Connecting Australia’s Next-Generation Audiences with our National Broadcaster

Audiences are increasingly turning to social media and streaming platforms for content, threatening the place of the ABC, and in turn Australian culture and identity, in the media landscape. The ABC were trying to reach new audiences by replicating the approach they took broadcast media in their digital experiences — creating siloed channels, and timeboxed content. However, this approach put each part of the ABC in direct competition with streaming platforms, and didn’t meet audience expectations for discovering and engaging with digital content — preventing them from finding a place for the ABC in their daily lives.

Over 10 weeks, we designed a strategy for the ABCs product suite that helped them connect to emerging audiences by shifting the approach they took to digital. Rather than mimicking broadcast, digital experiences are now designed for digitally native consumption — where content is inherently connected, personalised and mixed media. Making it easier for audiences to discover and engage with ABC content daily. Strategy is nothing without action. We created tangible experience principles and prototypes that are now being used by product teams across the organisation to build new experiences in-line with the strategy.

For Audiences - A trusted media platform that keeps them up to date on the things they care about. “Spotify is only audio content. Going to the ABC, there’s multiple types of media. It gives you variety. It’s really important. It provides a place of convenience and trust” For product teams - A shared vision, set of principles and design components aligned efforts across siloed teams, accelerating the ability to design, launch and sustain experiences. For the ABC - The project demonstrated the value of testing early concepts with audiences to inform strategy - an approach the ABC now uses to create audience-centred experiences.

Social media supports audiences to browse broadly, while traditional media outlets support deeper dives into a story through a single format. Our strategy breaks this paradigm, helping the ABC leverage its unique value by enabling audiences to: Browse broadly through a live, visual feed, personalised across the specific stories, topics and presenters they care about. Deep dive through mixed media content threads that bring together all ABC content, polls and AMAs related to a specific topic, story or person. ”Having it all completely unified would be great. If I knew I could access Triple J, news, and podcasts in one app, I’d use it all the time. It would probably become my main app for everything” Delivering this experience requires teams working together across the organisation. Our strategy included shared experience principles and a delivery plan to support collaboration across team silos. “The Product Futures principles have been the single most powerful tool for bringing our teams together and focusing their vision on a shared set of outcomes. They’ve brought a unified approach to how our product and platform teams work together to deliver the highest value digital experiences for all Australians.” — Tim Hardaker, ABC Group Product Manager