Generally speaking when one organisation merges with another someone responsible for corporate guff produces some words that claim certain benefits to a) staff; b) shareholders; c) suppliers; d) clients; e) society or consumers as a whole; or f) all of the above.
What Business Are We In?
24 April 2014
In a time long, long ago (October last year, to be precise) I posed the question: “What business are the media agencies (and more specifically their sibling trading desk partners) in?” You can read the original post, called Traders 0; Ideas 1 here.
I have been prompted to go back to this issue by an excellent article in the US publication Media Post by Joe Parchese, (here). In his piece, Joe makes a comparison between the online media business, and the sub-prime housing crisis of 2008. His point is that the root cause of what turned into financial meltdown was the practice of loaning money via mortgages to people who were most unlikely ever to be able to repay. Explained on a one-on-one basis no-one could ever think anything other than that this practice would have disastrous consequences. Why lend to someone unable to repay with the loan secured on a property worth less than the loan?
The Movement for Slow Media
15 April 2014
We live in a strange bubble; a universe inhabited by media experts, all of whom by definition are interested in new technology and the latest bright shiny object. This can be very misleading, which is why it’s always a good idea to spend some of your time when you’re out and about observing people’s media behaviour. Normal people; real people.
Sir Martin Sorrell and Google-the-Gorilla
08 April 2014
With thanks to Arif Durrani whose ‘Media Week’ article provided many of the direct quotes in this post.
Sometimes you just get lucky. I was scouring the web for ideas when I stumbled across a live feed of last week’s Advertising Week discussion between Sir Martin Sorrell, and News Corp’s CEO Robert Thomson. Thomson was in mad-swivel-chair mode, swinging around so fast that he often appeared to face in several directions at once; Sir Martin was perfectly still and yet somehow and most unusually appeared rather unsettled.