Personally, I don’t fully agree with them but I liked the fact they make me think about advertising and marketing, and role it plays in society…plus they are quite passionate statements.

You’re right but the problem is that our society has spent 3 decades, starting with the greed culture that Thatcher unleashed, telling people that home ownership (and indeed materialism in general) is the thing to aim for. In fact, it’s gone a lot further, essentially mocking those that are not wealthy enough to take part in this clamour for material goods. It has told people that if they don’t have the latest gadgets and fashion, or a nice home and car, they are nobodies. Our TV and other brain-dead media bombard us with images of the lives of the wealthy shit living it up. Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that many people do whatever it takes not to be left behind, even if you and I might think it’s all vacuous and not take part in this chase ?

Blaming the poor is missing the point. It’s those that seek to exploit them where the finger should point. The finance, advertising and media sectors are hugely responsible for the state we’re in.

Because advertising convinces them there lives are meaningless and worthless unless they have X. I don’t have a TV at home but it is impossible to miss adverts whether it is the TVs in the gym or when staying in hotels. Late last year one particular advert made my blood boil, it was Nintendo telling parents (not children) that if they did not have a Wii Christmas would be ruined as no-one would want to come around to celebrate and their kids would hate them. And for 8 minutes an hour umpteen TV channels beam this propaganda and nonsense like it into millions of houses. Never mind the other adverts on everything from newspapers to bus stops.

It is little wonder that people eventually believe that there life will be better that they have X, and that people are willing to get into debt to buy it?

Our whole economy is based on this – people spending money they don’t have on stuff they don’t need. As Modern Toss so succinctly put it on a carrier bag a few years ago – Buy More Shit or We’re All Fucked.

Thought provoking or insane ramblings? Maybe a bit of both.

You might have noticed the site has been stripped back a little in recent weeks.  I’ve been slimming it down as some work goes on behind the scenes which might come to fruition in the next few months.

Seeing as I haven’t posted in a while, and since being at V Festival last week, I thought it would be fitting to post this old(ish) note I scrawled.

I really don’t care who you are, where you’ve come from, what genre you chopped up, filtered, spliced and sellotaped back together again. I don’t care where you get your samples from, who’s style you’ve mirrored or where your beat has developed from.

I couldn’t care less if you’re retro, new-age, post-modern, old skool, electronic, or an all-time veteran of balancing beats and frying them up with a tasty portion of melodic drum-step. I don’t care if you’re fidget, bassline, clown step, hardcore, electro-tech, funk-indie, blues or rock and roll.

Artists change dramaticlly over the course of their careers. Usually, the journey will begin with some underground bedroom production, things will get big, and then beats will be flying out the door faster than double cheese’s at McDaddys.

I’ve seen far too much criticism thrown at artists because of what they look like, who they are, how they’ve produced and where they are heading. How they’ve fucked up and commercialised a genre by simplifying it and shipping it out to the masses. How they’ve ruined the world of music and forced us all to listen to [insert awful chooage here] for the rest of eternity. I think criticism on the internet must be the cool thing to do.

Listen to the beats, decide if you like them or not.

When you go out for a meal do you question the background history and cookery methods of the chef before you decide if you like your meal?

All that other stuff is just fluff by comparison. Stop judging music based on genres, impact and popularity – just listen to it as music and decide if you like it or not. Don’t worry about being cool or down with the kids. It matters not one jot. You like Lady Gaga? Go and dance the roof down to it, have fun!

Too many people take the ‘coolness’ of music far too seriously.

It’s all about the music.

That can increase to an ad every 2-3 tracks with continued use (or at least has for me).  Combined with their introduction of a 10 hour listen limit, it’s getting to the point where the new restrictions make the service unappealing.  Only using it for occasionally for work, I don’t really justify paying for it.  In it’s current form, with a 30-40 second ad every 3 tracks, I’ll simply move back to listening to my mp3 collection.

That’s not forgetting of course that there’s a great streaming music service I’ve been using for years, that I rarely hear anyone mention these days.  An advertising free app, unlimited minutes music player with millions of artists, tracks and features that is totally free to use.  It doesn’t seem to get as much press or media time as Spotify has in recent months (maybe because of the label interest in Spotify) but  I’ve been using it for years and remains one of my favorite web services.

Scobbling and the social aspects mean, like Spotify, I can keep track of my friends beats and explore who’s bopping to what.   No, it doesn’t allow you to listen to the Lady Gaga or Take That album on repeat five time, it forces you to discover new artists, no doubt a scary prospect for many of the crowd following pop sheep, and probably one of the reasons I think the masses haven’t adopted it.

Guessed yet? Last.fm.

And no, I’m not a sponsor, employee or sell out.  Just a satisfied (non-paying) customer that has been using a great service for years and doesn’t think it really get its dues.

To get you started, if you want some beats while you’re working, checkout some DJ Food bops.  You’ll get advertising through the web service though, so install the desktop app and away you go.

“In a world where no one experiences a commercial they don’t want to, do you really expect people to listen to what you tell them and be sold to every third minute?  You’re dreaming.”

I can’t admit that I’m not guilty of ad avoidance.  Working in advertising, I should probably feel a little guilty about that, but I don’t.  We are exposed to so many ads in a typical day (up to 625), can we really blame our audiences that try to avoid them?  Pain avoidance is human nature, and some advertising can be mighty painful.

With the increased amount of advertising that is thrown at us across an increasing number media channels, relevancy is everything to advertising success.  Ensuring that your ad is front of the right person at the right time should be much easier, given the increased amount of adjustable variables; audience information, flexibility over placement, channel, type, media format, and the additional functionality that new technology has given us.

Relevancy is large contributor to the success of any given advertising.  Being exposed to irrelevant ads can grate, but being bombarded with them day after day after day after day can really become an irritation.  For me, being aware of the targeting potential of some networks, it grates even more.  Advertisers throwing money on blanket ad campaigns with little to no targeting really gets my goat up.

When working with clients, I’ve always worked hard to ensure any advertising is as targeted as humanly possible.  Why should irrelevant consumers be exposed to ads that they have almost no chance to respond to? All this does is irritate the consumer and drive up advertising costs.  And, over time, this irritation builds up and turn into ad avoidance.  Working in a media where ads are being randomly thrown to people just seems like madness.

I can understand that ‘traditional’ media has major problems with targeting because of the way the media is delivered.  Sure, they can target by program type and time of day, but in general you’ll be exposed to a lot of crap ads you really don’t care about simply due to the fact it’s a one to many delivery channel.  Sky is a little better with across specific channels, but it’s still very generic.

I don’t however forgive ‘new’ media to the same degree.  Targeting is getting better with some services, but is still based on guesswork and still has miles to go.  With websites taking in a plethora of information about it’s users (age, interests, education, employment, ‘pages…’) there’s really no excuse why their delivered advertising should ever be as irrelevant as other channels.  Streaming music services are able to log everything you’ve ever listened to and how much.  They are able to know your exact music tastes down to a tee, so why am I being advertising Celine Dion albums when all I listen to is drum and bass?

I really like advertising, let’s just get it targeted, eh? Can you imagine only ever seeing ads relevant to your interests? How nice would life be where every piece of advertising you see is something personal to you, that you’d actually consider buying?

It’s an interesting approach, and one of the first major media services (that I know of) that allows it users to pay more and get the service ad free. Some websites also offer this option but not many. And those that charge for content through paywalls typically still feature advertising, albeit of a lesser degree.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea and hope that it will shape the future for many other paid services – though I have some doubts about whether it will benefit advertising.

TV subscription services such as Sky and Virgin charge for content in the same way, but their services feature advertising as well – you pay a premium for the service, and are still advertised to.  With the rise of the Spotify model, I know more than a few people who are becoming annoyed with that TV model – it’s almost creating a mindset for subscription services of “I’m paying for a service, why should I have to receive advertising too?”

Radio works in the same way, but is always free.  I’m sure  if they were to introduce a subscription service, you’d expect it to be ad free.  Cinema? You pay for your ticket but still get 30+ minutes of ads before a film, fair?

And the BBC, well they just charge anyone that has the potential to view the service as they maybe viewing it, and can function advertising free. Not a particularly fair model, but I’ll come onto that in some later discussions.

I think the Spotify model works great, and on tv subscription services could work well, it could almost be the future of content delivery.  I don’t however think it will be able to be delivered (at least not in the close future) – simply due to the technology that will be required and the cost.  With Sky requiring you to pay a premium and them receiving revenue from advertising to make their business profitable, I’d imagine they’d need quite a high subscription charge to make an ad free model affordable.  Upwards of £100 a month? Who knows.

Either way, I think the Spotify model is great and a subscription model that I hope a lot of other media providers consider.  Pay a subsciption, get the service ad free.  I also think a lot of people, particularly on what’s considered ‘over-advertisied’ services such as Sky, would take it up.

I don’t think it’s particularly beneficial for advertisers though, as it reduces their audience size and the amount of advertising people are exposed to.

You could argue if we make advertising more targeted and exposure people to less in general, then we’ll see it perform better, and I think that’s the key.

Less frequency, more relevancy.