Mediaboss Marketing

Athens For months in 2012, everyone in Greece knew about the "Lagarde list," but few had actually seen it.

The list contained the names of 2,000-plus possible Greek tax evaders who held Swiss bank accounts, and was given by former French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to her Greek counterparts in October 2010, during the worst of Greece's economic crisis.

But government officials claimed to have lost the list first by misplacing the CD it was on, then by losing the USB drive they copied it to and then dragged their heels for months.

Then, in the fall of 2012, Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis got a copy of the list and published it in his magazine Hot Doc. He named politicians, their relevant family members, and business moguls. Suddenly, the government sprang into action. In less than 24 hours a warrant was issued and 50 police officers were deployed to arrest Mr. Vaxevanis, not the tax evaders.

"They're entering the house with a prosecutor now. They're arresting me. Spread the word," he tweeted.

Vaxevanis was ultimately acquitted of charges of "invasion of privacy" over publishing the Lagarde list. But the government's apparent efforts to stop him from digging too deeply into corruption are all too familiar to Greece's journalistic community.

Since the start of the economic crisis six years ago, journalists in Greece have come under increasing fire from government officials and the business tycoons connected to them. Without domestic laws to protect free press and free speech, journalists are left vulnerable and open to intimidation. As a result, the country has fallen steeply on the press-freedom index compiled by the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, from 31st place in 2008 to 70th in 2010 and 99th this year.

"The problem is how to create a medium that will be at the same time independent and financially sustainable, in a country in deep economic crisis," Nikolas Leontopoulos, an investigative journalist, who was fired after he refused to bury a scandal involving Greece's biggest fast-food company. "This problem is still unresolved."

The corruption that has long plagued Greece and precipitated the economic crisis continues on here, including in the media sector. A genuinely free press is difficult when the business elite control much of the coverage, analysts say.

"Practically all of the country's major television and radio stations, newspapers, and magazines, as well as major web portals, belong to a handful of extremely wealthy and well-connected media and business moguls," says Michalis Nevradakis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin and expert on Greek media. "[They] use their media outlets to exert pressure on the government of the day and to present an almost completely one-sided [version of] their own political point of view."

Originally posted here:
In Greece, free press pays the price for crossing the government

It is important to not only understand disparate digital platforms, but also to identify which audience segments are consuming content and when they are consuming it.

In our previous article, we discussed how insurers can use addressable marketing strategies to achieve their awareness and conversion goals. Yet the ability to identify and target your customer and prospects is continually evolving every day. The importance of staying ahead in the race to develop and integrate new digital platforms is accelerating at a pace that can sometimes feel overwhelming. The individual consumer is increasingly empowered by digital media, through the ability to control when and what type of information they want to consume.

And companies are taking notice: See Facebooks recent acquisition of mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $22 billion, a startup with essentially no revenue, but access to more than 600 million active users. Just check out the figures:

Todays insurance leaders understand that digital investments and competencies must be achieved in order to establish a true competitive advantage in the insurance market space as more consumers investigate and shop on the web. In response to this digital evolution taking place, carriers need to ensure that their digital media programs are the stars of their own media portfolios. It is important to not only understand these disparate digital platforms, but also to identify which audience segments are consuming content and when they are consuming it.

Four critical areas enable insurance leaders to make better and more agile decisions around their digital strategies:

Size digital opportunity relative to the targetUnderstanding the size of your universe by segment is a critical component to a successful and scalable digital program. Implementing a segment-driven approach to sizing the opportunity will enable carriers to connect specific audience segment groups with distinct audience platforms and size the total opportunity based on each platform's associated reach. From this point, they are better enabled to develop media plans that are tailored to the appropriate segment, customer lifecycle and experience, and drive scale-based on those audience segments they want to target.

[Losing policyholders? The solution is ridiculous]

Gain a deeper visibility into media performance This starts with having a common and widely accepted attribution approach that will enable the carrier to measure and make sound business decisions around the allocation of your media spend. To gain the most consistent level of insight, its best to have a single, accurate version connected to your key metrics. How you measure your insights should also be scalable and flexible to add in new sources of data or to simply adjust to changes reflected in your current campaigns. Optimally, both top-down and bottoms-up approaches arerecommended and will provide you with a fully modeled view into the event stream that can assign credit to various touchpoints, timing, content, placement, and sequencing. A modeled event stream also provides substantiated insights into the holistic value that any medium contributes to a specific outcome.

Optimize around your specific measures of valueIn many situations, carriers will be able to define value solely based on a credit risk factor, while others will be able to create risk tiers (within behavioral or attitudinal segments) for a more thorough understanding of value. Value is also inclusive of the objectives associated with each segments lifecycle stage such as acquisition, retention, cross-sell, or lifetime value. Nonetheless, a clear understanding of the customer value or currency is required for each segment and should be aligned with your budgeting and forecasting plan to better allocate where media dollars are spent. Media plans can then be developed and adjusted based on the cost of reaching these individuals across the various audience platforms in both real-time and non-real-time environments.

Monetize digital media effortsNow that you have the right and agreed-upon measurement plan in place, its time to monetize your media efforts. There are three critical components to monetizing your digital efforts:

Read the rest here:
Optimizing a Digital Media Strategy in Insurance

Announced at the end of yesterday's big Nexus 6 launch, the Nexus Player is Google's new living room media box - it's answer to the Apple TV and other set-tops like the Roku 3.

The tech giants have long been battling for control of our living rooms, and it's surprising to some extent that one product has not yet emerged with a significant share of the market.

In the Nexus Player, Google thinks it's finally found a product in which it can smuggle itself into your living room, supplying Netflix streams to your TV along with Android games and more.

It's a busy market place that Google is tackling here, and recent history is littered with failed attempts from all kinds of companies. Media boxes were once the obsession of hard drive manufacturers like WD, now it's tech giants like Google and Apple.

Google, you'll remember, has already launched the Chromecast in this area, and has in the past failed in its attempts with Google TV.

"Nexus Player is a home media player for streaming Netflix and playing games on your TV"

Have you heard? The DVD player is dead. The Blu-ray player is dead too. Physical media - its days are numbered and its influence on technology trends is certainly weakening. The Nexus Player is the latest candidate to stake a claim on this post-disc world.

It's a puck-shaped device that plugs into your TV via HDMI and it's small - measuring just 120x120x 20mm. It's dinkier than a DVD, though substantially thicker.

Forgoing any kind of physical media playback, it's designed exclusively to stream and download video and music from both the internet and your own home network. So it's a Netflix player then - right?

Link:
Updated: Nexus Player: Everything you need to know about Google's Android TV box

Why Saif Ali Khan wont join social networking sites - BT
Why Saif Ali Khan won #39;t join social networking sites Saif Ali Khan recently revealed that he stays away from social networking sites because he fears that he...

By: The Times of India

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Why Saif Ali Khan wont join social networking sites - BT - Video

Why we need to think of Social Media as Social Networking - Peter Lunn - 10 October 2014
Peter Lunn of Cracking Media suggests to make social media work better for our business we need to understand it as social networking where we engage, listen and build relationships. This talk...

By: EDBN East Dorset Business Network

Originally posted here:
Why we need to think of Social Media as Social Networking - Peter Lunn - 10 October 2014 - Video