mediajunk

Online marketing company Marketleap has produced a thought-provoking report on a shift that, it claims, has occurred during the last year in advertising. The power of television advertising is declining as the power of web marketing rises: “Television is losing its relevancy as the single source of information communication because there are better things to do than just unplug and stare. The television model will begin changing dramatically because there are more cost-effective ways to drive traffic and action to a business without a 30 second TV ad.” Marketleap’s claims are based, in part, on the Nielsen for the autumn TV season, which traditionally brings in the largest viewing figures. “One group in particular is showing stunning declines in watching TV -- the American male aged 18 – 34, down almost 10% from last year.” Males, it seems, are leading the shift away from television and towards computer-mediated forms of communication, that give them more power as users/consumers. In Europe too, it is true that TV is no longer the "mass" medium it once was. Advertisers have to work harder to gain mind-space in this fragmented market. Does this mean advertising will go away? Of course not. Worse, we can expect the distinction between 'regular' content and 'sponsored' content to blur even further – just as we are seeing now in those search engines that merge paid listings with bona-fide ones. The practice is not confined to new media. Advertorials are becoming increasingly common in print and, even in current affairs news, it is hard to tell the spin from the reportage (so much so, in fact, that some are calling for ‘content labelling’ to be introduced in journalism). In the future, it will be difficult to tell what's advertising and what's not, regardless of the medium. The word "advertising" could even fall out of use, not because it won’t exist, but because it will be seamlessly integrated with the rest of the infosphere, making it effectively invisible. This article is brought to you by Heraghty Consulting. ;)

The capture of Saddam Hussein was a victory in the war -- against old media. That’s according to an opinion piece by Steve Outing in Poynter, an online resource for journalists. “The only way someone in the U.S. might have learned about Saddam first from a print newspaper was if their electricity was out all day yesterday, they had no social contact, and they read the news in Monday's edition,” writes Outing. “What this episode signifies to me is that Internet publishing operations of newspapers are now clearly as critical as the printing presses. On Sunday, those papers' websites were more important.” Perhaps. But most people probably fist learned of Saddam’s capture through radio or television -- as I did, in that order. I first heard about it on the RTE lunchtime radio news bulletin, then switched on Sky News to see the live press conference, where I did, admittedly feel senses of drama and participation when the pictures of Saddam (before and after beard) were revealed. I did happen to be online shortly after, however, on a bulletin board that has nothing particularly to do with news or current affairs, and it was a curious experience to see messages appear titled “Saddam Hussein” as participants learned of the capture. None of this, of course, means that new media are replacing old media. Rather, the internet is changing the function of previously-established forms of communication -- just as television changed the function of radio, movies changed the function of theatre, and so on. After all, this year’s new media are next year’s old media.

Surprised at the lack of media coverage of the Florida update, I sent an email to a journalist with the "Online" supplement of the Guardian.

He decided to print the letter in today's edition of the paper. Here's the text:

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Google Overhaul
What has Google done in its latest update of its search algorithms?

I run a weblog called MediaJunk, dealing with trends in new media culture - particularly blogging and search engines. I have been running it for more than a year, but I have never got as much traffic as I have done over the past week.

The spike started when I posted an article about the recent Google Florida update (the Florida name comes from the tradition of naming hurricanes, as this is the effect updates have on search results!). In short, Google has made a major overhaul of its search results in an attempt to cut out spammers, as a result of which hundreds of thousands of sites have been penalised.

It looks to many people as though Google is targeting small businesses and trying to get them to take out AdWords.

I didn't believe Google's overhaul was malicious but I got so many emails that I began to have doubts. So I checked out some of the cases and I think some people may have a right to be annoyed. See particularly this entry. I'm amazed that no major media source has picked up on this yet.

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At lunchtime today, the BBC had a report criticising Google's update. It probalby had nothing to do with my letter. But I like to think it did :)

In the decade since the arrival of the internet for home users, the shape of my day has changed dramatically. I now spend at least five, sometimes as many as ten, hours a day online. Conversely, my television viewing has decreased dramatically. Most days I don’t watch TV at all.

I’m quite happy to swap TV for the internet. The quality of television output grows ever poorer (television, more than any other medium, is responsible for the dumbing down of western culture), while time devoted to TV advertising is increasing (at least you can delete spam!).

There are, of course, exceptions. Some HBO dramas – such as the Sopranos and Six Feet Under (well, the first series at least) – are of a higher quality than contemporary movies. And occasionally a television documentary is produced that can stimulate the mind as well as, if not more than, any book.

“The Theory of Everything,” which was recently broadcast on three consecutive Sunday evenings on Britain’s Channel 4, was a neatly packaged, accessible introduction to a complex but fascinating subject – theoretical physics' “superstring” theory.

I had previously read a couple of books on superstring theory and so was looking forward to the three-part series. The fist two episodes built up to a climactic finale: the third and final episode would fill me in on the most recent breakthroughs in the search for a unified theory of physics (around three or four years had passed, after all, since I’d read those books).

Just after the programme started, I got an important phone call from my sister Louise, which couldn’t be put off. After about half an hour, I sat back down in front of the box, when a visitor called -- so I gave up trying to watch the show.

This is another of television's drawbacks: you have to watch emissions during a certain timeslot. Yes, you can record, but that’s hassle. What I want is TV content that, like internet content, I can access at any time, and view at my own leisure. (We don't have TiVo on this side of the Atlantic, BTW.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when it turned out that “The Theory of Everything” was available for viewing on the web – under its original title of “The Elegant Universe” (the programme was created by America’s PBS channel).

Each hour-long programme is divided up into eight chunks. You can’t download any of the clips, “due to rights reasons,” but you can view any or all as a streaming video clip.

Could this be the beginning of a (much-heralded) harmonious relationship between the internet and television? I hope so. As broadband increases, resistance to the merger of the internet and TV will be political (from companies who control television content and advertising), not technical.

Though I won’t mourn the passing of television, I must admit that I don’t know what I’d do if I suddenly found myself without internet access.

Yesterday, as accomplished journalist and author John Pilger complained about the contemporary silence of writers on political issues in Znet (originally in The New Statesman), Patrick Weever of anti-spin.com wrote a damning essay for The Observer on newspapers’ dependence on PR.

The articles share a similar theme – the toothlessness and passivity of contemporary writing, in all its forms.

“For the great writers of the 20th century, art could not be separated from politics,” begins Pilger. “Today, there is a disturbing silence on the dark matters that should command our attention.”

“That the menace of great and violent power in our own times is apparently accepted by celebrated writers, and by many of those who guard the gates of literary criticism, is uncontroversial. Not for them the impossibility of writing and promoting literature bereft of politics. Not for them the responsibility to speak out – a responsibility felt by even the unpolitical Ernest Hemingway.”

So where, wonders Pilger, are today’s Hemingways, Orwells and Steinbecks? Similarly, Weever laments the contemporary dearth of investigative journalism.

“Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post sleuths who exposed Watergate, are a dying breed,” he says.

Is journalism of all forms is being relegated to a by-product of corporate public relations?

“In the Eighties my old City editor on the Birmingham Post was still joking that the correct relationship between a journalist and a PR man was that of a dog and a lamp-post. But now the journalist is too often the lamppost and PR has taken over the world.”

Weever makes it clear he is not arguing that PR is inherently immoral or without value to the public, just that journalism needs to wean itself off the drug of PR news.

“The concentration of the media in a handful of multi-nationals is eroding journalistic values. Journalism is expensive, investigative journalism ferociously so. PR news is not just cheap, it is free. In the short term it aids the bottom line, in the long term it destroys the brand … [and] it may be expensive for democracy.”

The lack of political anger that Pilger laments in fiction writing, then, is mirrored in the lack of genuine social commentary that Weever identifies in the press, which in its heydey was described as the “fourth estate,” or the “government’s watchdog.”

But neither essay pointed out that there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. The internet has provided us with a new way to produce and disseminate news. It is a medium that cannot, by virtue of its democratic infrastructure, readily be controlled by the corporate forces that now have a stranglehold on so many other broadcast or "one-to-many" media channels.

Already the blogosphere has provided an outlet for alternative voices (like those of the Iraqi warbloggers), while Google News strives to bring us versions of stories from news outlets (often in different countries) that we wouldn’t normally access.

The problem, however, may not lie with the publishing industry – but with the public. Pilger tacitly assumes that there is still an appetite for political writing. I believe the public, in the west at least, rarely hungers for matters that do not involve celebrity; glamour; wealth; the phoney gender war; or "reality" tv.

Maybe we don’t need to wean passive journalists off the drug of PR so much as we need to wean the passive public off the drug of old, conglomerate-controlled media.

I do not believe, as Pilger (in much of his writing) seems to, that we live in an Orwellian world. But we may, as Weever's essay suggests to me, live in a Huxleyian one.

"How I met my wife," is a fiendishly clever essay by Jack Winter, that appeared in a July 1994 edition of the New Yorker.

It begins thus:

"It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate."

Reads funny, doesn't it? Look the sentence over again, and see if you can figure out what's wrong with it.

Yes, Winter illustrates our pervasive use of negativity in language -- by avoiding negatives (more precisely, he packs the essay full of expressions that we normally recognise in their negative form, but rarely if ever see in the positive).

The results are bizarre and amusing.

Joshua Carmody says the essay “makes fun of one of the oddities of the English language.” I don't agree that the oddity is exclusive to English. For example, the French language is similarly rich with negative expressions, n'est-ce pas?

I often think that advertisers and marketers are locked in a coevolutionary “arms race” with consumers. The more marketing-savvy consumers become, the less likely they will be influenced. Thus, advertisers are forced to come up with more inventive – and more furtive or duplicitous – ways to promote their brands and sell their products.

At the moment, that arms race is escalating to unprecedented levels. Newspaper “advertorials”; logos that are sported as fashion statements; movie-related toys that are given away free with happy meals; and paid-for search engine listings – these are all modern examples of advertising methods. Some methods are even sneakier. A couple of years ago, I discovered that a friend’s company had got a brand “makeover” with a new tagline, that I recognised as a movie title.

I noticed that the same movie was been shown that weekend on (Irish) TV. I genuinely thought this was a co-incidence, and mentioned to my friend how this was a spot of luck, since it would reinforce the new brand.

“Oh, it wasn’t luck,” she told me. “We’ve paid for the movie to be shown tonight.”

Since then, I’ve become increasingly vigilant about identifying the infotainment wheat among the marketing chaff (and I watch considerably less television).

Not that vigilance is enough. I once read that advertising’s power comes from the fact that we don’t believe we are being taken in by it. “Others, yes, but me? Nawwwww.”

I wasn’t terribly surprised then, that advertisers are now considering the possibility of creating false memories, or “memory morphing”, in consumer’s minds, to reinforce their brands.

"When asked, many consumers insist that they rely primarily on their own first-hand experience with products -- not advertising -- in making purchasing decisions. Yet, clearly, advertising can strongly alter what consumers remember about their past, and thus influence their behaviours," writes Jerry Zeldman in his book, How Customers Think.

Zeldman is chief evangelist of the power of memory morphing, and his ideas are explored in an article in today’s Independent.

“Zaltman's extraordinary claims are based on experiments carried out by memory researchers in the US, most notably the work carried out by Elizabeth Loftus, a former professor of psychology at the University of Washington. She singled out a campaign by Disney – "Remember the magic" – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers.

She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many of those who had seen the advert "remembered" meeting Bugs on childhood visits to the theme park, a feat that would have been impossible, given that the cartoon is a Warner Brothers character.”

Phrases such as “smacks of 1984” and “Orwellian” are so overused these days as to have lost their impact, but the falsification of individual (and collective) memories is a subject of that dystopian novel.

The chilling aspect of Zeldman’s memory morphing proposal is that, I suspect, it is quite doable. It is true that human memory is unreliable, and the brain is creative in its construction of memories.

We can only hope that marketing professionals will take the attitude expressed by Richard Huntington, head of planning at the agency HHCL/Red Cell, in relation to memory morphing:

"It is the last refuge of the scoundrel to say that there's bugger all we can tell you about this product, so we'll pretend that you all had great Christmases."

Nevertheless, we should brace ourselves for an ever-increasing number of “just like mother used to make” ads…

Nick Clarke, presenter of The World At One on BBC Radio 4, has written an incisive essay on the ill-effects of reality television and the related issues of our obsessive celebrity fixation; the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary culture; the dumbing-down of that culture; the hyping-up of its language; etc.

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Did you find Clarke's essay a bit depressing? (If you didn't, read it again!) Sorry. For a breath of fresh air, have a look at this wonderful 360-degree photograph, taken a couple of days ago by Roderick Mackenzie from the top of Mt. Everest.

Continuing the trend it has set ever since it broadcasted tapes of Bin Laden after 9/11, the Arab-language news station Al-Jazeera is proving to be the most widely sought-after news station of the current war.

Not that the station is universally admired; it has received criticism from the US administration for being impartial. The station's Kabul office was bombed (accidentally, said officials) during the recent Afghanistan war.

Al-Jazeera has once again captured the attention of viewers in the west, by broadcasting gruesome pictures of the effects of the war in Iraq -- images, for example, of dead and mutilated bodies of soldiers (on both sides) and Iraqi civilians. While the interviews with captured American POWs were roundly criticized in the west for being contrary to the Geneva convention, other horrific images go unseen on western tv channels, presumably because of fears of the effects of such images on the "hearts and minds" of viewers.

So westerners have gone in search of the images via the internet. This week, Al-Jazeera launched an English version of its website, which immediately came under attack from hackers. Earlier in the week, web users searching for the site found themselves redirected to an image of the US flag. When this problem was rectified, the site was hit with a mischievous "denial of service" spike, which has slowed its performance. The live stream of its television broadcast has been similarly affected.

The rise of the station's popularity is nevertheless indicative of the shift in media politics that is accompanying the shakedown in national politics. It's worth remembering too that the BBC's reputation grew enormously during WW2, when many Germans tuned in to for a less partial source of news than that provided by the Gestapo.

It's perhaps not surprising, either, to learn that many of Al-Jazeera's leading journalists were trained at the BBC.

I don’t claim that Al-Jazeera is impartial. I don’t watch Al-Jazeera; but there's no such thing as impartial news. Still, it's certainly an alternative to the increasingly similar western bulletins (regardless of political leanings), where “embedded” journalists seem as eager to promote their own celebrity as to create news.

It’s worth asking ourselves, too, whether viewers are seeking out Al-Jazeera’s images in order to spice up their “consumption” of a war that has become, for those not caught up in it, armchair entertainment. In arabic cultures, pornography as “entertainment” is largely prohibited and taboo, while the “real” pornography of war is freely broadcast; the inverse seems to be true in western cultures.