Archive for February, 2010
New Toys, Old Thinking – Advertising in a new age
Feb 25th
As a content provider a switch or move towards distributing content over the internet is quite a big thing, you can leverage the power of the internet, the extra input devices such as built in cameras, microphones and the standard keyboard and mouse.
With that, one would assume that you could offer a much richer platform for your advertisers and far more entertaining advertising content for your viewers, rather than disliking advertising breaks and finding ways to avoid them by installing various plugins for their web browsers they could at some point enjoy them.
The BBC have been great pioneers in the UK for experimenting with online distribution of their content. Most recently they have integrated twitter into their subtitles so that rather than users sending a text message into a show with their thoughts, viewers simply tweet with a hash tag of “bbcrevolution” and their thoughts are displayed as subtitles whilst the show is being broadcast on BBC iPlayer. (via http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.org.uk/mashe/2010/02/twitter-powered-subtitles-for-bbc-iplayer/)
Examples like this are great, but it should be down to the advertisers and content providers to communicate with each-other to develop a platform that benefits both the user, advertisers, the products and services that are being advertised and the content providers.
The current way of thinking is that you broadcast a program, and you allocate time slots in-between the breaks to place advertising, this is great, and it works. But why? Research at the London Business School has found that most people don’t actually sit through and take in the advertising breaks, they ‘chose one of six activities: social interaction, reading, doing a chore, surfing channels, watching the television and interacting with adverts.’ (via http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/what-viewers-really-do-during-commercial-breaks-596691.html). I haven’t found any research but I assume that the same applies to online, but what makes online so different from advertising on TV? Technology would be the first thing that springs to mind, content providers use the same types of distribution platforms, these are primarily Adobe Flash and Silverlight.
What confuses me is the lack of interest in experimenting with these platforms, they were never intentionally made just to distribute video, they were created to offer ‘breakthrough Web experiences to over 99% of Internet users.’ (via http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/) the flash player intro video says it all.
In my experience, it doesn’t take much to produce an interactive flash advertisement that’s enjoyable for the viewer, why can’t advertisers spend their £1.752bn (via http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8280557.stm) advertising budgets on creating good interactive advertisements for content distributed online? Or is this really the root of the problem? Maybe the problem is that content distributers don’t have a platform that can offer rich advertising experiences for the online viewer, I’m sure most viewers would find playing tetris or breakout for 30 seconds with the end result being a special offer for cheap car insurance far more entertaining over watching another annoying go compare advert.
Or maybe the problem’s even worse, advertisers simply can’t get their head around how to advertise on the current online distribution platforms, not realising that the internet is non-linear and that people often don’t/won’t do what we expect them to do with our content.
We really need new thinkers in the industry, advertising has changed from advertising things that people need to things that people want, people (I’ve switched to people here over viewers as I’m looking at it from another perspective) can switch channels, or watch your programs on websites such as surfthechannel.com where there are no advertising breaks and no restrictions of what you can watch and when. Feel free to discuss this topic, any input would be much appreciated.
Setting up Zend Framework from PEAR
Feb 18th
Alright, so I’ve just changed my VPS provider because 1&1 are shit and my buddy Andy runs a good hosting gig http://www.theserve.com/. We’re running our stuff one one of his VPS’s until September and will more than likely move to a dedicated server once we move office. Any way!
One of the teething issues I have with Zend Framework is that with every ZF project I put up on the server I’ve had to include a distro of ZF in the library folder, or constantly keep a centralised version up to date by downloading and overwriting… Until now… There’s an unofficial pear channel that will let you install and update ZF with 1 command… Here’s what you need to type in terminal…
pear channel-discover zend.googlecode.com/svn pear install zend/zend
That’s it, the Zend Framework will be installed and accessible from every website, as with PHP, make sure you only update to the latest version if you’re 100% sure that all of your web applications will work.
There has to be an easier way :(
Feb 18th
So I’m working on a project, and I want to find all of the rows that don’t have a row in it’s related table using Zend_Db_Table_Select… Simple right? Not really 
. In theory this would be the query that I would write…
SELECT author.id FROM author LEFT JOIN project ON project.author_id = author.id WHERE project.author_id IS NULL ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1
After toying with Zend_Table for a while I’ve managed to figure out how to do it…
/**
* Fetches a random author who has not had a project assigned to them
* @return Ambigous <Zend_Db_Table_Row_Abstract, NULL>
*/
public function findRandomNull(){
$authorModel = $this->getDbTable();
$select = $authorModel->select()
->setIntegrityCheck(false)
->from('author')
->joinLeft('project', 'project.author_id = author.id', array())
->where('project.author_id IS NULL')
->order('RAND()');
return $authorModel->fetchRow($select);
}
Which will produce the following SQL
SELECT `author`.* FROM `author` LEFT JOIN `project` ON project.author_id = author.id WHERE (project.author_id IS NULL) ORDER BY RAND() ASC
