In 2012, Hoipolloi and Hugh Hughes launched a new digital space – www.invisibletownstories.co.uk – that shared a multitude of stories, created by Hugh, his brother Derwyn and sister Delyth and a cast of friends. This digital collection of stories twinned a performance called Stories from an Invisible Town that toured the UK in the Autumn of 2012.
The digital space
had two express intentions. Firstly, it was designed as an artistic
space: it wasn't built to market the show, but to express ideas; it
wasn't designed to provide information, but to provide an artistic
experience. Secondly, the space was designed to adapt, to develop
iteratively, in response to what we found out when people used it.
We
originally had a timeframe in mind for the fifth iteration of the
site (the soft launch was the fourth iteration), but when we raised
this with the developer we'd worked with, and after interrogating
data provided through analytics, we received a warning: beware
of noise. The feeling was
that there simply hadn't been enough visitors to make any useful
decisions about how to develop the site, and part of being responsive
is actually taking heed of the data available. So we waited. It took
just over a year for as many people to visit the site as had been to
see the show on tour (a tour that lasted seven weeks). In the
meantime, we made a neat little hack from some of the qualitative
feedback we'd had – that visitors just wanted to turn the site 'on'
and not have to fiddle around to get a stream of stories – and that
is still going strong as Hugh Hughes FM.
There
was only one conclusion to draw from this information, and that was
that we hadn't marketed the site well enough. As is often the case
with small organisations, having the relevant expertise in-house is a
case of pot-luck, and having
the time to develop the expertise is very unlikely. It's a phenomenon
that was noted by the Arts Marketing Association and the Audiences Agency recently, something that they have attempted to remedy through
their Small Scale Development programme (an intensive retreat
designed up upskill and begin to develop strategic marketing plans).
Hoipolloi benefited from this
programme.
The
biggest thing to take away from the programme was confidence. We're
trying to enter a new 'market', with players who've developed
extraordinary tactics for capturing attention (no matter what we
thing of linkbait), a market saturated with the bizarre (wet wipe
phones?) and the banal (cats in tights?), a market that to try and
navigate feels like playing with giants. But for all that, we believe
in Hugh Hughes, that quirky, charming, offbeat character, whose
perspective on the world is the perfect partner to a globally
connected, social society. And that's worth all the effort to raise
profiles, reach new audiences and deepen enagagement.
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