The last dimension of relevance: timing

Stephen Garrett is the man behind Kudos, makers of some of the most successful programmes on British TV over the last decade, including Spooks, Hustle, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. A little over a decade ago he was staring down a barrel.

Channel 4 had, in 1998, chosen the day of Kudos's annual Christmas lunch to announce that the spy-series the company had been pitching to them had been given the red light and would not be commissioned. Nobody had made a TV series about spies for decades and the received wisdom amongst the broadcasting fraternity was that nobody should bother trying. In 1999 Garrett took the idea to the BBC and ITV - an executive at the latter, as Garrett remembered in the first of his lectures as the New International Visiting Professor of Broadcast Media at Oxford in 2010 (a lecture I attended), asking him: "My dear boy, who's interested in spies? What do they do? And since the end of the Cold War, who on earth is the enemy anyway?"

Garrett and his team had, of course, done their research and worked out who the enemy might be. In fact, as he went on to say in his lecture "we'd found at least 100. Half way down our list was someone called Osama bin Laden. He may not have been on the CIA's list but he was on ours."

But nobody was buying it and by 2000, with the business struggling to break even, the future was looking very gloomy. Garrett remembers his accountant pointing out that he'd made more money from his house accruing in value simply by sitting there than he'd made from Kudos, and suggesting that he might like to consider a career in property instead. "Economic ruin imminent," said Garrett, "the sensible thing might have been to give up. It was certainly tempting."

Then came the first break. A bunch of new faces at the BBC suddenly became interested in Kudos's idea, eventually green-lighting it (giving it the go-ahead) in the middle of 2001. "It was still an extraordinarily risky proposition," said Garrett. "There we were making a pre-9-11 spy show. And then the world changed [...] and spies, who had been invisible since the Berlin wall came down, were in the headlines every day."

The success that followed, for Kudos, is widely attributed to the quality of the programme making, but the reality - acknowledged by Garrett himself - is that it also owed a lot to a quality every bit as mercurial as the arts of acting, writing or directing: timing.

Talking to consulting clients - as we've been doing again recently (this time in the public sector) - we're reminded of the critical role that relevance plays in the success - or failure - of thought leadership. In fact relevance stands head and shoulders above all other attributes of a piece of thought leadership as the thing most likely to persuade clients to pay attention to a piece of material: about half of the 400+ clients we heard from said it was 'critical' and the overwhelming majority of the other half described it as 'important'.

Relevance, in thought leadership terms, usually means sector-specificity (something that fewer than half of the 20,000-odd pieces of thought leadership on White Space manage to achieve) but even sector-specificity isn't enough for many clients these days. They want something that's relevant to their organisation, their function and even - if it's at all possible - themselves. That's what constitutes good material from their point of view; material that they'll actually read and use; material that has the potential to influence their behaviour.

But clients also want something else when they talk about relevance, and this is something that comes through time and again in conversations with them: they want thought leadership to hit their desk at the right time. Not at the time it's broadly of interest to everybody; at the time it's specifically of interest to them.

Kudos, it seems fair to suggest, had the creative capability to make Spooks for many years before it was commissioned, and the series would doubtless have been just as brilliant no matter how the world changed after 9-11. But it was the combination of creative brilliance and timing that made it hit the sweet spot and turned it into the runaway success became.

There was, of course, a large dollop of luck involved for Kudos (if it's not insensitive to talk about luck in relation to 9-11), but the point about timing stands nevertheless: the right content at the wrong time stands no better chance of success than the wrong content at the right time. A piece of thought leadership can (and probably should) be relevant in terms of subject matter to an audience of one, but it can still fail if it doesn't hit that audience at the right time. Get both bits right and - if what clients are telling us is true - the chances of real success (a client actually acting on what they've seen) are multiplied many times.

And anyway, luck shouldn't come into it half as much for consulting firms. After all, unlike a TV production company they already know a large proportion of their 'audience' personally. And who says the role of an account manager shouldn't incorporate the role of a commissioning editor, green-lighting content at precisely the right time to give the best guarantee of success? Just as long as nobody starts expecting invites to glittering award ceremonies - that's best left to the TV people.