I can’t help but wonder if News Limited totally miss the point regarding the new digital world or are just spectacularly successful trolls.

Rupert Murdoch, who spent a fortune investing in the like of MySpace only to see it drop away, continually threatens to remove his news content from search engine indexing and seems set on constructing paywalls to access his content.

In Australia, the News Limited marketing boss Joe Talcott toes the company line by unleashing regular diatribes about online measurement. His latest came last week when he attacked research showing that time spent online has outstripped that spent consuming traditional media.

The internet is not a medium, it’s a place where people do stuff. There’s media on the internet, no question. No one sits down to `watch the internet’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Is this a sign that Google feels the need to compete with the Bing advertising budget? Is it a bit of cheeky post-modern irony? I don’t know. But it sure was interesting to see that Google just ran an ad in the Superbowl coverage. Here it is…

Apps are another important media touch-point

We recently announced (rather excitedly) that our Inbound Marketing site GetSticky was now available as an iPhone app. A week later I was happy to inform you that MediaHunter had also become available through the iTunes Store as an app.

So what you ask? Good question.

Read the rest of this entry »

We have the technology

Welcome to the future.

Its 2010, a time oft referred to in sci-fi movies and old TV shows as “The Future”. Sure, we haven’t got hover cars yet, but technology and media is now well and truly exceeding expectations. It wasn’t long ago that we were marveling at the push and touch technology in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, now becoming a reality on smart phones and the forthcoming iTablets.

In fact, technology and media are evolving so rapidly that its hard to keep up with what will be the break-out hit of the year and what marketers should be focussing on. Here are just some of the prognostications from those in the know:

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop Interrupting

The last 80 years of advertising has been about interruption. Interruption of the music or conversation you listen to on the radio. Interruption of the program you watch on the television. Interruption of your view when traveling. And with the advent of pop-up ads online, interruption of the material you are viewing or reading online.

Occasionally advertising has engaged us, but that is the exception rather than the rule. Overwhelmingly advertisers try to interrupt us to gain our attention. Notice the screaming voice-overs, eye-popping graphics and loud music that leap out of your TV every ad break? That’s just more advertisers fighting for your attention.

Up until recently interruption has been reasonably effective too. There wasn’t a lot of media choice so we just endured the interruption and purchased enough of the products being advertised to justify the advertising expense. Interruption was the price of mass media.

Not any more.

Read the rest of this entry »

The commercial free-to-air television stations have been all claiming various triumphs since the end of the 2009 ratings year, but who were the real winners this year? According to David Dale it was Pay TV and The ABC.

Pay television: Between 2001 and 2009 the population of Australia grew by 10 per cent. Between 2001 and 2009, the average number of people watching prime time TV on Channel Nine dropped 17 per cent, on Channel Seven dropped 10 per cent, on and on Channel Ten dropped 2 per cent. In the same period, Pay TV’s audience rose 95 per cent. The free networks’ addition this year of digital spinoffs specialising in flops and repeats has done nothing to slow the rise of Pay.

The ABC: Between 2001 and 2009, its prime time TV audience has grown by 9 per cent, its metropolitan radio beats most of the commercial talk stations, and its website has expanded to offer serious competition to the newspaper chains.

Writing this blog has been an amazingly informative experience for me. What began as a small site dedicated to the media in and around the Hunter Valley (hence the actual reason for the name Media Hunter) quickly grew to tackle national media issues. Then, as the media landscape began changing rapidly with the convergence of digital technologies, I began musing on the implications for traditional media and marketing organisations.

Researching and writing Media Hunter helped me tap into a realisation that we are experiencing one of those rare revolutionary periods in history. Old powers are falling, new technologies are rising. And the changing media landscape has become one of the most important battle grounds of the 21st Century.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tim Burrowes at Mumbrella has just published a wrap of the year’s free-to-air television results. Perhaps the most interesting statistics though are those published by non-commercial broadcaster ABC regarding iView. Is this a strong indicator to the future of broadcasting???

Here’s the iView excerpt from Tim’s post:

….although the ABC officially doesn’t care about ratings, it released some helpful analysis today.

The most fascinating stuff is around the ABC’s iPlayer and video downloads , which doesn’t get picked up by OzTam.

ABC iView (which is streamed from the site) has had more than 6m views since April, with an average of about 600,000 visits to iView per month. Last month, there were 286,000 visitors and 1.054 million visits to ABC iView. That suggests that iView will have a massive impact next year.

And video downloads of ABC content have amounted to 7m.

Interesting also to see how important adland show The Gruen Transfer is to the ABC – the 1.3m the final episode of the second series pulled in on May 20 was ABC1’s fourth biggest audience of the year. The penultimate episode was also ABC2’s sixth biggest show with an audience of 138,000.

The Gruen Transfer recorded 258,000 vodcast downloads this year (across the series rather than per episode). It recorded 70,000 views via ABC iView and in April it was the most viewed program on iView.

Meanwhile journos’ favourite show (until they’re on it)  Media Watch achieved a series average of 736,000 this year, peaking at 936,000 on October 12.

Media Watch also recorded 149,000 views via ABC iView and 869,000 vodcast downloads (across the series).

Next year will be the one where the full impact is felt….

A few years ago it occurred me that digital media had enabled transition for marketers that allowed them to become their own media outlets, to engage their audience directly and bypass the traditional media outlets. I have subsequently posted extensively on the subject here on Media Hunter.

So naturally I am thrilled when venerable industry watchers like AdAge concur with this theory.

Recently AdAge editor Jonah Bloom gave a speech saying

the marketer has become the media owner…the job of the agency is going to morph into bringing their expertise to bear to help marketers build channels that connect them with potential customers and continually reward the customers who come back with new valuable information.

I couldn’t agree more. A new age of marketing is upon us. You can watch the short video with Jonah Bloom’ speech here.

Today I experienced first hand an example of how pervasive social media has become.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a master media manipulator. He has played his cards remarkably well across all media since ascending to the Labor leadership. He also jumped on the social media bandwagon fairly early and has dabbled ever since.

This morning, our workaholic PM obviously had a bit of rare spare time on his hands and was considering hitting the local cinemaplex to catch a flick. But first he had to let us know via Twitter and ask our opinion of his likely entertainment:

@KevinRuddPM: Thinking of going to the movies with T to see Julie and Julia with Meryl Streep. Any thoughts out there? KRudd

I happened to be online when our No.1 tweep said this and naturally I felt compelled to comment:

Read the rest of this entry »