Media Beat: October 14, 2021

By David Farrell

Jonathan Pie’s latest hilariously offensive rant about Boris and his U-turn party

William Shatner’s ultimate Captain Kirk performance

SiriusXM links with Audio Up to develop scripted podcasts

The US podcast content production company has a roster of marquee names it is bringing to the satellite broadcaster, including James Ellroy, Stephen King, Machine Gun Kelly, and Gary Busey. The deal includes The Playboy Interview series featuring actors voicing the transcripts from Hugh Hefner’s once famous magazine.

Canada's wireless costs 'continue to be among the highest in the world'

Tefficient, a Swedish telecom market analyst, found in a July study that Canadian data rates were the highest of 45 countries surveyed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the analysis also found that Canadians were the most miserly with their mobile data.

Last year, a study of international cellphone prices by The Markup, a New York data journalism non-profit, also found Canada in the clear lead in terms of mobile rates. Loading an hour of Netflix using Canadian mobile data was found to cost an average of $12.55, as compared to 43 cents in Italy. – Tristin Hopper, National Post

Do News publishers “own” the news, and how should they be compensated?

Google and Facebook have grudgingly come to the table and begun discussions with some publishers in some countries over payment for use of content. Threat of government action has been the catalyst to make these negotiations happen. While progress is being made in terms of indirectly flowing back to news publishers some of the advertising revenues that their content generates for the platforms by attracting and retaining users, this begs the question of what the news content providers are actually “selling”, and what they actually “own”. At the end of the day, who owns the news? – Hugh Stephens’ Blog

Not a joke: Trump was going to appoint Ivanka president of the WTB

Back in 2019, as only the patriarch of the world’s most delusional family could, Donald Trump told The Atlantic about all the jobs that he’d wanted to give his daughter Ivanka, ones for which she wasn’t even qualified to do an unpaid internship. Ambassador to the United Nations? Ivanka “would’ve been great,” just “incredible” at the job, Trump explained to reporter Elaina Plott. “I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank,” he added. “She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers. She’s got a great calmness...I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless. She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”

At the time these asides just seemed like the typical pronouncements of a guy whose most dominant features are his pathological inability to ever tell the truth and his creepy obsession with his eldest daughter, which, just a few months later, would result in his boldly and insanely claiming she’d created 14 million jobs. But according to a new report, Trump was actually dead serious about naming Ivanka, of the Ivanka Trump clothing line, the president of the World Bank—and had to be stopped from doing so. – Bess Levin, Vanity Fair via The Intercept

Roku remains on top of US CTV device market

Roku remains the top CTV platform in the US, accounting for 51.7% of CTV users. But Amazon Fire TV is much closer now with a penetration rate of nearly 45% among CTV users. Apple TV's penetration is pretty low compared with the rest, at only 13.1% of US CTV users. – Sara Lebow, eMarketer

The one part of the OZY story podcasters can’t afford to ignore

Gaming the system is done all the time in the digital world from bot farms to pixel stuffing, billions of fake impressions, pop-ups and everything in between. My friend Bob Hoffman writes The Ad Contrarian, a blog often about rampant digital fraud in ad tech. It’s a must-read if you like spitting up your coffee.

Sure, much of Ozy’s shadiness comes from their own corruptness – but a lot of it has to do with the lack of transparency in digital advertising and issues with how digital ads are trafficked or measured and the games that can later be played. What exactly is a “social impression?” – Craig Silverman, amplifi

Social media addiction

The national concern over social media's health effects has intensified.

A recent article in The Atlantic equated social media to “attention alcohol” and The Wall Street Journal drew a comparison between Facebook and the tobacco industry in its manipulative targeting of teens with a dangerous product. Helen Lee Bouygues, president of Reboot Foundation, identifies these issues as a national health crisis.

Reboot Foundation's recent survey displays users' feelings of concern on the topic. – Colin Kirkland, MediaPost

‘What if I don’t have a favourite radio station’

Most radio research qualifies respondents by asking (potential) respondents if they're broadcast radio listeners.  Maybe it's 30 or 60 minutes a day, or a minimum number of days in a week.  In any case, most research studies avoid those who have little-to-nothing to do with AM/FM radio.  Their rationale?  Why talk to defectors unlikely to come back?

So, what's the net effect?  After all, don't we just want to know what radio listeners think of the local stations in the area?

Of course we do.  But the radio qualifier question masks or diminishes the effects and impact of satellite radio, streaming audio platforms, podcasts, and even talking books on FM radio. – Fred Jacobs, Media Strategies