Trashing Your Product

In the East Midlands one of the adverts that is on local radio stations constantly is for the University of Derby. It is plugging some kind of 12 week business courses. It features an employer being very impressed by the applicants commitment in attaining these qualifications whilst the applicant knows that it was actually just a three month course.

In other words they are essentially advertising as a feature, not a bug, of the course that employers might mistake the qualifications for something deeper and more expansive. So they are effectively telling employers that their qualifications are a bit of a con, and presumably diminishing the value of whatever proper students come out with.

Good work advertisers!

Say Did Something Happen To David Beckham?

I turned on the radio yesterday and was shocked to hear them discussing some kind of tragedy, as I wondered whether there had been another big earthquake or if a much loved public figure had passed it slowly began to dawn on me that they were talking about a football player who had been injured.

Just a bit over the top in my opinion.

And I should probably listen to more high brow radio stations than 5 Live.

Smothering The Competition

I was listening to a discussion about the future of the BBC digital radio stations 6 Music & the Asian Network and one of the points that kept being made by the presenter and the callers was that the sort of thing 6 Music is doing is not available in the commercial sector.

That is kind of the point though, when the BBC fills up every available niche it is inevitable that commercial providers will be wary of competing directly against such a vast organisation in much the same way that saplings don't grow under a rainforest's canopy.

Digital radio presented a dilemma for the BBC, people had to be encouraged to take it up to free the FM and MW frequencies and commercial groups couldn't really afford to establish digital stations until enough people had digital radios. Which put the BBC in a bind, they had to drive the changeover to digital by establishing digital only stations that people would want to listen to however this inevitably meant occupying potential market niches that might be attractive to commercial stations at a later point.

Must Remember To Include A Title.

This is serious:

TalkSport presenter Jon Gaunt has been suspended by the UTV-owned station after he called a London councillor a "Nazi" during a live debate.

It seems harsh, and I agree with Jon Gaunt on the issue he was discussing, a London council's ban on letting children be adopted by smokers, but if he wanted to insult the Nazis he should have used a less offensive comparison.