The New York Times has this lengthy piece about film special effects and advertising innovator Robert Greenberg, head of R/GA, a media/web/ad firm that is pushing the envelope in how marketers reach consumers.
Penned by Timothy O’Brien, the in-depth look at Greenberg focuses on his efforts to push Madison Avenue and companies beyond the increasingly ineffective 30-second spot model. Interactive communications, particularly content that is interesting and worth a visit, is where advertising is headed and Greenberg is leading the way.
Mr. Greenberg’s new equation offers a brighter insight: Technology has put consumers in the driver’s seat by giving them a vast array of new choices and better information — and corporations and agencies that want to succeed had better get on board.
Companies that follow Greenberg’s lead are admittedly in the vanguard, but they’re on the right path. Still, it’s hard to fight the entrenched and surprisingly rigid ad industry, which Greenberg thinks is “fossilized.”
Too many agencies, he believes, are tethered to a “30-second TV spot” mentality because “agencies get paid based on 30-second spots and that financial incentive keeps them from changing their model.” Whip up those spiffy Super Bowl ads and those catchy print ads as much as you like, he says, but their impact is fossilizing and the companies that foot advertising bills are increasingly aware of it.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:59 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Joseph Kahn has this item in Sunday’s New York Times that puts more heat on Google’s decision to cooperate with the Chinese government in censoring search engine results. While Kahn notes that other Internet companies play ball with the restrictive regime, he fingers Google as being the worst culprit in perpetuating the oppressive system of censorship.
Several of the biggest media and technology companies have come under attack for helping the Chinese government police the Web. Yahoo provided information about its users’ e-mail accounts that helped the authorities convict dissidents in 2003 and 2005, Chinese lawyers say. Microsoft closed a popular blog it hosted that offended Chinese censors. Cisco has sold equipment that helps Beijing restrict access to Web sites it considers subversive. But few have cooperated as openly as Google. Google’s local staff works closely with Chinese officials to ensure that search results from Google.cn do not include information, images or links to Web sites that the government does not want its people to see.
While Google gets credit elsewhere for at least noting results that have been censored, thus giving the user some inkling that something’s missing, the article raises the notion that Google’s new censored service, Google.cn, is a step backwards for the Mountain View-based search giant. The old Google produced unworkable links when the user pulled up censored results, letting the user know that information existed but was simply unobtainable.
Now, however, users aren’t even really sure when information is available or not.
“It was one thing when you hit on links that did not work. You could see what was blocked,” said Liu Xiaobo, a leading dissident writer. “The new Google hides the hand of the censor.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:30 PM | Print | Comments (0)
While I hope no future doctors will sleep in and skip classes as a consequence, Harvard Medical School (HMS) has become the first medical school in the country to podcast lectures. The lectures will be available to students, faculty and staff. According to HMS, 68% of the students own iPods
What’s with NTL these days? The UK-based cable company seems to be gearing up for big things in anticipation of its merger with rival Telewest. The latest: NTL will be testing the distribution of video content over the Internet using BitTorrent’s technology. The move comes as the previously outcast BitTorrent strugles to find a business model for its file-sharing service. BitTorrent, which, in its dark-net applications, is a bandwidth-consuming bane of most broadband network providers, might not run into capacity issues with NTL given NTL’s tentative forays toward delivering 100 Mbps service.
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