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Opinion | Features
Woz not great
In this guest post Tony Prysten argues that the thousand dollar price of seeing out-of-touch Apple co-founder Steve Wozniack on his Australian tour was a waste of money.
This week, for the cost of two iPads (yep, two) I went to the Woz Live conference in Melbourne. I was not impressed.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
According to industry experts Encore spoke to, the key elements that define transmedia can be summarised as follows: platform, time, audience, adaptation, and creative collaboration.
Innovation is the remedy for the ailing magazine industry
With magazine circulations plummeting, FHM closing and rumours rife on future ownership of ACP Magazines, Paul Merrill says the only way forward is launching new titles.Eight years ago in the UK, nearly a quarter of all magazine sales came from magazines that were less than four years old. In Australia, the figure was slightly lower, but still significant. Today, the situation is very different. For a start there are so few new magazines. Yes, Masterchef briefly flared, and Top Gear made an initial impact. But Grazia and Alpha fizzled, and now ACP has shelved their plans to launch Elle.
More than a game: broadcasting the Olympics
The 2012 London Olympics will be the biggest televised sporting event of our time. Brooke Hemphill discovers the logistical challenges and technical requirements of producing the event.
From July 27 to August 12, the Australian media will go sport crazy as the Games of the XXX Olympiad, aka the 2012 London Summer Olympics, unfold. The games will be the most televised sporting event of our time as broadcasters look to master every manner of technology at their disposal.
The Voice - Australia's best example yet of social TV
In this guest post, Sputnik’s Rodd Messent has a theory on why audiences have taken to The Voice .I am an addict of Channel Nine’s hit show The Voice. Such is the extent of my addiction I seriously think my housemate might kick me out of our apartment for the semi-frenzied yelling and tweeting that ensues in our lounge room each time the show airs.It’s the first time in almost three years that such disagreement has resulted in less than civil behaviour towards one another, and it’s made me think it might be a microcosm of the large volume of online debate about the show and, correspondingly, an explanation for its success as a social TV experience.Why brands are the US Army - and culture jammers are the Viet Cong
In this guest posting, Dave Burgess, who painted ‘No War’ on the Sydney Opera House, claims that ‘amoral’ advertisers have copied his idea.
Culture jamming is a 28-year-old term coined by the San Francisco-based band Negativland, who declared that the ‘Studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’.
Branded content is dead. Long live branded content
In this guest posting, Anthony Freedman argues why branded content is making a comeback.
A few short years ago, probably concurrent with the advent of the PVR, a new term emerged within the marketing communications industry; branded content. This was really synonymous with advertiser funded TV shows where programming was created by brands and deals struck with networks to broadcast them.
There were varying degrees of success with this model.
Shock advertising: 30 ads that would give Australia's ad watchdog a coronary
Is shock an underused weapon in Australian advertising, asks Robin HicksToday, Sydney agency The Cabana Boys used an image of a mouth sewn together to shock people with the idea that problem gamblers lie to conceal their habit. Is it the most disturbing image ever? No. Will it get banned by the Advertising Standards Bureau? No. But it did make me wonder why shock is not used more often in Australia – and not just by charities and government bodies. (WARNING: NSFW)
The making of ratings blockbuster The Voice
Jason Mountney goes on the set of Channel Nine’s talent search series, The Voice, to see how the format, based on an international franchise, has come together. What ingredients have gone into making this certified hit that’s rated more than two million viewers on three consecutive nights?
Mike Goldman has one of the toughest jobs on the set of the Nine network’s new talent show, The Voice. He not only has to narrate the show, but also keep the audience from losing their enthusiasm as they realise shooting TV programs takes a lot longer than the one-hour bursts they see in their lounge rooms. A lot longer.
Nine problems stopping The Global Mail from getting an audience
While it’s a shame The Global Mail has failed to make an impact on the media landscape, the signs have been there for some time.I love the concept of a well resourced, philanthropically-funded independent news site. Anywhere in the world, that’s a rare and wonderful thing. In Australia even more so. So I hope that Grame Wood gets to see his investment make a difference.
And I have no inside info on whether Monica Attard’s sudden departure is linked to the site’s failure to find an audience so far.
Regardless, here are nine areas they can easily start to address:
Journalism’s new model?
Does the launch of philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail signal a new era for journalism or is the model destined to be a passing fad, asks Cathie McGinn in this article first published in Encore magazine.With little fanfare, philanthropically funded news site The Global Mail launched in February this year.
The online-only title received a generous five-year funding commitment from businessman Graeme Wood, founder of accommodation website wotif.com, who donated $15million.
Five things that make a great suit
In this guest posting, Gareth Collins argues that the role of a great account manager is to make the work betterI’m surprised at how many suits I meet who don’t know their role in the advertising business. The question ‘what does an advertising account manager or director do?’ is frequently met with answers such as project manager, relationship manager, plate spinner or go between … and those are the nice ones.
Success is judged on the ability to manage a process, be strong administratively and get stuff done. And while a good suit needs to do all of these things brilliantly, if these are the traits that define a great suit, then I’m in the wrong job.
What the hell is transmedia?
From advertising campaigns to online video series, the term ‘transmedia’ gets quite the work out. But what does it actually mean? Cathie McGinn trawls the media landscape for a definitive definition.
Transmedia, all media and multiplatform are terms often used interchangeably when referencing modern storytelling techniques. Yet, depending who you speak to, there are distinct differences between them.
The top seven...most patronising pieces of communication
Sometimes brands have big ideas. Sometimes marketers get so caught up with a grandiose idea that instead of finding engaging ways to sell breakfast cereal, they start to believe their own rhetoric. And sometimes it’s just lazy marketing. Here are my top seven inadvertently patronising pieces of communication…
1) Last night thousands of women gathered in Sydney’s Centennial Park to take part in She Runs the Night, an event created by Nike.
TV audience measurement – why big isn’t always beautiful
In this guest post, Chris Walton argues that the media industry needs to take a new approach to TV tradingThere has been a significant amount of coverage recently about how successful The Voice has been. Indeed, audience figures of 2.6m+ people are very impressive these days. Based on reports, this is apparently double the size of audience that Nine was hoping for in the lead up to the programme launching.
Murdoch’s The Times switches on the pay wall
Rupert Murdoch’s pay wall adventure has begun.
The subscription page for News Corp’s London-based newspaper The Times has just been switched on.
The price – £1 for a day’s access or £2 for a week – was announced a few weeks ago.
Today the paywall was turned on, with readers being offered an initial special offer of £1 for a 30 day trial.
The Australian arm of the News Corp operation has also been uppping the pace in its race towards paid content online.
And The Australian has already launched its paid iPad app.
July 2nd, 2010 at 3:49 pm
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Comments
2 Jul 10
3:55 pm
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/rob.....a_and.html has the figures for what happened when the register wall went up…
Market share has dropped from 4.37% during the week ending May 22nd to 2.67% last week (w/e June 19th).
Expect these numbers to drop even more dramatically.
2 Jul 10
4:08 pm
It’s Christmas for The Guardian
2 Jul 10
4:38 pm
…and in the ultimate irony, the headline on the front page of the website “Times paywall starts up with special offer” requires you to go through the paywall to read it!
2 Jul 10
4:44 pm
Tim
Your special offers link is broken
On the plus side, the 1 pound a day offer has NO MOBILE ACCESS
They much have an iPad app
2 Jul 10
5:17 pm
Shame, ’cause it was awesome. Probably the best news site in the world. Maybe I don’t get it, but surely having millions of people access your site and charging more for the advertising is a better model than having 3 people subscribe to it and no one look at the ads.
Anyways, The Times is the wrong site to charge for. Primarily it’s a news/sport/lifestyle site – stuff every site has. If it was a business site, with sharemarket information etc, etc, that was going to make the user money, I’d understand….
I can go to plenty of free sites to get the scores in the World Cup, thank you Mr Times….
2 Jul 10
6:30 pm
Hi Keith,
A fair question. But the issue is whether in the current market (or a future one) you can successfully charge advertisers to reach all of the people who stop by.
Ever expanding inventory and ever-declining cpms suggest not.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
2 Jul 10
9:00 pm
wtf is Hopkins on about ? The Aust was updating its site during the day starting with the first online editor Peter Wilson in 1999. As for the iPad feedback comments, he’s partially right: there has been a lot of feedback but about 80pc has been negative. Meanwhile Nick and editorial will continue their current level of influence over the amount of ad inventory and its placement – which is absolutely NO influence at all.
2 Jul 10
9:18 pm
Mr Mumbrella,
I’m truly humbled by the reply.
…. Interesting point. However, what’s the bet “The Times” is free again in 3-6 months’ time?
Anyway, it’s not free. It’s like commerical TV – I get to watch the content but I have to sit through the ads.
That said, websites are costly buggers to produce, so to be fair to Murdoch, why shouldn’t he charge for them?
The problem too for newspapers (in Australia) isn’t all the readers migrating online, it’s all the classified ads migrating online.
And there’s still plenty of life in print yet. I don’t see newspapers falling over any time soon. This may be slightly off the point but take the recently-launched Masterchef magazine, It sold 250,000 copies and had close to a mill in ads. Online just can’t match that! Saturday’s Herald with all its sections and magazine pisses on SHM.com
We recently saw the launch of the much vaunted ipad. I believe 150 Sydneysiders camped out over night to get one. 150 people? On the same day over a million Australians bought a print publication. Let’s not get too embroiled in the hype. Just yet anyway.
2 Jul 10
9:19 pm
PS As an experiment, Mumbrella should become paid subscription only. It’d be interesting to see how you fair…
3 Jul 10
6:58 pm
I clicked on to The Times the other day and was greeted with the pay wall. I just went to the Beeb. The BBC must be laughing. In the UK the TV licence funds their set up and for the first time (other than selling their content) they can sell ad’s on their own broadcast…
The Guardian, Telegraph, BBC and many more will gain numbers as The Times Online demises. We shall see though I might be wrong..?
5 Jul 10
2:42 pm
I second Keith. The Times’ content is too general and not niche or critical enough to get many subscribers at this stage. Maybe later, if and when most otter newspapers have gone paywall. But I doubt they all will.
Another, minor issue is the inward sense of revulsion at actually backing Murdoch with ones cash. Passively reading it for free is one thing, actively buying it quite another.
It’s like the Daily Mail: you find yourself reading it everyday, but you just can’t quite bear to bookmark it.
5 Jul 10
2:45 pm
The choice is Rupert’s to make – I suspect that the loss in revenue will not be too great from the online advertising, especially when you take into account the selling, running of that as well as how users probably would prefer less advertising.
1 paid reader is probably worth 500 non-paying – it would be interesting to see the revenue per unique visitor for similar sites over a monthly period.
Where Rupert has gone wrong, is to introduce this too soon – getting peoples’ email addresses with a simple signup form would’ve introduced a very valuable email database to market to, and almost certainly brought in a good revenue stream.
I don’t think I’d do it if it were my paper, but compulsory free registrations might still adversely affect traffic, but would give you heaps of revenue from those registrations (Times readers are Times readers, after all).
The other interesting aside is that they now appear to have blocked all search engine spiders, the articles that do show up will soon not. Meaning that they will soon have next to no presence on teh interweb, and the new user stream will dry up. It seems a shame that after building up that content, links and history to rank highly to turn it all off at night, and probably outweighs any advantage gained from revenue gained/lost by the change, at least in the longer term.
6 Jul 10
12:23 pm
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2.....ss-models/
“Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.””
7 Jul 10
2:25 pm
It is certainly a big experiment for Mr Murdoch and the results should be known within a few months. It can only be declared a success if The Times increases the overall revenue (ie. only if the sum of all revenue streams is greater than the current level). It may be a big challenge because the figures just don’t add up…
Gav, a couple months ago I did some investigations into revenues from printed vs online assets for Fairfax and I published results on my blog. The bottom line is that in order for paywall strategy to work access fees would have to be huge to cover losses from advertising revenue and/or online advertising revenue per visitor would have to jump several fold to just match current level of online revenue. The strategy will bring losses unless they can sign up millions of paying users… which is a very unlikely scenario (The Wall Street Journal, widely quoted example of pay-for-content success, has just over 1 million paying subscribers in the country with 307 million people). It turns out, the whole media game is exclusively about advertising revenue and not content…
http://all-things-spatial.blog.....ubles.html