Day: 1 May 2009

When Will The Water Run Out?

We’re moving into a world where there is a proliferation of ‘stuff’ that we all enjoy that we don’t directly pay for. We pay by allowing the product/service to take a fraction of our time in viewing the ad. This proliferation of ‘stuff’, however, means the marketers/advertisers have to spread their limited budgets in an ever-growing number of places.

I wrote some time ago about the amount of advertising in the world and how we should not fool ourselves into thinking that advertising will pay for all the products and services we would like to use, be they a TV programme, a daily newspaper or a website. Advertising won’t pay for it all because there’s not enough money to go around. Basically, the well isn’t that deep. The pot isn’t that large. There are too many hands in the till. Those kinds of metaphors work here, I think.

For me to say that is really easy, but we also need to think about the pot/well/till and just how big it really is. There are a lot of resources that estimate the amount of advertising measured in all sorts of ways. And with different conclusions. Will budgets grow, or will they shrink during the global meltdown? And where will the money go? Newspapers are suffering, traditional ad-funded TV and radio have long since lost any licence to print money, and digital advertising will grow, or maybe shrink. The outsider would assume that digital advertising has taken some kind of wild bungee jump into the well, and the hands can, sometimes, grab the cash (if the cash was floating in the well … ah, you get the point).

But regardless of the current state of the budget, we’re moving into a world where there is a proliferation of ‘stuff’ that we all enjoy that we don’t directly pay for. We pay by allowing the product/service to take a fraction of our time in viewing the ad. This proliferation of ‘stuff’, however, means the marketers/advertisers have to spread their limited budgets in an ever-growing number of places. The water in the well must now quench the thirst of many more people.

Thinking about the well, I’ve started to wonder how long it will be before the amount of water in the well isn’t enough to keep anybody alive for very long. Are we moving to a position where things we all want to watch/read/consume will disappear because marketers are trying to use a little of everything? You know what I am thinking here: spend some money on social media marketing and take it away from TV. But now there isn’t enough money for either TV or social media.

Is this a concern? I don’t think my views are wholly thought through, but I’m kind of throwing it out there to see what people think.

When will it end? When will the water run out?

Stupid White Men

Probably the most famous of American Liberal thinkers at the moment,Michael Moore is a US treasure, and they should treat him as such. Instead, the land of free speech tried to prevent this book from being published following the attacks on the World Trade Centre.

Thankfully, this book made it out. It’s certainly very US-centric (it was, after all, written for that market), but many of the points apply to much of the Western world. While suggesting that “we live in a society that rewards and honours corporate gangsters”, Moore does it with a humour that’s accessible and easily read.

Much political writing is hard to read, whereas this is written in small chunks and is easily digested. For those familiar with liberal writings, much of Moore’s work may appear superficial, but that’s to do with the style rather than the content. It is Moore’s style that has made this book number one on so many book lists, but it’s the content that people will remember. For the British reader, the challenge is to see where our democracy is following the US lead.

Why should you read this book? Because it puts the greed of the consumption society into perspective and genuinely makes you think about the society in which we live.

You can read other people’s opinions of the book at Amazon UK

Elsewhere: Wayback When

Trying to find some of my earliest work on the internet was an interesting lesson in how we have failed to archive the internet, but I did find some references to some early emails I wrote.

Two years ago today I left my colleagues at Satellite Media Services in Lawford Heath, Warwickshire and moved on to IPC where I can be found looking after advertising systems for ybw.com. I left copies of my original web presence on SMS’ servers, but sadly they no longer exist. For a side project, I have been trying to determine when I first started building websites. The Wayback Machine only appears to have an archived version of the SMS site from 1997 but, unfortunately, I don’t appear to have the earlier versions. Wayback does have a copy of the original Independent Radio News site we launched in 1997 but not of the original news audio we were serving for several years before that. If I am not mistaken it was the first real-time news audio service in the UK.

Thanks to Deja News (now Google Groups), I can find references to the UK Radio Mailing List that we at SMS took over running in 1996 and one reference to a 1995 request for information about an indirect access service called 1602. It’s a shame those original sites are not archived somewhere. I guess this is a lesson in the transient nature of the web. We need to remember how easily digital history can be erased.

  • Update September 2002: Deja News links updated to Google
  • Update August 2003: Links updated