William Owen
Advising on digital innovation and growth in the cultural sector
William is a leader and innovator in digital experience. He has worked with the world’s leading brands and cultural organisations to grow audience engagement, build reputation and develop core digital capabilities. His track record rests on the ability to establish how digital works as a value driver in each unique situation, focus teams on customer insights and organisational objectives, and respond with creative ideas1. The resulting return on investment is consistently high.
In 2007 William founded Made by Many, one of the first interdisciplinary digital product consultancies. The firm has been at the forefront of digital innovation, working across the world within established corporations and institutions to create breakthrough products and services. William introduced clients to techniques for rapid product innovation and value-oriented design and investment frameworks to improve decision making, reduce risk and generate powerful audience impact. Here’s three examples:
At the V&A William advised the senior leadership team on the investment framework and design strategy that established the museum as a global leader in digital in the cultural sector.
An eight year partnership with the World Economic Forum established direct engagement with a worldwide audience of 100 million and, post-Covid, the creation of new and powerful digital tools for extending its membership circle beyond boardrooms and governments, moving to on-line and hybrid events.
50 years of print, audio and televisual advertising entries to the Cannes Lions festival were transformed into a vital archival information service for the advertising industry, and a profitable year-round revenue stream.
William now works as an independent consultant, focused on the cultural sector and advising government and international museums, galleries, libraries and archives on strategy, policy and action. Areas of expertise include visitor experience, editorial strategy, research collaboration and infrastructure, collection digitisation and conservation.
Services include:
Strategic planning and building the investment case
Experience design and innovation
Content strategy for digital marketing, visitor experience and interpretation
Identifying commercial and research opportunities in re-use of existing assets, both digital and analogue
Training and mentoring digital product and editorial teams
Sector experience
News media & entertainment, Cultural institutions, Exhibitions, Consumer goods, Retail & fashion, Travel, Financial Services, Property, Non-government organisations, Education.
Past and current clients and partners
Adidas (Global), Amnesty International, Ascential, Aviva, BBC News, British Airways, Burberry, Cannes Lions, Carlsberg (Global), Channel 4, Eye Magazine, Factum Arte and Factum Foundation (Spain, UK, USA),Financial Times, Finnair (Global), Hearst Magazines, HSBC, Innogy RWE (Germany), ITV News & Sport, Man Investments, Mars (USA), McKinsey, Mitsubishi Estates (Japan), Nike (USA), Nomura Research Institute (Japan), Royal Academy of Arts, Science Museum Group, Trinity College, Type Archive, UKTI, Universal Music Group, Victoria & Albert Museum, Valor Economico (Brazil), VRT (Belgium), World Economic Forum (Switzerland)
Contact details
Email: william@wdowen.com
Phone: +44 7968 582 136
Highlights
The V&A, London - a bespoke digital experience for the world’s greatest museum of art & design
William guided the V&A through its award-winning digital transformation programme in 2014-17, bringing in half a million new visitors and £3.5m additional revenue annually. By using highly visual and time-sensitive content the rebuilt platform showed the V&A at its best and most relevant, projecting the museum’s exhibition marketing capabilities in new ways that enabled events and exhibitions to work together within a daily changing audience programme. Project success was built on close collaboration with the senior management team, with fortnightly demonstrations of work-in-progress open to the entire museum staff. We established programmes to improve digital team collaboration with curatorial and marketing groups and so bake digital into the exhibition planning cycle. The first phase of the integrated platform was launched just 4 months after beginning implementation of the strategic plan.
The programme is seen as an outstanding success in the sector, winning best website at the IDCA Awards 2016, establishing digital as a core competence in the museum, integrating collections management with content management within a purpose-built platform that massively increases editorial productivity. The transformation process delivered a huge boost to the digital team’s confidence; regularly rolling out new services and demonstrating new capabilities in design, technology and product management, with a more agile approach to digital investment and financing.
World Economic Forum, Switzerland - a hybrid digital/analogue membership network
This 8 year engagement began with a race for scale, creating an effective content publishing system - both owned and social — that over 5 years built a global web audience of 6m unique users and a social media audience of 100 million, with 1bn video views a year. Covid interrupted Davos and brought significant changes including a strategic shift towards paid subscription and new forms of membership engagement. Digital is now a core component of the organisation’s capabilities, as a means of maintaining corporate and political relationships using hybrid physical and virtual events. The result is a world-leading digital ecosystem that enables WEF to create new and powerful networks for its membership as well as influencing an audience of millions.
The Work, for Cannes Lions
An essential archive for the global marketing industry
Fifty years of entries to the Cannes Lions advertising awards created a massive but unused archive of the history of advertising for television, radio, newspapers and magazines. This was a dormant assent of potentially great value. Big doesn’t necessarily mean useful, so we undertook a rapid in-depth research programme with advertising and brand executives; this identified two important use cases for agencies and marketing groups: training executives and preparing client pitches. A search mechanism that worked within a cleaned-up data structure was designed to serve these two core audience needs. Even before launch, our client had sold sufficient licences to repay the entire investment in the product. The Work, as it became known, is now a vital source of year-round revenue for Cannes Lions, and an object lesson for museums, galleries and libraries in how to transform unused archival assets to extend both reach and usefulness to the research community.
Publications
Eliza Ogilvy’s Commonplace Book is Missing, 2024, a work in progress
Restoring the corpus of Archie Creswell, in The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality, Ed. Adam Lowe, Factum Arte Madrid, 2021
Messy Medium, Eye Magazine 2007
Getting lost on the critical path, Eye Magazine 2006
Painting the World Pink, in Looking Closer, Critical Writings on Graphic Design, Ed. Bierut et al. 2006
Wheels of Fortune, a history of the design of Fortune magazine Graphic Design History, Ed. Heller & Ballance, 2001
Unsteady States, in Digital Prints, Ed. Adam Lowe 1997
Bodies, Text and Motion, Peter Greenaway’s Pillowbook, Eye Magazine No.21, 1996
Design in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Eye Magazine No.14, 1994
Magazine Design: a history, 1990, Rizzoli
Contact details
Email: William@wdowen.com
Phone: +44 7968 582 136
‘value’ and ‘return’ may be cultural, social, economic.