Al Gore - an agent of change at Engine

We are so proud at Engine to be Al Gore’s hosts during his visit to the UK.

Change has been at the heart of what Engine does – arguably since it started in 2004. But we’ve declared it as our passion for the past two years and in that time we’ve worked with clients and industries not only to cope with change, but to embrace it.

Al Gore is a change agent. In his career through politics and the environment he has seen opportunity where most have seen, at best, a conventional outlook.

Five years ago he set his sights on media, and incubated an experiment in media called CurrentTV.

When he and Joel Hyatt set up the multiplatform TV channel, the last thing anybody was thinking of setting up was another TV channel. But what Gore and Hyatt saw was a change in the media landscape. User-created content, but presented with an editorial eye for high quality. A relationship between brands and producers that went beyond sponsorship.

And they saw a trend in traditional broadcasting away from spending on documentary, yet if you looked at the YouTube top 50 in 2005, half of those clips had current affairs subjects.

Al Gore has made a career out of taking what we assume to be too difficult and making it real.

On Thursday morning we’ll be spending a couple of hours with the former vice president, talking about the changing media landscape, how he sees it, and how he sees it changing.

We’ll be filming it, and it will be viewable soon after here on the Engine website. We hope you’ll join us then.

Image courtesy of World Economic Forum @ Flickr