James Cridland

James Cridland's blog

A radio futurologist writing about what happens when radio and new platforms collide

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Meet the listeners

Posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 10:00am. #

BBC Radio 1 gets a frightening amount of text messages every month; most of which they can’t read out (there’s no time) so they simply throw them away. But they did an interesting experiment recently to use rather more.

All mobile network operators dropped their charges to BBC Radio 1 for one day as part of what the station calls a mobile digital literacy initiative; and the station asked for pictures of the audience. They got some. Well, I say ’some’ – 42,000 of them. In one day.

They published the results on their website – which was exciting – but also produced the above video (here if you can’t see it). It’s a thing of art, beauty, and a hell of a lot of Moo cards – and a great example of what happens when you have creative people thinking about how to involve the audience in new and interesting ways.

Congratulations should probably go to the achingly fashionable Hugh Garry, who’s very good at this sort of thing. (It’s not his first appearance here either).

(Hat tip to Alan Phillips; this video is embedded using BBC code but since I’ve changed the size I’m flaunting their terms and conditions, whoops; it may not be available outside the UK for which I can’t do much about.)

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3 comments

airsdoesmusic said at December 22nd, 2009 at 6:29pm

Meet the listeners – James Cridland http://bit.ly/8b0xAX

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

ActionNowMkting said at December 23rd, 2009 at 12:38am

Meet the listeners – James Cridland: BBC Radio 1 gets a frightening amount of text messages every month; most of wh… http://bit.ly/4Psef7

This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Ashok said at December 25th, 2009 at 3:06am

Works fine over here in Canada.

If that’s an accident on their part, it’s a happy one.

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