✅ Monday briefing: Local news desert, video explainer, eco ad criticised, new inflation index, PR employment data, ad cookie plan, Tumblr revival, Twitter transparency report, and more...
Media, best and bad practice, research and insight, social media and platforms, and more
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from my blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and public relations. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join us.
37% of recipients opened this newsletter last week. 3,535 people read it and 742 of those clicked on a link. If you’re interested in collaborations, please hit reply.
Media
🏝️ LOCAL NEWS DESERT: The collapse of local journalism has led to a “news desert and erosion of democracy,” according to award winning ITV News correspondent Robert Moore who reported on the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. He made the comments during a Royal Television Society discussion. Must watch. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🎥 VIDEO EXPLAINER: The BBC's Ros Atkins spoke to the Reuters Institute about his video news explainers. Atkins and his team explain complex stories by piecing together video clips into a story with an explanation of the facts and context. The content typically receives millions of views via social media. Spotted Stuart Bruce.
Best and bad practice
🌍 ECO AD CRITICISED: The ASA investigated a campaign by Swedish milk brand Oatly that claimed cutting dairy and meat products from a diet is the single biggest lifestyle change an individual can take to reduce environmental impact. Environmental marketing is under increased scrutiny following publication of the Green Code in 2021. Spotted David Edmundson-Bird.
🍺 BREWDOG REGRETS: Brewdog founder and CEO James Watt took to LinkedIn this week to write about what he'd learnt from growing the business. The open letter addressed areas of criticism such as the company's culture and aggressive growth but stopped short of an apology. Spotted Tricia Fox.
Research and insight
🍽️ NEW INFLATION INDEX: Poverty activist Jack Monroe has issued a call for evidence for the #VimesBootsIndex. Their assertion is that inflation is disproportionately impacting budget supermarket ranges and is much greater than traditional measures of inflation which are already at a 30 year high. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
👎 B2B MARKETING WOE: Three-quarters of marketing practitioners report that capturing the attention of B2B audiences is harder than it was a year ago. Investment, low appetite to risk, and competition were all cited as issues. Spotted Alan Morrison.
📊 PR EMPLOYMENT DATA: 94,000 people are employed in the UK public relations industry with up to a quarter forecast to change roles in 2022. There was a notable increase in employment during January in Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Newcastle, and Sheffield. Source Stephen Waddington.
Social media and platforms
🍪 AD COOKIE PLAN: Google has a new plan to replace cookies, the files that track us when we browse the internet, but it is controversial with both advertisers and privacy campaigners. This week it proposed moving to a model that clusters large groups of people with similar interests. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith and Alan Morrison.
📻 SPOTIFY TALENT BOYCOTT: Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young in pulling her music from Spotify in protest against it providing comedian Joe Rogan a platform for anti-vax messages. Both suffered polio as children. An open letter from hundreds of scientists also asked Spotify to censor Rogan. Spotted James Crawford and Stephen Waddington.
📈 YOUTUBE PLAN: YouTube's priorities for 2022 are supporting the creator economy, innovation and protecting the YouTube community. The platform, clearly feeling heat from TikTok, cites investing in creators and YouTube Shorts as a priority. Spotted Alan Morrison.
😯 TUMBLR REVIVAL: Social media relic Tumblr is claimed to be making a comeback as almost half its active users and two-thirds of new users are Generation Z. Critics claim the renewed popularity of the 15-year-old blogging platform has more to do with internet nostalgia than hard data. Spotted Michael Greer.
🐤 TWITTER TRANSPARENCY REPORT: Governments made 12,000 requests for content to be removed from Twitter according to its transparency report for January to June 2021. The US accounted for 57% of all requests whereas there were none from the UK. 4.7 million tweets were removed in the six-month period for violating Twitter Rules. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
🤖 AI SUPERCOMPUTER: Meta is building its own AI supercomputer to support its efforts to bring the metaverse to fruition. The AI Research Super Cluster (AIRSC) will be used to train massive new speech recognition, language processing and computer vision models. Spotted Catherine Arrow.