Interactive Storytelling: Audience analysis from BBC Taster

Published: 16 November 2016

Run The Jewels - a classic from our back catalogue - gives users a clear, enjoyable and rewarding role, and is the Taster top rated interactive pilot of all time.

Oliver Spall
Senior Product Manager

Senior Product Manager Oliver Spall shares findings from testing new digital projects with BBC Taster.

If you're interested in that, then read on.Through the Taster platform, Connected Studio programme, and partnership throughout the BBC, we've experimented with content ranging from customisable audio, to quizzes through to fully interactive video. Plus we've played around with using social media as an interactive tool, as well as digging into the graphic novel format to bring a story to life. What's great about this range of experimentation is that it gives us some clear pointers to what works, and what doesn't work with audiences from a broad base of experiments.Over the summer, BBC Connected Studio and BBC Audiences developed a research methodology that provides an extension to the data captured on the BBC Taster piloting platform. We wanted to deepen the level of insight available, provide benchmarks, and ultimately provide a level of insight that could serve as the beginning of a set of indicators around what digital formats might be worth investing in.In interactive projects we saw three core trends coming from audience research, and the data we were analysing on Taster:

What is That?

First: Quizzes rule! There's something about the clear reward mechanic that is always a hit for audiences. Our research shows that from the multiple formats of quiz we tested, they were all in the top percentile of ratings, moreover the trend of data via Taster, showed quizzes in the top quartile of traffic.

Body Scrubs

Second: Enjoyment and memorability aren't necessarily mutually exclusive when it comes to short-form interactive content. Gross-out projects like Body Scrubs, mostly involving interactive gifs of A&E / Jackass level calamities hit (unsurprisingly) a note in people's memories, but not many said that they were 'enjoyable'. The takeaway here is that if you got that balance right between mild provocation and fun stuff, the audiences we surveyed got on well with the content. Get it wrong, though, and it acts as a pretty powerful turn-off.

How to Survive a Nuclear Bomb

Third: Give people meaningful stuff to do in your experiences. When we analysed the research to see which pilots people were more likely to try again, How to Survive a Nuclear Bomb indexed above average in this metric. Comparing this to the data on Taster, we saw that the game mechanics in the pilot drove both significantly higher traffic and ratings than average, but also strong engagement within the pilot itself. This is a great example of how using clear and meaningful mechanics brings people into the experience and drives engagement.

It's always exciting when some collaborative work generates far more insight than just the combination of resources, and the collaboration between BBC Audiences and BBC Connected Studio to develop a pilot research framework has been one of those experiences. We're looking at ways to incorporate what we've learnt from this experience into how we create digital content in future, and hopefully these pointers help you too. Next up, we'll be looking at some stuff we learned about immersive formats. That's VR and 360 video, spatial and binaural audio. Warm up your headsets, folks.

Accessibility links

Oliver Spall

Rebuild Page

Useful links

Demo mode

Theme toggler