This summer AT&T’s reality show @summerbreak, filmed and edited as the summer progresses, returns for a second season to track the adventures of a group of Southern Californian teens. Back in the 1940s-50s, AT&T sponsored a very different radio and television program, The Bell Telephone Hour, featuring classical music and opera stars. Despite their obvious differences, the two…
AT&T has produced a teen reality program, @summerbreak—seen not on TV but on social media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. General Electric is sponsoring articles in the magazine The Economist. And Pepsico has a blog site, Green- Label, devoted to skateboarding, rap music, and other interests of “millennial males.” These examples of branded…
Affdex, a facial recognition software made by Affectiva, is being used by advertisers to measure audiences’ emotional reactions to ads. Capturing minute facial changes, Affdex tracks viewers’ fleeting emotional reactions, allowing analysts to identify, through proprietary algorithms based on “283 facial frames,” their positive and negative responses to an ad. Affectiva hopes to sell this…
“As soon as you limit access, piracy increases,” pointed out Boxee CEO Avner Ronen in a talk at the NAB in Las Vegas on April 17. Locking up content behind excessively expensive paywalls or withholding content for too long behind exhibition windows may just encourage audiences to find their own access solutions. This should be…
The SOPA/PIPA battle isn’t just about who controls intellectual property, it may also represent a decisive watershed in how people see Old versus New Media. The struggle is nowhere near over: the IP regime is not dead. But many in the ancien regime are surprised by the vehemence and strength of the uprising. The New…
Are the digital and legacy media sides of the advertising industry heading toward greater integration? Michael Miraflor, who works at the Zenith agency, gave a presentation at the IRTS Faculty Seminar recently. He claims that ad agencies specializing in “digital” only, that is online and other new media, peaked during 2006-2010. Now, he says, agencies…
The recent Salon series documenting the decline of the creative class has been circulating in the Twitterverse. As with many a punchy slogan, it enfolds a truth within a misconception. Scott Timberg claims that the Internet promised to bring fortune to those in “creative” fields, such as journalism, music, publishing. And yet, record retailers have…
