Assia Graziloi-Venier, head of Ministry of Sount TV (London) and flypaper.tv

I’m going to blog a little differently during these sessions. I’m going to seize upon a few things that the speakers say and talk about this.

In looking forward to this year, Assia talked about the difficult of brands letting go of the power as they try to encourage consumers to become brand evangelists. One thing she said was that spam was dead. That’s not a revolutionary idea. (In some places, not only is spam dead, but it’s actually illegal.) But let me take that one step further. As I said during my presentation, many of mass media’s mistakes in a social media era are down to the industrial, mass media model being shoe-horned into the social media world. Isn’t spam just a low-yield broadcast message? It’s antithetical to social media.

No one likes spam, but to be a little provocative, if you take that idea of spam as a generalised, unfocused and unwanted advertising message, could one not also argue that TV and radio ads are generalised, unfocused and often unwanted advertising messages? Isn’t that why people are not only time-shifting with TiVo but also cuting out the commercials? What about people who surf with display ad blockers?

I’m not anti-advertising. I’m actually not calling or predicting of all advertising, just questioning the over-reliance on relatively dumb, untargeted advertising.