Blair gets lesson from Silicon Valley on innovation
Tony Blair took some time out from Middle Eastern politics on Sunday to pay a visit to Silicon Valley’s brightest and best.
Hopefully the PM will have left with some ideas about how to create an environment in which dotcom and tech start-ups can flourish here in the UK.
Sky launches broadband, triple play services
BSkyB has announced plans to roll out a broadband service, to be bundled alongside its pay-TV and newly relaunched ‘Sky Talk’ telephone service. Triple play, baby!
Diggnation – Digg relaunches and widens potential appeal
If you’re a user of Digg, you should know that it recently redesigned and relaunched its website. This in itself is not that interesting since we always knew that was coming soon – however, what is interesting is that new categories have been added which make the site more useful to a wider audience.
Journalists complaining about bloggers – who are you to talk?
If you’ve been reading the national media press recently you may well have read more than an article or two by established journalists which attack the rise of blogging. Principally, they criticise the lack of quality (fact checking, grammar, sources, regulatory compliance etc.) exhibited by many bloggers.
But are they really just annoyed that bloggers are threatening their status? Are journalists asking themselves similarly tough questions about how their readers perceive them?
The woes of ITV and TV Broadcasters – what can they learn from the Internet?
You cannot have missed the coverage in the media at the moment about the woes of ITV, and TV broadcasters more generally.
I used to work in TV and find it hard to feel much sympathy for Big Media, but what might the broadcasters learn from the world of the internet?
What MySpace means to Murdoch's space
It will come as news to few that MySpace is the social media phenomenon
du jour
. Picked up by News Corp for $580m, 90m members, and that oh-so juicy teen demographic to market to when no-one under 30 is buying newspapers anymore? Strewth, Rupert Murdoch's got a fair dinkum bet there.
So you may be perplexed by this suggestion Rupert should spin MySpace off on its own, from MarketWatch's wonderfully named Bambi Francisco:
"Clearly, MySpace -- if it were a standalone company -- would be the hottest kind of stock, one that every sell-side analyst would gladly hawk. It's very likely the thought has crossed the minds of executives as well as MySpace founders. Prior to the sale to News Corp., MySpace founders had considered an IPO, according to someone close to the company."
YouTube and NBC jump into bed together
YouTube has settled a six-month dispute with NBC, after the TV network decided to relax and climb into bed with the video-sharing behemoth.
The turnaround is unbelievable, and a huge positive for YouTube. Some months ago NBC’s legal department forced YouTube to remove the 'Lazy Sunday' sketch, taken from NBC-owned Saturday Night Live. Like much of the content on YouTube, the clip was used without the permission of the copyright owner, in this case NBC.
BBC to roll-out ads on websites
The BBC looks all set to introduce “low-key” advertising on its BBC Worldwide websites within a year, with a final decision on the matter due in the autumn after a further round of consumer research.
The announcement was made yesterday, when BBC Worldwide announced annual profits of almost £90m, up by around two-thirds on the previous year.
“One Word Equity” – what is Saatchi on about?
Last week Maurice Saatchi did an interview with the FT talking about the “strange death of modern advertising”. According to Maurice “Sometimes I feel as though I am standing at the graveside of a well-loved friend called advertising”.
I’m not sure many of us would mourn the death of advertising, but his solution? “One word equity”. Mmm… sounds like a very expensive ad campaign is required to achieve that…? What is he on about?
IAB's new research initiative misses the point
The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has launched its latest initiative to understand more about the online behaviour, in a bid to provide advertisers with “a holistic understanding of what, where and how people are accessing the internet”.
The Holy Grail for the IAB is to provide “a single online planning currency” for marketers, to help them “plan their online brand campaigns against traditional media”.
The IAB has teamed up with National Readership Surveys (NRS), which will add an online element to the 3,000 face-to-face interviews it does each month with random consumers: “Areas covered in the study will include; demographic information, frequency of internet usage, where people are going online and how they are accessing the internet - for example by PC or through mobile devices.”
The trouble is, I don’t think this is what online media planners need...
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Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
