TOOLS : Scorn from Siobhan

The conference at Auckland's Hyatt Regency last month wasentitled Opportunities in Next Generation Networks. A bunch ofpointy-heads were there to discuss telecommunications policies,local loop unbundling, fibre-optic networks, and high-speedbroadband.

Very worthy stuff but, let's face it, subject matter that can besleep-inducingly dry and boring. Thank goodness Siobhan McKennaarrived at the podium on the morning of day two.

As the head of new media at MediaWorks, McKenna is at theforefront of the battle to harness broadband technology to pump outcontent via the TV3 website and a number of other media sites in thegroup's stable.

The groaning state of the national infrastructure available tohelp achieve this clearly pisses her off, and she wasn't afraid tosay so. "It is deeply frustrating to me when people can't access ourcontent in a fast and efficient way," she told the audience.

The best example of creativity foisted on us by thetelecommunications industry has been the telco providers getting usto believe they've even given us broadband, she said. "Withparticularly savvy marketing of this misnomer, New Zealand telcoshave managed to get us all referring to their band-aid as ourbroadband. In fact when it [real broadband] does arrive I guesswe'll need an entirely new word for it."

Other industries would not get away with offering up such a sub-optimal service, she claimed. "It is difficult to imagine TV andradio's content and advertising industries getting very far if thetechnologies behind them were as intermittent and unreliable as NewZealand's broadband."

Then McKenna shifted her sights to the ad industry, saying manysenior agency planners didn't want to come to grips with web andmobile advertising. She quoted Rupert Murdoch, who three years agotold an audience of newspaper editors: "Many of us have beenremarkably unaccountably complacent; quietly hoping this thingcalled the digital revolution would just limp along."

McKenna added: "Two years ago I myself witnessed several senioradvertising agency execs wishing out loud they would make it toretirement before new media kicked off. Their unenthusiastic viewtowards new media advertising opportunities was, they felt,vindicated further by their inability to see margin in it.

"As we know ad agencies make the bulk of their revenue not offthe buying of the media itself but off the production of the bigbudget TV ad. After all it's easier to make $100k off a big TVCproduction, not so easy to pull that $100k out of a banner ad."

Then a swipe at Google's AdSense advertising programme, which issupposed to put "contextually targeted" ads onto sites that sign upfor it.

A TV3 website search for "Shaun Summerfield" (the channel'smotoring journalist) generated a "Buy pussy shavers in NZ" Googlead, leading McKenna to surmise that the Google scheme was "arguablyverging on being more about using up a client's budget as quickly aspossible regardless of the actual context ... I'm not sure whatShaun has to do with pussy shavers. Perhaps we should ask him."

While participating in the Google scheme provides a revenuestream for the TV3 website, but "for $US2000 a month is it worth it?It's probably a lunch budget somewhere."

McKenna is right to be frustrated. New media has yet to reach itspotential, for a number of reasons, including the ones she raised.

But the internet's growing influence as a news and advertisingmedium is undeniable, and is probably best illustrated through ananecdote from McKenna about a 3 News cameraman who ditched hiscamera to clamber over a high fence to shoot footage of a planecrash on his cellphone so the channel could be first to post imageson its website.

"That kind of energy and technology being used in a practical wayis vital to us being able to do our jobs," she said.