Tom Roope, Founder and Creative Director of award-winning design firm The Rumpus Room, has been a creative pioneer since the early years of digital content. Brands from Google to the International Olympic Committee have sought out the innovation and engagment that The Rumpus Room has become renowned for.
Roope will be a speaker at AIB’s #iamabroadcaster Global Media Summit, hosted by the AIB on 18-19 February at London’s Royal Institute of British Architects.
How did The Rumpus Room start?
We’ve all seen that music and publishing was all radically changed by digital. But TV hasn’t yet. So we started the Rumpus Room based on what’s going to happen to TV.
Our process started by making interactive films – and we realised that nobody cared. Then we started making content with the audience and that started feeling like a really interesting area of activity, because it had social value. It generated value both in the creation and in the content that you were accessing. And it also had a kind of different spirit compared to how content is usually created for those spaces.
It’s a transactional relationship. You must be giving people back more than they’re putting in. That has to be. You can do that with prizes, or maybe you get on TV if you’re good, but if the idea is good enough, it should be generating enough value for people socially for them to participate.
There’s an idea that almost anyone with access to a camera and a web connection is in some sense a broadcaster. Is it true? Are we all broadcasters?
We are in the same way that we all became graphic designers when desktop publishing came out. There were suddenly lots of bad graphic designers around! But technology throws up all sorts of things, doesn’t it? It makes you realise how television is such a construct. Why must everything be a half-hour or sixty or ninety minutes? I think it is interesting how people’s ability to create something, people’s passion to create something, is really greater than we all expected.
At the Rumpus Room we talk about the ‘Ikea Effect’. People value things that they have made more than other people might value those things. If you participate in creating something, you perceive its value as higher than other people do. A lot of the work we do at The Rumpus Room is based on the idea that if we get some people in to create some content, then they’re more likely to share it. They’re a participate in this creation.
The key brand for most people is themselves. And a lot of the work that we do is helping them promote themselves. Or helping brands help people promote themselves.
What place does storytelling have in a media world where we’re always talking about experiences and things happening in real time?
Did you see the Stefan Sagmeister critique of storytelling? Basically, every concert you go to, everybody’s talking about storytelling. Sagmeister met someone who designed a rollercoaster, and the designer said he was a storyteller. And he replied, “If you’re a storyteller, it’s a pretty stupid story that you’re telling.”
We definitely design experiences. We do lots of experiences that we hope are engaging and fun. I wouldn’t class them as stories, but a lot of them manifest thmeselves in stories. A lot of our work is a kind of game that manifests itself in stories. We’re not totally obsessed with this story thing. There’s a nice piece we did for X Factor where a cat is playing the guitar. Is a cat playing a guitar a story? I don’t know. I don’t dwell too much on it. but it’s quite funny.
Tickets are still available for AIB’s #iamabroadcaster Global Media Summit. Featuring two days of conversation by top figures from the global media industry, and the inaugural David Frost Memorial Lecture, #iamabroadcaster will be held at London’s Royal Institute of British Architects on 18-19 February.
In addition to Tom Roope, other speakers include, Peter Limbourg, Director General of Deutsche Welle; Dido Harding, CEO of TalkTalk; and John Momoh, Director of Nigeria’s Channels TV. Download the conference agenda here.
(read this article in full in the next issue of AIB’s print magazine, The Channel)