One of the fun parts of setting up a new company is naming it. In a world full of Yahoo!s, Googles and YouTubes, the relevance and, indeed, the reverence of a name counts for little, but the name is the first step in brand building.

There are a few criteria to follow when selecting a name:

• Is the company name available ?
• Is the URL available ?
• Does it mean something bad in another language ?

And more recently, the ability to mangle a proper noun into all kinds of grammatical forms is a consideration (“Google it”, “a Yahoo!”, etc..), and although this goes against prevailing trademark advice and many companies sue for the perceived misuse of their corporate name (“to hoover”).
Trademarking a name takes a long time, so the best way to protect it in the meantime is to register a company in its name.

For Project V I’ve decided to turn to the long list of names I already have registered and I’ve also decided not to register all the suffixes, just use the .com, .net and .co.uk I already own. And that name is V….. now, that would be telling…

Excerpted from:
Project V – What’s In A Name

The demise of traditional commercial television in the UK has never been signified more clearly than in ITV’s decision that it would rather pay fines than deliver local and public service programming.

The original strategy behind ITV Local was to move such programming onto the web; but if you’re not producing the programming, there’s nothing to show, so that service will equally decline.

ITV’s strategy is regressive in a world that is made up of audiences of one. If a company can’t make narrowcast audiences pay, then I believe there is little future for it in the media industry. It is something the publishing industry learned the hard way in the eighties.

This is a company that has totally lost its way and I doubt if it will be able to exist independently for much longer.

Perhaps the much better run UTV, which is responsible for the ITV franchise in Ulster, will step in and take up this opportunity to target local TV markets and special interest groups in the UK.

See the original post here:
Tears Of A Clown

There are few seminars and conferences in this industry that I regret missing, but I wish I had been at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, to see WPP’s Marting Sorrell chair a panel of representatives from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sorrell’s enmity towards Google is well documented, and as you learn that the world’s second largest ad group spends more than 5% of its billings with the world’s favourite search engine, you begin to understand why.

However, methinks he doth protest too much.

Ad agencies are sleepwalking their way into oblivion. In a world of ‘an audience of one’ they remain obsessed with volume. They are lazy and stupid and serve their clients very badly. On the other hand Google is successful because it delivers, is measurable and accountable. And as such it is reasonably recession proof.

So, the most powerful adman on earth is helpless in the face of a superior business model and he knows this is not going to end well for WPP. But he should be wagging his finger at the mirror, not at Google.

See original here:
Bad Eggs

If there’s one way in which I hope I can change the way of thinking out there in internetTVland it’s the philosophy of an audience of one. In fact, it’s not the internet TV people who need convincing, it’s the people paying their way – the ad and media companies.

What does ‘and audience of one’ mean ? Well, it’s taking any individual viewer and making money from their media consumption through delivering content (and advertising) that is relevant to them.

Traditionally media, and TV in particular, has worked off vast numbers of homogeneous viewers. An audience of one is the antithesis of this. It recognises that TV can be targeted and can be a ‘below the line’ medium. It’s the very end of the long tail.

Read the original here:
An Audience Of One

It’s maddening being a professional in this industry and watching the UK’s only cable company, Virgin Media (well, the only one with any significant client base) totally cock up. I’ve always been big on this company, but they’ve failed to deliver in any way, shape or form.

They have a potentially great product offering, but they are totally unimaginative and have totally failed to capitalise upon their market position.

First of all, more people in homes where a Virgin cable runs outside their home take Sky than what’s on their doorstep. That’s a pricing issue.

Second, the broadband is great when you buy their XXL package, until you get dumped 500Kbps in the evening as they throttle. When you’re paying top dollar that stinks.

Third they don’t offer VoIP. That’s just greed and short termism.

I could go on… This is a company whose sole raison d’etre is to exploit hundreds of millions of pounds of investors’ money that went south digging holes in the road and they can’t even capitalise upon this massive investment.

They have true on demand video, which Sky don’t, and should be able to offer better broadband, but don’t. They could offer local and targeted advertising, but don’t and could be offering internet TV aggregated into their core proposition, but don’t. And their STBs are slow and clunky.

In effect, there is no reason in the world to subscribe to Virgin Media. Even the name, for which the company pays royally, is a grindstone around their neck, as Zavvi (formerly Virgin Stores) has proven. The Virgin brand is worth diddly squat in the market. Indeed, it probably brings with it negative values by now.

Virgin would be a great acquisition for Comcast, who equally have almost nowhere to go in the US, but the huge debt in both companies probably works against this eventuality. So who will step up now that Vodafone have rejected Tiscali ?

The rest is here:
Virgin Bride