Kudos to BT Ingenious and The Observer, for The Observer Ideas Festival for the mind, a culturally activist brainfest held at the Barbican on Sunday (October 12th).
#Obsideas served up a programme of global perspectives on art, activism, politics, food, government, sustainability, music and justice. The speakers fetched up with passion and persuasion – and without a PowerPoint presentation in sight.
Highlights included The Wire-creator David Simon on story telling, Tiny Tempah on the pursuit of happiness and Guardian poster-boy Edward Snowden (via Skype) on life exile in Moscow.
Conchita Wurst was an unexpected entrant into the discourse on Scots and English devolution, Jewish Black American chef Michael Twitty explained the cultural memory of slave cooking and campaigner Jack Monroe put food at the centre of a growing class war.
An event like #Obsideas this is a treat, not only because it fires neurons, but also because it allows familiar brands to extend and reinvent themselves.
The Observer is a great read. But quality costs money, and like all newspapers - even those that have a strong digital strategy - it is experiencing precipitous sales declines. National newspaper sales are dropping by 8% year on year and the Observer has fallen faster, with sales down 10% and circulation hovering at just over 202,000 copies a week according to September's ABCs.
In that environment, extending its “reason to exist” is crucial to future of The Observer brand. At the Festival for the Mind, its ability to curate an edgy line-up of speakers and catalyse debate was on full display.
BT had a different objective. For the past two years its shareholder and customer focus has been on growing its broadband footprint. It has spent more than a billion pounds on football rights and the launch of BT Sport - so that it can bundle “free” Premier League and Champions League soccer with internet, telephony and digital TV.
If you aren't keen on the lure of football, the beginning and end of how you interact with BT's brand might be to wonder how much Jose Mourinho gets paid to loom so grumpily from billboards up and down the land.
#Obsideas was sponsored by BT’s innovation and creativity hub, though. And this gave the telecoms provider something different to say.
As sponsorships go the presence was low-key: the BT Ingenious logo was not splurged everywhere. But while it might be quietly spoken compared to its sporty sibling, BT Ingenious actually has plenty of cultural and political things to say.
It plays around with clever ideas, for a start. Current innovations include a project to hook up Coca Cola vending machines to Wifi routers in the developing world, which will create a network of free regional internet access hubs.
Hypercat - a multi-partner project - is working out new ways for your fridge to chat to your solar panels so that they can optimize your energy usage. Next-generation household appliances will soon generate enough data to talk sustainably to each other all day. But first they have to get around “the bottleneck” of human intervention. That is to say – me and you.
Little wonder that BT’s head of innovation Jean Marc Frangos muses on how the intervention of technology will shape our collective humanity.
Perhaps his questions are why the BT Ingenious brand mash-up with the Observer works so well.
Technology of the kind of fibre and router plumbing that forms BT’s core business rarely fills stages or sets the soul on fire.
But, in its own way, telecoms companies have been at least as subversive as Tinie Tempah and Jack Monroe. The changing shape of society is a consequence of the tools and innovation we have to hand.
BT’s high-speed fibre backbone is one reason that more than four million people are able to work from home, a 30% leap in past decade, according to the Office of National Statistics.
Uncoupling humans from the traditional workplace has lead to a surge in women launching their own businesses, regional entrepreneurs and a lengthening of working life.
BT might not have the charisma to lead the social activism debate, and wisely outsourced that job to a creative specialist in the form of The Observer.
But the technology company is an innovator and a disruptor all the same. It has a place at the table of social change - not least because it develops and delivers the technology that drives it.
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