So Radio 4’s Today was full of Frank Bruno being mental and miniature documentaries from Skegness, while Women’s Hour focused on bunions (insert your own Osborne joke here). There’s a wonderfully awkward pretense that hmm, nothing much seems to be happening today, which explodes into deranged swingometer-led musings the minute the polls close.

But this election is different. It was the first where social networking was used in campaigning, and the failures of big hubs like Labourspace (six grassroots campaigns in the whole of 2009!) were somewhat balanced out by candidates getting on Twitter and directly engaging with voters. In terms of election day reporting, social networking has created an even bigger change: where once your election day discussions were only passed around your immediate circle, now they’re on the Internet in a manner that completely rips up all the traditional rules on what’s allowed to be broadcast today. And on a day when vast swathes of the electorate still seem undecided, the cacophony from Twitter and Facebook could potentially change a lot of minds.

With the traditional broadcast media temporarily gagged, we’re also getting a glimpse into the future of news. Since the arrival of the RSS feed and the Twitter list, people can increasingly tailor the news they get to create a hyper-personal stream of information that’s relevant to them. Opinion from friends and trusted sources, augmented by a variety of cameraphone photos, Flip vids, and other democratic reporting techniques, is increasingly the future of news, or at least the news that people are increasingly preferring. We’ve touched on the dangers of this before, the way that people can seal themselves in an echo chamber, and looking at the comments section of any newspaper is testament to the calcified opinions of the internet age. Equally though, one look across the retweeting and 25+ comment Facebook status updates today suggests that there is a genuine discursiveness that top-down old media could never provide.

Today, election news is being made and shared by the people, with the popular stories getting traction because people are engaged with them, rather than a single editorial decision. And perhaps one day all news will be this way. It depends on whether you believe a news organisation can be truly impartial; if you don’t, then there’s little point in bothering with them over your own tailored news feed, but if you do, then it becomes the only place you can trust in a sea of subjectivity. For today, just tune into social networks and see if you’re ready for that version of the future.

First of all, for a report that costs £99, and that frames itself as taking the magazine industry forward, there’s an awful lot of low-res photography, sub-editing errors and terrible writing. “Mm! Smell that? You’re getting a whiff of the citrus-scented pages of Lemon magazine”. No, I’m not. Other cringeworthy moments include 2 pages on Entertainment Weekly putting a video screen in its pages, which in an iPad world quite thunderously misses the point; and the section on what makes a good cover, which your average journo undergrad would balk at being over-simplistic. It also overplays the potential for the likes of Issuu – while it’s great for cheaply archiving content (and we use it for exactly that), it’s not going to be “leading the way” in the future. There’s still a residual sense of believing you can shove the qualities of print into the online and tablet space.

This report is being aimed squarely at the lumbering giants of the publishing industry, who haven’t got up to speed with apps, augmented reality and the rest. To be fair to FIPP, it’s collated a lot of significant recent developments in one place, and it’s a sad fact of publishing that those at the very top are usually the least nimble and need this education. Witness Jonathan Newhouse, Conde Nast’s international CEO, using his conference speech last year to deliver a sentimental hymn to print.

But there are points that this report fails to hammer home. It underplays the importance of social networking – this is an opportunity to get a vast group of people effectively advertising your magazine for free, while getting an unprecedented level of emotional attachment to your brand through online discussion. It’s more powerful than the idea of putting ads on the cover, or any little gimmick. There also needs to be a continuing breakdown of the idea that a magazine is words and pictures, something that Monocle, with its 360-degree lifestyle, does very well, even if its products have the occasional whiff of emperor’s new clothes about them.

And the thing that’s really missed out is the very thing that FIPP themselves are doing so well – selling intelligently collated, sought-after information for a high premium. The internet is a challenge to mediocrity in print, because of its democracy – anyone can dredge up some Jennifer Aniston red-carpet pics. Similarly, the internet is very good at providing free information you didn’t really need but enjoy anyway, but its infinity means that getting exactly what you want is a lot harder. Magazines, in whatever form, need to address the need for specificity and excellence, and as the internet becomes more and more fractured and time-consuming, people will increasingly pay a premium to get what they really need quickly and easily. Data sets, quality journalism and writing, and trustworthy information – these are what make money, and because of the internet, you can charge more for them now than ever before. Creating niche brands, that allow you to buy into a small, self-contained lifestyle and set yourself apart from the cultural homogeneity created by the internet, will also reap huge dividends.

The old guard are clearly, by the tone of this report, still queasy and uninformed about the decline in mass print. But the creative opportunities for the rest of the magazine industry are huge – we get to be event organisers, fashion designers, statisticians, product designers, and club owners, and all the while creating even more luxurious and beautiful print products. And for all the technological toys we get to deploy in all of these areas, the most important thing to remember isn’t an innovation at all, but the oldest adage in the book: content is king.

If you’ve had the misfortune to go to the current US embassy in Mayfair, you’ll know that it’s a building that positively invites aggression with its portcullis exterior and labyrinthine interior; it’s also surrounded by roads on all sides, making it extremely vulnerable to attack. Looking at the other designs, it’s clear why two of them were rejected. Pei Cobb and Freed’s is merely a bland redux of Foster’s brilliant Gherkin and City Hall; Richard Meier’s is however beautiful, but its slim tower rising behind its main structure suggests, and potentially creates, vulnerability.

Designing an American embassy is delicate, steering between the two poles of thundering over-aggression and dangerous passivity – the trick is to make a space that is inviting but nevertheless repels threats. Whatever you think about the supposed blandness of the central blast-resistant glass cube, the KierenTimberlake design is intelligently landscaped, with a moat and ha-ha encircling the building, and trees acting as natural crash barriers (something that the UK government recommends). The Thom Mayne design, which Rogers praised as being “touched by genius” similarly deploys innovative landscaping, with the building on stilts, and an esoteric layering of walled-off green areas to act as protective walls. Symbolically, the American flag is encircled by a loop of concrete.

I recently spoke to Peter Hughes, a graduate of the University of Sheffield’s architecture program and now on the staff at Jefferson Sheard. Last year he won a RIBA competition to design a public space that resisted terror attacks, and the design (pictured below) reflects and augments many of the current counter-terror innovations. His ‘Dove and Olive Branch’ design transmits messages of peace, both literally, with giant letters that spell out ‘PEACE’, and more subtly, with cosy curling nooks laid out across the square for people to relax in, or hide in if a shooter attacked.

“I wanted to create a safe place, that wasn’t a bunker, didn’t have sniper towers, wasn’t searching everyone when they came in – otherwise it’s like the terrorists winning, it’s destructive enough”, Peter says. ”In the Omagh bombings they had two explosives – one to scare everyone and funnel them into one place, and one to kill everyone. With my design, everyone can escape across 360 degrees of the site.”

He also mentioned the importance of pulling back public buildings from roads, which is a no-brainer when designing new buildings, but which is difficult to retroactively create with existing buildings. The anti-terror buzzword here is creating “standoff” – space between a building and where an explosive could go off, because air acts as a good insulator against the pressure wave of an explosion. Hence the planting of trees, or the quicker solution of deploying giant plant pots or water features. Other innovations include curtains that catch flying glass (cheaper than the polymer coating that KieranTimberlake’s cube will have), and the ability to lock down a building section by section, to prevent the kind of indiscriminate, roaming attack that the world saw in Mumbai.

It’s depressing that these innovations have been borne out of the constant threat of terrorism, but it’s commendable that we aren’t seeing a wave of insensitive new buildings. After the riots in the early 90s, Los Angeles saw a rash of reactionary architecture, as documented in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz – from the individual buildings, like libraries which more closely resembled panopticon prisons, to (in Davis’s perhaps slightly paranoid analysis) entire swathes of downtown LA being explicitly and aggressively designed to repel undesirables. Considering the military response after 9/11, architecturally we might have expected a series of bunkers; credit must be given to architects for protecting us, while allowing us to live our lives in beauty rather than fear.

Restricting product placement in this way is the kind of nanny-statism that’s completely defensible, and also preserves one of the most acute pleasures in British drama – watching someone go into the Queen Vic/Rover’s Return and ask for a pint of non-specifically branded lager. At least now they won’t be able to add: “And a packet of KP’s delicious new chilli-roasted nuts”. But how much further might the government end up modifying these rules? Will you be able to show someone eating a non-branded burger? Or perhaps only allow the most depraved villain to eat them, thus putting you off? What about showing real-life plastic surgery clinics, strip clubs, or any other area of potential moral ambiguity? If something that even a small portion of the British public find offensive is seen to be making financial gain during “our” shows, then the Ofcom switchboard should probably batten down the hatches.

But as well as the pact dooming broadcasters to a case-by-case assessment on what’s appropriate, product placement will inevitably damage our enjoyment of culture. The ideal is of persuasive placement that merely adds realism to a show, and functions on an unconscious level, but given the frequent lapses in sophistication in even the biggest Hollywood movies, we can’t expect the production crew of Emmerdale to position brands in an unobtrustive yet advertiser-friendly manner. Given the recent outcry from the gaming community about ingame advertising that Peter Walsh examined on these pages recently, we can expect a similar resistance to bullshit from TV viewers. Assuming that audiences with be blithe to product placement badly underestimates them.

The world of augmented reality, the process of adding interactive richness to existing environments like mobile phone interfaces, will also impact harshly upon TV programming via product placement. Claire Beal, writing in the Independent last week, considered the possibilities: “Imagine watching, say, an episode of Mad Men on your iPad, touching the screen when you see a jacket you like, and immediately being able to order it via an online store. At a stroke product placement becomes a measurable, transactionable and immensely more interesting proposition for advertisers and content creators alike.” And creates a sea change in the way we perceive and consume drama.

There’s something to be said for Beal’s vision – imagine the number of times you’ve lusted after a character’s wardrobe, or wanted to know the name of a song playing on the soundtrack – but would this choice inhibit the deep enjoyment we can get from drama? It becomes less a story and more a coathanger for a series of retail opportunities. And that’s without looking at the potential compromises in objectivity for documentaries, fashion shows, food programming and more.

The problem brings to light the curious trade we make when we watch television. The experience is the very definition of mediated – it comes via a television screen – and so to create the crucial feeling of immersion we have to get rid of anything that might remind us that it’s a construct. Advertisers would obviously argue here that brands strengthen the realism; but for the “realness” of a piece of TV to be created, you have to paradoxically create an unreality, portraying not the real world but “TV world” where real world commerce is banned. In a TV show, there is nothing for sale except itself, and that is a rare pleasure in the modern world, and we put up with, nay need, the awkward ordering of non-specific lager to keep it going. Adverts break the spell, but reanimate it a couple of minutes later; product placement disintegrates it throughout the show.

In the end, the only truly brilliant way to combine commerce and television is the unashamedly honest celebration of consumption that is the infomercial. We need less Pepsi cans lying conspicuously around a Hollyoaks set, and more of Mr. T saying things like: “My tastebuds is going wild… I love it when a plan comes together!”

The growing digital sector was recognised by the UK Government’s landmark Digital Britain report, with games development being specifically earmarked as a key creative industry in need of acknowledgment. And with ‘industries of the future’ becoming part of the discourse running up to the general election, developers will be keeping an eye on the disparity between politicians talking up, and actually acting to support video games development.

The games industry’s calls for tax relief come as Britain, home to big developers like Eidos, Rockstar and Traveller’s Tales, slides down the global ranking of games development nations. Extensive tax credit schemes for the digital media industries in South Korea and Canada have seen both countries leapfrog the UK in the global pecking order, prompting UK games industry lobby groups TIGA and ELSPA to challenge the major political parties to create policies that will help attract foreign investment. With the indigenous film industry continuing to receive tax breaks to keep it competitive, overlooking an industry which is larger than film in revenue, if not in influence, seems snobbish at best.

While the Digital Britain report stated that the government remained ‘committed’ to reviewing the feasibility of tax breaks, December’s pre-Budget report failed to bring any actual relief, raising the hackles of many UK developers. However, with frontline services increasingly under threat, the possibility of tax relief for a single specific sector was inconceivable, and it seems the games industry might have been overly hopeful in its expectations of special treatment in a massive recession. Raising National Insurance while simultaneously granting tax cuts for the makers of Grand Theft Auto would have been beyond the power of spin, irrespective of how big or important the games industry actually is.

Disgruntled barbs were nevertheless thrown at the government for this oversight, but the opposition is still struggling to offer any solid alternatives. As the Conservatives’ primary spokesperson on the games industry, Shadow Culture Minister Ed Vaizey MP has repeatedly criticised the Government for it’s failure to recognise a ‘critically important economic growth area’. Yet the criticisms come without concrete alternatives, and beyond kind words the only promise of reform the Tories have proposed is to extend the UK Film Council’s remit to include the videogames industry.

This proposal unfortunately neglects  the recent budget cuts at the UK Film Council, which have already forced the body into drastic reform. Work by the funding body Games Republic, that supports gaming development in the North under the wing of Film Council-funded Screen Yorkshire, has demonstrated how the games industry could effectively receive the same support as film, but the nationwide extension of this support would place greater demand on the already shrinking budget of the Film Council and regional development agencies. With both sides of the political divide admitting that a discreet tax break is out the question, the likelihood of a cash injection for a rollout is slim.

Current difficulties aside, the fact remains that presently little support is forthcoming. While Canadian provinces offer tax breaks which increase relative to how remote a region is, Britain instead has to sell itself on its past reputation as Europe’s gaming centre, and claim that this has an inherent value above, say, a 40% Ontario tax credit for companies who produce original games.

Labour MP Tom Watson has echoed Vaizey’s suggestions for institutional recognition, but instead of Film Council support, Watson has suggested that lobby groups TIGA and ELSPA collaborate to establish an independent UK Games Council that might present a unified front to any future government.

While he readily admits that this idea is nothing more than a ‘sketched’ notion at present, an industry-led body could act as a ‘proof of concept’ for any future government and might argue more successfully for greater institutional and financial recognition. Tax relief might be out of the question now, but it could become possible once the cultural budget is settled after the grand Olympic blow-out in 2012.

Their demise was a consequence of digital music’s ascent – the proliferation of MP3 music files, either being purchased or downloaded illegally; and the growth of online retailers with their massive product inventories. The core attraction of buying records in a shop – the conversations with staff, immediacy – also diminished in the face of mass discussion, knowledgeable staff, efficient delivery and the DJ recommendations and mixes offered by the online retailers. But while most bricks and mortar music shops have lost out in the rush to new digital music channels online, many dance music specialists are thriving, and their formula of selling niche releases to devoted genre fans is proving a recipe for success on the Internet, where specialist businesses can gain a foothold on global markets.

One of the kings of the online space is London-based Juno, which describes itself as ‘the world’s largest online dance music store’ and has been going since 1997; Juno initially developed a reputation as an online retailer selling dance releases on CD and vinyl, but it has slowly moved into the digital arena and now competes with other dance music e-commerce sites such as Beatport, BeatsDigital, AudioJelly and DJDownload, all of whom exclusively sell digital MP3s.

Nick Unsworth from Juno’s digital team says that while genres like tech house and minimal techno are extremely digital-friendly, there is still an identifiable market for physical releases in bass-centric genres like dubstep, where dubplates (or acetates) are still very much part of the lifestyle. Limited test pressings, dubplates were originally used by dub soundsystems in Jamaica; the format has been nostalgically kept alive through the lineage of drum and bass and then dubstep.

Beatport’s CEO, Jonas Tempel, concurs: “It’s very clear that drum and bass DJs prefer the heritage of vinyl and the culture of the acetate”.

But this culture is being eroded, as Juno’s Unsworth points out, in part thanks to software like Ableton, which enables DJs to play MP3s through MIDI interfaces and simulated vinyl.

“Part of that popularity for digital sales in certain genres could be down to the software they are played on,” he explains. “Generally speaking, 4/4 dance like minimal became popular with DJs using Ableton, because of the way the software worked. Now it has become more versatile, DJs from different areas are starting to use Ableton to mix.”

Minimal techno requires perfect mixing, with even the tiniest mistake breaking the spell and so Ableton was an obvious solution for DJs. It was nevertheless much derided when it first hit clubs, with accusations of deathly slickness, lack of artistry and unimaginative mixing being thrown at DJs who used it. But as market forces have seen digital releases triumph over CDs, so too the sentimentality towards vinyl is disappearing, further invalidated by ever-more sophisticated digital mixing techniques. “There was a badge of honour and authenticity about using records, but that’s no longer the case”, says Sean Bidder, editor of the dance magazine Fact. “Vinyl’s no longer a necessity. I don’t think anyone’s going to be frowned upon for using a computer or a CD”.

“The performance can, at times, feel a bit too ‘perfect’,” says Tempel, “but the reality is that this industry needed to progress. Digital content allows DJs to become producers in the booth and remix things live in front of a crowd – that’s something that was unheard of a handful of years ago.”

Digital may have broadened creativity and changed dance culture, but the same forces that battered the mainstream music industry – piracy, filesharing, lower margins – also affect dance music retailers. So why are they not suffering to the same extent? It seems there are a couple of major reasons why specialist dance music appears to be relatively immune.

The first is the importance of sound quality. Most Lady Gaga fans don’t demand perfect quality versions of her music; look at the decline of the CD, with its high-quality sound, in favour of lower-quality mp3s and streams that can be found inexpensively on iTunes and elsewhere. But many specialist dance music consumers are DJs, and to play out of a club soundsystem for a clientele who demand fidelity at every point of the bass to the treble, you need at least a 320kbps release, if not better. This kind of quality is not easily accessible on blogs or filesharing networks but Beatport and Juno meet this need, providing high quality files that have an accompanying higher price of £1.70 each.

“Beatport sells content exclusively tailored for DJs,” says Tempel. “It’s something that iTunes and other commercially focused retailers just cannot afford to do.” Beatport’s high quality and otherwise hard-to-find inventory has led to annual revenues of over US $20m.

Second, with sound quality an issue and many specialist tracks hard to find through filesharing networks, the ubiquity of free music online can serve to promote specialist retailers. Juno’s Unsworth sees the MP3 blog, one of the biggest sources of illegal downloads, as a boon for his business. An important arbiter of what is cool at any given moment, blogs can encourage consumer purchases, though only as long as the files they offer remain low-quality.

“Blogs bring a lot of traffic to Juno through upstreaming and in that sense we’re very happy, and they do get people talking about the music and releases,” he says. “Blogs that stream aren’t a problem. It’s when there are high quality downloads available weeks before a release is out. Labels feel it more than us, and it’s forcing them to change their approach to promotion. Some will not actually have a campaign now because leaks make the promo work redundant.” But there are simple remedies to this problem: dance labels like Border Community and Kompakt have taken the step of signing up to Ripblock, a service that scans the web for leaks of their releases before removing them, charged at £50 per release.

The popularity of digital files is also nurturing a second, smaller revenue stream for retailers: sales of covetable, limited edition physical releases. Richard Dawson, head of online retail at avant-garde music store Alt Vinyl in Newcastle, a bricks and mortar shop that has survived by diversifying into online sales, says a key element of his company’s success is in selling niche records and products to a committed fanbase.

“We sell unusual stuff, it tends to be the more well known underground acts which do well”, he explains. “If there is only a limited release and there are only 200 pressed, and we can get 20 of them, they are guaranteed to go.” The store’s own Alt Vinyl label produces records with lavish sleeves and liner notes, with MP3s as an extra; it’s a tactic that the dance community is starting to learn the value of.

Owning a rare and limited physical release is now an alluring selling point. The record may never be played in a club or even at home, but collecting, hoarding and adoring a release is a vital aspect of music consumption for frequent record buyers. Shops like Alt Vinyl demonstrate the benefit of pursuing an integrated music retail model that encompasses digital and limited run analogue products, and their success suggests that bricks and mortar retailers can survive if they adapt to supply the digital demand for specialist music.

Sean Bidder’s Fact magazine is part of a mini-empire comprising the respected dance retailer Phonica, who have an online store but don’t sell MP3s, and the limited-edition press company The Vinyl Factory, as well as providing event spaces, e-commerce platforms, bespoke web development and data provision. The Vinyl Factory illustrates how a specialist fanbase can be leveraged to make money from scarce physical products: they release small runs of extremely high-quality special edition records, costing between £20 and £300, from the likes of Air, Damon Albarn and the Pet Shop Boys, pressing them with the same machines that were used to create original Beatles and Sex Pistols records. In doing so, they’re tapping into a powerful sense of nostalgia and authenticity.

“The days have gone where you can put out bog-standard dance 12″s and expect them to sell,” says Bidder. “We operate in a niche market that’s about quality, craft; closeness with the music, art and experience. The magazine champions new and emerging talent, Phonica gives a bespoke selection of music on vinyl… [and] collectible, bespoke vinyl [from The Vinyl Factory] is something that’s tangible in the face of digital music.” The lesson is that successful dance brands must forge a niche, target the right people, and create a series of products - both digital and non-digital - to cater to their demands. The physical products need to have the highest, most lust-inducing quality though, and - crucially - scarcity.

Culturally, tastes are more diverse than ever, and an artist who’s relatively niche or cult or underground can actually get paid and doesn’t have to achieve some level of mainstream success”, continues Bidder. “As long as there’s a fanbase out there who are interested in what you’re doing, you can access those people through the Internet, in a way you couldn’t have done before unless you had a marketing budget.” Globally, more people are dance music fans and DJs than ever before, and that feeds into sales of physical products, as well as club tickets, merchandise and other ephemera (like Ministry of Sounds’ workout video line, complete with branded hand towels).

It’s not just retailers who are taking advantage: artists from Theo Parrish to Emalkay can now be bought, and indeed booked all over the globe thanks to raised online profiles.

They’re tapping into a small, localised niche that becomes a sizeable global niche online. Take techno artist Si Begg, who, as well as putting out free MP3s, self-released a recent project as a limited-edition £100 box set with laser-etched USB sticks, ‘records’ made of oak and rubber, hand-sewn packaging and giant textured posters – creating a strange, defiantly physical package that targets a small core of techno fetishists. Meanwhile, the free MP3s are widely distributed, raising Begg’s profile for bookings and production work.

While digital content may be killing physical stores, it’s saving and reformulating the rest of the dance industry. Aesthetically, the versatility of digital files is allowing for greater creativity in the studio and the DJ booth, and arguably the most exciting sonic innovations in the dance market of recent years – nu-disco, wonky, dubstep – have come from deploying digital aesthetics to established genres. But more importantly, retailers and artists are using the Internet to cheaply target a global niche of fans, and honing that niche to sell them high-value products - something that major labels, with their expensively marketed yet low-return products, could do well to take note of.

The dance music industry is cleverly playing off digital and analogue against each other within a defined niche: maximising the efficiencies of digital, and using those efficiencies to maximise the romance of analogue.

As Chris James of Massive Inc., a Microsoft subsidiary that handles in-game advertising (IGA) sales, says: “Gaming [advertising] is one of the outliers in the recession with video game industry sales increasing.”

Advertising in games is nothing new: every sports game since the 8-bit generation of video games consoles has, like real world professional sports, been saturated with endorsements. Traditionally, IGA takes the form of in-game billboards or hoardings, but these days it can extends to product placement and filling otherwise dead loading screens with promotional messages.

The current growth is being accelerated by the latest generation of consoles, whose pin sharp graphics and Internet connectivity can deliver tailored adverts to meet changing campaigns across global markets. These new standards also lead to ever-increasing development costs, meaning that games studios are increasingly looking to IGA as a significant source of revenue.

The threshold to accessing such funds is high though, and while the multimillion-selling FIFA football games are soaking up advertising revenue, start-ups and independent outfits hungry for funds receive little consideration.

Beatnik Games is an eight-man development team based in London, who by day code educational games for Channel 4 and by night work on their pet project Plain Sight. The development of their colourful, frenetic combat game was primarily funded by friends and family, and the team is looking at a spring launch through the online distribution system Steam (think iTunes for games). While the team considered implementing IGA, the team’s producer Robin Lacey was reluctant to take the risk: ”I would never gamble the stability of my company on IGA because it is so hit or miss.”

Beatnik has been courted by smaller IGA agencies, but Lacey felt none of them could offer “a viable solution that [made] monetary sense.” While online distribution systems such as Steam and Apple’s App Store for the iPhone have successfully provided opportunities for independent developers to earn revenue from their products, a similar centralised model for IGA has yet to emerge.

The mass adoption of IGA is also subject to its reception by gamers, a demographic who are notorious for their hyper-critical nature. The self-appointed guardians of the medium gleefully point out every instance where they feel advertising oversteps their standards of acceptability. In the summer of 2009, gaming blogs and forums foamed with nerd rage at the news of an intrusive advert in the futuristic racer WipeoutHD for the Sony PS3. The promotion in question was a short spot for the American insurance company State Farm that extended the wait from pressing start to racing by all of ten seconds, just three to four times every hour played. Absurd as this may sound to the non-gamer, the transgression of delaying the action of a paid-for stirred widespread ire and condemnation from vocal Internet hordes. The backlash was so severe that the promotion was pulled within 24 hours of its launch.

Jamie Sefton, the head of Game Republic, a subsidiary of Screen Yorkshire, which supports games companies in Yorkshire and Humber, believes that for all its financial appeal, IGA can backfire on games developers and brands if they do not take the utmost care creating contextually relevant advertising.

“The issue comes for gamers when it’s an advert that jumps them out of the experience,” he says. “If you get it wrong, and have an advert that intrudes on that experience, then it can actually damage the [games] brand, as well as the advertising brand.” James of Massive Inc. also stresses this point, “… Ads need to enhance the overall game experience, never detract from gameplay, and add realism to the game.”

Yet while critics have derided the State Farm commercial in WipeoutHD, they tend to forget Wipeout’s earlier iterations on the Sony PSOne. The extensive Red Bull branding in Wipeout 2097 preceded the launch of the drink in Western markets, introducing gamers to a caffeinated beverage that successfully dovetailed with the unique futuristic vision of the game.

While Beatnik’s Lacey doubts his small team would have the man power to make IGA work, James of Massive Inc. estimates the time he needs to implement an IGA client in larger projects at approximately 20 hours. Lacey doesn’t begrudge the bigger studios, as he thinks their in-house marketing departments “handle it well,” and believes that the “over the top” IGA efforts can actually add realism, mimicking a brand obsessed world in a “less intrusive” manner.

One example of this was the use of IGA in the explosive Burnout racing series, which caught worldwide attention last year when it featured a series of ‘Vote Obama’ in-game billboards that appeared during the American election campaign. The context of a political advert in a video game broke new ground and maximised coverage, becoming a news story in its own right and defined a youthful candidate looking to profile himself against an ageing opponent. Analysts at Screen Digest point to the Obama IGA campaign as a landmark moment in the history of IGA’s growth.

“Video game advertising is moving past the ‘test budget’ phase,” says Massive Inc.’s James. “Many marketers and agencies are now incorporating video game ad campaigns in their broader marketing plans and allocating dollars earlier in the process.”

Industry wide efforts are also being made through the Interactive Advertising Bureau to establish a universal standard for quantifying IGA exposure. Modern games can precisely measure advert impressions in terms of the quality of depiction and prominence (angle, size, lighting), and in terms of user exposure (how long the message is viewable on screen, and how frequently), and then instantly feed this data back to ad buyers. The hope is that this transparent measurement will make the IGA market more attractive to a wider range of new advertisers, and provide commercial momentum.

With these impression metrics becoming more defined, companies like Massive Inc. are initiating ventures with digital research companies to measure the depth of IGA’s impact on consumers more accurately; Microsoft are currently beta testing a new game on the Xbox’s online service ‘Live’ that promises to integrate market polling data with precisely targeted IGA messages.

This market data is polled in the disguised form of a free to play online game, an adaptation of the American quiz show 1vs100. The 1vs100 game ‘screens’ at specific primetime slots, placing players (or rather their avatars) directly into the show, where they are asked to answer multiple choice questions on trivia, and compete in a national competition for Xbox ‘credits’ and occasional real-world prizes like consoles, televisions and cars. Like its TV counterpart, the online 1vs100 contains short advert breaks, a trade-off that gamers, just as viewers at home, seem willing to accept.

While the pub-quiz standard questions might feel innocuous at first though, every response is monitored by Microsoft, who use it to accumulate blocks of marketable data. If only 30% of a typical Friday night audience of 40,000 knew the exact name of the big Hollywood blockbuster due out the following week, Microsoft could easily approach the relevant parties with opportunities for IGA with a quantifiable value attached to it. Provided Microsoft is able to prove to advertising buyers there is a measurable link between fresh audiences and their adverts, and participating gamers do not revolt, the 1vs100 game will pay for its development costs several times over.

IGA remains an emerging advertising channel competing in a wider advertising market that has shrunk in the global recession, and is hyper-competitive like never before. However, Google has proven that emerging technologies that connect previously untapped online audiences with relevant, highly measurable advertising have the potential to become monumentally profitable - and few media can compete with videogames when it comes to attracting young eyeballs.

If the main players in IGA can refrain from stepping too heavily on the sensitive toes of gamers, the market has the potential to outstrip all digital advertising fields outside of search.

Livestation is a downloadable application that tidily bundles global television news channels, and is one of a number startup services offering live video streaming of news content. Others include Veetle, another website and application that was created by Stanford Uni graduates and facilitates high quality user-generated video feeds, and a wide range of illegal TV streaming services that are knocking around. Livestation’s primary content consists of excellent quality feeds from 23 partner news channels, who include Al Jazeera, BBC World News, and Bloomberg.

In exchange for streaming their news channel, each of Livestation’s partners receives a revenue share of their premium subscription revenues and website advertising profits; the streams aren’t edited, so ads on the channels are streamed to Livestation viewers too, and thus their reach will also increase.

While Livestation can either be accessed online or through the desktop application, the latter offers superior navigation: the experience is akin to iTunes, where you can scroll through channels as if they were album covers, tile as many video streams as you want (I stopped at 20), and skip between audio.

The desktop app also offers more than 4000 user-generated streams. These vastly outnumber the official partner channels, but Livestation CEO Matteo Berlucchi tells me they are “just to complement the desktop player”.

“We’ve built a video player that works on every platform,” he says on the phone, “so we let people use it to watch other streams. In a sense it’s like Del.icio.us for live streaming. We don’t look at it, it’s just there if people want to use it, as the crowdsourced element of Livestation.”

Berlucchi says that the agreements with partner channels will change if Livestation reaches “critical mass” and the number of users spirals upwards. At this point, stations will be charged to be included on the service.

The worry is that the majority of users will blinker their news intake though, and only follow sources that appeal to their political prejudices. Berlucchi however, doesn’t think this will happen:

“News-hungry people will, and already do, look for alternative news sources. Livestation can be used a source for more perspectives and views on news stories.” 

And herein lies the limiting factor. This is a service primarily for desktop news junkies. Where’s the wider appeal? Berlucchi think it lies in mobile and multi-platform services, and claims his company was the first to stream video live on via an iPhone app.

“Within three to five years mobile will overtake desktop,” he says. “There will be a big shift of all these services, so anything that is successful online will have to build a mobile presence on a scale never seen before, when previously, mobile before was an afterthought.

“Mobile is smaller and has different characteristics, there are similarities but also profound differences. If you’re trying to build an app for a smartphone and is meant to be consumed on the go, it will be very different to the desktop version.”

It seems that mobile is where the mass appeal of Livestation lies – junkies and industry bods can consume at their desks, but the mass consumption of news will be on the go.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report shows that over 50 independent UK film companies went bust in the last 18 months, with Tartan, Palm Tree UK and Grass Roots Films amongst the fallen. To make matters worse, the demise of Woolworths and Zavvi last year saw the UK lose a chunk of the DVD market that many independent films rely on. This created a massive gap in the DVD retail market, with a significant portion of walk-in purchases disappearing; evidence suggests the void has not necessarily been filled by online retailers either – according to the British Video Association, DVD sales suffered a year-on-year drop of 9.5%.

Meanwhile, the UK Film Council, seen by many as the backbone of the industry, received a third more funding applications than last year. Producer Leo Pearlman, the man behind football documentary In The Hands Of The Gods, claims that the organisation chooses to fund safe ‘banker’ projects with established directors on board rather than back new talent.

“In the last 2 years, Jane Campion and Shane Meadows have received large portions of that cash,” Pearlman tells me. “Now they are both exceptional directors, but they are clearly not new directors. The UK Film Council’s remit is to build up UK independent film, and somewhere along the lines they have completely lost sight of that.”

A spokesperson for the UK Film Council, Tara Milne, disagrees: “We have supported today’s established filmmakers since their early careers, and we also fund new filmmakers, like James Marsh, Noel Clarke, James Watkins, who go on to achieve national and international success.”

Nevertheless, the increased competition means that some filmmakers have instead turned to commercial interests for funding. After Shane Meadows persuaded Eurostar to finance Somers Town with the help of the advertising agency Mother, others have been trying to follow suit. Environmental documentary The Vanishing Of The Bees struck a sponsorship deal with the Co-operative Group and their film distribution partner Dogwoof which saved the filmmakers nearly £30,000 in marketing costs in exchange for a bit of brand identification. There is a risk however, that such commercial partnerships can cause people to view these films as advertorial. The film came under fire from a review in The Sunday Times that said that it was ‘let down by… a blatant plug for its co-sponsor, the Co-Op.’

Executive Producer James Erskine says that Co-Op had no say over any editorial matters.

“I personally welcome that kind of funding, there just needs to be an open and clearly defined set of rules. The only obligation of the filmmaker is to get their film made with as much integrity as possible.”

Pearlman’s studio, Fulwell 73, plans to wait out the recession by diversifying, taking on TV work, music videos, corporate films, and doing “whatever we can do to survive”.

“At the moment, if you are only going to make feature films, then you’re going to spend a lot of time making very little money,” says Pearlman. Approaching companies for funding or taking on commercial work are two ways for a studio to cope with a recession, but for there are more options open to today’s guerrilla filmmaker than ever before.

Filmmakers often now go online for a digital whip-round, also known as ‘crowdfunding’. Hinging on a process known as ‘Do-It-With-Others’ (DIWO), the website IndieGoGo acts as a resource market, where visitors can watch a pitch trailer for films in varying states of production, share clips with friends (thereby creating a buzz), ‘demand’ screenings in their area and even contribute to a film’s release costs. Filmmakers can set various tariff schemes for their donations – Terence Nance, writer, director and producer of How Do You Feel, uses the site to serenade viewers with a quirkily cut pitch-song asking for £5,000 to finish the animation on his film. By way of enticement, Nance offers contributors a copy of the film, a ’special thanks’ credit and “a free one night stay at my home” as well as an avocado omelette.

So far the stand-out IndieGoGo success story has been the documentary Tapestries of Hope, which raised US $25,000 through the site to expose the shocking child abuse problem in Zimbabwe, where young girls are raped because of a mythological belief that virgins can cure Aids and HIV. Another film, The Lilliput, a feature based on the true story a Jewish dwarf who hid in garbage bins during the Holocaust, raised $10,000.

For Nance, the donations would enable him to finish his film’s animation and build an online databank where users can contribute via text, video, pictures or sounds, effectively crowdsourcing the content for a mixed media film which would be ‘free, viral in nature, created by the public, infinitely re-mixable, and constantly growing online’. Using social media in such a way allows a project to grow organically, if popular, from a trailer into a short film, and from a short film into a feature or a series.

For DIY filmmakers averse to the idea of relying on random people and online serendipity, there is a worry that creative control may be lost. And an example of the difficulties of crowdsourcing film is the A Swarm Of Angels project, which after nearly four years of development is currently on hiatus. However, Slava Rubin, co-founder of IndieGoGo, claims that DIWO is merely a means of bypassing the ‘permission culture’ that acts as a stumbling block for many filmmakers.

“DIWO isn’t about giving up the integrity of the film,” he tells me. “Its about getting organisations, brands, partners to be a part of the process as opposed to leading the project.”

Some directors are using social media in a manner that is beginning to transcend the idea of the film as an end product, instead using a multi-platform approach to send audience members down a rabbit hole into an alternate reality that can exist totally independent of the cinema screen.

“We were bound by distribution format; now people engage with media in so many different ways and places, there is a possibility of a film not being bound by 90 minutes,” says Liz Rosenthal, director of cross-media think-tank Power To The Pixel.

Rosenthal highlights Lance Weiler (listed by BusinessWeek as one of ‘18 People Who Changed Hollywood’) as the perfect example of the potential power of cross-media. Weiler accompanied his feature, Head Trauma, with four quite terrifying but compelling ‘webisodes’ riddled with clues, ciphers, film clips, sound effects and subliminal messages. The results are enchanting – each webisode looks like some sort of holo-slide from a Philip K. Dick novel, a living, breathing, talking comic book. Fans wanting to take it further can participate in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called Hope Is Missing and 2.5 million people are already involved.

“It got people searching all around web looking for clues of where they need to look next – more people participated than actually saw the film,” says Rosenthal. “You could say that that story was just as important, if not more than the 90 minute feature.”

The key to the success of Head Trauma and Hope Is Missing was using social media tools to ‘micro-target’, or tap into, pre-existing audiences and generate a word-of-mouth following, rather than just hoping people will watch it when comes out. Rubin says that tools such as IndieGoGo allow independent filmmakers be more proactive in their promotion: “Hollywood has done a great job in really building up the audience in advance, but the indie world has always been a little bit behind that process. If you wait until you’re actually releasing your movie to start marketing it, its way too late.”

Grassroots promotion can be spectacularly successful. Timo Vuorensola, director of Finnish sci-fi comedy, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, used a pool of 3000 online fans (who had previously helped with parts of the film’s production – including its special effects) to publicise the film online for free, resulting in Star Wreck being downloaded 8 million times and picked up for DVD distribution by Universal.

The big studios are keen to learn from these viral campaigns. Having the cash to really push the boat out, Hollywood studio Warner Bros created an alternate reality game (ARG) for The Dark Knight of truly epic proportions; 10 million people in 75 countries played an intricate online game that utilised every possible medium available, with spoof websites, phone calls from actors and a fully-functioning Gotham Times fictional newspaper. Creating a seemingly bottomless world for fans to indulge in, The Dark Knight ARG won a Web Award for Games at the 2009 SXSW Festival and generated huge interest in advance of the film’s release.

Similarly, Paramount created a buzz around low-budget horror Paranormal Activity by releasing it in a small number of college towns, and then encouraging others to demand it come to their city; in so doing, they created an illusion of scarce distribution to generate online word-of-mouth. 2012’s unfortunate viral campaign terrified Americans into thinking the world was really ending, but the infamy arguably helped the film out.

Although those at the top and the bottom of the industry seem open to innovation, many in the middle are still sceptical of the role social media has to play.

“I could be wrong but every year there is some film that you hear about that did it all through Facebook or Twitter or God knows what, but those are the exceptions to the rule,” says Leo Pearlman. “I don’t know anyone who is actually using them as the basis for a successful film production business.”

James Erskine also expressed doubt: “The question of how you get your film to a viable commercial audience have been struggled over by movie studios for over 100 years. I don’t think the internet is going to revolutionise that. I think it will allow communities to respond to a specific interest and reach a specific audience that you wouldn’t have been able to reach conventionally, for cheaper, but I don’t think it will really have a massive impact on the mainstream.”

The evidence suggests otherwise. As well as the big studios, more established parts of the independent industry have begun to take notice of social media. IndieGoGo recently formed a partnership with the San Francisco Film Society in a unique deal which allows filmmakers to use the crowdfunding tools of IndieGoGo, whilst receiving access to the fiscal sponsorship scheme of the SFFS, which means their contributors now get tax reductions on their donations. Rubin says: “We really are bringing the best of the old and new worlds together. Nowhere else can you combine those two things.” He adds that any studio trying to save money is missing a trick by not embracing social media: “Reaching a million people with social media is going to be much cheaper than with billboards.”

With the traditional barriers removed, some people (such as Erskine) worry that the sheer volume of content will become white noise, drowning out potential classics and fragmenting film-going audiences. Rubin, however is unconvinced by the theory.

“Its just a matter of having the right discovery tools to find what you need,” he says. “The best content will still get to the top.”

With social media crowdsourcing opinion, we might actually see a higher number of quality films becoming successful, rather than those selected by studios. Determined and talented filmmakers now have the tools to get films made, with or without government or commercial funding.

Although necessity is often cited as the mother of invention, it is important to stress that the rise of these innovations was not triggered by the recession. “Niche marketing is easier with social networking sites, niche content is now more acceptable, peer to peer funding is becoming much more acceptable thanks to the Obama campaign”, says Rubin. “Film was just next to evolve after journalism, photography and music.”

While those who ignore the advantages of social media risk being left behind, there is also a risk for those who attempt to use social marketing techniques in an insensitive manner: film production companies can have a much deeper, intelligent and far-reaching relationship with audiences, but the process is a dialogue and online audiences can respond aggressively to excessive plugging and poorly thought-out online initiatives.

The film-going public will see themselves become not just sedentary consumers, but creators, distributors, and even financiers. From bouncing ideas around on a forum to offering money, services and content to help make a film, to requesting screenings (e.g. using MovieMobz- a ‘cinema on demand’ service currently networking 200 digital independent screens across 26 cities in Brazil) or streaming a film directly to their laptop or iPhone (NetFlix, the US equivalent of LoveFilm, also allows users to stream to their computer or TV), people are going to experience cinema in a profoundly different way, although this does prompt a re-evaluation of the aesthetics of the cinema-going experience.

By removing a film from it’s normal format and environment, there is a risk that instead of being something we dedicate ourselves to for 90 minutes, it becomes an amorphous collection of experiences we have as we are going about our business, at the shops, in work, or at the pub, the thought of which will have cinephiles choking on their popcorn.

Illustration: Jez Burrows

Advances in neuroscience are being adopted by marketing and advertising industries keen to show the efficacy of their communication in an era of falling budgets. Companies such as the Boston-based Innerscope have developed a cheap and effective way of monitoring part of the brain’s response to media. From this data, they create ‘Engagement maps – moment by moment analysis of the audience’s emotional response to the media stimuli.’ Welcome to neuromarketing, where brands and marketers push the frontier of consciousness in search of an answer that perennial question: do you like me?

”Emotions are our quick decision makers,” explains Gareth Ellis, senior planner at Saatchi and Saatchi. “On the most basic level, emotions instruct our instinct: Fight or flight. We have a saying here, ‘Reason leads to conclusion but emotion leads to action.’”

Saatchi and Saatchi have developed their own language of love, specifically the terminology of ‘lovemarks’: brands that don’t just inspire admiration, but ‘Loyalty Beyond Reason’. ‘Lovemarks reach your heart as well as your mind,’ explains the official website, ‘creating an intimate, emotional connection that you just can’t live without. Ever.’ But how do you create that emotional connection? Opinion is divided. While some are attracted to neuromarketing’s promise of monitoring the emotional responses of an individual’s brain, other experts feel that the answer to emotional engagement lies in the culture, in the domain of signs and symbols known as semiotic analysis. Many brand managers will engage a grab bag of these feuding experts and pick and mix from their advice. The various sects and dogmas of Marketing are treated expediently by their clients though: they just want an approach that works.

Gareth Ellis was the planner behind T-Mobile’s advert ‘Dance’, which saw an outbreak of choreographed joy in Liverpool Street Station in January 2009. ‘Dance’ won a Golden Lion at the Cannes 56th International Advertising Festival in recognition of its impact as a pop culture phenomenon (13 million views on YouTube and counting). Launched against a backdrop of a wintry recession, but with the tailwind of hope blowing in from Barack Obama’s imminent inauguration, its communal dancing in the grim, banal surroundings of Liverpool Street Station was a celebration of the human spirit, an outbreak of pure positive emotion.

The most prominent adverts of the age seem to swerve around the rational to light up an emotional response. Chocolate is equated with sex in advertising, specifically female masturbation. The famous Cadbury’s Gorilla, made by top creative house Fallon, took an unsung toiler, a drummer, combined it with the physical discomfort of a gorilla suit, and gave them their moment in the sun. On an unconscious level, the gorilla’s drum solo was a moment of solitary orgasm. The gorilla suit is the body horror that regular female consumers of chocolate feel. And the drummer is the person at the back who does all the work – a position that resonates with a target audience weighed down by thankless domestic chores. That’s my back-of-the-envelope interpretation, none of which diminished the pure joy the advert aroused in viewers

On a rational level, the advert seemed incongruous – on an emotional level, we understood it. Think also of Sony Bravia’s coloured balls pouring down the hills of San Francisco – a refined visual expression of giddiness with only the subtlest appeal to the rational (the balls enact the promise of the television’s vivid detailed colours).  Music also plays a prominent role in these three adverts, from Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ to Jose Gonzalez’s ‘Heartbeats’, for its power to unconsciously influence feeling.

On June 8 2009, Andre Marquis Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Innerscope, a three-year-old biometrics research company, gave a lecture at Google. Here he presented his company’s methods and their belief in the crucial role of our primitive emotional responses in the choices we make, citing obesity as an example of how “our cognitive mind has a minimum effect upon our decision making”. “Neuroscience has figured out that emotions are what drives us,” he continued. “Everything we do is filtered by our emotions first. What you see and what you experience is influenced by what you are feeling on a second-by-second basis.”

At Innerscope, viewers wearing light wireless biometric vests are shown adverts in a ‘clutter reel’; that is, the advert is surrounded by trailers and film clips to reflect the way we encounter advertising within a stream of other culture. These biometric vests are a shift away from the use of functioning magnetic resonance image scanners (fMRI) – the big white doughnuts into which subjects are slowly immersed – or the older electroencephelogram (EEG), a collection of scalp sensors that pick up activity in the various lobes of the upper cortex, both of which have been and still are used in other practises of neuromarketing. The vests are cheaper and less claustrophobic than a fMRI, and unlike an EEG, they focus upon the emotional limbic system.

The emotional limbic system, sometimes referred to as the ‘lizard brain’, evolved to ensure our survival. Emotions influence what we pay attention to and what we remember. ‘The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals,’ writes Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works. Emotions make decisions. In the Romanic view of the brain, reason and emotion are separate – like Kirk and Spock. Pinker demonstrates that there is no line between thinking and feeling: cognition and emotion function simultaneously and in tandem. Without fear, how would Spock have realised that defending himself against a Klingon was more important than playing a round of Vulcan chess?  In the limbic system, the amygdala is the specific nuclei responsible for processing and storing the memory of emotional reactions. It is an almond-shaped organ buried in each temporal lobe that fires signals to the whole brain. Experiments have shown that the injection of chemicals into the amygdala of rats influence their ability to recall tasks or indeed to forget them.

Innerscope partnered with the global research group OTX to bring their biometric methods to the UK. “The OTX scale has two axis – one is emotion and the other is cognitive. And ‘Dance’ was off the scale,” explains Gareth Ellis. “Some people take the view that advertising in the UK needs to be either incredibly emotional or incredibly rational – so either Cadburys Gorilla and Andrex Puppy, or a hard sell of the message, like Direct Line.”

(Direct Line recently resurrected the motif of their renowned 1980s adverts, a red phone on wheels that repeatedly beeps a chirpy signature jingle. In a recession, the insurance advertiser’s love of repetition is apparent to anyone unfortunate enough to watch daytime television; this mimetic sub-genre attained beery genius with the ‘Compare the Meerkat’ campaign for the car insurance website Comparethemarket.com, which relies on the brain’s stubborn response to error to keep it at the forefront of your perception).    

Greg Rowland, expert in brand semiotics and the founder of Greg Rowland Semiotics, suggests that the emotion vs. rational thought split is often a false dichotomy. “Emotion that isn’t tethered to a product reality can easily float away into pure entertainment, with no tangible benefit for the brand. There is no such thing as pure rationality in advertising – unless perhaps one day a laundry advert displays the chemical compounds for their detergent and nothing else. There is nothing that is entirely emotional or rational. ‘Emotional’ can mean ‘does this create a guiding set of metaphors that connect with culture and engaging symbolism?’ Rational can mean ‘does this suggest something useful I can use in life?’ But ultimately, they are just convenient abstractions.”

For marketeers, emotion is their weapon on the battleground of memory. As you walk through the supermarket, processing the thousands of possible choices, in a state of consumer flux between habit and potential experimentation, which products you select could be determined by your emotional memory. Advertising and marketing is about changing habitual behaviour. That is why younger audiences are so valuable to marketers: catch young minds prior to imprinting with brand habits. The further along the timeline of habit a consumer is, the more expensive it becomes to convince them to change. The amygdala’s role in emotional response and learning makes it seem like the sweetspot in changing habit. Although it works in tandem with the higher cortex, the bulk of its work is unconscious.

“Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists contend that the unconscious mind controls as much as 95% of human behaviour,” writes Dr. Neale Martin in his book Habit: The 95% of Behaviour Marketers Ignore. Martin advances a dual mind theory and insists that for too long marketers have been aiming their messages at the wrong mind. Martin moots two distinct types of mental processing: the executive mind, where conscious cognition occurs, and the habitual mind, which regulates the body, and stores our responses to previously learned behaviours.  “If the purchase enters conscious awareness, the realm of the executive mind, it is quite likely that your customer will re-evaluate your offering as well as your competitors.” Better that our consumption of brands remains on the unconscious level of habit.

The underlying trend to these commercial applications of neuroscience is to circumvent the thinking mind. You don’t need a wireless biometric jacket to know that if marketing is to be influential, it needs to tap into an audience’s feelings. But neuromarketing’s promise of more accurate evaluation of the very part of the brain responsible for setting and acting upon goals is particularly alluring.

Greg Rowland is not impressed. Semiotic analysis of brands comes at the matter from a humanities perspective. Spend ten minutes with this brand semiotician and you will feel like you have met the puppet master.

“Neuromarketing presupposes the human being to be a self-sufficient and self-contained consciousness,” explains Rowland,  “and that is not how culture and response works. In the world of cultural theory, we are empty vessels through which identity and symbols pour. So when you dig further into the brain, you are still pursuing the idea that somewhere within the deepest recesses of the brain lies the answer to engaging with a mass audience. I am sure that in ten years time, we will send nanobots out to bring back the chemicals from individual nodes of the brain so that we can gauge the response to an ad. But digging deeper and deeper is the wrong principle.”

By comparison to the scientific promise of neuromarketing, semiotic analysis may seem rarefied. “But it can lead to effective insight,” says Rowland, “and creative inspiration rather than simple evaluation.” 

It was Rowland’s semiotic observation that Pot Noodle is to real food what pornography is to sex that inspired the famous Pot Noodle “Slag of all snacks” positioning. He uses the example of his recent work with Rexona (Sure) deodorant in Russia to explain the shortcomings of evaluative methods such as neuromarketing:

“The idea was to adopt the strong tone of a Putin in the advertising. To create a 1960s strong-arm paranoia around body odour. [Advertising agency] Lowe’s execution of this idea showed a tattooed pig living in a smelly woman’s armpit. A lot of women were deeply offended. If the ad had been tested by neuromarketeers, it would never have gone ahead. The biometrics would have shown utter disgust. But the ad was highly effective in actually persuading Russians to buy Rexona, and has been used as a template in other countries – although pigs were swapped for goats in Indonesia, for understandable reasons.”

Neuroscientific insight into the role of emotions in decision-making is informing the creative work of advertisers and marketers. The most acclaimed adverts of our times have combined music and feeling with a lateral appeal to the unconscious. Yet its main application as another way of evaluating creative concepts only further emphasises how distrustful corporate culture has become of the creative. It is safer to biometrically wire up twenty people to tell you which trailer to promote your film, rather than to trust to your own instinct. Yet it is creative instinct and insight that make adverts like ‘Dance’. ‘Dance’ was filmed and edited in a day before being broadcast. There was no time to test it.

Neuromarketing is a focus group of the emotions set up to evaluate an existing idea. Perhaps if marketers and advertisers invested more in the creation of interesting and entertaining ideas, and less on measuring them, they would make more effective adverts. Put simply, they are overthinking. They need to feel it.

Illustrations by William Davis

Last week at the IAB Engage conference we saw AOL’s Jeff Levick slagging the UK advertising market off as being obsessed with the X Factor ad slots, and neglecting the online space. Now, in an article in Ad Age, a whole host of industry heavyweights line up to pillory UK advertising. “There is a tendency to default to the safety of TV and posters”, says David Droga, formerly of Saatchi and Saatchi; “Creativity is at an all-time low in the U.K… The new interactive model requires a new mindset and a new skill set. Not everyone is able or willing to make the transition”, accuses Steve Henry, former exec creative at TBWA; “We are struggling to find a direction”, says Jeremy Craigen, exec creative at DDB.

Meanwhile, this blog over at Brand Republic notes research that shows how little advertising agencies are genuinely engaging with social networking, regarding blogs/Twitter/Facebook as things to be seen to be doing, rather than things that could actually get you traction.

So why this malaise? Part of it could be the reluctance of the creative end to engage with the fragmented online advertising space compared with the epic canvases of outdoor and the storytelling of TV. As one of the interviewees in the Ad Age piece suggests, there is a greater level of public discussion about advertising in the UK than in the US – we’re likely to talk about the latest Honda campaign as much as Jedward or Jordan over the watercooler. This has led to a climate of ad-creative-as-auteur, which dangerously pushes campaigns onto pedestals away from the public; there’s a latent sense of online, with its primacy to the consumer, is somehow debasing the creative’s “art”.

Charlie Brooker notes today how Christmas ad campaigns for M&S, B&Q and others are descending into embarrassing self-referentiality – there’s a depressing blend of fawning and misplaced self-regard from the creatives who made them. Fawning at the brands, flattering them that they’re part of the magic of Christmas; and self-regard at the very adverts themselves as being an integral element of the population’s Christmas cheer. Good luck guys – it took Coca-Cola decades and a world of invented iconography before they created even a whiff of the potent nostalgia and magical realism that denotes Christmas warmth, with their ongoing “Holidays Are Coming” campaign.

In the chicken-or-egg conundrum of online advertising, is it the creatives’ uninspiring campaigns that keep premiums low? The buyers’ selling of these campaigns short? The brands’ love for the grandeur of traditional advertising? This circular lack of faith reinforces itself with every turn. But why? Mass media is a terrible way of reaching your audience – a ton of money thrown at a wall with the hope that a fraction of it bounces back to you. Messages get lost in audience passivity, capricious demographics, vandalism, reluctance and even hostility to the messages. Online display advertising is still prey to those pitfalls – but online can potentially provide a level of subtlety, seduction and positive audience engagement that traditional channels can only dream of. And that should be commanding far more money than a bus shelter.

All absurdly old hat wisdom of course – yet apparently not to the UK market. UK creatives need to stop trying to come up with the next watercooler moment and start the devious, moneymaking business of truly getting inside people’s heads, something that the online space can do with new and terrifying levels of effectiveness.

AOL’s president of global advertising and strategy, Jeff Levick, built up content creators’ hopes before dashing them within a single speech. He appealed to brands to spend more online, and in more innovative and fragmented ways in order to deal with a niche, fragmented audience. The days of chucking a few ideas at billboards and the X Factor breaks are over: “Niche is the new mass”. If they heed his words, that means a more diverse pattern of investment from advertisers, broken up across the media landscape, from brands that are starting to really have faith in online as a place to create sales. That means a bigger spend, and more cash for more people.

But then the classic nightmarish vision for content producers presented itself once more: Levick said there was “a real opportunity to mash advertising closer to content creation… Over the next 12 months we’re going to see advertising sit much closer to the content”. His ugly choice of words is apt: he’s encouraging that nirvana for brands where the audience is receiving “content” funded by the advertiser, advertorial in other words.

It’s almost unfashionable to speak out against this these days, and that there’s a kind of snobbery in doing so – suggesting that content should be independent of commerce is beginning to be seen as quaint, elitist, even Luddite. Brands often frame this content/advertising mashing as a win-win situation, giving consumers content that they want while getting brands closer to consumers than ever before; and they’re pushing this line hard, as if it’s inevitable and the only format they’re willing to pay a decent premium for. But I’m not convinced by this. Do consumers really enjoy cookery shows where chefs open jars of Dolmio, for instance? There needs to be some very indepth research into audience attitudes to advertorial content before brands can start pushing it as gospel.

Subtle product placement, while arguably more sinister and insidious, is still much better for consumers than the experience of a heavily, blithely branded TV show, book, or concert – when the pockets of pure experience afforded by art and entertainment become smoothed into a constant arc of commerce, is when life becomes very depressing indeed.

Then there’s Ashley Highfield, Microsoft’s UK MD, cosying up to the room and saying that advertising will remain the chief source of revenue for online content producers – and in his vision of the future, the TV screen will give way to a world of screens with video content embedded all around us. Fair enough, but the question here has to be: given the level of engagement from the consumer with targeted online advertising and increasing levels of online video advertising, why are the premiums so much lower than for passive mass-media adverts?

Elsewhere in his speech, his future screen-world leaves Hollywood adaptations of Philip K Dick novels with a lot to answer for, and he said “ubiquitous and disposable” low-end netbooks would provide a constant stream of video content – hmm, doesn’t exactly sound wonderfully sustainable though. 

And elsewhere in the conference, nascent new media guru Stephen Fry was wheeled out to talk about Twitter, mobile evangelists of various stripes tried to get people not just to think about the iPhone, and Mark Lund, chief exec of the Central Office of Information, said that he wanted to join up citizens and the government better via the internet, and that digital is “the plasma that runs through media ecology”. Lovely, unprofitable plasma.