Talking Shop April 2024

The Media Shop Celebrates 36 Years!

Today, we’re thrilled to celebrate a monumental milestone – 26 years of The Media Shop! From the outset, our foundation was built on the core values of integrity, innovation and intelligence. These principles have guided us and grown stronger with every year, and we think it shows.

Over these 36 incredible years, we’ve been fortunate to achieve significant success for us and for our clients. Our long-standing clients, many of whom have been clients since the early days – are a true testament to the relationships we have built and nurtured over the years.

Managing Director, Caroline McGrath’s dedication and leadership has been pivotal in shaping us into who we are today along with an exceptional team. The Media Shop continues to push the boundaries and innovate communications planning every step of the way.

To our team, our clients, and all our media partners, thank you for being an integral part of our 36-year-long journey. Here’s to many more years of success, growth and innovation together. We’re just getting started – our best work is still to come!

Meta Rivals TikTok with New Video Player

Meta are introducing an updated video player on Facebook that brings together Reels, longer videos and Live content all in one full-screen, engaging experience.

Videos will automatically play in full screen, portrait orientation, although it will be easy to flip your device and switch to landscape view for horizontal videos. In addition, the algorithm for video recommendations is being updated to show more relevant content to users.

This is only being rolled out in the USA and Canada for now, but it is expected to be introduced in other markets soon. The changes will have a big impact on how organic content is shown, but also for advertisers, who will need to focus on vertical and landscape videos, not the current 1:1 square format. See more details here.

OOH ‘Most Sustainable Ad Platform’

A new report from Outsmart, the trade body for the UK Out of Home (OOH) advertising industry, claims that OOH is the most sustainable advertising platform for brands when compared to other major media, The findings, produced by KPMG, identified that out of all the media measured (Online, TV, Radio, Print and Email), the OOH industry produces the least amount of carbon emissions per impression.

OOH represents 3.3% of the UK’s total advertising power consumption, and just 0.067% of all the power consumption in the UK. This means that OOH advertising’s power consumption is lower than its share of all advertising spend (3.8%).

Outsmart suggests the sector’s ability to improve sustainability is in great part due to OOH media owners having control over the entire supply chain and end-to-end operations.

Ocean Outdoor Competition

If OOH’s new ‘sustainable’ credentials have whetted your appetite, why not consider entering Ocean Outdoor’s annual Digital Creative competition? The competition allows both regional and national brands to gain recognition and exposure through digital out of home. All you need is an innovative idea for the chance to win up to £10,000 of media space.

Previous winners have gone on to win at the Cannes Lions, including The Big Issue campaign which won in 2022. Their innovative campaign used personalised billboards to let the whole community know when their Big Issue vendor was at their pitch. If the vendor was busy, customers could buy a magazine from them through a QR code on the digital screens.

The entry deadline is 23 August. Ask your Campaign Manager for more info!

SXSW 2024 Puts Spotlight on AI

The TMS team attended the annual SXSW Tech 2024 debrief last week, from the Institute of Practitioner’s tech guru, Nigel Gwilliam. The event focus was very much on the AI explosion, highlighting how Big Tech firms such as Amazon, Apple and Microsoft continue to go all in one investing, buying or poaching from AI firms.

Nigel also discussed the advent of Generative AI creative agencies, such as Faith from VCCP. But AI needs data to learn, and Amy Webb, CEO of the Future Today Institute, predicted that “sometimes in the next 2 years, AI will have run out of the internet. We will have used up all of our high quality text and data, which will slow down AI’s progress.”

Tech companies are therefore inventing new devices to sell in order to gather more data – think wearables, XR devices, the internet of things, smart cars and smart homes. Whilst all will have their uses, Amy believes these are primarily designed to gather a wealth of sensory and visual data from the public. See Amy’s (slightly terrifying) full talk here.

Nigel also touched on the massive amount of computing power it takes to train AI models, which is where exascale computers come in. The tech world is in a race to produce these next-generation supercomputers – with the first (official) one operating in Tennessee since May 2022. In a coup for Scotland, the first UK exascale computer will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh – and will be 50 times faster than any of the country’s existing machines.