Imagine a world where advertising and market segmentation don't exist.
Where the mention of product or brand names is taboo to the extent that the names get purposely covered over wherever they appear. Where all creativity and content is unfettered by the distorting influence of the advertiser and is allowed to run without commercial interruption. That world is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was before it's time in 1927 and today it's continued resistance to advertiser funding runs against almost every other form of media today.
Sure it's not a free service and as a television licence payer I am required by law to contribute to its £2.4 Billion yearly income, but I'm happy to do so. Happy for continuously commercial free radio and television programming. Happy for its neutrality and the kind of output an advertiser wouldn't approve of. Content like the internationally respected The Planets, Walking With Dinosaurs and The Blue Planet - they cost many millions of pounds more than a commercial entity would have spent on them, but that's because commercial entities wouldn't have spent anything on them. They are scared to change from proven gameshow content designed to secure high audience figures to please the big bad advert man with his hyper-accurate (but not really) demographic reports and prime time viewing figures. Paying for the privilege of not being someone's demographic, how novel.
On the Web we are often heard to forecast the decline of advertising and mass marketing.
Perhaps the real contribution that the BBC has made isn't it's 75 years of world class broadcasting. Perhaps it really foretold of a world where the sequence of words we'll be right back after the break just doesn't exist, a world that has much more in common with the successful Web of the future than we realise.
All the more ironic that it has the words broadcasting and corporation in its title I suppose.
ps. I worded that to sound like an advert on purpose. Irony, look it up.
Where the mention of product or brand names is taboo to the extent that the names get purposely covered over wherever they appear. Where all creativity and content is unfettered by the distorting influence of the advertiser and is allowed to run without commercial interruption. That world is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It was before it's time in 1927 and today it's continued resistance to advertiser funding runs against almost every other form of media today.
Sure it's not a free service and as a television licence payer I am required by law to contribute to its £2.4 Billion yearly income, but I'm happy to do so. Happy for continuously commercial free radio and television programming. Happy for its neutrality and the kind of output an advertiser wouldn't approve of. Content like the internationally respected The Planets, Walking With Dinosaurs and The Blue Planet - they cost many millions of pounds more than a commercial entity would have spent on them, but that's because commercial entities wouldn't have spent anything on them. They are scared to change from proven gameshow content designed to secure high audience figures to please the big bad advert man with his hyper-accurate (but not really) demographic reports and prime time viewing figures. Paying for the privilege of not being someone's demographic, how novel.
On the Web we are often heard to forecast the decline of advertising and mass marketing.
Perhaps the real contribution that the BBC has made isn't it's 75 years of world class broadcasting. Perhaps it really foretold of a world where the sequence of words we'll be right back after the break just doesn't exist, a world that has much more in common with the successful Web of the future than we realise.
All the more ironic that it has the words broadcasting and corporation in its title I suppose.
ps. I worded that to sound like an advert on purpose. Irony, look it up.