Cultural regeneration and impact on creative industries

Figure 13: Benefits to projects, by number of projects

Source: ICC/DHA Cultural Olympiad Project Survey (base 37 projects)

6.5

6.6

6.7 Although it is encouraging that projects recognised the value of being involved in the Cultural Olympiad and London 2012 Festival, this also to some extent masked some of the difficulties in promoting Scotland via the multiple London 2012 cultural offers. There was an unavoidable element of competition between attracting audiences to London and to established Scottish cultural events in the summer of 2012. For example, the Edinburgh Festivals, brought together under the banner of Festivals Edinburgh, were anxious about the potential deleterious impact of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games on ticket sales and visitors to Edinburgh. While for ‘new’ cultural projects the Games catalyst was always likely to lead to greater profile and increased ambition, for existing projects or activities the counter factual comes into play - had the Olympics not been held in the UK, there would have been less competition for audience and media attention.

Though not solely the responsibility of Creative Scotland, there was broad agreement that the London 2012 cultural offer in Scotland suffered because of brand confusion. Projects experienced confusion in being funded at different times by different brands and in navigating the layers of the Cultural Olympiad, Inspire Mark, London 2012 Festival and Scotland’s London 2012 Cultural Programme. However, at the research symposium, project leads suggested that Creative Scotland’s Creative Programmer and her team were effective in reducing complexity where possible.

To assess the contribution of the Programme to the image of Scotland as a cultural destination, there needs to be greater consideration of measures of Scotland’s current position (e.g. Anholt GfK Roper Nation Brands Index) and a clearer understanding of funding made and mechanisms put in place to operationalise this vision. Festivals Edinburgh provides a useful exemplar of what needs to be put in place: they are increasingly sophisticated at being able to place a value on their Festivals in terms of economic impact, media value and other indicators of international esteem.

Cultural regeneration and impact on creative industries

6.8 As discussed in Chapter 7, in order to assess the contribution of a one-off event to the wider creative and cultural economy, agreement needs to be reached on what projects (or parts of projects) in receipt of funding are being asked to achieve, what activity they will undertake to secure the required outputs and ways of knowing they have been successful individually and as part of a wider programme.

6.9

6.10

6.11

6.12 A number of individual evaluations have been undertaken of projects (or programmes) contained within the Programme and these provide some insights that can inform the approach taken for Glasgow 2014. Two of the most relevant are Edinburgh International Festival’s Ingliston Season and NVA’s Speed of Light Media Report.

Edinburgh International Festival was the only Edinburgh Festival to receive direct funding as part of the London 2012 Festival. This funding was used to support the Ingliston Season, where a venue was established to stage large-scale international theatre to attract national and international media, diplomatic and cultural attention, putting the spotlight on the Festival, Edinburgh and Scotland during the Olympic and Paralympic Games. In its End of Project Report, the project provided evidence of its success in achieving additional reach, PR and national and international media impacts. It secured 405 articles in the UK print and online media, generated over £2.1 million through the UK print media and PR value of over £6.4 million through UK print. Its broadcast coverage AVE was estimated to have a value of over £1.7 million. There are two main aspects of these data that are worthy of mention here. First, the EIF is a large enough entity to invest in external evaluators to capture the value of its activity – this would be unlikely to be available to smaller projects. Second, they are making use of industry recognised valuation tools like Advertising Value Equivalence (AVE) that provides a measure of media exposure and the equivalent cost of placing an advertisement in a particular medium.

Both Edinburgh International Festival’s Ingliston Season and NVA’s Speed of Light have in common investment from Scotland’s national event agency, Event Scotland, which requires its funded projects to account for their impact using the eventImpacts toolkit 5, which encourages use of the AVE method and others that help to assess economic and other forms of value of events. Speed of Light (see full case study in Appendix 3) received widespread media coverage nationally and internationally, supported by a valuation of media coverage with an AVE of over £1 million and PR value of over £3 million. This coverage included national BBC news, a 30-minute BBC Artworks documentary, a substantial slot on the BBC’s The Culture Show and radio features on the World Service, The Review Show and Late Junction. The imagery combining the Scottish landscape and contemporary culture/technology was central to press representations of the work.

These two examples highlight a connection between promotion of a fresh, sophisticated image of Scotland and a wider contribution to the creative and cultural economy. Festivals Edinburgh also provides a good example of how a strategic approach to the London 2012 Games helped alleviate the potential displacement of visitors and the media during Games time. As a collaborative forum created by the twelve major festivals, Festivals Edinburgh worked on plans for the London 2012 Games for 3 years to position Edinburgh as a cultural destination of choice for visitors. They recognised the opportunities and risks involved in London hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games and they responded by securing the agreement of all twelve festival directors to work to a set of themes to enable enhanced programming and marketing of the Edinburgh Festivals and the Festival City over this three year period, extending to Glasgow 2014. The economic importance of this strategic approach was important as Festivals Edinburgh sought additional investment to capitalise on the significant international profiling opportunities afforded to Edinburgh in 2012 and 2014 and to develop international relationships, a tourism legacy in key existing and emerging markets, and increased cultural profile and business development opportunities.

5 eventImpact website http://www.eventimpacts.com

6.13

6.14 Whereas, for Edinburgh International Festival and Speed of Light, promotional returns from involvement in the London 2012 Festival programme were tangible, the wider cultural brand of the Edinburgh Festivals generated less positive outcomes. Strategic interview findings suggested that Festivals Edinburgh had hoped for better representation from its association with the Olympics and the Cultural Olympiad. There was no noticeable increase in interest in the Edinburgh festivals with Olympic marketing activity. The marketing of the Programme did produce more tangible marketing returns. Overall, additional marketing support was forthcoming for Festivals Edinburgh and this led to a stable year of audiences when there was a fear that figures would have dropped. This learning needs to be considered as planning continues toward Glasgow 2014 to ensure that recognition is given to existing cultural assets, but without squeezing out new activity.

The more effective use of social media within the Programme could have led to greater measureable impacts of sentiment about Scotland’s cultural offering during 2012 and beyond. With an increasingly abundant use of social media in 2012 and in particular, the rising demand of mobile smart devices in public life, there is great potential to harness online promotion and marketing and large scale data collection methods to measure the wider impact of cultural events.

6.15

6.16

6.17 The potential lies in the ability to dip into a widening world of distributed, user-generated and audienceled content that has not been witnessed at this scale previously. However, the Programme would have benefitted from the development of a social media strategy that fully utilised social media analytics throughout, in order to take advantage of organically generated public discourse being encouraged through online and established media engagement with the Programme. London 2012 Festival was successful in utilising Twitter, particularly the tag #london2012fest to promote and secure online engagement.

Social media, while an increasingly valuable tool to support the promotion and marketing of a cultural project or programme, can also operate as a strategic intervention to encourage public discourse as a source of genuine, organic/non-invasive feedback from existing and potentially new audiences. Some projects, like Speed of Light (see case study) were successful at deploying social media to engage participants and audiences, and others, like CitizenRelay fully integrated their creative concept with social media. In the case of the latter, this approach secured extensive public engagement and media visibility and (at the same time), a robust set of metrics that justified this approach.

The data available on employment opportunities generated as an outcome of the Programme is partial, with 37 jobs reported as being created through the projects (UK Evaluation Survey). However, it is not possible to ascertain whether these jobs were full time equivalents (FTEs), or whether they were permanent roles. The wider economic contribution of the Programme has not been assessed systematically, to date. Bearing in mind the baseline indicators included in Glasgow’s Legacy Plan, it is important that an agency (not necessarily Creative Scotland) is cognisant of the need for clearer measures for the economic contribution of cultural activity and events if it is to be possible to produce robust data for 2014.

Conclusion

6.18 In terms of Promotion, there is evidence to suggest that projects did experience a benefit from being involved in the Cultural Olympiad – although it is less clear whether the umbrella brand of Scotland’s London 2012 Cultural Programme brought additional benefits. National and international profile was enhanced for projects and being part of a national celebration was deemed beneficial. The absence of robust data on employment, international visitor numbers and other indicators associated with investment in the creative economy means that it is difficult to place a value on the promotional opportunity that London 2012 represented.