Firetop

It’s easy to get carried away with all the social networking hype; one has only to spend a few minutes eavesdropping on the train to hear how successfully young people have latched onto the current tools for keeping in touch with their peers (think Bebo, MySpace and Facebook) as well as the proliferation of Instant Messaging. It’s fairly evident that as this young tech-savvy audience moves into the world of commerce, the networking tools they’ve grown to love will be put to new uses; job searching, candidate location, news & information gathering, even supplier research and contract negotiation will be second nature in the modern virtual world. This in addition to their existing love of all things Web 2.0 for the entertainment aspect of their lives - which already carries so much weight in setting modern music and film trends. (more…)

As we moved into 2007, Forrester Research identified that 81% of broadband users now have pop-up blocking software installed. According to the National Statistics Office, UK broadband users account for more than 73% of the UK’s Internet audience. With such information available it’s fairly safe to assume that next to nobody will see a pop-up campaign on screen. The continual demise of the traditional pop-up advert has surely reached its climax; pop-ups are beyond terminally ill, they’ve flatlined and there’ll be no resuscitation. (more…)

London has Big Ben, Paris has the Eiffel Tower and Rome the Colosseum; these easily recognisable symbols have done wonders for their host cities to build brand awareness over hundreds of years. Not to be outdone by these giants of tourism, Dorking Council has now added a monument for all who enter Dorking to gaze open mouthed at. Standing in the middle of the A24 roundabout this morning was a giant Cock (a Cockerel I mean - *thanks Alan*). (more…)

Some of my more regular readers will recall that in early November I looked into the popularity of ‘Celebrity Sex Tape’ downloads. This followed a Channel Four documentary detailing the history of the top 10 celebrity sex video downloads – a documentary which I felt compelled to correct on its statistical inaccuracies (I reordered the popularity chart based upon actual search volumes not just search results). As it turns out, that blog entry is now one of my most popular; bombarded with searches for ‘celebrity sex tapes’. However, we all know what these visitors are really searching for… and it’s not the correct video download chart. (more…)

On Thursday evening I was privileged to attend the first AdMonsters event of 2007, this time a cocktail & dinner evening at Axis / One Aldwych. One Aldwych is a hotel not too far from Temple tube station, ‘Axis’ is one of their restaurants (a rather nice one). This online advertising operations event was, as usual, pretty popular - a few familiar faces from agencies and publishers were present to discuss the daily grind facing us all in delivering online advertising efficiently and effectively. (more…)

Towards the end of 2006 I wrote a short article about the legality of digital broadcasting to UK audiences using SHOUTcast; essentially it’s quite legal to broadcast music in the US - to the US - at a small license fee, however if UK residents download the stream then a separate license is needed – and at the time of writing it was believed that there wasn’t one available… (more…)