The Warc Blog

Les Binet and Sarah Carter get a little bit angry about some of the nonsense they hear around them… like ignoring the 'still' majority.

We attended a conference by Thinkbox (the UK body responsible for TV advertising) the other week. There were a number of great speakers and an interesting session at the end giving useful facts on the current state of the UK TV market.

One headline struck us as particularly fascinating: 90% of all TV programmes are still watched live. When you consider how much TV technology has changed, this is quite remarkable. Despite on-demand viewing, digital recording and the ever-growing range of devices that TV' can now be viewed on, people still mostly choose to watch TV in the good old- fashioned way.

Last Thursday night I attended an event at advertising agency iris' London headquarters where a handful of speakers, just returned from the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, presented their 'Texas Takeaways’: what they regard as the key themes from this year's festival – billed as the "largest interactive event in the world".

As well as the margaritas and tacos on offer to the guests, there was a lot to learn from the two hour talk. Here are the four highlights that stood out to me.

It's that time of year when chaos hits the streets of Austin, as South by Southwest (SXSW) gets into full swing.

But chaos can be good for business, according to a group of panellists discussing "This is Generation Flux", an article published by Fast Company last year, and written by the title's editor-in-chief, Robert Safian.

Latest content highlights on warc.com include an in-depth look at achieving influence, how brand owners are embracing mobile and insights on engaging consumers at both ends of the age spectrum.

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How to achieve influence

"There is currently much debate and disagreement around what 'influence' really is, and how it can be achieved, if at all as a controlling action, writes Admap editor Colin Grimshaw, introducing a series of articles in the magazine's current issue.

Standing before a crowd of 2,000-plus at the Association of National Advertisers' annual 2012 Masters of Marketing Conference, Bob Liodice, the organization's president/ceo, set the bar for the conference, pledging lessons in performance from his keynote speakers.

The focus, he said, would be on the impact of marketing on business. "Great marketing isn't great unless it is validated by terrific business results," he argued. "Superb business performance is what CEOs and shareholders expect from us. And it will only happen through the collaborative effort of advertisers, agencies, media owners, publishers, suppliers and vendors. Otherwise, it's all for naught."

I like reading children’s books. They are full of life, colour and imagination. Last night, I finished reading ‘Lost and Found’ by Oliver Jeffers once more. It’s the story of a boy who finds a lost penguin on his doorstep and then travels all the way to South Pole to return the stranger.  It is, by all standards, a pure story of curiosity and love from a child’s eye. In 2008, the story was adapted into a 24-min film and was first aired in the UK on Christmas Eve.

I recently read it to my daughter and she loved it too, to such an extent that she carried on reading it (over and over again) at short intervals throughout the day.

To their innocence, children carry the most creative brains amongst us all. And the thing I find most fascinating about children’s books is how they engage with children’s creative brains. They are always relevant, timely and acquire complete attention. Instead of talking at them, they ignite the imaginative neurons and talk with them. And of course, if you can connect with the brain of a child, you can connect with any. It’s no mystery why we suddenly change our tone when reading the bedtime story to the little ones.

Read my report from day one of ESOMAR Congress 2012, and browse all of the available papers from ESOMAR Congress 2012.

The second day of this year's Congress, held in Atlanta, started with the announcement of the winner of the ESOMAR Young Researcher competition. Now in its fourth year, the top prize won by Patrick Pfefferkorn (HTP Concept, Germany) for his paper You Won’t Find Me on Facebook. His research explores the potential future development of social networking by drawing from the experiences of non-users and drop-outs, to find out whether these people might be part of a new grass-roots movement to abandon social networking sites.

There were also a lot of new research papers discussed on the day, highlights of which are below.

NBC is launching two free Olympic mobile apps. They're available only to pay-TV subscribers who have MSNBC and CNBC as part of their service. Consumers can watch events and will also be able to look up athlete profiles. They'll be able to do that on iPads, iPhones, and some Android devices. Oh, and there'll be advertising too. OK, no surprise. You expected that with a free app.

The broadcaster says it's the first time all 3,500 hours of Olympic events will be available on smartphone and tablet computers. But given the time-line of smartphone and tablet invention, introduction, and adoption, that's not quite the mind-bogglingly astonishing statement it must have sounded like when they wrote the press release, but, hey, it's the Olympics and it's apps!

Facebook has had one of the roughest months in its short history since becoming a public company, with lowlights ranging from a 16% decline in its stock price to media complaints about Mark Zuckerberg's restaurant tipping habits. And things seemed to be going from bad to worse at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity yesterday when Paul Adams, the firm's global head of brand design, disappeared backstage soon after starting his keynote due to what seemed to be a bad case of stagefright.

But having taken a quick breather, Adams offered the audience a nice one-liner on his return to the stage – "That was the most anti-social thing I've ever done" – and went on to deliver a strong case for Facebook's massive importance to marketers. After all, despite the negative headlines, the firm remains a global company with near-unparalleled reach, and is inexorably closing in on signing up its 1 billionth user. It's also worth noting that the Facebook seminar was by far the most popular of the Festival so far among delegates, with queues to enter the conference room beginning to form half an hour before time.

This week Warc is reporting from the Advertising Research Foundation's (ARF) Audience Measurement conference in New York City. The theme is the 'measurement crisis' – but is 'crisis' a fair description of the current state of audience research?

Terry Kent, the Kantar Media North America CEO who served as co-chair of the first day, told the audience: "We've adapted and transformed our industry in the face of what we call 'big data'."