Mumbrella Podcast: Magic PR formulas; the battle for media planning; Optus looks to the bloggers; What next for Toyota?
In this week’s Mumbrella Podcast with editor Tim Burrowes, deputy editor Camille Alarcon and House Party’s Scott Rhodie:
- The future of ad agencies – and are media agencies doomed?
- Will Naomi Robson’s online video show get the viewers?
- The verdict on Ten’s new show The Circle
- Optus calls in the bloggers
- The Twitter debate that turned into a public slanging match
- The formula for love (and PR headlines)
- Toyota’s new PR crisis
- Nova’s party hitch
Production by Georgina Pearson.
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With the support of :
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large. He returned to Mumbrella as Publisher in January 2025
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I wrote about the future of ad agencies in July last year for my blog http://diffusionblog.blogspot......ising.html and another publication and thought it interesting how little concern agencies have in both their brands and their future. They seemed so tied to the same moribund models that their own failings go unobserved and undefined. More so, the industry as a whole seems so utterly disinterested.
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Re: The formula for love
Nice debate on why stunts and statistics work in creating media coverage if done in an intelligent way that underpins the brand values of whatever is being promoted.
You’ll be pleased to know that the client was indeed the University of NSW School of Mathematics and Statistics. Horizon’s brief is to raise awareness of how maths can be used in the real world and reinforce how UNSW does some of the leading research in this area (the love formula is a bit of fun, but connected to serious research on probability).
Of course, you can’t keep a good story down, particularly when love is involved and this has now been picked up by the UK’s Daily Mail amongst others- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new.....gaged.html
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Interesting that Scott challenged Tim’s “4 weeks of prime time” TV analogy when he (very correctly) asked how many of the audience would have seen prior weeks. I felt that there was an implicit belief that the 120m oline”views” were ‘unique audience’ – I just that the impression I got was wrong. To flip the coin on its head – how many of the online 120m were duplicate views (God knows how many times I have watched ‘More Cowbell’)? Were all the views for the complete duration?
If I can share one piece of data with you – the latest data on ‘unique browsers’ for Australia is just over 71m. Yep … more than three times the Australian population! The moral of the story is that any similarity between ‘unique browsers’ and ‘unique audience’ has long since disappeared. Numbers aren’t always what they seem!
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Media planners working more closely with creatives is absolutely the way things are going to go. Does that mean that they need to carry the same namecard? No. What is important is teamwork and the mindset and attitude of individuals in that team, not the logo on their card.
I agree with what Camille says in that clients won’t care where great work comes from. They can however smell poor teamwork and territorialism a mile off.
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I wonder what Nielsen thinks of the 71m unique browsers you have quoted, John. I’m sure they can be deduped.
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Mike. While I cannot answer on behalf of Nielsen, I am quite close to the measurement systems and can make my own (informed I hope) comments.
The 71m figure is derived from accumulating all the UNIQUE tag strings that Nielsen have reported to them in their Market Intelligence (MI) product.
As I understand it, when a page is fully rendered, the page tag along with the cookie on the hard drive is sent back to Nielsen. So, if a page is rendered a second time, the page tag/cookie combination remains unique – i.e. one Unique Browser (UB). However, if the cookie is non-existant on the hard drive a new cookie is dropped and then it and the page tag are sent to Nielsen. This would then appear as a NEW UB to Market Intelligence.
So what we are seeing is that cookie deletion is really seriously inflating the UB data to the point that it has gone from around 30m to 71+m in a period of around 2 years. (This primarily affects the UB data and not the traffic data).
The key thing to note is that this scenario is NOT uinque to Nielsen. Any product, service, tracker etc that uses cookies is subject to issues of over-statement due to not accounting for cookie deletion.
I would also like to stress that as we tend to talk about monthly UBs we are allowing cookie deletion to have a greater impact. The impact for weekly UBs is much less (but still very noticeable), while the impact fordaily UBs is probably only a few percentage points.
Nielsen, to their credit, have been very aware and transparent with this issue. They believe (well it is my perception that they do) that audience measurement based on cookies is becoming so poor that it is doomed to die someday soon. They also realise that panels can’t measure the entire market either and under-estimate it (duplicate PCs, other OS, mobile, public-place access etc) – hence their drive towards a “hybrid” system that uses the traffic from a tag-based system in conjunction with panel data to provide the best measurement of online audiences. I concur with this position, as does Nielsen’s largest competitor ComScore. The question remains, whose ‘hybrid’ is better?
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