It’s not just computer programming and call centres that are being outsourced to India, it now appears that advertising and research on advertiser-funded programming is moving there too.
As the public gains more control over their media due to digitisation, we all know that traditional advertising takes a knock.
The massive Interpublic Group, which includes the advertising agency McCann-Erickson, is creating an Emerging Media Lab in India under one of their companies, Lodestar Universal.
It will not only have the now-inevitable ‘this is what the house of the future’ setup within it, but will be applying all of those highly-educated brains to studying the affects of these medias on individuals and try to apply some matrix to them.
Lodestar Universal CEO Shashi Sinha told Television India, “We are in the process of building up a credible measurement system for consumer behaviour in the activation, films and retail space with the launch of the Emerging Media Lab in India. Consumers today are involved in multiple activities at the same time and hence there was a need to churn out some mechanics to measure it.”
Sinha is very optimistic about the future of branded entertainment giving the example of paint manufacturer Nerolac, who are shifting their advertising spend by “starting allocating 20-25 per cent of their spends to the branded entertainment space.” He believes this will shift over the next five years to half of their spend.
Those in the West would do well to gain an understanding as deep as our Indian cousins appear to have.
The Murdoch empire continues to buy to part of the online world, as BSkyB announce the full purchase of Web publishing and design company, mykindaplace, a company that they’d invested in 2000 when they previously dabbled in buying bits of the Internet.
James Baker, Managing Director of Sky Networked Media, who will have the mykindaplace teams under his power, invented a new term to us “super-serve,” when he said “Working even more closely with mykindaplace will allow us to accelerate the expansion of our web portfolio. We intend to super-serve audiences in key content genres and target new users with a suite of content-rich sites thatdeepen customer relationships and drive new revenue.”
If you thought that YouTube was going to rule the roost forever in delivering videos over a Browser, think again.
Every two or three videos that you watch will trigger the showing of a video advert. They’re currently running at 30-seconds, and I’d imagine that they’ll stay at that or less. Anymore and people will see it too much as a barrier to seeing the content they want. Most of the ads I’ve seen today have been for the Library of Congress
There’s been tons of financial results coming out around now, but we’ve spared you from them – we’re nice like that. Today we felt it was worth an exception.
As is well known, one way Google does so well is by getting other sites (partners) to carry their clients advertising for them (of which Digital-lifestyles is one). In accounting-ese/jargon, they refer to it as Traffic Acquisition Costs or TAC. These increased to $785 million, up from $723 million in its first quarter. The TAC (see how quickly you can get into the swing of this jargon) remains at 32% of their advertising revenue, giving a rough understanding that Google take 68% of these ad earnings – pretty healthy in their favour.
YouTube is being sued by a video news service, Los Angeles News Service for infringing the copyright of their video material, in particular, the footage of the 1992 LA riots, including the horrific attack on a truck driver.
YouTube has made moves to reduce copyrighted material on their sites, including limiting the length of videos that can be uploaded.
The terrible day that the mobile phone companies had been hoping wasn’t going to arrive, is here. Skype have today announced four WiFi handsets that let you send and receive calls without switching your computer on while wanding around – err, like a mobile phone. They’ve been expected for a while, but are finally getting closer to the hands of the public, being as they’ll start selling in Q3 this year.
We got our hand on the NetGear SPH101 recently and were really impressed with the solid build and how easy it was to use. The Skype interface was loyal to the computer-based editions, with the graphics being an exact replica.
Today it was announced that Whitehaven, Cumbria will be the first area in England to have its TV reception changed over from analog to digital.
When we saw the 
There’s thirteen different skin designs currently available with any RSS or Atom feed simply turned in to a Widget.
Yesterday saw the press unveiling of Sky Broadband, showing the eventual absorption of EasyNet, the UK ISP that they 
Sky marketing have been taking their now-expected simplistic approach to the name of the product, with Base, Mid and Max. It’s genius like this that produced the name Sky+, the name that sold 100k+ PVRs to the UK public, when previously they didn’t understand what the hell it was.
Since James Murdoch took over running Sky, its stated ambition has been 10 million subscribers by 2010, but as we get closer to that, it’s getting hard to convert over those naughty-non-subscribers.
Movielink, a service which delivers films over the Internet, will soon be offering the ability to burn the downloaded films to DVD, complete with DRM protection, reports ZDNet.
Sonic Solutions signed a similar deal with video CoDec company DivX back on 20 June to use Sonic’s AuthorScript disc-burning engine, although it was unclear if DRM would be transfered to the burnt disc.