The lowdown on the digital economy bill which could be rushed into law by the election
Charles Arthur The Guardian
The digital economy bill could have a big impact on all areas of the media
The murmuring in parliament is that the digital economy bill will get its second reading on Tuesday 6 April – the day that Gordon Brown is expected to hop into a car and head over to the palace to ask for the dissolution of parliament. The timing is precise: by getting its second reading in the Commons, the bill becomes eligible to go into the “wash-up” – the dirty process by which bills that have run out of proper parliamentary time are hurried through to royal assent via a series of backroom deals.
But what shape is the digital economy bill in now, compared to what we were offered by the Digital Britain report (DBR) last June, and the first reading of the digital economy bill (DEB) in the House of Lords last December?
Let’s examine what we were promised, and what we seem to have. This is not easy: the bill tends to add bits to other existing acts, such as the Communications Act of 2003 and the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. You can see an explanation of its contents at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’s DEB page. Read more…
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Until Christmas, I’d been watching TV on a beaten up Matsui that was left behind when my step-mum’s tenants left in 2001. It was roughly the size of a shoe box and had a very unreliable remote, and not surprisingly I didn’t watch it much.
It made far more sense to replace it with a deliciously large Mac screen, so now we use an Eye TV Hybrid* that shares those 23″ with overflowing browser windows, Twitter clients and music players. It works for us.
Multi-tasking: Not exactly the experience the advertiser had hoped for Simultaneous TV and internet use is becoming more common, according to Nielsen’s new Three Screen Report, with 59% of those surveyed using TV and internet at the same time. The amount of time spent using them together has increased 35% in a year, up to an average 3 hours 30 minutes a month. (It’s approaching that a day in our house.) Read more…
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Contest between ‘Love Party’ and ‘Hate Party’ will run alongside the real general election, with online voting
Mark Sweney The guardian
Detail from Marmite ‘Hate Party’ ad. Click for full image
Marmite is jumping on the general election bandwagon with an advertising strategy featuring two spoof political parties, Love and Hate, campaigning for and against its product.
The campaign, which will include radio, TV, poster and press ads, aims to get the public to vote online.
If the results of the “election”, which closes on 29 April, goes the way of the Hate party then Marmite will launch a special new version across the country called Tarmite. The product – which is branded as “Tar extract. Warning. Bad Breath” – is supposedly the follow through of one of the Hate party’s pledges to eventually get Marmite banned in the UK.
Posters promoting the Hate party will start appearing this week with the line: “If cowpats were rich in B-vitamins would you eat them?” Other “pledges” from the Hate party are a tongue-in-cheek take on current policies such as setting up a Spread Offenders List to “expose Marmite lovers” and to set up containment areas as the only places where the spread can be eaten. Read more…
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Idea is welcomed by bands who can’t afford to pay a publicist
Trevor Baker The Guardian
Journalists could earn cash for reviewing bands. Photograph: Dougal Waters/Getty Images
Over the past few weeks dozens of music journalists have received emails with the subject heading: “We pay journalists to review bands”. The email came from a new music PR agency, The Men From the Press, and is part of a bid to end the traditional mailout of free CDs for review and, controversially, put money directly into journalists’ pockets.
Hacks simply have to log on to TMFTP’s site, listen to music and write a brief comment on it. The idea has been welcomed by some bands struggling to pay for a publicist (the agency’s founder, Dave Chisholm, promises bands to “get your music to the right journalists”), but it also raises questions about PR in the music business.
The site is akin to an oddly punctuated “journalists for hire” billboard, with a worrying lack of contact information. Bands can send music to a music paper, the Fly, for just £8, and the most expensive group, which includes the BBC and the Guardian, is apparently worth £28. Read more…
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Havas chief David Jones says companies must work harder to prove that brands are socially responsible following the downturn
Mark Sweney The guardian
history David Jones, the global chief executive of Havas Worldwide, has warned that advertisers who market their brands as socially responsible should fear “inherently negative” social media such as Twitter and Facebook more than getting ad campaigns banned by regulators. Read more…
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Survey forms part of a new social networking site for advertisers
400 people joined a choreographed dance routine in Liverpool Street Station, London, for the T-Mobile advertising campaign. Photograph: Jeff Moore
T-Mobile’s “Life’s for sharing” ad campaign began by filming the reactions of commuters to 350 “flash mobbers” breaking into a choreographed dance routine at Liverpool Street station, central London, and went on to stage a giant karaoke version of Hey Jude in Trafalgar Square. The ad has helped to propel Saatchi & Saatchi to joint first place in the Agency Reputation Survey, relaunched today by the publisher Centaur after a five-year absence. Sharing the top slot is Bartle Bogle Hegarty, for its innovative work for clients including Barnardo’s, Robinsons and Lynx.
The survey, which featured annually in Marketing Week until it was dropped for cost reasons, is being Read more…
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Departments and quangos spent £1.5bn on professional consultancy in 2008-09
The Treasury has promised a crackdown on the use of management consultants and external PR experts by government departments as part of a £650m savings drive.
Amounts spent by Whitehall and quangos on consultants in areas such as finance, strategy, communications and legal services will be cut by 50%, while marketing budgets will be slashed by a quarter as more work is done in-house. Read more…
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Rupert Murdoch’s preregistration for the Times paywall seems to suggest that it’ll welcome anyone - even newborns. But the 13-page Ts+Cs might put them off .. if the lack of security doesn’t
It looks rather like lazy coding to allow the newborns to register for your soon-to-be-implemented paywall. Born in 2010?
The announcement on Friday that News International would implement a paywall for the Times and Sunday Times from June has sparked a lot of interest.
And now it’s offering people the chance to pre-register for the service. Wow - not only do you get to pay £1 per day, or £2 per week, but you also get to be the target of News International mailshots. Come on, tell us that’s not fun. No?
Interesting to have a look behind the site and unravel the code though. Which has a bit of a knife-and-fork feel - especially in its implementation of the age check.
Which is important, of course. “Only private individuals aged 18 years or over are permitted to register for use of the Website and to use the Services.” Why? That’s not explained. Is it something to do with credit cards? Anyone?
The age restricition is set out in the terms and conditions, which intriguingly is dated 16 March - 10 days before the announcement was made. Oh, and it’s 13 pages long. And seems to have attracted comments before the move was made public. Who knew that keeping your eye on Ts+Cs pages was the way to track paywalls? We do, now.
Anyway, rather than do what a smart coder might do, and use some sort of check against the current year in order to set the latest year available in the drop-down menu (pictured above), it has simply started at 2010. Read more…
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Millions of YouTube videos to get subtitles with ‘auto-captioning’Murad Ahmed
YouTube introduced a system today that will automatically create subtitles for all its English language videos. 
The technology, called “auto-captioning”, uses complex algorithms to work out what is being said in a video and convert it into text. Once the feature is turned on, the words will appear on the bottom of the video screen just like subtitles in a film.
The system was previously available as part of its “Voice Search” feature and on a small sample of videos made by selected partners. Now, Google is opening the system to any video with a spoken soundtrack in the English language.
Auto-captioning began to be rolled out this afternoon. Google said it would take time to “fully process” the many millions of YouTube clips in English. But YouTube wants its users to help speed up the process, creating a button for people to request subtitles, which YouTube will then prioritise for captioning. Though the feature is currently only available in English, it will include more languages in the next few months. Read more…
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