Wowser! Tax Credits are Go!

OK, OK, so not a go just yet. Today's budget announcement heralded, in fact, another year's work ahead of us before the Tax Credit will be fully introduced in April 2013. We were worried that it was going to take two years by which time a whole bunch more companies would have gone to the wall. A year is near enough for most to be able to hunker down and wait for the cavalry to arrive.

I have learnt so much about so many things by being part of the team pushing the Tax Credit agenda. Time for a list:

1)  Try not to launch a high profile media campaign during Movember. If you've never grown a moustache in your life it's not a good time to try, when you are on TV every other day. The worst thing though was the Spectator interview I did in Movember but which wasn't published until February. The reporter quite fairly called me on my stupid tache but failed to mention that he had talked to me three months before .... the Spectator didn't want anyone to think that it took them three months to get their act together.


2) This is tricky but try to make a statement that suggests a controversial headline but which doesn't go the whole way so that when sections of the media publish the controversial headline you can deny it but still get the media coverage. In our case the story that Aardman was to quit the UK which appeared on the BBC website and spread like wildfire, was a not very subtle distortion of a statement that I made that we would be outsourcing some of our work overseas if we didn't get a tax credit. Beautiful. I was able to deny the story while still getting it in front of everyone's face. I had plausible deniability.

I was surprised (but grateful) that it was the BBC website that took this approach to the story but they do have 'form' in this regard having been the source of the story that Aardman's studio had burnt down in 2005 when in fact it was a storage facility.

3)  While people like me blab away to the media, behind the scenes someone has to be doing some very hard work. Most of it was done by the indefatigable Oli Hyatt of Blue Zoo, without him the campaign would never have happened or succeeded. Aardman may have been the trump card but Oli played a difficult hand with great skill. Respect is due.

4)  Radio 4 has amazing reach and influence. The campaign took off in the media after the interview I gave to The World This Weekend on Radio 4. It was a great interview by Shaun Ley and most of the rest of the media coverage at that time ran on from that interview, or a strange version of it.

5) The press agencies sent under-qualified people to interview me; cameramen with a couple of questions emailed to them on their phones. The decline in quality of the news provided by agencies (as described in brilliant detail in Nick Davies' Flat Earth News) is a great worry - so many news organisations rely on agencies for their stories.

6) The FT is ace, they reported the story in depth and accurately, another good way of getting your story in front of the Treasury, for example.

7) Sky News appeared to be a serious news organisation committed to getting the story right, I had not expected this when they asked for an interview.

8)  Don't watch your TV interviews back especially if, like me, you are not a 'natural'. I hate seeing and hearing myself on TV or Radio but the job had to be done. By not watching any of it back I didn't get self conscious and worry about how I was coming across. People said I was OK, I chose to believe them without checking for myself.

9)  Journalists short of ideas and background information will often default to the adversarial approach .... using attack as the best form of covering up their lack of preparedness or skill.

10) There is just a tiny, tiny chance that the Chancellor gave UK animation producers a tax credit just so that he could make the Wallace and Gromit gag about the labour front bench.

11) There is no 11, I just think lists of 10 are lazy.

Update: 23rd March 2012

12) I feel the need to add another item to my list as I have been reminded, very good-naturedly, that the media hullaballoo actually began in our august trade mag, Broadcast. Back in October I gave a rushed interview to a reporter who, in my view, didn't report the substance of what I had said and instead cherry-picked a quote to prove a point she had to make about the film tax credit. I complained to the editor who was sympathetic. She offered me an opinion piece in the mag and made it clear that Broadcast was going to be a suporter of the campaign, which it really has been. I wrote the piece and it's one of the things that got Radio 4 (see item 4) interested. Again, it's not always a disaster being misquoted ...

The Long Awaited Awakening of Payment-ism

I'm excited by the recent outbreak of 'payment-ism' that's broken out in the media. Payment-ism is the long long awaited push-back by content providers who are seeing their businesses destroyed by the 'everything-for-free-ism' of the web.

This latest round started with Rupert Murdoch saying that he was going to stop providing free online versions of his newspapers. Online is killing newsprint, just like it killed CD sales and just like it's killing DVD sales. The editor of the Wall Street Journal likened Google and YouTube to parasites in what's starting look like a coordinated attack by News International on some of the 'everything-for-free' pillars of the web establishment.

There's another interesting angle on this that has crept out into the news too – and that's the paradox that is the BBC's iPlayer. The iPlayer is a superb piece of technology with an incredible content offering (relative to most online video destinations) and I am now hearing tales of people I know personally (as opposed to people made up by the newspapers) who are not bothering with the whole buy-a-TV and a TV License thing. Everything they want to watch they can watch online, usually legally, on the iPlayer, on itv.com or 4OD. What they can't find there they find on a torrent site.

The truth is that students, singletons with active social lives (who therefore don't watch much live TV), divorced dads, TV-phobes, geeks and technophiles are all people who can't live without their broadband connections but they can live without their conventional TV.

Aardman's most recent TV film, Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death really brought home to me how the iPlayer is changing everything. With the previous films there has been a scarcity about them; it wasn't possible to watch them again and again until the DVD was released or unless you recorded them on a crappy VHS.

Wallace and Gromit is all about the detail – you can freeze the film on pretty much any frame and find something funny going on somewhere that you hadn't picked up on. You can marvel at the finger prints on Gromit's face or at the sly arching of his mono-brow.

With the previous films the only way you could really indulge a passion for repeated viewing and frame by frame Gromit gratification was by buying a DVD. Owning the DVD meant you owned a little piece of Wallace & Gromit's heritage, a piece of their world.

You can watch AMOLAD again and again on the iPlayer for free (in the UK) for the 7 days following each of its broadcasts. Sixteen and a half million people watched AMOLAD on Christmas day on BBC1 and millions then went on to re-watch it on the iPlayer. Many of them, I am sure, will no longer feel the need to buy it on DVD having gorged on all that detail on their laptops.

So how are we going to finance the next film if DVD publishers can't afford to pony up a substantial advance for DVD rights now worth a fraction of what they were worth even 2 years ago? And if we can't afford to make another Wallace and Gromit, what are the BBC going to show in its place ... and how is that going to get financed?

Consumers are going to have to pay for their content online – either through an enhanced license fee (and surely you will soon need to use your TV License account number to watch the iPlayer I think), through subscription or micro-payments or pay as you go online content accounts or TV Everywhere

Some people won't like it. These people believe it is their right to get content for free on the web. A huge educational initiative is required to teach kids the basics of copyright law and to explain that disaster that will befall us all if we can't get paid for our artistic endeavors.

More people that you think won't mind. I was amused by this post on TechCrunch today where the writer gave us a list of all things that he currently gets for free that he would be prepared to pay for. I think he got a bit carried away with his theme, if push came to shove he'd ditch half of them but the very fact that he is raising the idea of paying feels very new
and very encouraging.

All we would need to make the next Wallace an Gromit film would be for the BBC to pay us a few pence for every iPlayer viewing and we'd be away. How on earth will I sell them that idea ....