Tagged: digital

Open2Study Online Advertising Module 1 notes

  • Evolution of the web:
  • the web simplified what was complicated into a standard protocol
  • 1993 – Tim Berners-Lee – made access of info available to everyone
  • mobile now primary access –> what does this mean then for online advertising?
  • Hyper Text Markup Language
  • Commercialisation of the internet
  • advertisers sought to monetise consumers
  • WIRED magazine – how technology was affecting culture – first web ad for AT&T “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”
  • portals, eg netscape
  • opportunities for commercialisation of search
  • online ad banners generate high volumes of interest displayed by high percentages of user click-through rates
  • Digital industry players
  • marketers have more choice than ever in terms of where they can advertise and run their marketing messages
  • digital has exponentially increased choices
  • advertisers have to sift through and ask: where is the best place to spend my money?
  • buyers: agencies primary buyers
  • issue that there is no standard structure for the way advertising is bought and sold
  • sellers:
  • pure play = a media company that has no legacy property (eg TV network, newspaper), it is online only, eg Amazon, Yahoo
  • traditional = eg, print publishers having websites
  • creatives: more interested in allure of TV than small postage-sized ads online
  • technology companies – SEO etc
  • New players and traditional outlets repurposing themselves
  • How digital complements print media
  • magazines with apps with additional content in editorial and advertising – can bring print to life – online enhances print
  • not competing medias but complementing
  • channel isn’t as important as the content
  • not tied to physical product anymore
  • How digital complements broadcast media
  • TV expensive, so video online may be more feasible
  • TiVo etc, fast forwarding ads is a major challenge to industry
  • tablet use in front of TVs offers opportunities for networks to connect with these audiences
  • TV show shareability over social channels
  • ads with Shazam embedded at the bottom for us to use over phones while watching TV
  • Online audience measurement
  • every medium has an agreed standard audience currency, eg TV ratings and viewershio, radio listenership, print readership and circulation
  • difficult for online to settle on a particular standard currency
  • Australia one of the first countries to establish the standard
  • Nielsen had a couple of different methodologies:
  • site centric = based around code to measure activity counting browsers as people – challenges because often more than one person uses a computer, and people often use more than one device
  • based on panel = track activity of panel members – challenge as may under represent
  • every measuring metric has inherent flaws, the importance is that the industry agrees on a methodology
  • Nielsen combined both to create UA – Unique Audience
  • Still not all websites use this system when reporting audience members to agencies/advertisers, may use Google Analytics
  • Digital jargon
  • hits = one of the first measurement metrics on the web
  • outdated and irrelevant
  • it doesn’t mean visitors but the load on the webpage, ie each element that needs to load (this means nothing to advertisers)
  • be confident enough to ask what someone means by hits, eg visitors, pageviews, etc
  • SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  • updating content, unique content, appropriate keywords, external links
  • things that make search engines things this is a valuable, content-rich site
  • cookies = piece of code that a website uses to determine browsers
  • they are identifiers
  • when sites remember usernames that is because the cookies recognise you

 

 

Picked up the wrong book

I just found this article from The New Yorker about comprehension with online reading and training to read deeply on the internet. An interesting market: digital apps to train students in the tools of deep reading.

We read more quickly when lines are longer, but only to a point. When lines are too long, it becomes taxing to move your eyes from the end of one to the start of the next. We read more efficiently when text is arranged in a single column rather than multiple columns or sections. The font, color, and size of text can all act in tandem to make our reading experience easier or more difficult. And while these variables surely exist on paper just as they do on-screen, the range of formats and layouts online is far greater than it is in print. Online, you can find yourself transitioning to entirely new layouts from moment to moment, and, each time you do so, your eyes and your reading approach need to adjust. Each adjustment, in turn, takes mental and physical energy.

Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary- and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has found that good reading in print doesn’t necessarily translate to good reading on-screen. The students do not only differ in their abilities and preferences; they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s naturally good at self-monitoring, you don’t have a problem. But if you’re a reader who hasn’t been trained to pay attention, each time you click a link, you’re constructing your own text. And when you’re asked comprehension questions, it’s like you picked up the wrong book.”

 

Temporal Nostalgia

Vivian Sobchack considers and celebrates QuickTime “movies” – or “memory boxes” – in the reading Nostalgia for a digital object. Sobchack expresses that QuickTime movies “draw us down and into their own discrete, enclosed and nested poetic worlds: worlds re-collected and re-membered; worlds miniture, intensive, layered and vertically deep“.

Sobchack likens QuickTime “movies” to Cornell boxes – Image sourced from WebMuseum, Paris ibiblio.org

Sobchack’s poetic and highly image-intensive language explaining her thoughts on QuickTime movies adds to this innate sense of nostalgia distilled within them. The following video is Lev Manovich’s “A Single Pixel Movie”, an example of a short QuickTime movie:

Sobchack notes the idea of the computer as a “memory box”: it “collects, preserves and allows for the conscious retrieval and re-membering“. This is interesting to consider but a point I agree with. Often when I’m bored and/or procrastinating, I’ll go through old photos stored on my computer, or fiction pieces written years ago and memories will come flooding back.

Reading this article I can’t stop thinking about the idea that everything is a journal, everything is a museum of or lives. My computer, with documents comprising uni work, job applications, photos and videos from events and trips, and pieces of fiction; my desk, home to notebooks, framed photos, sewing machine, weekly schedule and makeup. Everything around us tells us something about ourselves. A living labyrinth of our lives.

Future visions

This week’s reading Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s camera-stylo by Bjørn Sørenssen begins with asking whether “expanded access to digital production means and distribution channels of audiovisual media also imply an enhancement of the democratic potential of these media“. These changes in media production and distribution certainly change the way we think about film: as discussed in the first lecture, film isn’t scarce anymore and this has many implications. We can record on our phones to brainstorm and think through ideas, not necessarily making polished pieces as we may once have considered the use of film. Similarly, a writer can brainstorm on the back of an envelope.

Sørenssen makes an compelling point that it is “always interesting to review old utopian visions, as they remind us of our part in fulfilling or failing to fulfill the expectations of earlier generations“. I found this an amusing sidenote to consider how we have stacked up to Plato’s Republic or whether we will measure up to Star Trek.

Utopia – sourced from michaelromkey.typepad.com

Sørenssen notes Astruc’s thinking that Descartes’ philosophy “would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily“. Are there ideas that can only be expressed through certain mediums? Undoubtedly there are times when I am lost for words trying to explain something, maybe it could be better expressed through film. What about the combination of words and image – does film in that way lend itself to better understanding simply due to the combination of factors?

Similarly, how does expression through art come into play? Image sourced aestheticamagazine.com

Sørenssen mentions the personal computer and its importance on how we view content; similarly the mobile phone. What does this mean for content creators and how is it different to imagining creating for a big cinema screen? More personal = more intimacy?

Habermas is quoted within the article lamenting that the “use of the Internet has both broadened and fragmented the contexts of communication”. The Internet recently celebrated 25 years of the web, and in a commemorative article on the Irish Times Davin O’Dwyer notes the Internet ” has revolutionised communication to the point where most people can publish and disseminate information within seconds. This unhindered ability to communicate and disseminate information has also led to powerful citizen-driven movements, such as the Arab Spring in 2010″.

We no longer have to go into an office to work or go to the library to find information. What impact is this having on our culture? And what about implications surrounding our privacy?

Astruc’s “vision of the future author who writes using a camera instead of a pen” certainly opens up new possibilities for expression through audio-visual mediums, however I have to edit this vision for myself as I can’t see a future without written memoirs: that authors write using a camera and a pen.

What is your canvas for expression? Image sourced from guestonplanet.blogspot.com.au