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Never go on holidays... Looks like a few days into my holiday on the Sunshine Coast, one of the electrical storms sweeping through Brisbane these days knocked out the server, even in spite of various forms of surge protection. Ah well - a motherboard replacement and some serious fiddling with Linux later (massive thanks to Nic Suzor for pointing me to the tip that enabled my successful necromancy), here we are again.

And while we're here, I might as well note that the audio and Powerpoint from my Interactive Minds presentation on 27 November are now online. I'm afraid the audio quality is, shall we say, 'for collectors only', but here it is, for what it's worth. This end-of-year IM event aimed to highlight trends in 2008 and predictions for 2009, and regular readers of this blog will recognise a few of my recurring obsessions. Many thanks to Jen Storey for the invite.

Sydney.
Up next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Robert Leach, Head of MCn Connect, whose interest is in digital television - and he begins by saying that interactive TV is now here; he finds it impossible to watch TV news without being able to 'press the red button' and get the latest news headlines. (Hmmm... Most Australians appear to use the Internet for this, rather than pay-TV?) Digital TV is changing rapidly. Does this mean the death of TV and TV advertising?

No, says Robert - we are watching as much TV as we ever have done, even though usage of other devices is also growing. Where the major growth area lies is digital video in its various forms. In the digital environment, devices have multiplied, but media are converging; the challenge for marketers and advertisers is to involve and engage audiences in video content. Where the Clinton campaign slogan in 1992 was "it's the economy, stupid", today the slogan for advertisers should be "it's the content, stupid" - if broadcasting or other media forms are declining, this is not the fault of technology, but of the content being broadcast. Great content will continue to attract a mass audience - but that audience may exist across a wide variety of devices from conventional televisions to online and mobile devices, scattered across time and space.

Sydney.
Matt Bruce from Nielsen Online is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; his focus is also on online advertising. There is continuing growth in the number of banners, advertisers, and campaigns online in Australia, as well as in the overall display advertising spend online. As of quarter three, 2008, the big spenders in this field of advertising continue to spend (even the battered finance sector); search advertising is strong and dominated by Google; even spending on Google image search advertising is in itself as strong as advertising on the next closest search engine.

Sydney.
The last afternoon at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress begins with a panel session on the future of advertising. Paddy Douneen, National Advertising Director for Fairfax Integrated Solutions, is opening the debate by highlighting the difficulties established media companies are having in shifting advertising from traditional to online spaces, especially given the uncertainties of the current economic climate. He says that advertising in some traditional media is still very strong, especially now that car manufacturers and department stores have increasing backlogs of stock to clear because consumer demand is slowing.

Sydney.
My talk was next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, and seemed to go down pretty well - I had been somewhat worried about getting booed off the stage by the broadcasters in the room, seeing as I was pointing out the dark clouds on the horizon for them. Here's the Powerpoint, and the paper is online, too - hope the audio recording worked, too! the audio turned out a little noisy once again, but it's better than nothing...

Sydney.
Rachel de Sain is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; she is Strategy and Commercial Manager for Mobile at Sensis. Her focus is on mobile advertising and marketing. Sensis operates brands such as Yellow Pages, WhereIs, TradingPost and Citysearch, and has recently come around to placing this content in Google and Google Maps as well - in this, mobile has become one of the most fundamental parts of the business.

Sensis gets around 2.5 million searches from mobile devices per month, and this doubles around every four months. Mobiles now have a 101% penetration rate in Australia, but over 49% of Australians have owned a phone for over 7 years, so it's not a new technology any more, even though technological features keep changing. Benefits for consumers are that mobiles are always on, that they choose whom to communicate with, that communication is personalised, and that it is relevant on the fly - if therefore provides confidence for consumers. For advertisers, the always-on nature is also attractive, and customers using mobile phones to connect are genuine customers, not windowshoppers. Also, the return on investment is measurable. Overall, though, the mobile is about building bridges, it takes users from one platform to another, and this is crucial.

Sydney.
The next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress 2008 is Tiffany Hall, Technology Controller of Nations & Regions at the BBC. She's focussing on the experience of rolling out the BBC iPlayer, an on-demand TV catch-up service (similar to the ABC's iView); programmes can be streamed or downloaded, and the service is funded by UK television licence funding (which is why content at present is not available outside the UK - unless you use an anonymiser proxy with a UK IP address). The player also contains parental guidance features (as timeshifting undermines the more conventional scheduling of differently rated programmes at different times of the day). iPlayer streams at 800kbps, with sound at 250kbps, and there are further moves to maximise the picture quality. About 80% of users use Windows, about 20% Macs, and only around 1% Linux; the player is now also available on the Nintendo Wii and on the Virgin platform.

Sydney.
Following on from the last two very informative sessions here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, we have a social networking panel. Akamai's Stuart Spiteri kicks off by asking about the impact of continuing change, and Andrew Cordwell answers that this is indeed difficult. For MySpace, local people talking about local issues will always continue; the challenge is to build on this in a more global fashion, and to connect these levels. Francisco Cordero also points to the importance of continuing to develop the technology.

Sydney.
Next up here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Francisco Cordero, General Manager Australia at Bebo, a social networking site which is big in the UK and has recently moved into the Australia/New Zealand market in a more substantial way. Indeed, the promo DVD that Francisco is showing here still has a strong British accent, in contrast to the MySpace promo we saw in the previous session.

The DVD compares Bebo profiles with users favourite music and media to a typical teen's bedroom, incidentally. It also highlights the made-for-online drama series Kate Modern as an online marketing tool, which was used to promote new bands, for example. The Bebo term for brand engagement with Bebo users is 'open media' - even though the DVD promises in the same breath that brands control content, distribution, user experience, and advertising.

Sydney.
We're now starting the second and last day of the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress here in Sydney, and I'm speaking about the impact of online media on broadcasting around noon. We begin with Andrew Cordwell, Director of Sales at Fox Interactive Media, though, which runs sites such as MySpace, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes and Ask Men. Globally, there are 122 million users on MySpace, with 300,000 new sign-ups per day and some 8 million users online at any one time.