MediaCat Magazine

Dec 20, 2024 | mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Natasha Randhawa

Daisy is O2’s new head of scammer relations. She was created by VCCP’s AI agency, Faith, to take calls from suspected fraudsters, keeping them on the line for as long as possible to protect real customers. When we last spoke to Faith’s joint creative director Ben Hopkins in March, he teased the agency’s ambitions to blend human ingenuity with AI precision.

Dec 17, 2024 | mediacatmagazine.co.uk | James Swift

In January, executives and department heads at EssenceMediacom predicted eight things that would happen in the media industry in 2024. How did they do? In the spirit of accountability, the agency’s joint CSO, Richard Kirk, partner Andrew Monks, and its head of planning, James Parnum, spoke to MediaCat about what they got right and what they got wrong with their forecasts for 2024. BARB data reveals that hours spent with YouTube on TV grew 32% last year, while Netflix hours plateaued at +0.4%.

Dec 12, 2024 | mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Natasha Randhawa

OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar told the Financial Times last week that advertising was now on the table as a potential revenue stream for the company. After the interview, Friar sent a note to the publication to temper that statement, saying OpenAI sees plenty of opportunities within its existing business model and has ‘no active plans to pursue advertising’.

Dec 12, 2024 | mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Svilena Keane

Last week, Spotify gave its 640 million or so users a detailed breakdown of their listening habits for the year with its 2024 Wrapped campaign. But Spotify doesn’t just document people’s aural preferences, it shapes them, too. Its focus on playlists, for example, has changed how people listen to music, and these compilations have long since become a vital route to market for new songs and artists.

Dec 12, 2024 | mediacatmagazine.co.uk | Eaon Pritchard

The exact origins of Misirlou are a bit murky, but it’s believed to have emerged as a kinda folk tune from the Eastern Med sometime in the early 1920s. The song’s title is Turkish and roughly translates to ‘Egyptian Girl’. The earliest known recording was made in 1927 by Theodotos Demetriades, a Greek-American musician but most of us know it from Dick Dale’s blistering 1962 proto-punk psycho-surf-abilly theme to Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 genre-redefining Pulp Fiction (1994) movie.