Posts filed under 'media'
Buying viewers’ attention
Andrew Curry writes:
The combination of the FA Cup Final – the last for a while on the BBC – and the epically overhyped Champions’ League final on ITV sent me to some recent interesting data (above) from BMRB Sport. They measure both the total interested audience for sport on TV, and also a “passion index” which captures the quality of the audience, assessed by their level of interest in the sport. The passion index seems to me to be a reasonable proxy for ‘attention’ – that increasingly important, but often elusive, quality sought by traditional media owners.
Broadly, the passion index is higher for football, and doesn’t correlate strongly with overall audiences, which leads to the thought that commercial terrestrial broadcasters need both scale and passion to make their rights investment pay off, in terms of advertising and sponsorship revenues, whereas a public service broadcaster can justify its investment by the breadth of the audience. And with next season’s rights to Formula 1 moving to the BBC (ITV couldn’t afford both F1 and the FA Cup), the BBC’s sports properties, if you include the Premiership highlights on Match of the Day, now include five of the top seven sports by breadth of audience, but only one (those Premiership highlights again) by ‘quality’ or interest levels.
And there is some good news for the BBC here. According to BMRB, Formula 1 has climbed steadily in the popularity rankings over the last year, from seventh to fourth, on back of Lewis Hamilton’s successes.
Add comment 23 May 2008
Flying the flag (post 2 of 2)
Jake Goretzki writes:
In the first half of this post, I wrote about flags as brands with an army and navy – but still in need of relaunching or repositioning from time to time. When they do work, relaunches are marvellously transformatory. Imagine Canada with this blazer badge of a flag (below) – unbelievably, this survived until 1965. It seems to convey the notion of Canada as some kind of British backwater. How could it ever have stood out? The Maple leaf on the other hand is ownable, differentiated and unifying. That said, of course, Quebec might beg to differ – anyone for a rebrand?
Canada Pre-1965
Canada Post-1965
Add comment 22 April 2008
But what about Tim?
Holly Moore from Yankelovich writes:
The latest television programming kerfuffle over the U.S. fashion reality TV show Project Runway is telling us something interesting about both the future of the reality genre, and the increasing visibility of life coaching.
For new readers, the kerfuffle goes like this. The producers of Project Runway, now a four seasons-old hit, are trying to move the show from Bravo (the U.S. cable network owned by NBC Universal) to Lifetime Television, a cable network that’s looking to diversify beyond programming that’s often about women in crisis. NBC claims it still has the rights to future seasons, and so, inevitably, is suing the producers.
But viewers are more likely to worry about the future of the person who has become America’s favorite mentor, Tim Gunn. Unlike many reality show stars, Tim’s the compassionate master of constructive criticism and tough love. Gunn is the tutor we all hope to have and the manager all managers should strive to be. (I recall an Echo Boomershow and a big gig as the creative chief at Liz Claiborne. comedian once saying, “I so wish he was my gay dad.”) His popularity and fashion judgment have already earned him his own
We talk a great deal about the importance of coaching in the Yankelovich MONITOR. And in an era in which so many of us under 40 were raised to think that we were unconditionally special, it’s rather remarkable to find a voice who can find the balance between nurturing growth and encouraging exploration while still reinforcing objective standards of excellence.
So while the courts decide where viewers should ultimately tune in, hopefully content creators will notice how quickly Gunn’s brand star rose – and the void he filled in the landscape of back-biting reality programming – to help make Project Runway a TV brand worth fighting for.
(Image from BravoTV.com)
1 comment 17 April 2008
The frenemy of my frenemy is my, err?
Alastair Morton writes:
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s CEO, has long recognised Google as a frenemy (part friend, part enemy). On one hand Google offers communications agencies the chance to buy interactive ads for its clients but, on the other, Google makes no secret of its intention to allow anyone to buy ads for themselves, thus disintermediating agencies.
Google has now announced that it will cease to restrict keywords for ads served to users in the UK and Ireland. This means that surfers who key-in a trademarked brand name such as ‘O2′ may also see rival brands (Orange, Virgin etc) appearing in the search results alongside those for the brand they had sought. It seems that Google is now a frenemy of brands – providing access to huge audiences but potentially eroding brand equity – as well as of communications agencies.
And in all of this, is Google making any real friends? Well, consumers apparently. Matt Brittin, Google UK director, claims that ‘we are making this change because we want to give users greater choices to help them make informed decisions.’ But there is a problem with this line of argument. Our Planning for Consumer Change (PCC) data shows that more than half of UK consumers, and nearly two-thirds of those aged 15-24, feel that there is sometimes so much choice nowadays that they can’t make a decision. To borrow from Barry Schwatrz’s critique of the notion of choice [article here, opens in pdf, see video here] “choice maximisers” may welcome greater information, but find it harder to ‘maximise’ – while ‘choice satisficers’ – usually happy to make a ‘good enough’ choice – will feel greater pressure to maximise their choice from all the available options. Both groups are likely to be more frustrated.
In truth, many consumers actively use trusted and recognised brands and providers to sift the choices which face them. Whether or not Google’s intentions are admirable, I have a feeling that this change will have more effect in growing their ad revenues than in helping consumers manage their already complicated decisions.
Add comment 10 April 2008
A dog’s breakfast?
Alastair Morton writes:
In recent years cookery shows have picked up and amplified a wide range of consumer trends, from Gary Rhodes’ rock-chef rebelliousness of the mid ’90s to the apparent ‘authenticity’ of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares providing, at times, gripping viewing.
This thought was brought home to me by Delia’s latest offering – more a case of ‘How to Cheat at Tapping into Trends’ than a food heaven. The premise is clearly to help out the ‘time-starved’ consumer, but there’s more than a pinch of ‘community connections’ with both family and tribal (Norwich City FC) references, topped off last week by a good slug of Catholicism to tap into the search for meaning. And let’s not forget about ‘health and wellness’ – tinned food as nutritious as its fresh counterpart? Well, I could go on.
I know that different trends play out in different ways for different people, and that Delia’s trying to stand out in a crowded market where there’s also a significant movement towards ethical food and slow food, with Hugh and Jamie’s respective chicken liberation fronts leading the charge. But beyond the fact that not all trends pull in the same direction, Delia’s approach comes unstuck, at least for me, because I think the joy in cooking is in the dream of what you’re going to create, from start to finish, and not just opening the relevant cans or defrosting the right pellets.
Image courtesy of http://www.joe-ks.com
Add comment 25 March 2008
Unravelling the cassette
Stacey Yates writes:
The audio cassette is 45 years old this year, and is reaching the end of its life, at least in Europe and the US. It peaked in the 1980s, but started to decline after the CD was rolled out in 1993. As our music consumption becomes increasingly intangible, people are pointing to some of the pleasures of more tangible forms – as a amusing post at the design blog Core 77 recently reminded me: the cassette as a design convention.
In contrast to the age of digital, the cassette was a lo-fi, low tech object and it was the first hard format to emerge in response to a more mobile society – the age of the Walkman preceded the iPod generation by 25 years. It could get stuck down the back of your sofa or crammed into your banger’s glove compartment for months, and you knew you could still rely on it to work when you found it again. Unlike the CD, it was near unbreakable and was always ready to play just where you left off. If it did get a bit chewed up, all you needed was a pencil or a biro to sort it.
The one time you might have been precious about a cassette was when you made a mix tape. In the 1980s creating a mix tape for someone was an act of dedication. Sitting through selected tapes with your finger hovering above the pause button took time and choosing the right mix of songs took creativity. The mix tape could also be a personal selection, creating a whole new way to mix and match music that has been reinforced by the rise of the celebrity DJ and by digital music. But let’s face it, there’s no romance in a USB stick. So perhaps it’s not surprising to find a site which, perhaps cunningly, is selling the ease of the digital ‘mix-stick’ - but in a package which offers all the personalisation that you used to get from the cassette.
Image © Stacey Yates
[Correction: A typo above has the CD launched, incorrectly, in 1993. In fact, it was launched commercially in Europe and the USA in 1983 (late 1982 in Japan). Thanks to Harry, in Comments, below, for pointing this out.]
6 comments 5 March 2008
The lure of celebrity
Andrew Curry writes:
I think we sometimes under-estimate the power of the relationship between our increasingly audio-visual world and the rise of celebrity culture. And the second part of this story is about the way in which media coverage of celebrity is a classic form of ‘reveal and conceal’ narrative, where the audience is simultaneously invited into this world of money and power and exclusivity and also excluded from it. Media empires have been built in the space between knowing and not knowing. Some of the sharpest commentary on this world has been in the work of the artist Alison Jackson, who works with celebrity lookalikes. TED.com has just posted a revealing lecture she gave in Oxford three years ago. It runs just under 20 minutes – and some of the images she uses to illustrate her talk are not for the easily shocked.
The picture at the top is a publicity still for Jackson’s Channel 4 film, Blaired Vision, shown last year. She’s interviewed about it here. And yes, that is a Blair lookalike: she’s currently looking for Gordon Browns for her latest project, apparently.
Add comment 29 January 2008
iCoursework
Lucy Pickard writes:
In an interesting classroom change, A-level media studies students will now earn 20% of their marks by podcasting or blogging, according to various newspaper reports (Education Guardian, Mail). Formal essays are to be exchanged for voice-presented video clips and informal, blog-based writing in recognition of the skills needed to succeed in media today. The Queen’s English Society was quoted as lamenting the loss of traditional essay-based coursework, but the OCR exam board maintains that the changes are in line with both the growing demand for a ‘more modern and exciting’ media studies qualification and recent media developments.
The image is from the business blogging site RSSApplied.com
Add comment 5 January 2008
Online couch potatoes
Becky Rowe writes:
Watching TV on your own or looking to indulge in the irreverent wit of a bunch of Guardian Unlimited readers? Then log on to the ‘Real time telly – talk about it now’ thread. The premise is that you can chat about what you are watching, whilst you are watching. Particularly good to spice up the solo viewing experience, or if your ‘witty’ comments have been banned by your sofa buddy, but you are still desperate to share…
This phenomenon came to my attention last Saturday when I noticed that the X-factor thread had become one of the most active on the GU discussion boards. Not only is a place to share observations about the contestants, or canvass votes for your favourite, but there is now a real sense of online community around the live Saturday night transmission. A perfect example of what happens when real (if you count X-factor as real!?) collides with virtual
Add comment 26 November 2007
Outing Dumbledore
Andrew Curry writes:
There’s a whole story here about fan culture and celebrities, and also what happens when authors don’t have to worry about what happens next. No sooner had J.K.Rowling mentioned at a reading in New York that Dumbledore was gay than the Dumbledore Pride site is selling the T-shirts – 7,000 before you can even get your wand out.
As Jason Kottke pointed out in his blog – the fan fiction floodgates are surely about to open. If Dumbledore, then who else?
Add comment 26 October 2007
