Day: 8 September 2024

Weeknotes #85: Paralympic Paris 2024

Eventful week with travel challenges, sports highlights, and impressive sights.

Week commencing Monday, 2 September 2024

Paralympics Paris 2024 collage with images of Paris South Arena and Para Table Tennis
Paralympics Paris 2024, Paris South Arena

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 7/7 and Move 7/7. 100%). Morning walks: 0/3 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/4. Total steps: 81,490

Life

  • I was going to put Mum & Dad on the train at Raynes Park. Glad I stayed with them as delays (into Clapham) and a removed stop (Vauxhall) necessitated agile planning. They had to cope with additional cancellations at Birmingham.
  • Then on Friday, my train had to run slowly to Guildford and, therefore, a missed connection. Really frustrating. What’s happening to our railways? A refund claim was submitted.
  • Monday night at the hotel. Total power blackout. We were shown to our room by the light of somebody’s phone. Not sure we should have checked in. The lights startled us when electricity was restored. And then the TV came on, seemingly at full blast, at 2am.
  • Tuesday, early Eurostar start for a day at Paris 2024 Paralympics: GB lost in the Boccia, France lost in the goalball, and Israel won, GB won (twice) in the table tennis. So much to see and so much existing sport.
  • Related, we saw the Paralympic flame in the balloon-cauldron from behind the barriers, in the rain, before they had raised it to the sky for the day. And it was still very impressive.
  • Relatedly, sometimes I felt there was too much “where did it go wrong” when we just won a silver medal.
  • Wednesday night, the pub had a branded lager. Thursday night, a different pub was noisy, so we sat outside in the rain. What did the table next to us really buy, if it wasn’t the rose they later gave us and we, in turn, passed along the tables?
  • Saturday, Galeón Andalucía was docked in Cowes. It’s very impressive close up, but we didn’t pay to see inside. Inspired sail past with the Pirates of the Caribbean theme.
  • Sunday it rained and thunder was predicted. When we got to the top of the Spinnaker Tower, the skies turned blue and we watched the boat traffic on The Solent while having a wonderful afternoon tea. Recommended.

Media

Curns’ Ad Links for 8 September 2010

Curns’ ad links is a collection of links about the digital advertising industry, generally focused on the display advertising market and emphasising the technology that delivers great advertising experiences.

  • Advertisers get hands stuck inside HTML5 database cookie jar
    HTML5 and client-side storage can have privacy implications for advertising. Here’s the latest information from Ars Technica.
  • What’s So Creepy About Retargeting?
    Adotas has one of the best articles I have read on how privacy needs transparency so that the world understands the trade-off between data and a (supposedly) free internet.
  • US newspaper ad revenue slumped in second quarter | Reuters
    Newspapers are having a difficult time recovering from the slump, but online revenue rose nearly 14 per cent to about $744 million in the second quarter compared with the same period a year ago, yet it still could not offset almost an 8 per cent drop in print advertising.
  • What Engagement Means For E-mail Marketing
    ClickZ is looking at how Google’s Priority Inbox – and other things – impacts email marketers. It offers another take on the engagement metric, which is becoming popular: how often we interact with senders is a good way to understand what kind of messages we receive.
  • The Future of Ad Agencies and Social Media
    Great piece at Mashable, featuring the opinions of some ad agency types on how digital media is changing the world of advertising for agencies. “Location Campaigns Are the New Targeting Mechanism” is just one headline.

Commercial Radio Should Shut Up

By its very nature, Commercial Radio is a business, and no business has a right to exist. It has to prove itself worthy of its customers. It has to show it provides something somebody wants.

In response to http://www.mattdeegan.com/2009/09/08/commercial-radio-bleating/

A great, considered piece. The points you make could be debated endlessly, and probably will, as long as we have BBC Radio, which we all pay something towards.

Even as a commercial radio fanboy (because I think that’s what I am), I have “tweeted” many times along the same lines as Nicky Campbell this week (and the clock’s only just moved to Wednesday). But I want the “bleaters” to shut up because the commercial radio industry is coming across so poorly that it’s better to say nothing. Seriously, tell your colleagues to shut up.

It’s a shame I’m saying that because this much radio chatter hasn’t been in the news for years. But Commercial Radio is a commercial business, and it’s killing itself every time it’s quoted somewhere. It doesn’t need the BBC, Wogan, Moyles or Evans to do it; it’s doing it to itself.

The week started with Richard Park effectively suggesting that he’d love to take Jamie & Harriet national at breakfast but can’t, and then blasted BBC, etc. etc. If you’re a listener to Heart in, say, Norwich, what did that suggest to you about what the boss of your local radio station thinks about the shows he’s putting on for you? If you’re a local advertiser in Norwich, what impression does it give of the radio station you’re thinking about spending some of your limited marketing budget on? If you’re an agency-type in London, you now think you should stick your cash on Heart London and forget the network (because it’s not as good as the London programme, is it?). And if you’re “The City”, aren’t you glad Global Radio isn’t traded, because your investment might have just tanked.

Then we have the Moyles longest-innings, Wogan going; they won’t like Evans stories. Commercial Radio continues to complain about BBC salaries, changing targets of Radios 1 & 2 and how Moyles v Evans is bad for “the listener”. Nick Ferrari sat on Newsnight last night moaning about the BBC, going as far as to suggest the BBC would show a promo for one of their stations after the programme, which wasn’t very fair, competition-wise. If I was any of those listeners, advertisers or agency people, I would have come away thinking commercial radio can’t be very good, can it? Ferrari’s a talk radio broadcaster used to twisting the point to say what he has to say, and he had a prime(ish)-time national slot. He should have been championing the fantastic programming on commercial radio and how it was brilliant that all this great programming cost the listener nothing.

Now you may argue that this is really a lobbying exercise. Listeners & advertisers won’t take these words to heart (excuse the pun), but the government may. But Commercial Radio is leaving the impression (intended or otherwise) to 5 million Evans listeners, and 7 million Moyles listeners that they shouldn’t have those shows. That could be 12 million people who don’t listen to Commercial Radio hearing somebody suggesting the programmes they love shouldn’t be there. Commercial Radio won’t be helped by alienating 12 million people, many of whom may come out saying to their MP, possibly in an election year, that Radios 1 & 2 should be kept as they are.

By its very nature, Commercial Radio is a business, and no business has a right to exist. It has to prove itself worthy of its customers. It has to show it provides something somebody wants. And, moreover, Commercial Radio is a media business. Any forward-thinking business, when faced with a glut of news about its industry, would be spinning the positives, proving why we should be sampling their product and selling themselves. But, as Nicky Campbell said, Commercial Radio is bleating about how unfair the world is.

Lobby in private. In public, shout about how great Commercial Radio is.

Another Day Gone

Where did today go?

So I had the day off work today and had planned on doing lots of things. I did, in fact, do quite a lot but not the things I wanted to do. I wanted to work on some web site projects and other stuff that I usually don’t get time to do. Still, I upgrade this Movable Type instance to 3.11 so I can see the new features. I did – also – move it to a MySQL database rather than leaving it on the static files that it used to be on. I hope this has made it better but there will be – no doubt – be some oddities that need ironing out.

Comments now need approval unless you have a TypeKey id. This is designed to reduce the amount of spam but if I find spammers have keys I will just turn all comments to require approval.<