adambowie.com

Category: Media

  • The Media Festival

    Throughout the year, there’s a never ending series of conferences around the country on all sorts of subjects. It’s not surprising as they make lots of money. Fees from delegates easily pay for the conference room facilities and a buffet lunch leaving lots of cash in pure profit. Speakers aren’t usually paid with perhaps only…

  • Newspaper Archives

    It’s an unfortunate coincidence that just days after I’d first used The Times’ archive for a little project that I’m working on, that they announce to registered users that it’ll have a paywall from the end of this week (confusingly, they list the date as Friday 18 September when there isn’t such a day). Still…

  • Picnic Shelved

    I never knew that it had been given the working title “Picnic”, but it seems that Sky has decided to put the whole venture on ice. Let me explain, 18 months or so ago, Sky suddenly announced that it wanted to take its three current Freeview services – Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky…

  • Alcohol And The Media

    There’s a widely reported story today about a report examining how alcohol is covered in the media. In particular the perceived glamourisation of excessive drinking by radio DJs such as Chris Moyles. You can read coverage at the BBC News site, and in all the papers (here are links to the story in The Guardian…

  • How NOT To Rebrand Your Radio Station

    There’s an entertaining blog on Media Guardian that compares the route that my employers have taken in rebranding Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio compared with the route taken by Revolution in Oldham: For years the station bucked the trend of better music mixes and instead served up alternative indie and rock, making presenters out of…

  • Martin Kelner in Media Guardian

    Martin Kelner’s been penning some very honest pieces about radio over the last few months, and today’s is as true as any of them. Talking about Kenny Everett is possibly a little hackneyed – sorry if that sounds heretical. But in essence, what he says is true. It seems to be TV personalities only who…

  • Old Virgin Radio TV Ads 2

    Here’s an ad that I’m 99.999% certain that you haven’t seen. It’s a Russ and Jono ad for Virgin Radio that was never actually aired. This is a rough cut without final graphics or sound, but it still gives you a good idea of what they were trying to do.

  • The Launch of DAB Digital Radio

    Today there are over seven million DAB digital radios in use in the UK, although it’s future still has a few question marks hanging over it rightly or wrongly. But it’s fascinating to go back and see how the system was first launched. So amongst some of the videos I’ve recently been going through at…

  • Old Virgin Radio TV Ads

    In the run-up to Virgin Radio rebranding as… – well, we’ll have to wait and see what precisely it becomes – I’ve been digging through the vaults to see what old TV ads I could find. Here’s the first second ad which ran sometime after the launch of FM in 1995 featuring Russ and Jono.…

  • Still No Live Cricket on Terrestrial Television

    Under a new deal announced today by the ECB… precisely nothing changes. Sky has retained live rights to… well… everything. And Five has a highlights package. Sky undoubtedly does a superb job. They’ve got lots of resources and they’ve innovated with new technology high-definition coverage, and super-slomo cameras (Although I did laugh on Saturday when…

  • BBC Fined 400k By Ofcom

    As a consequence of the BBC running fraudulent competitions, Ofcom has fined the Corporation £400,000. Undoubtedly, mistakes – whether deliberate or not – were made. And some kind of remedial action was necessary. When ITV or GCap were recently fined, you didn’t hear me complaining. But both of those organisations are commercial companies, and therefore…

  • Knock It Off, Nigel

    Good news all – there’s a new “Knock Off Nigel” campaign airing on TV and radio (in reality this has been running for a few weeks now, but since ITV has seemingly given up for the summer – apart from ITV4’s Tour coverage – and Channel 4 is a no go area for me with…

  • RAJAR

    I wrote a little piece for the One Golden Square blog on RAJAR last week which it’s worth directing you to. I’d also suggest you read Martin Kelner in today’s Guardian.