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...

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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.

Sydney.
The final Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress panel for today shifts our focus from broadcasting to (print as well as online) publishing. Hugh Martin, General Manager of APN Online, opens the discussion by noting the long history of developing online counterparts to print newspapers (and the slightly shorter history of doing the same for magazines). He points to the recent announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is soon to cease its print version, moving entirely to an online newspaper, while magazine publisher Condé Nast has a very hard time working out how to make money online.

Sydney.
We're now starting the post-lunch session here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress. The speaker is Tony Surtees, CEO of Australian regional broadcaster Prime's digital arm iPrime. He begins by noting that complacency is the enemy of innovation - and for that reason, starting new businesses during times of recession is actually very appropriate, as this added pressure means that complacency goes away.

By way of a very funny video from Bring the Love Back, Tony suggests that consumers have changed, but advertisers haven't. Time investment and advertising spend on different media no longer match - online advertising significantly lags behind take-up, while newspaper advertising remains significantly above circulation figures. Additionally, of course, people increasingly multitask (especially also between TV and online). Each time new media are introduced, we begin consuming them, but we consume them in multiple, different ways.

Gießen.
We're in the afternoon session of the Gießen conference now (and I will need to run out a little early from here, in order to catch my train back to Hannover in the evening). The keynote speaker is Adam Arvidsson, whose interest is in what he calls the ethical economy (an online book of the same title is being released next week). Session chair Jörn Lamla introduces the session by referring to the German Website Ciao.de, a consumer-driven product discussion and rating Website (perhaps similar to sites like Epinions the English-speaking world) which is operated by a PR company - a kind of commercialisation of culture and a culturisation of commerce at the same time.