Media

When the consulting firm’s logo appeared routinely in Six Nations rugby broadcast graphics this weekend, James Cridland was amongst the viewers to ask: “Accenture advertises on BBC Sport - how?”

Sponsorship on the license-funded BBC in the UK is strictly forbidden. But the workaround, for Accenture, was to build a mobile app…

Back in January, the RBS 6 Nations tournament anointed Accenture with “official technology partner” status. That’s a relatively new trend, but not entirely - 12 months ago, the Barclays Premier League gave Electronic Arts (NSDQ: ERTS) the same status.

To earn the status, technology partners must each provide a service to the tournament. EA provided match data. Accenture built the official Six Nations mobile application, with tournament news, live scores, squad lists, tables and video highlights.

Broadcasters are frequently bound, by the terms of their contracts with tournaments they air, to show the brands of these supposedly integral tournament partners. EA got to show its logo alongside live on-screen match facts on Sky Sports. Accenture’s logo is displayed along with rugby scores broadcast to by the BBC, Ireland’s RTE etc. Many other broadcasters do the same for many other sports.

What’s interesting here is Accenture is not just providing a private partner service to the tournament but, through the mobile app, is itself providing to the tournament’s end audience the same kind of content media consumers might expect to obtain from an organisation like the BBC

BBC Sport gave paidContent this statement…

“Accenture are the official data supplier for The Six Nations and as a technology company are responsible for providing the statistics for The Championships. This ‘facility’ is available to all partners/media covering the event.

“The relationship is between ‘Six Nations Rugby Limited’ and ‘Accenture’. In accordance with BBC and EBU guidelines (which provide for the crediting of official data processing and timing suppliers) the BBC credits Accenture as official data supplier on a number of occasions throughout the match.

“For television, a corporate logo accompanies a select number of statistical match graphics. This is common practice, industry wide, and should not be confused with reflections given to event title sponsors.”

We run this story in the interest of clarification and curiosity and not necessarily as a BBC-bashing piece.

How come the BBC are allowed to show the Accenture logo during the stats coverage in the rugby? #sixnations #England

How did Accenture advertise on BBC Sport, when the Editorial Guidelines specifically prohibit it? More: mediauk.com/tv/discussions…

The Financial Times now reaches 2.2m people across the world on a daily basis, according to the latest Average Daily Global Audience (ADGA) figures.

Before I continue, a health warning: ADGA is a metric devised by the FT’s own research department in 2009. They are independently verified by PricewaterhouseCoopers rather than the industry’s main auditor, ABC.

The ADGA statistics reveal that the number of people accessing the FT’s online site every day has surpassed 900,000, showing a 36% year-on-year increase.

The paper has also seen a sharp rise in mobile users, with increases of 66% on smart phones and 71% on tablets over the last six months.

The number of people who read FT content on two or more platforms every day has risen to over 300,000, or 14% of the total audience.

To achieve its results, ADGA uses a combination of sources including syndicated national and regional readership surveys, unique user and browser data, FT proprietary research based on large samples of the reader base as well as ABC (NYSE: DIS) circulation figures.

The number is divided into channels as well as regions. Duplicated consumption is removed to produce one global net audience figure.

Anita Hague, the FT’s global research director, said: “FT readers are comfortably moving between platforms to access our content… this means that advertisers who run a cross-channel campaign are maximising their reach.”

Source: FT

The circulation of the 20p Independent spin-off i - including giveaways - has passed the £1.20 Guardian for the first time, six months after it passed The Independent.

Sales for many of the UK's national newspapers recovered from the seasonally slow December to result in slight monthly increases in much of the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) figures today for January 2012.

After quickly gaining a warm reception and a rapid post-launch investment from BSkyB, the social TV app startup co-founded by ex BBC iPlayer head honcho Anthony Rose is making its first real play at monetisation.

From Thursday, Zeebox is starting to include “click to buy” slots in its iPad and iPhone app and to sell second-screen ads to brands, so that each generates money from people watching TV shows with Zeebox on their laps.

It works like this…

Thanks to speech-to-text, subtitles and other metadata including from Philips’ Civolution fingerprinter spin-off, the Zeebox iPad app already shows users a live stream of info “tags” corresponding to material in shows they are watching on their lounge TV. Right now, they link to Wikipedia articles.

But Zeebox also had always hoped to leverage them to start linking to marketing messaging as well as to purchase options during the commercial breaks between shows.

So, during those breaks, Zeebox will denote actionable tag links with icons for songs, products, travel services etc. Those links will send users through to merchants like iTunes (for music), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) (for DVDs), Tesco (for food) and Boots (for cosmetics) via Zeebox affiliate codes, so that it generates a percentage commission of any subsequent sales.

Zeebox is running the system so far on about 20 percent of UK TV’s commercial break ads, mostly for ITV (LSE: ITV) hcnanle.s

Will it work?

“Our consumer research told us that people want an easy way to buy things they see on TV,” Rose’s co-founder Ernesto Schmitt says in a press release.

Do affiliate links add up to a business model? Not in isolation. Shazam claims to make a percentage of music purchases worth $100 million a year that its app sent to stores last year. But it has tried to diversify its revenue streams.

Using just the affiliate commission model, Zeebox will need to generate click-throughs and actual purchases at a large scale in order to clock up significant total income. But the startup appears to be seeking other streams, too.

The prospect of selling specific second-screen tag ads to advertiser brands is exciting as an innovation. But brands would likely consider this experimental until such time as Zeebox is being used by large numbers of TV viewers.

Zeebox last month claimed “250,000 users” - but simultaneous prime-time users metrics are not publicised.

One route to scale for Zeebox is through BSkyB (NYSE: BSY). The UK pay-TV platform leader in January took equity in the startup with a deal through which it will leverage Zeebox features in a social-centric upgrade revision to its EPG app for its Sky+ PVR.

But, still, the whole prospect, for all such operators, depends on the usage scale of tablets or smartphones as engagement facilitators during TV shows. On that hinges the very notion of the second screen but, so far, much research points to a growing trend there.

The Net-a-Porter Group has hired Tess Macleod Smith as its new group publishing director.

Maplin Electronics, one of the UK's leading retailers of consumer electronics, has appointed AdConnection to handle its media planning and buying account.

It’s been almost a year since former Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPad 2, and according to a new report, the company plans to launch the third version of its breakthrough tablet device around a month from now in early March.

AllThingsD didn’t have an exact date, but said Apple has settled on the first week of March to introduce what most people are calling the iPad 3. Less is known about the device itself, but it’s expected to feature a more powerful processor and a higher-resolution display than its predecessor.

This will be the company’s first major launch event since Jobs’ death last October, as January’s iBooks launch event was a much smaller type of introduction. Apple continues to dominate the market for modern tablet computers, and despite upstarts like Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) finally getting traction for tablet other than the iPad, Apple sold 15 million of the current model in the fourth quarter, far more than any other company.

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