ASIA

Radio broadcaster Percival Mabasa, better known as Percy Lapid, was shot dead on Monday night atTalon Dos, Las Piñas, Philippines.He was the host of the online broadcast program “Percy Lapid Fire” at DWBL 1242 and was known to be critical of previous and the present administration, touching on topics such as red-tagging and supposed extrajudicial killings.According to his family, he had received a lot of death threats before he was killed. He was on his way home to do an online broadcast when he was gunned down by two unknown assailants.According to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP), Lapid was the second journalist killed during the term of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The first was radio broadcaster Rey Blanco, who was stabbed to death in Negros Oriental last month.NUJP Secretary General Ronalyn Olea said Lapid was the first in recent years to be killed in Metro Manila. He was also the 196th journalist killed in the country since 1986, the year democracy was restored after the ouster of dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, the father of the current president.In an October 2021 report, the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists ranked the Philippines seventh on a global impunity index, with 13 murders still unsolved. […]

The BBC World Service has outlined plans to accelerate its digital offering and increase impact with audiences around the globe. This supports the BBC’s strategy, announced earlier this year, to create a modern, digital-led and streamlined organisation that drives the most value from the licence fee and delivers more for audiences.Changing audience needs around the world – with more people accessing news digitally – go alongside a challenging financial climate. High inflation, soaring costs, and a cash-flat Licence Fee settlement have led to tough choices across the BBC, and the BBC’s international services need to make a saving of £28.5m, as part of the wider £500m of annual savings and reinvestment to make the BBC digital-led.The proposals entail a net total of around 382 post closures.The proposals will see seven more language services moving to digital only, modelling the success of others which are already offering purely digital services and performing well with audiences. This means that nearly half of all 41 language services will be digital only.Language services which are already digital only are: Azerbaijani, Brasil, Marathi, Mundo, Punjabi, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.Language services the BBC is proposing to move to digital only are: Chinese, Gujarati, Igbo, Indonesian, Pidgin, Urdu, and Yoruba.Radio services the BBC is proposing to stop are: Arabic, Persian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Hindi, Bengali, Chinese, Indonesian, Tamil, and Urdu.The BBC World Service will continue to operate in all the languages and countries where it is currently present, including the new languages added during its expansion in 2016. No language services will close.Some TV and radio programmes will stop under the new plans. BBC Arabic radio and BBC Persian radio will also cease.The World Service will continue to serve audiences during moments of jeopardy and will ensure audiences in countries such as Russia, Ukraine and Afghanistan have access to vital news services, using appropriate broadcast and distribution platforms.World Service English will continue to operate as 24-hour broadcast radio, available around the world. Some new scheduling, programmes and podcasts will be set out in due course.The World Service has already achieved record levels of growth on digital platforms, currently reaching 148m people in an average week. The digital share of World Service Languages reach has more than doubled, from 19 percent to 43 percent since 2018.Director of BBC World Service Liliane Landor says: “The role of the BBC has never been more crucial worldwide. The BBC is trusted by hundreds of millions of people for fair and impartial news, especially in countries where this is in short supply. We help people in times of crisis. We will continue to bring the best journalism to audiences in English and more than 40 languages, as well as increasing the impact and influence of our journalism by making our stories go further.“There is a compelling case for expanding our digital services across the World Service in order to better serve and connect with our audiences. The way audiences are accessing news and content is changing and the challenge of reaching and engaging people around the world with quality, trusted journalism is growing.”The proposed changes to the World Service include:
Focusing on its own platforms and presence in markets, and reducing the volume of syndicated TV and radio content on partners’ platforms in some territories. A focus on impact, rather than reach, means we need more audiences to come to our platforms. This is where audiences most closely associate with the BBC and where we can build long-term engagement.
Creating a new centralised digital-first Commissioning and Newsgathering Content Production Hub to create high-impact content for distribution across all non-English language services.
Moving some production out of London and closer to audiences to drive engagement, for example moving the Thai service from London to Bangkok, the Korean service to Seoul, the Bangla service to Dhaka and the Focus On Africa TV bulletin to broadcast from Nairobi.
Bringing together long-form content activity such as investigations and documentaries made by Africa Eye, the Investigations Unit and BBC Arabic documentaries to ensure a more collaborative approach across our platforms and services to enable stories to travel further across the world, as well as in the UK.
Creating a new China Global Unit based in London to tell the global story of China to the world.
Creating a dynamic Africa content hub that commissions and delivers original, distinctive and impactful digital first content for all 12 African language services, digital, TV/Radio, plus coverage of the continent for the rest of the BBC.
Continuing linear TV broadcasting for both Arabic and Persian languages and investing in building audio and other digital capability in Arabic and Persian to replace radio.
Closing some radio services, for example Arabic, Bangla, Persian and some TV programming on local broadcasters across Africa and Asia.
World Service English making changes to its content and schedules which will allow investment in new initiatives, including a new podcast for younger audiences globally, and developing the podcast offer more broadly. The station also plans to launch a new hour-long science strand from the new science unit in Cardiff, as well as adding more live news and sports programming to the schedule.
These proposals are now subject to consultation with staff and trade unions. […]

Content from BPRRecently I was reminded of how marketing ideas and concepts can vary from spectacular to downright dumb when I came across a presentation by the smart, interesting and always entertaining Mark Ritson presenting his Top 10 list of Bullshit Marketing ideas and concepts.Most people involved in Marketing and media will have their own stories of Bullshit Marketing ideas – viewed from either side of the fence and it doesn’t take much effort to identify a few of these that still exist in most countries in various local and national media.Mark Ritson’s list is more macro and tends to focus on different theories, concepts and ideas that are evaluated on several criteria including:
Nonsense Factor
Damage Score
And the overall marketing BS index.
Of course, most of the comments and criticisms are slightly tongue in cheek but also highlight the risks of committing huge marketing budgets on ethereal concepts like segmenting products into colours or animals.You can find the summary of the 2021 list on YouTube.However, within the narrative of why Bullshit Marketing can be risky, expensive and wasteful, was a timely reminder of the basics of good marketing that can apply equally to media in all forms.
Do my customers (consumers) want it?
Can I deliver it (successfully, professionally and in a compelling way)
Can it be different or meaningfully differentiated from other, similar or competitor products.
The first and last points on this simple list are often overlooked – do the market research and deliver a clear benefit.By Peter Don, BPR […]

Content from BPRI’ve written about the importance of Game Theory previously. But given recent events I thought it would be timely to have another look at the concept, and its importance to a radio station’s overall strategic plan.According to Bloomberg, as China waged military exercises off the coast of Taiwan earlier this month, a group of American defence experts focused on their own simulation of an eventual – but for now entirely hypothetical – US-China war over the island.The unofficial what-if game or Game Theory is being conducted on the fifth floor of an office building not far from the White House, and it posits a US military response to a Chinese invasion in 2026. Even though the participants bring an American perspective, they are finding that a US-Taiwan victory, if there is one, could come at a huge cost.In sessions that will run through September, retired US generals and Navy officers and former Pentagon officials hunch like chess players over tabletops along with analysts from the CSIS think tank. They move forces depicted as blue and red boxes and small wooden squares over maps of the Western Pacific and Taiwan. The results will be released to the public in December.The success of a radio station’s strategy often depends on the strategies of its competitors.As a result of this interdependence, the ability to anticipate your competitors’ strategies is essential. And this highlights the importance of strategic-planning tools such as Game Theory and Scenario Planning.How many times in a strategy meeting do you ask: what if a competitor station changed format?….what if we changed format?….what if we lost our successful morning show?Knowing what you would do in a certain situation is one thing.But the other key aspect of Game Theory is correctly defining what your competitors would do.This is not easy.You need the ability to reverse-engineer the moves of competitors and predict what they are likely to do, what they will avoid doing and what they are actually capable of doing.Getting inside your competitors’ heads is difficult because radio stations (and their decision makers) are usually very different. They often have different cultures, different theories on programming strategy, different budgetary pressures and always…..different talent in their line-up.To use the China/Taiwan/US analogy…different warfare techniques, different weapons and most importantly different political systems and cultures.To really play Game Theory you have to think like your competitors……not think like you would in their situation.You must think like your competitors’ decision makers, which will usually be the Group Content/Program Director or CEO but don’t rule out majority shareholders either. And station programmers will also have a voice in the room.This approach moves you into a thought process that helps turn competitive intelligence into competitive insights.Too often when a competitor launches a direct attack, a station will formulate a defence strategy after the event. In an ideal world, the defence strategy would already be prepared and ready to be implemented immediately so as to blunt the competitor’s attack.As Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”  By David Kidd, BPR […]

Users of the Adthos Ad Platform now have even more opportunities to further personalize or target their audio advertising, thanks to the introduction of more than 75 new data API’s.The new API’s cover a wealth of different interest areas including Sports, Travel, Finance, Retail, News and many more. Advertisers will now be able to add extra dynamic information based on data from sports matches such as football, travel data including TSA and other airport wait-times, and updates from the stock market, forex or crypto. There’s the option to utilize price data from retail giants such as Target and Walmart. And they can also engage their audiences with the latest news from Reuters or Google and help share important public health information on issues such as Covid and Monkeypox.In addition, the Adthos ‘Ads Template’ feature offers the ability to generate ads as part of a suite of pre-produced templates that include many of the data API’s. Users can quickly create high-quality audio ads which can be highly targeted thanks to the easy insertion of these dynamic elements.Raoul Wedel, CEO of Adthos says: “There is so much data out there which can be used to enhance the possibilities to target audiences or share crucial up-to-the-minute information, and these API’s put the power in the hands of advertisers, publishers and broadcasters to do just that. We can wait to see what our users do with these new opportunities – and rest assured we are working on even more for the future! ” […]

Pioneering streaming and podcast solutions provider StreamGuys has announced a trio of leadership promotions and appointments.Eduardo Martinez and Jesse Orr have been promoted to VP of Technology and VP of Engineering, respectively, while Tara Strickwerda has taken on the role of Director of Customer Success.Eduardo has been a key contributor and leader at StreamGuys for over 15 years, most recently leveraging his deep podcasting and streaming experience as the company’s Director of Technology. Always on the pulse of the rapidly evolving digital media landscape, he successfully guides StreamGuys in defining and developing their end-to-end SaaS delivery, analytics, management, and monetization products and services. As VP of Technology, he will continue to oversee the planning, architecture, and design of StreamGuys’ growing range of solutions.As VP of Engineering, Jesse meticulously oversees the company’s extensive infrastructure. He is deeply intertwined with every aspect of StreamGuys’ platform, including deploying new technology stacks that support greater levels of automation; tuning and optimizing existing workflows to ensure “epic uptimes” for clients’ services; and writing scripts to support next-generation services. He continually pushes his boundaries, always learning new methods to solve many complex problems inherent in streaming media and sharing his findings with his skilled teammates.As the Director of Customer Success at StreamGuys, Tara is passionate about identifying and meeting the individual needs of the company’s diverse clients. She joined StreamGuys last year with over 25 years of experience delivering simple to complex solutions across multiple industries. A problem solver by nature and education, she applies her skills to addressing real-world problems faced by clients and organizations. Before joining StreamGuys in 2021, she helped turn a struggling aerospace company into a top-performing supplier for aviation component manufacturing.“Our employees are the lifeblood of StreamGuys’ success, and it’s important to us that we provide career paths that enable them to continue developing and meeting their goals,” said Kiriki Delany, president, StreamGuys. “These appointments not only help position StreamGuys for the next stage of the company’s growth, but are also intended to enable these exceptional individuals to continue their own personal advancement. We’re excited to see what they can achieve for our customers, our company, and themselves in their new roles.” […]