Kersh Media's blog

I recently bumped into an old BBC colleague. I’ll call him John, though that’s not his real name. John didn’t look happy. He said he’d left the BBC, but was finding it tough getting a job outside. John was fed up because a prospective employer had just told him they considered him “institutionalised”.

John explained that employers outside the BBC didn’t think he could adjust to life in the private sector. That life at the BBC had made him accustomed to working within a rigid, bureaucratic culture.
I felt sorry for John and I understood his problem.

Here at Kersh Media Towers, the news has been all about cows. To be precise we’ve been amazed at how news travels round the World in just a few hours. Let me explain.

We’ve recently been asked to help publicise a Kent theatre company’s open air Shakespeare summer tour. “How are rehearsals going”? I asked the Director one day.

“Fine” he replied, “Because of the hot weather, we’ve been rehearsing outdoors on a farm. We even have an audience” he added; “A herd of 170 cows”.

“You’ve been performing The Merry Wives of Windsor to a herd of cows”? I asked.

Unusual story which we've been involved in promoting this week.. enjoy!

A herd of Kent dairy cows must be World’s most cultured animals after being treated to their own private performances of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.

The herd of 170 Holsteins, at Chart Sutton near Maidstone, have been listening to selected scenes for the last few months.

Quiz time.

How many videos were watched on YouTube in May this year? Was it 1.4 million? 14 million? Or 140 million?

Actually it’s a trick question. The answer is a mind numbing 14.6 billion. And that’s just the number watched by American residents!

According to figures just released, May was a record month for YouTube with the average visitor watching 100 videos. YouTube now accounts for 43 percent of all video viewed online.

YouTube has just released a new video editor that lets you edit clips from your library of existing video uploads. The new service enables you to edit together separate clips, as well as add or change the background music using YouTube’s commercial AudioSwap library of licensed songs. The features are fairly basic, but nonetheless represent an amazing jump forward in terms of the YouTube offer. You can trim individual clips and then arrange them in a timeline. You can also adjust the audio as a separate track.

It’s a huge international competition which takes place every four years and involves the biggest footballing stars on the planet. The stakes are high with prestige and big rewards for those who succeed.

No I’m not talking about the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, I’m talking about the battle to create the most successful World Cup TV advert.

If the World Cup is a unique sporting event, it’s also a unique marketing opportunity. It’s estimated 25 million of us will be sitting down watching TV at the same time over the coming last weeks.

So which are the ads lining up to do battle?

My seven year old daughter picked up the TV remote and switched channels. Off went live coverage of the post election, pre-coalition talks; on went Glee. Off went David Cameron and Nick Clegg, on came Sue Sylvester and Will Schuester.

“I was watching that” I protested.

“But it’s boring” she replied, “The Conservatives are getting together with the Lib Dems and they’re going to share everything. That’s all that’s going on”. Back to the shenanigans and plotting at McKinley High.

Gordon Brown like, I conceded defeat and reflected that she had a point.

While British politics has failed to really exploit digital media in 2010, the internet, and especially online video, continues to have a growing impact on our “real” lives and businesses.

New figures from the respected agency Comscore show people in the UK watched 37% more online video compared with the year before.

We Brits are now watching more than five and a half million online videos a month compared with four million last year.

YouTube is of course the biggest player, but Facebook reported a 205% increase in the number of video views while the BBC reported a 143% increase.

So what role did social networking sites and online media play in influencing your election vote? Probably none at all.

2010 turned out to be the “TV election”, not the “internet election”. The big noise was all about how the party leaders performed in the UK’s first ever TV election debates.

I was left wondering why the internet hadn’t played a more decisive role; especially after Barack Obama’s stunning use of social media in his 2008 election victory.

Imagine the M20 near Folkestone. Now imagine that the traffic is only moving at four miles an hour and that in front of every vehicle there walks a man carrying a red flag.

This is what the world would be like if the Locomotive Act were still in force.

The law was introduced in 1865 because of fears that the growing use of traction engines and road locomotives would endanger the safety of the public. It was believed that mechanically propelled vehicles might cause injury or even fatal accidents on the road.