Home Made Advertising

Another example of how digital technology is blurring the boundaries between audience and producer and how it's helping to lower the costs for traditional media institutions. Pringles will be using an ad made for just £300 by a member of the public. The ad will be first shown on terrestrial TV in Christmas day on ITV. The cost to Prigles of running the ad once on ITV is £60,000 but you could add that again to the cost if an ad agency had produced the ad for them. By running the competition for a new ad, Pringles have saved a huge amount of money and the winner of the competition has earned a reputation for himself within advertising circles - as well as the £2,000 prize. Of course Pringles can also benefit from the low cost viral marketing this will inevitably lead to.

Has downloading killed the album?

An interesting question is posed on the BBC 6Music site - are we witnessing the beginning of the end for music albums? Do you value your album collection? Are tracks better appreciated as part of an album or do you all use the shuffle function on your iPod or MP3 player. Many artists (e.g. Travis, Ash, Prince) are beginning to acknowledge that the downloading of tracks has fundamentally changed the way audiences listen to music and have decided to either do away with or give away albums.