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The advertising people want everybody to know that advertising is good, particularly good for the European economy. The World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and other related trade bodies commissioned consultancy Deloitte for a “Value of Advertising” report, released this week. Advertising and the business it supports, it says, employs 5.8 million folks in European Union (EU) and contributes 4.6% of total gross domestic product (GDP).
Deloitte’s statisticians calculate that every euro spent on advertising “can create” €7 “of GDP in the EU economy.” A similar calculation for UK Advertising Association in 2013 hypothesized GB£ 1 creating GB£6 in the UK economy, but that was well before the Brexit vote. The object of all this learned mathematics is influencing policy makers.
“This study provides concrete evidence of the benefits that advertising brings to the daily lives of millions of EU citizens,” said egta director general Katty Roberfroid in a statement. (See related egta presser here). “It is vital to remind policy makers of the importance of our industry in building a strong and vivid media industry.” Folks need to be reminded, over and over, of all the neat free stuff advertising pays for.
“We need a positive public agenda that explains why advertising is a good thing,” said WFA CEO Stephan Loerke to Marketing Week (January 15). “It needs to be much more proactively promoted and championed.” The advertising people have several concerns, from ad blocking to recently proposed revisions in the EU ePrivacy Directive, sometimes referred to as the Cookie Directive.
Every journalist, editor and publisher has had, possibly in the last hour or two, a conversation about fake news. Some are angry, some frightened, at least among those participating in the tasks of real news. Those producing fake news are giggling, reading their own tweets, convinced they have “elites” and “book-learners” on the run.
Nobody thinks fake news, largely but not exclusively an online phenomenon, is going away. Fans will be fans. And there’s lots of money in keeping the angry, confused and miserable tirelessly searching for conspiracy theories.
A set of news publishers surveyed by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism see a light in that tunnel not as a speeding freight train or UFO. Of the 145 professionals, 70% see fake news as “a chance for quality journalism to stand out,” said research associate Nic Newham, quoted by UK Press Gazette (January 16). “Publishers hope that high quality reliable news will be more needed than ever in a world awash with misinformation, but some fear that the public’s trust in media could cause people to turn away from news altogether.”
Facebook began flagging fake news items appearing on its US portal a month ago. It isn’t perfect, by far. The same filtering has been extended to German users, perhaps as a result of lawmakers suggesting significant financial punishments for allowing fake news items to proliferate. Facebook has huge global reach and, as such, is a target for considerable criticism on a variety of issues.
There is a possibility of Facebook, Google and Twitter executives sharing their views - in person - on fake news to the UK House of Commons Culture Committee, maybe in the spring, maybe summer, reported the (UK) Independent (January 15). No need to hurry. UK public broadcaster BBC is planning to call-out “deliberately misleading stories masquerading as news” with a Reality Check portal, said news director James Harding.
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