The growth of social media usage is by now well known and well documented. But publishers and broadcasters are also increasingly interested in building a social media presence.
For media brands who are used to talking to large audiences, a platform like
Twitter seems to provide new opportunities to create deeper levels of engagement and loyalty, as well as to reach wider audiences through word of mouth and ‘earned’ media. Read More
News International’s experiment with a non-penetrable paywall around websites for The Times and Sunday Times has been a failure, while the rise of Mail Online has been the “world success story”, according to former Guardian leader, Tim Brooks. Read More
For many brands and marketers the other Friday was a game changer – they just haven’t realised this yet.
As Facebook rolls out Timeline for brand pages, one of the most overused fan gathering tactics is on the way out. We believe this is a good thing. We are talking about “Fan gating”, often referred to as “Like gating” or “Like blocking”. Read More
Copyright violations are the bane of entertainment executives lives. If you stop and listen you might just be able to hear the anguished screams of entertainment corporations, floating through the sky from Hollywood. Conversely, in the UK news industry such copyright infringements are unheard of. Why is this?* Read More
HBO have released the trailer for Aaron Sorkin’s latest TV drama ‘The Newsroom’. It is his latest project after ‘The Social Network’ and it looks like a much darker affair as a previous impartial TV anchor called Will McAvoy, played by Jeff Daniels (“the Jay Leno of news anchors”), goes into meltdown after he lets rip in front of a college audience.
The Newsroom will be the first modern drama about journalism made for the digital and social media age. With ‘The Social Network’ behind him this looks like a show that will be heavily informed by the internet and how it has changed news media. Read More
The Mail Online appears to have secured its place as the world’s biggest online newspaper as it overtakes the New York Times’ in terms of daily visitor traffic for the first time, according to figures from Comscore.
In February it racked up an average of 6,265,000 unique visitors a day, compared with 6,239,000 for the The New York Times. Read More
As the Leveson inquiry rattles on, every day seems to uncover a new angle to what can truly be called a scandal (today whether Rupert Murdoch is a fit and proper owner for BSkyB)- proving once again that sometimes truth really is more bizarre than fiction. Headline-writers had a field day when it emerged that the Met Police had ‘loaned’ ex-News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, a horse. In the midst of allegations of bribery, corruption and inappropriate relations between the media empire and the police force, this slightly surreal turn of events did nothing to stem the rising tide of evidence against News International.
Events took another dramatic turn when James Murdoch resigned as News International’s Executive Chairman. The official line was that it was to focus on ‘international television’ but it’s clear that the only way the Murdoch empire might truly recover from this mess is with a clean slate – a new paper (the Sun on Sunday) and a new public face. Which may potentially be another Murdoch. Read More
Lots of kind words being said about the BBH created ad for The Guardian. It is a modern day take on the fair tale of The Three little pigs as armed police take the pigs into custody after they wreaked their revenge on the big bad wolf.
The ad gives a perfect state of nation snapshot of how newspapers and news have changed and the affect digital and social media has had upon them as the story of the death of the wolf at the hands of the pigs plays out. Read More
Everything is becoming more complicated.
It’s a given that consumers are spending less time on more tasks, giving everything less attention, and generally skipping around loads of subjects at any one time on Twitter, Facebook, TV, email, text and a thousand other digital touchpoints.
Now, the challenge of the digital marketer to gain entry into the consciousness of the time-and-touchpoint-squeezed consumer is greater than ever.
So it struck me as interesting when I read a quote in an essay by Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, that ‘consciousness is not unlike Twitter – millions of mundane messages bouncing around, all shouting over one another, with only a few rising as trending topics’.
It doesn’t get more high concept than this. We heard the iPhone 6 might be getting a curved display, but this is just downright insane.
Perhaps years ahead of its time, Flickr user Vchenjingyuangel‘s flexible iPhone concept simply serves to remind us that while a razor thin phone with a bendy screen would undoubtedly be very cool, it would also be quite impractical. Read More
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