Will Covid-19 Kill Channel 4? On Friday night after a day’s zooming and home schooling, Jenny and I watched Gogglebox on Channel 4 by chance. The reactions of the now-famous TV viewing households to
Media Running Short of Cash? Fund Raising during a Crisis. Is this the worst time ever to be a media business that is reliant on advertising or live events? Possibly. In September 2007 I was
Media Coronavirus: The Media Winners Our small back garden has been my office during this lovely weather. Shielded by walls, I can sometimes hear 2 or 3 Zoom, Skype, Teams, WhatsApp or Hangouts meetings going
Media Coronavirus: The Media Losers Twice a week I do a cycle tour of central London as my exercise. I head down through the City of London, inhabited solely by security guards in masks. I
Media The ‘Monstrous’ BBC Poll Tax Brexit and the election campaign have not been fun for the BBC. A public institution that strives to be objective and even-handed while also holding politicians and those in power
Media Vice: Unicorn or Nag? Nine months ago WeWork was pushing for an IPO of $47billion despite munching its way through cash losses of $3bn per year. WeWork’s value has since fallen by 80%
Media Public Service Media – Knowingly Undersold Sharon White, Head of OFCOM, is about to make a remarkable leap. As Chief Executive of the media and telecoms regulator she has overseen a domestic industry facing huge disruption
Tech Game on; TV off I am delighted when my teenage godson shows enough interest to read my latest blog post, even if it is only because he is part of it. He is not
Media Auntie must be tough on the old The BBC has taken a tough decision. The over 75s who were given free TV licences by Tony Blair’s government back in 2000 will have this benefit taken away
Tech Apple takes on the Cookie Monster The cookie monster isn’t happy with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook. Tim has decided that cookies, or the lack of them, will be a key battleground in defining what
strategy, YouTube, Netflix, Regulation, Facebook What I learned in 2018 It is traditional to make predictions at this time of year. But as all parents of young children know, it is almost impossible to do anything that involves serious thinking
Media New Generation Digital Feels the FAANGS’ Bite For traditional media businesses with a background in print, the rocketing profiles and valuations of the latest generation of pure-play, free digital content businesses have been hard to watch with
Media Goodbye ShortList Magazine After 11 years, ShortList, the pioneer of free, quality high-volume magazines, will close its print edition at the end of this year. When the news was announced, Joe Mackertich’s
Jamal Khashoggi; China; economic leadership Thank you for your emails Writing ‘thank you for all the messages’ following the posts about Jamal Khashoggi and the rise of Asia, is like going back 40 years to writing post-birthday thank you notes.
Jamal Khashoggi; Saudi Arabia Farewell, Jamal, I’m proud to have known you We had been travelling for 13 hours, changed planes twice and flown over hundreds of miles of desert. Finally we had arrived in Abha, a small city deep in the
China; Asia; internet leaders; Alibaba; Amazon Go East, Young Woman! You won’t be surprised that I have a number of nerdy friends for whom analysis is significantly more important than emotion in making decisions. We are all men. We
TV Rights: the Nightmare for Public Service Broadcasters "Why can't I watch it now?" TV rights: the nightmare for public service broadcasters
ecommerce, sosandar, look, asos Look is dead. Long live Sosandar The weekly fashion and celebrity magazine ‘Look’ made its final visit to the nation’s newsstands last week. Launched in February 2007, it is easily forgotten that Look was an
Tech Facebook: Unbelievable Earnings vs Terrible Newsflow It has become commonplace to talk about deleting Facebook among the liberal chattering classes.
Martin Sorrell; WPP "Not a Pretty Year" WPP shares fell 15% on the publication of the company’s results for 2017 today. For a short period this morning trading in the shares were suspended due to the
Media Media Buying Feels the Squeeze Martin Sorrell is very grumpy about the oligopolistic power of the tech giants in global advertising. “Google and Facebook control 75% of digital advertising. Digital advertising is about 30% of
Six Predictions for 2018 In the media industry we are experiencing the end of a period when domestic media companies have largely dominated home media markets and its replacement by a globalised era when
Broadcast TV Feels Pain-on-Demand Broadcast television has been the big dog of the media industry for nearly half a century. It has dominated the media time of the British consumer, created the nation’s
Social Media - The Dangerous Obsession? Jaron Lanier and Russell Brand aren’t often mentioned in the same sentence. The former is a hippy coder with who was part of the Silicon Valley scene since the
E-Commerce Is Just a Distraction Consumer magazine companies have largely missed out on the growth opportunity of e-commerce. It is an enormous miss and a vivid demonstration of the risks and opportunities created by a
