Kersh Media's blog

What’s the most foolish thing anyone’s ever said to you? I can think of quite a few daft things that have been said to me over the years, but one of them leaped back into my mind this week when I read about the spending cuts. It was something said to me about 18 months ago by a senior employee of Ten Alps Digital – we’ll call him Ron (not his real name). Ten Alps is the company part owned by Sir Bob Geldof which used to run Kent TV. The credit crunch was biting hard and I asked Ron how things were going at Ten Alps? “Great”!

Imagine if someone set up a local TV channel for Folkestone or Dover. What would it be like? The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has recently re-stated his vision for local TV in the UK. “What’s the biggest difference between UK and US television”? asked Mr Hunt; “The lack of local TV in the UK”

Last week at home I opened the cupboard under the stairs and peered inside. Something had changed; something was wrong. It took a few seconds to realise what it was.
“Where are my Yellow Pages”? I asked my wife.

“I threw them out” she replied proudly, “There were half a dozen of them, all unopened. One of them was from 2004. Completely useless”.

“But I was collecting them” I said.

“You were collecting Yellow Pages”? repeated my wife with the look of alarm she reserves for people who sit on park benches talking to themselves.

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.