Hidden amongst the usual news of account wins and staff moves the 16th January edition of Campaign magazine offered up some very interesting advice on the recession. More

UGC and participatory marketing are increasingly popular and there are some very successful UGC ads out there. The latest Doritos ad for example not only bagged the creators $1million but was voted the most memorable ad in this year’s Superbowl. More

While studying Comscore we came up with a simple realisation: compelling content is no longer the big draw for a mass audience, Comscore data shows that large audiences gravitate towards online services not content. More

In early February, the heaviest snow for decades fell across the UK. London was (typically) the centre of media attention: the buses stopped and the press fretted over the billions lost through a day off sledging. More

This week Yahoo! have launched a new trading system called Apt. Apt effectively plugs directly into a publishers ad management system and enables media buyers to option inventory without talking to the media owners until the point of negotiation. More

I’m not talking about analytics but boring old pixel-based third party tracking carried out primarily by our friends at Doubleclick or Atlas. More

Digital. I’m not sure the media world will ever see such a word that strikes fear and hope into the hearts of so many media professionals. More

PR enjoys a thoroughly symbiotic relationship with journalists. Most scribes would be loathe to admit the degree to which they rely on PR agencies for stories, but – whether on the City desk of the Financial Times or the fashion desk of Now magazine - rely on them they do. More

The key to how the iPhone would fundamentally affect the mobile industry was always going to be how it forced innovation at the incumbent players. The latest example is Nokia’s bold step to buy its partners out of their shares of Symbian, make it free for developers to develop on, and free to handset makers to put on their devices. More

The publishing market must have been confounded with the latest set of Google results. With quarterly revenue standing at $3.21 billion (a 67% yoy growth from the previous 2005 Q4) – it seems there is no stopping the company. For all the talk of these gargantuan numbers, one of Google’s greatest assets is its ability to be comfortable to deal with and help the small business, which is exactly where the major publishers have failed to adapt. More

Well we all know that is impossible – but hopefully it got your attention. Type in any brand into Google followed by the word ‘sucks’ and you will see why brands are scratching their heads trying to work out what is going on, should they be worried about blogs, should they be doing anything, what would they do if they did decide to deal with these angry consumers? More

The most interesting thing so far to come out of Circus Street’s investigations into the business models of the new digital age is a suggestion that online ‘brokers’ – sites that make their money from matching ‘buyers’ with ‘sellers’ are the most likely to suffer from promiscuity among their audiences. More

Media agencies have long been regarded as audience experts, investing in powerful industry surveys such as BARB, TGI, IPA Touchpoints, and in most cases their own bespoke quantitative audience research. Access to these expensive analysis tools are a compelling argument for advertisers, as they are cost and time prohibitive to all but the largest multinationals. More

This is the big issue at the moment. How do the social networks (SN) realise their potential in terms of ad sales or more simply revenue in. I will discuss this problem from the advertising point of view but do not pretend to offer all the solutions in this posting. We at Circus Street obviously have some very innovative theories in this space but publishing them…well…now that would be just plain silly. More

Early in 2000, Ernst Malmsten (one of the founders of boo.com) sat across the table from a group of city backers. He had just asked for an extortionate amount of money and they had agreed. He is looking into their eyes and a realisation has just dawned upon him. The backers haven’t given him the money because they think boo.com will be a success. They have given him the money in the fear that they might get it wrong. Ernst walks out of the meeting and over the course of the next 6 months he and his team squanders $120m of investor money before going bust. As is now well documented, the market also fell apart and by 2001 was on its knees. The actual story of the collapse is reasonably complex in nature, with a large number of contributory factors.

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A new investigation into mobile media is the current order of the day and it leads us down a familiar path – in a world where content is free, how does anyone make money from delivering it? On the web, the answer has turned out to be advertising. On mobile, where everything is on a smaller, more personalised scale, can it be the same?

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