Shell Like

Woolies going to the wall, MFI collapsing like a badly constructed flat-pack chest of drawers. The next big name on the high-street or retail park to bite the dust is anybody’s guess.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but Woolies missed a trick in trying to beat Tesco at selling cheap toasters, DVDs and games, instead of concentrating on what it did best. Namely the Pick’n'mix and spectacularly surly assistants.

Seriously though, as company’s fold, then so do potential clients for us, and that is worrying. The less players there are in the market then the less accounts there are for us to work on. As any biologist will tell you, diversity is the key to allowing life on earth to adapt and prosper. That is why we have a competition commission.

But as companies go then new ones will come along to replace them. They may not be on the high-street in the same way as before but the new guys will still need to differentiate themselves from the competition in some way. Advertising is one way of doing this and radio should be part of that. In fact, when you think about it, if everyone else is fighting to catch people’s eyes as they are surfing the web (surely there must be a better name for this activity now?) then why not go for their ears instead?

I was talking to a mate the other day, and he said he was annoyed to have missed Ian Hislop’s BBC4 programme about Dr Beeching. He said that he had seen a trailer for it, and had meant to watch it, but had forgotten it was on.

Aside from the fact that he can watch it again on i-player, it got me thinking about tagging. Very few of us have time to read through the schedules and set our PVRs or SKY+ to record what we’d like to watch later.

Some EPGs from SKY and Virgin Media in particular have a reminder button, but that only pops up when you are watching TV to remind you to switch over. Surely a good idea would be that every trailer has a ‘red button’ function embedded in it to automatically set your PVR, or at the very least a schedule reminder, when you actually happen to catch the trailer. That way if you happen to catch a trailer for something, but are just on your way out to Salsa class (we know who you are) you can just touch a button once and it’s all sorted for you.

The same goes for radio too. Radio manufacturer PURE recently launched a DAB set called FLOW that apart from loads of really cool functions, also apparently supports tagging. It means that the set itself has a button/function on it, which the listener is able to press whenever they hear something that piques their interest and that they want to come back to later. This has massive potential for advertisers. Offers and details can be picked up later by listeners. Money-off vouchers too.

This could also mean that (in an ideal world) the dreaded T&Cs could be read later along with any additional info about prices and stockists etc. It could be made compulsory to include them. This would mean more time in the 30″ slot for the creative bit (excellent!), but perhaps a dip in gigs for those clever fast-talking T&Cs (which is all done by time-compression now anyway!). Clip here is from Jonathan Kydd - if you need to book him then speak to Another Tongue and tell them I sent you.