NewsBytes: Morning TV Frills, Gender Parity in News Interest, Paco on Retail Tech
1) Morning television is all about women, as we’ve all long known, but there does come a point of no return in the fluffy factor. In “Morning TV Veers from News to Frills,” (December 4th, reg. required) New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley wonders how/if viewers will be able to tell between the extra hour of the Today show and a shopping channel. As Stanley writes: “It used to be that hosts who are at least nominally part of the network’s news division maintained an air of neutrality during consumer segments; now they are in on the pitch. And sometimes they make no sense.” In an era of consumer-driven everything, morning television is trying to get away with being advertiser-driven. Good luck with that.
2) New research from a combination of Nielsen Online, Netview and AdRelevance, as published in a MediaPost Research Brief , shows that men and women go online to check out global news and current events equally. Is anyone surprised that there is no gender difference in world awareness/engagement levels? Research organizations must be running out of issue ideas…
3) Paco Underhill isn’t impressed with all the “technology in search of an application” in the retail industry, according to an interview in the Dec/Jan issue of Fast Company. Here’s what he has to say about last year’s National Retail Federation show “darling,” the magic mirror: “It’s not that the idea isn’t cool, but the idea that you’d mobile your friends…does that turn into sales? Think about Niketown in New York: It was cool at first, and now it sits there like a white elephant.” Let this be a cautionary tale for any businessperson with “tech-glamour” clouding their vision.
