Tag Archives: Television

Why do the Germans beat the Brits at media conferences?

By April 28 2012, 12:55 pm Comments Off

I’ve just returned from Dusseldorf, where I presented the keynote speech at the German broadcasters’ ‘TV Effectiveness Day’ at the hugely impressive Tonhalle.  It was my third time presenting at this event, and this was the best of the lot. Everything passed by with a ‘Vorsprung Durch Technik’ efficiency, the entertainment was first class and the catering alone cost more than most conferences cost to stage in total.

What impressed me most was the attendance. Well over 1,300 attendees, of which almost 1,000 were from media agencies or advertisers. In fact, the number of advertisers alone – around three hundred in total – is more than I’ve seen at a year’s worth of media events in the UK. Read more »

BLOG – ATTENTION! THIS IS NOT ENGAGEMENT…

By December 19 2011, 11:24 am 1 Comment

‘Engagement’ is still one of the most overused words in media. It is a slippery snake of a concept, still without a consensus definition and ‘measured’ in a menagerie of random (and often conflicting) ways. Each medium has a different interpretation of it and those interpretations don’t travel well. We have no accepted view of how it contributes to the bottom line. We know very little about it. But we know one thing; it is not attention. We don’t ‘think about’ engagement. So why does it keep getting pushed that way?

Siegmund Freud studied neuroscience, but became frustrated by the limited explanation the physical brain could provide for the complexities of the human experience. When he proposed, more than a century ago, that “‘most of our mental life operates unconsciously and that consciousness is merely a property of one part of the mind” he was vilified by the scientific community. Yet those two hypotheses, that most of our mental functioning happens at an unconscious level and our conscious brain is relatively unimportant in the wider scheme of things, are readily (and provably) accepted by that same community today.
Read more »

In or out – the most important media segmentation

By November 14 2011, 2:35 pm Comments Off

There does appear to be a strong relationship between television and outdoor; when used together, they seem to aid advertising effectiveness, by working in a highly complementary way. Certainly, the IPA Databank suggests they work well together, and well over half of the prize winning case studies feature TV as a lead medium and outdoor as a significant support channel. The fact that one dominates our time in the home and the other is eponymous with the time we spend out of home suggests to me that the most basic media segmentation, and the one that is perhaps most relevant to the media consumer, is in or out; whether we are sitting in the relative calm and comfort of our own living rooms, or we are out and about in the big, wide world, getting on with our lives and managing to cut a path through all of the noise and distractions.

Is Co-operation the Secret to Local TV Success?

By November 4 2011, 5:54 pm 1 Comment

Is it just me who is utterly perplexed by the deafening silence that followed the much-publicised letter to Jeremy Hunt, from prospective Local TV licence bidders opposing the government’s Muxco proposal? Why is so much emphasis being placed on the delivery mechanism when local TV should be about deriving revenue from the distribution of engaging, relevant content, not the technology or the platform?

Maybe we need an analogue solution to this digital conundrum. In 1950, 23 European broadcasters got together in a Torquay hotel and laid the foundations of what must be one of the first ever content sharing agreements. Thus the European Broadcasting Union was born – a self-regulating alliance with each member agreeing to provide minimum levels of “free” content and services to the collective – and nothing whatsoever to do with the EU. Using the “virtual” currency of Gold Francs to trade between themselves, membership costs and dividends were subject to a complex but irrefutably fair algorithm that was primarily based on the number of TV sets within each region – in modern day parlance, reach. Read more »

If You Ask A Stupid Question…

By October 27 2011, 11:25 am 7 Comments

I almost expect new research on our media usage to be misleading these days. You know the sort of thing; like asking an online panel how many hours a day/days per week do they claim to do this or that and then concluding that people spend more time online than doing anything else. We’ve had a steady flow of that kind of research from the digital specialists for so long now that I’ve become inured to it, but when the industry regulator – OFCOM – engages in similarly dodgy research, the hackles begin to rise again.

In their latest study of young people’s media use, OFCOM asked a sample of 1700 children (aged 5-15) and their parents a number of questions about how much time they spend with different media channels and how important each one is to them. In particular, they ask a question about which piece of technology they would most miss if it was taken away from them; television, the internet, or their mobile phone. Read more »

Local TV – Muxco, Measurement and Money

By October 13 2011, 12:18 pm 2 Comments

This week’s “Next Steps For Local Television” Westminster Forum conference proved quite an eye-opener for the uninitiated. With as many opinions as attendees, even agreement to disagree couldn’t be established.

With the main sessions split neatly into two hot topics – Technology and Content – the panelists and the audience divided pretty neatly into the Experts who “knew what they were doing” and the Passionistas who were “doing what they knew”, with not a great deal of common ground between them. The Experts quoted stats, creds and models (note that’s previously successful ones) whilst the Passionistas got straight to the touchy feely heart of what real Community TV might actually look like. Read more »

Local TV – To Be or Not To Be?

By October 6 2011, 8:36 am Comments Off

When Jeremy Hunt addressed the Royal Television Society last month, his “Boldness be My Friend” reference (to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, not Pink Floyd’s Cymbaline, wouldn’t that have been awesome?) was a brave one.

In spite of the relentless cynicism, and much behind the scenes lobbying against the project, Hunt and his Department of Culture Media and Sport team are tirelessly pressing on with plans to shoehorn a TV offering into the local media ecosystem – this latest iteration being the most recent in a series of attempts by successive governments to introduce a hyper-local news service to select parts of the UK. Read more »

Understanding the trick with product placement

By March 15 2011, 11:37 am 1 Comment

At the end of February Nestlé coffee brand Dolce Gusto made history by becoming the first brand to be featured on a UK-produced TV programme in a paid product placement deal on ITV1′s ‘This Morning’. This relaxing of the rules around product placement on UK TV presents brands with a new and exciting channel within an existing media, and I’m fascinated to see how this moves forward. Read more »

Murdoch: reaction from the web to Hunt’s BSkyB decision

By March 3 2011, 10:42 am 2 Comments

According to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 Andrew Neil put it like this: Rupert Murdoch “would have sold his granny to get the rest of BSkyB” says

And the point to product placement is?

By February 25 2011, 3:42 pm 1 Comment

Simon Cowell, American Idol judgeWhether there will be a flourish of product placement when Ofcom opens the regulation floodgates on Monday (28 February) is anyone’s guess, but from the agency buyers I’ve been talking to they are not going to bet their expense accounts on there behind a sudden flood.

The truth is, from the chats I’ve had this week with some pretty senior “gorillas with calculators” (TV buyers to the uninitiated) the response has varied from indifference, “its small beer, mate” to questioning, “why are you hacks so interested?” and back to indifference “can’t we talk about something sensible?” Read more »

Jobs