Electric Media now largest Irish digital sales house

The Irish digital advertising industry’s largest consolidation to date has occurred. Electric Media has acquired the assets of Sales Online.

Electric Media, owned by Dermot Hanrahan, purchased Sales Online (for an undisclosed sum) from Simon Ferguson.

Electric Media handles the ad sales for such premium sites as entertainment.ie, myhome.ie and irishtimes.com and will now sell for Sales Online’s premium clients, including ft.com, breakingnews.ie, eBay and irishexaminer.com. Over sixty premium online brands/publishers will now be represented by Electric Media.

Dermot Hanrahan, chief executive, Electric Media says, “In both the US and the UK, online advertising is now the number one medium. While we do not yet have exact figures for online spend in this market – and we look forward to the new IAB Ireland’s figures later this year – we do know we are not yet near the UK online share. There, digital advertising accounts for 23.5% of all advertising spend – I estimate that in Ireland, we are still hovering in the late teens.”

The deal “provides for a centralised planning and buying point, delivering near 100% reach of the Irish mobile and online audience,” says Simon Ferguson.

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Privacy is dead, long live privacy

One of the biggest debates surrounding the advancements of the digital age concerns the privacy of individuals. Some argue that privacy is no longer an issue for people with social media accounts – if you’re on social media you can’t expect privacy. As someone put it recently: “If Andy Warhol was alive today he’d say ‘Everyone wants 15 minutes of privacy’”.

The trouble for privacy advocates in the digital age is the sheer number of applications designed and launched every week that strip away our layers of confidentiality. Take The Astonishing Tribe’s latest app – Recognizer.

The user points their phone camera at a person’s face and face-recognition software creates a 3-D model of that person’s head, sends it to a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition and sends back the person’s name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to.

Privacy is dead, long live privacy.

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Muzu launches ‘Spotify for video’

Muzu.tv has launched a music vdeo jukebox. It enables users to create music video playlists, rearrange the video queue in the playlist in real-time, and get videos recommended, based on artists the user likes.

“In the simplest of terms, Jukebox is like a free ‘Spotify for video’, but with the addition of these in-built recommendations which opens up new music for users to discover,” says Muzu.

To fund this free content, and to avoid disrupting the experience with ads, Muzu skins the outside of the video player with premium entertainment-related ads, which don’t interrupt the viewing experience.

Above is one of the world’s first jukeboxes. Annoying, isn’t it?

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A handy introduction to twitter

Here at Digital Times we’ve been having a lot of conversations about twitter with non twitter users and light sceptics. Many still simply don’t get it and don’t see its value. With this in mind we thought it would be good to post this handy instructional video. Twitter can be whatever you want it to be, but its best to think of it as an colossal resource for whatever subject (professional and lifestyle-realted) you are interested in. Have a go, you could be surpised by its value.

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Free business training and possible €30,000 grant

Synergy Centre at the Institute of Technology Tallaght, Dublin (ITT Dublin) is looking for entrepreneurs from all technology and knowledge-intensive sectors to apply for a free 12 month, full-time practical support programme.

The course will bring entrepreneurs from business concept and planning stage right through to first sales and to being investor ready.

Applicants will undergo a rigorous screening process however, successful candidates, who also meet Enterprise Ireland criteria, may be eligible to receive CORD grant funding of up to

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