Breakfast announcer Brent Bultitude has resigned suddenly from Newcastle radio station 2HD. He has been Breakfast announcer on the Bill Caralis owned station since late 2009 when he replaced Luke Grant who was dismissed in controversial circumstances.

Bultitude has only been on air for one radio survey in the Breakfast slot, falling to 4th place behind ABC1233. Word is that he walked out last Thursday and said he wouldn’t be coming back.

Richard King is currently filling the Breakfast slot on 2HD. Ironically, King was also controversially dismissed just before Christmas in 2008.

Update: 3/6/10

Yesterday in the Newcastle Herald 2HD management denied that Brent Bultitude had resigned. Station manager Guy Ashford said “Bultitude was on leave to pursue business interests, as he had done in the past, and was welcome back when ready.” Does anyone believe this?

Update 4/6/10

Both Jocks Journal and RadioInfo have reported that Brent Bultitude has resigned, despite denials in the Newcastle Herald by Guy Ashford. Of course, given the history of announcers being dismissed and then returning to air when the station has no other alternatives, there is always a possibility Bultitude will be back at 2HD again.

Update 28/6/10

I have removed a series of comments from this post for legal reasons. This is not something I take lightly but some comments have made serious allegations about employees of 2HD and many of the responses have been equally sensitive. This website is intended to be a commentary on media and media management (and marketing), not a forum for personal battles. Everyone is welcome to comment on the topics here but once it gets personal and potentially slanderous I am compelled to moderate. I hope everyone understands and appreciates this.

Are we heading towards total media convergence?

I was showing someone through the new Wired Magazine iPad application yesterday and while she was marveling at the animations, video, audio and general interactivity she made the comment, “Its not really a magazine anymore.”

And in a way she’s right. It seems that with increasing broadband speeds and new media delivery devices such as smart phones and tablet computers that host an array of apps, we are heading towards total media convergence.

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A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs, homework or trivia nights.

• 27.3 million tweets are recorded on Twitter per day (November, 2009). Source: Pingdom

• Nokia’s share of industry profits fell from 64% in 2007 to 32% in 2009. Source: The Economist

• Revenue for Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, topped $78 million in 2008 – against expenses of just under $50 million. Source: Slate

• The average Internet user in the US watches 182 online videos in a month. Source: Pingdom

• Around 5 million e-readers are expected to have been sold in 2009. Source: The Economist

Up until now I have never really thought about LinkedIn as an inbound marketing tool. As a business owner, not someone considering a new career anytime soon, I have been a fairly passive member of LinkedIn. However after attending Social Media Club Sydney’s presentation last night I think I might have to take a fresh look at it as it may actually be a valuable inbound marketing tool for corporate marketers.

Michael Field, a Sydney-based marketing consultant, was second speaker for the night, outlining how LinkedIn is an amazing inbound marketing tool for his business and his biggest source of enquiries. Suddenly I was very interested in LinkedIn.

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Seven months after ABC’s Media Watch program claimed that Bill Caralis was “cynically dudding his regional listeners” for not meeting their local content obligations under the Broadcasting Services Act, the media watchdog ACMA has agreed after releasing the findings of its investigation of the network.

In a ACMA report into 2HC Coffs Harbour, 2EL Orange and 2PM Kempsey, they were found to have failed to meet the minimum three hours requirement.

2HC and 2PM were found to have broadcast approximately five minutes of local content respectively on September 8 – the sample business day ACMA used in its investigation – while 2EL broadcast approximately 46 minutes.

The Bill Caralis owned stations have been ordered to report periodically to the AMCA detailing how they are meeting their local content requirements and to implement training for employees so as to meet broadcast requirements.

Read the full ACMA release here

A series of short posts with the latest facts about our digital economy and lives. Use them for your presentations, blogs, homework or trivia nights.

• Research pegs the total U.S. social media audience at 127 million. Source: Adweek

• At the end of 2008, there were 189 million mobile-broadband connections generating on average 175 megabytes of traffic per month. A year later the respective figures were 312 million and 273 megabytes – a growth of 158%. Source: The Economist

• Despite the surfeit of available apps – some 140,000 and counting – the average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses between 5 to 10 apps regularly. Source: The New York Times

• Facebook users post over 55 million updates a day on the site and share more than 3.5 billion pieces of content with one another every week. Source: The Economist

• An average of 247 billion email messages per day were sent in 2009. Source: Pingdom

Is traditional media and advertising reaching the end of the creative line? In an increasingly cluttered media landscape it seems that nostalgia is being seen as the way to cut through and grasp our remaining collective attention.

Radio has long used the “formative years” approach to appeal to different demographics. This means playing music that was new during the teenage years of the desired audience. The result has been a plethora of classic hits and golden oldies formats. Read the rest of this entry »

Start me up

I have become increasingly fascinated by technology start-ups and the business of launching an online business. With this post I am looking to start an occasional dialogue on the trials and tribulations of starting a new business in the digital economy. We’ll see how it evolves.

In early April 2009, five Australian guys met in a funky bar in San Francisco to compare notes on their respective business ideas. There were three different technology start-ups involved in the conversation, all excellent ideas with bucket-loads of potential, and all three have taken very different paths to realization.

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Meet the future of television, where broadcast TV and social media converge via the iPad. This video shows how the iPad can become a remote for your television viewing while also allowing you to share your viewing with friends. If you’re not convinced the television industry isn’t heading for major major change then this might convince you.

I originally saw this video on Mumbrella and tweeted out a link to it that generated big response because its just so interesting. So I thought I’d “file it away” here too.

How many marketers and advertising experts actually practice what they preach?

Until recently it probably wasn’t a very viable option.

How many times has your media rep, who happily suggests where to spend your hard-earned advertising budget, actually “invested” his or her own funds in an ad campaign?

How often has your agency account manager had to feel the anxiety of committing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a campaign that could make or break their business?

For that matter, when was the last time you saw an advertising agency run their own highly-creative, cutting-edge 30 second television spot during prime time?

You haven’t, have you. Agencies enter awards and then drum up column inches in trade press. Its called PR.

Truth is that most of the marketing and advertising experts who businesses rely on don’t actually practice what they preach. And, to be fair, in many cases its not very practical to expect them to.

But the emergence of social media and inbound marketing means that a new generation of marketers has emerged who do have skin in the game, who do actually live, breathe and experience the highs and lows of the strategies they extol.

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