Matthew Brady has just joined the British Council as Regional Communications Manager, based in Malaysia. He talks to Eleanor Turney about what he's learned so far, the importance of cultural relations and the social network with tens of millions of users that you've probably never heard of...
Bridging the gap
I started with the Council in December (2013), so it's only been four or five weeks! I've got quite an extensive background in digital editorial – I started my digital career back in 2003, at Johnson and Johnson, and then I moved to Microsoft. More recently, my background has been in consulting, so the past four years I've been in Asia in consulting roles. I wanted to stay on in Asia. I find the region fascinating, the massive diversity and variety. Asia, obviously, spans a huge distance, from Northern China all the way down to Indonesia, so for cultural reasons I wanted to stay. And of course Asia is undergoing massive economic growth at the moment along with South America. Asia, especially China, seem to be focal points for the world at the moment. I'm based in Malaysia, but China's one of the countries that my work will be focusing on.
I spent two years in China in my previous job. I'm still very new to the Council, so most of my time so far has been focused on meeting people and learning about their roles, and their communications needs and priorities. That's been really interesting. For example, in the first month I went to Shanghai, Jakarta and Singapore, so that involved meeting a lot of people, asking a lot of questions. And now I find myself in London, talking to you! I'm here for much the same reason. There's a lot to take in at th moment, as it's such a big organisation. But I feel that my colleagues are very passionate and knowledgeable about their chosen areas, so that's very motivating.
The purpose of the Council's work is multi-faceted, but with the arts work I do think that there's an opportunity around cultural relations and facilitating those relationships, creating dialogue between cultural groups with arts as the focal point. There's so much we can learn from each other, and this is something I've felt in previous jobs, too, especially living in China. With the arts as a focal point, those discussions become a lot easier.
I've looked at various projects recently, but having started in December things were quite quiet – I'm sure it's going to kick off more soon! But I've been talking to colleagues across Asia, and we've been talking a lot about upcoming plans and it's all very exciting. On one level, there's the technological barrier; China, for example, is a huge opportunity, but there's some technological differences: few people in this country [the UK] are even aware of huge platforms like Sina Weibo, which is literally used by tens of millions of people. WeChat has already overtaken WhatsApp as the world's most-used messaging service. Sina Weibo is like Twitter, but it sits behind a firewall, and it's hard to know how to bridge that gap. How do we make that connection? All brands and all companies are facing this same question, of how we connect. It's not limited to the arts or to the British Council.
Matthew Brady was visiting the London Office of the British Council to meet colleagues and discuss arts strategy.
He was talking to Eleanor Turney. You can follow the Theatre and Dance team on Twitter @UKTheatreDance for all blog updates and other arts news. You can follow Matthew on Twitter @MattBrady and Eleanor on @EleanorTurney.
