Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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How To Incentivise Your Audience to Skip Podcast Ads
If you publish a podcast, your podcast may well take advertising. And if it does take advertising, you probably want people to actually listen to the ads. Your audience listening to podcast ads increases the likelihood of products being sold, and therefore the advertiser coming back to buy more advertising. If your podcast doesn’t increase…
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127 Hours
A new Danny Boyle film is always something to get excited about. 127 Hours closed the recent London Film Festival, and is Boyle’s first since he hit the serious bigtime with Slumdog Millionaire. It tells the true story of Aron Ralston (warning: spoilers), an adrenaline junkie who careers around the wilds of Utah without a…
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The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest
And so we reach the third and final part of the Millennium trilogy. But before I get onto this film, a couple of things that irritated me in the cinema over the weekend. And neither were to do with the actual cinema (Vue in Islington). Nope, I’m talking about trailers. Because we’re approaching the end…
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Ofcom’s Broadcast Code Review
Sometime towards the end of the year, Ofcom should be reporting back on some changes it’s making to its Broadcast Code – the document that legislates what television and radio broadcasters are allowed to do on air. The big news on the day it comes out will undoubtedly surround Product Placement on television. Will Simon…
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The War For Late Night
Occassionally, when you delve into the non-Sky branded movie channels with names like True Movies or Movies 4 Men, you might have come across a TV movie called The Late Shift. It was a dramatisation of a book by New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s account of the hostilities surrounding the succession of hosts…
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Stone
Robert De Niro can be an annoying actor. He’s made so many brilliant films in his career, and yet, so often these days, you feel he’s on autopilot. While I’m not sure that I need him to throwing his all into his films as he once did, I’d quite like him to try a little…
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What’s An Ad In Your Social Media Stream Worth?
It’s a Friday today, and for a few of my colleagues here at work, that means free coffee. Let me explain. Vida e Caffé is part of a chain of coffee shops, one of whose branches is placed right opposite the front door to our office. People here are as addicted to coffee as people…
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Exhibitions
Here’s a picture that doesn’t feature the portrait of anybody at all, but that I took outside the National Portrait Gallery. Over the weekend I went to two utterly unrelated exhibitions that have recently opened in London. The National Portrait Gallery has the Taylor Wessing PhotographicPortrait Prize – an exhibition of around sixty photos from…
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Pictures From The Last Week Or Two
The Cowboy Junkies were great at Union Chapel on Tuesday. More photos here. More photos from Sheringham here. This actually forms a cutdown collection from the 1200 photos I actually took that night. But you can see a select 19 here.
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Classical Music Downloads
Let’s revisit an issue from a few years ago. In 2005, BBC Radio 3 presented the first in their now regular “Experiences” when they broadcast the Beethoven Experience. They broadcast, non-stop Beethoven for six days including pretty much everything he composed. As part of the Experience, they made available as downloads, a new recording from…
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Digital Radio – Is It All Doom and Gloom?
I’ve already been through the latest RAJAR results, and in my summary I said: The digital listening figure for all radio went up a fraction as noted above. I think it’s fair to say that it’s a bit disappointing even if the year on year growth is quite reasonable – up from 21.1% to 24.8%…
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RAJAR – Q3 2010
Like clockwork, another RAJAR comes around, and the radio industry all pauses to look at the new figures for the quarter. Here are some of the overall highlights: Overall reach remains at the high point it was last quarter (down just 9,000 people) Digital listening has increased to 24.8% (up from 24.6% last quarter) Commercial…
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The Independent & i
I could start this talking about how I bought the first edition of The Independent in 1986, and how for years I read it pretty religiously – if not exclusively. These days, I’m more of a Guardian man, still buying paper editions of it and its Sunday stablemate every day without fail. I still like…
Hadrian’s Wall
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