Let’s all play Monkey Tennis!

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 | Posted by: Fiona Cullinan
Categories: Media sector | Tags: Alex Connock, entrepreneurs, media, BBC, Glasgow, Manchester, Media City, Pacific Quay, TV formats, Monkey Tennis

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps: There is a great game played by TV formats producers called Monkey Tennis. Look into it – the speed and creative invention, its similarity to the accelerated brutality of consumer demand – and you will see product development across any business in the shape-shifting 2010 economy.

Here’s how to play…

With big new infrastructure and bandwidth being launched in the creative business – like MediaCityUK in Manchester – finding the ideas for content to fill those cavernous offices and digital pipes will be more critical than ever. And that means playing a sort of Monkey Tennis.

Which of course doesn’t involve monkeys or tennis.

It’s a reference to the I’m Alan Partridge scene in which he pitches rapid-fire TV formats, each unique but each more desperately out of step with the zeitgeist and more dismissively rejectable than the last:

Arm Wrestling with Chas and Dave
Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank
Cooking in Prison

Try playing at TV format creation yourself.
Pick up the racing results in the paper, take the names of horses and make up shows about them. Then ask – is any of them good for today’s market? This from today:

Crazy in Love – it’s a dating show in a secure unit
Royal Holiday – will Princess Anne enjoy sharing your trip to Wales?

You get the idea.

Monkey Tennis is a poignant summation of the law that says everything in showbusiness (and consumer demand) changes faster than the people or companies who deliver the ideas.

For anyone entering the TV game – say MediaCityUK in Manchester with its impressive new studios – the Monkey Tennis process is a project in which victory will fill the space for years, and failure could leave a yawning gap. Imagine someone in Manchester inventing the next Britain’s Got Talent, and what that would do to a place that has already had the boost of BBC Breakfast moving in. Now imagine the missed opportunity for Manchester if someone does that at BBC Glasgow instead.

Hitting the rare moment in Monkey Tennis when an idea does catch the zeitgeist (as opposed to being as off-the-mark as all the Alan Partridge efforts) determines the marketability of products, companies and people – and well beyond the media, from fashion to shampoo launches.

Now try Monkey Tennis on your industry.
Try it with your Gü cake range, your models of bicycle, your Tesco flatscreen TV range, your Pets at Home dog toys, Nandos chicken sauces, BMWs, garden sprinkler heads…

Wherever you look in this recession, product evolution, the need for companies and staff to reinvent their creative proposition is changing faster than ever before.

Win the game and you hit a global market like Simon Cowell. Miss out and you’ll be stuck in a Norwich motel like Alan Partridge.

Image: © Rhys Davenport/Flickr, 2009

Alex Connock, CEO, Ten Alps comments on the media industry for the Grant Thornton Elevate blog -– read more posts by Alex Connock

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