✅ Monday briefing: Local news literacy, ITVX launch, Les Binet on evaluation, AVE status, Socially Mobile applications, AI images, AI builder, generative AI, and more...
"A good leader is someone that can inspire people, trust people, and be vulnerable around their team" - Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa
This newsletter is crowdsourced each week from our blog and community of practice for people studying and working in marketing, media and PR. It’s a hive mind, newsroom and source of information, help and support. You’d be welcome to join us.
Career Ready supports young people in accessing the workforce through a network of educators. It's a brilliant intervention for school aged children that tackles the need to level up diversity in the creative industries and professional services.
In the latest Wadds Inc. podcast Sarah Waddington spoke to Career Ready CEO Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa about the structural societal issues preventing diverse talent from entering the workforce. Find it wherever you find your podcasts: Apple, Google, and Spotify.
Media
🗞️ LOCAL NEWS LITERACY: More people are interested in what is going on in their locality than in international news, social issues, crime and health-related stories according to a study by the University of Derby and the University of Leeds. Local news is also believed to have less of a hidden agenda than national media. Spotted Alan Morrison.
📺 ITVX LAUNCH: ITV’s new streaming service ITVX (which replaces ITV Hub) is the first streaming service to have news as a central pillar. ITV says it has “invested heavily” in the platform, with 19 editorial jobs created. Its news section will now feature both repurposed ITV News content and bespoke video packages. Spotted Alan Morrison.
Industry
📏 LES BINET ON EVALUATION: Facebook and Google are shifting away from attribution modelling to econometrics to evaluate effectiveness. Attribution models overestimate the short-term (eg. performance marketing and direct response ) whereas econometrics is better able to measure medium to long term effects (advertising and public relations). Spotted Richard Bagnall.
📊 AVE STATUS: Three in five public relations practitioners globally are still using advertising value equivalent as a metric according to ICCO World Report 2022/23. The UK has the lowest figure at almost half. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🔵 SOCIALLY MOBILE: 40-50 students are expected to graduate in 2022, a number of whom have already achieved life changing career moves. If you know someone who might benefit from the 10-week programme please urge them to apply for the next cohort. Applications close 8 January. Source: Sarah Waddington CBE.
Technology and Platforms
📉 AUDIENCE ANALYTICS: LinkedIn has added additional analytics information for creators.It includes audience insights, information about top performing posts, and an export function to allow the data to be analysed using third party tools. Spotted Alan Morrison.
🖼️ TIKTOK VIEWS: A compilation of the top ten UK most popular TikToks posts contains some surprisingly dull and long form content. Original content, comedy and behind the scenes are the most popular genres. Source Rhian Williams.
🤳 INSTAGRAM TRANSPARENCY: The Instagram Account Status hub enables users with professional accounts to understand if their content is eligible to be recommended in places like Explore, Reels and Feed. Alerts are posted to the notification feed. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
Tools
AI IMAGES: Lensa is an app that analyses a portrait image to produce dozens of artistic styles including anime, fantasy, and science fiction. It’s a paid for tool but ensure you check the terms and conditions. Images are used to train an AI model and can be used for third party marketing. Spotted Stephen Waddington.
🔢 AI BUILDER: A Google Sheets free No-code add-on enables users to build AI machine learning models. ‘Simple ML’ doesn’t require machine learning knowledge to use and is accessible through a panel in the Google Sheets interface. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
🧮 GOOGLE DATA STUDIO: Google’s Looker Studio or Data Studio turns analytics data into easy-to-understand reports through data visualisation and dashboards. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
✍️ GENERATIVE AI: Tools such as ChatGPT and OpenAI are as good at creating dull content as human beings. The new generation of robot writing tools produce content that is equally poor as that written by practitioners. It’s a harsh truth made in a blog post by Velocity’s Doug Kessler. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
ℹ️ G4 DATA THROTTLE: Web referrer data in GA3 and GA4 has been reduced over the past two years. It records the domain of the referral link such as ft.com, and not the full page link (URL of the coverage). It means public relations practitioners have far less insight into editorial coverage. Spotted Andrew Bruce Smith.
Thank you to everyone that has supported our fundraising for mental health charity bigmoose and the Bay Food Bank, our local foodbank in Newcastle.
Through fundraising, WaddsCon tickets, and WaddsCon donations we’ve raised more than £17,000 for the two charities in 2022. Thank you.
We’re taking a break for the next few weeks and will be back on 16 January 2023. Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.