Spotify has finally come to Singapore! The world renowned streaming music playlist/personalised radio brand has landed after years of developing its brand in America and Europe and building up a loyal following. The main stumbling block in Asia for all these music/video content players is rights.

Asia is infamous for illegal downloading. The 240 million people who live in Indonesia for example only bought 11 million CDs last year compared to the 6 million illegal downloads they do a day, at a conservative estimate.

Singapore is actually the world capital of illegal downloading per capita fuelled by the obsession with the latest tech gadgets, high speed internet and multiple music playing devices…..and desire for a freebie (despite having the world’s highest GDP per capita, US$30k above the UK)!

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Traditional media owners are set to profit from multiscreen viewing and smartphone ownership if the right pricing models are adopted, is the rather heartening message from a KPMG study this month. In the advisory firm’s Media And Entertainment Barometer study, the decades old assumption that people have become too accustomed to free content online to start paying, is challenged. Read More »

Yahoo is on a mission. Last week saw the acquisition of Tumblr for over a billion dollars. In March, it purchased an app, Summly, from a Wimbledon schoolboy for $40 million. This week, whispers are rife within Silicon Valley that it is a lining up another colossal bid for hot tech property, Hulu. Rumours are that it’s prepared to pay a staggering $800m for the service which allows you to stream films and TV series.

Many theories have been put forward for Yahoo’s sudden glut of activity – the ability to buy data, the fact they will get better insights into their audiences and can target them better – and all have valid reasoning. But I think there is another reason that Yahoo is making these purchases – image.

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With convergence of markets, proliferation of choice and information more accessible than ever, the challenge for brands to present and mould themselves into distinct personalities is ever increasing. Going beyond a product or service function and becoming a set of values, symbols, icons that target consumers can relate to is a key goal for brand owners. This is a relationship building function that needs to evolve along with culture, society and changing preferences.

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China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity. As each social media platform looks to monetise faster and further than its competitors, brands are dealing with a constantly moving environment, and nailing a strategy across this can be extremely complicated.

Within this nebulous environment, brands have to learn to navigate and make use of the market size in the most efficient manner – setting quality over quantity. To help cut through the noise and complex social media structure in China, we have selected some key channels that are an essential starting place. Read More »

The Guardian has launched a citizen journalism platform where readers can submit stories, videos and pictures, which will be published on the new GuardianWitness site.

GuardianWitness has been created in partnership with mobile phone firm EE. GuardianWitness is designed to be the home of user-generated content on The Guardian and highlights increasingly how user-generated content is playing a vital role in reporting news. Read More »

A TV company is turning to the crowd to find ideas that “appeal to the Y Chromosome”. The brief is live on creative crowdsourcing site Alternativegenius.com and shows the increasingly serious use of idea competitions in more sectors. (They don’t want to tell you who they are yet, but the £5000 prize shows they mean business).

Crowdsourcing has been around longer than most people realise – The Longitude Prize was a reward offered by the government via the 1714 Longitude Act for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. Useful at the time when getting lost at sea was generally fatal. The French government also created Montyon prizes to reward poor Frenchmen for virtuous acts. Read More »

We recently heard that the “Mail Online is like journalism crack”, according to editor Martin Clarke. Clarke was talking about the Mail Online’s mix of human interest stories and a heavy dose of celebrity.

That formula has made it a clear success as we reported earlier this week in a story telling how ad revenue at the Mail Online increased by 59% year on year. The ad revenue rise came on the back of the Mail Online kicking off the New Year with a record high of 126,753,431 global monthly unique browsers in January, according to ABC figures.

Now comes a US ad campaign as the Mail Online seeks to continue its drive to colonise the States with a message that dismisses the hard news pumped out by US newspapers for something “not so serious”. Read More »

The belief of WPP’s chief executive Martin Sorrell that Twitter is more a PR medium for brands, rather than an advertising opportunity, has been widely shot down by rival agencies and social media practitioners.

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As Chinese New Year celebrations draw to a close, it is a great opportunity to reflect on what the Year of the Snake could mean for UK businesses looking to take advantage of the huge market potential in China.

Chinese wisdom states that the Snake brings good luck, and that the year ahead will be a period marked by ‘steady progress and attention to detail, where focus and discipline will be necessary for you to achieve what you set out to create’. Read More »