Visual Language and its power to communicate

Bronwyn van der Merwe has written an amazing blog post at the BBC, detailing the corporation's detailed plans for re-designing the visual language it uses across all areas of its online presence.

It provides a first rate insight into the importance of design in communication, and the need for media institutions to build consistency and ease of use into the core of their practice. It's an essential undertaking if audiences are to recognise and engage effectively with media companies and their content. It's a long post indeed, but very well worth the effort of reading and looking at in detail.

19 million watch X Factor final. Why?

www.guardian.co.uk

Why did more than 19 million people watch this weekend's X Factor final, the show's largest audience in six series?

Personally, it' rather passed me by. Call it the Big Brother Syndrome, or perhaps attribute it to the fact I've been very busy at school, but I find it puzzling.

You can read all the statistical data here.

From a Media Studies viewpoint it shows that:

1. Simon Cowell is great at capturing populist trends
2. Simon Cowell is great at monetizing the TV show as an international brand
3. Audiences don't always follow predictable patterns
4. Institutions hate to leave their comfort zone if audiences and advertisers seem happy, although experience suggests that time and repetition should dull popularity.

Thanks to the Web I can of course revisit what I missed and see the key moments, thus saving myself hours of valuable life time, focusing in purely on the best bits. Does this make me a bad media consumer, or a thoroughly postmodern media interaction specialist? I'll leave you to decide.

News International - the biggest media audience database?

The Guardian reports that Rupert Murdoch's News International holds information on its database about a third of the UK population.

This information has been provided willingly, when consumers sign up for Sky TV, or subscriptions to the Times, Sun, Sunday Times, and News of the World.

In a period of recession it was quite amazing to read that around 200,000 users are rated as 'high value', meaning that they were potentially worth as much as £600 a year each to News International.

When we talk in Media Studies about the relationships between institutions and audiences, it's useful to remember that often these relationships are predicated on financial transactions - the consumer pays, the institution delivers content, and increasingly, enhanced services.

However, the newspaper industry itself seems to be in terminal decline, with readership figures falling and ad revenues getting hammered by the move of advertisers to online sources. It should come as no surprise, then, that News International and the Guardian Media Group have been making noises recently about Google's dominant position. Not only does Google reap advertising revenue from visitors, but, say its detractors, it's 'stealing' revenue via its Google News aggregation service. This provides access to a range of news headlines, but also enables Google to make cash from associated on-screen advertising. This, claim NI et al, is not fair, because Google is in effect recycling someone else's news and making cash from it.

It's an interesting debate, since Google is driving more users to respective news providers, and evidence shows that online browsers are more likely to click on ads if they're using a search engine, and indeed, are more likely to make a purchase. There's a great article here that explains this in more detail.

And, as an end-note, it's worth observing that the Office of Fair Trading has ruled recently that it won't be referring Google to the Monopolies Commission, as it is a major driver for innovation, change and consumer satisfaction.

For the newspapers, they're going to need new business models. For those of us passionate about the media and the future of newspapers, it's going to be fascinating to see if the news print industry can respond to changing market dynamics faster and more effectively than the music industry managed, when faced with threats from online, MP3, and Apple.

An Age of Personalised Content and Media Collaboration

news.bbc.co.uk

The news that the outstandingly successful BBC iPlayer will be launched on Nintendo's Wii console is proof, if proof were needed, that the relationship between media institutions is changing dramatically in a web-driven world.

Fundamentally, commercial alliances and content sharing with acknowledgement are the way forward. As we move to an age where personalised information will find you, consumers are becoming less brand loyal and more content focused. Nicholas Negroponte made this observation back in 1996, but it's taken more than a decade for the mass market and appropriate technology to play catch up with the theory.

For producers of media content this means that cross-platform co-operation and content fertilization will be key drivers to economic success. The power of Twitter to enable disparate networks to rapidly share links to relevant information, is the most striking example this year of how consumers want to find what they want, and find what they didn't know they'd like.

The age of content protected walled gardens, with media institutions battling to keep audiences within their reach for as long as possible, is over. And that's why claims that Rupert Murdoch may try to limit Google searches for paid-for content coming out of his News International stable ultimately will be floored.

It's not just content that's King. It's the consumer. And the sooner media institutions embrace that idea and think about reach and spread, rather than control and restraint, the sooner they'll find new and profitable business models appearing.