definitely looking forward to. I think, you know, in a longer sort of life career arc, I don't know where I'm going. None of us do, Tim. Anyone that says it has a five-year plan is a liar. Yeah, and that's weird having a five-year plan. I think that I quite like the sort of portfolio career idea. It's a bit of a pretentious phrase, but I like having moved around a bit and done different things. Now I'm a bit older. You know, I've got a clearer idea of what I don't want to do as much as what I do want to do. I don't want to run an organization. Just doesn't appeal to me. But I'd like to be, I don't know, whatever, in the future. But uh, I think I will stick, you know, working with audiences in the cultural sector creative organization space. And that's sort of my brief to myself. And, you know, who knows where that's going, but it's going to be interesting for sure.
SPEAKER_00:And that feels like a hopeful and curious note to end on. Thank you so much for your time this morning, Tim. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on thedigital.works. And if your organization needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at ashman.co. That's man with two ends. See you next time.
