Media and Power, with Moisés Naím

Power is easier than ever to obtain, more difficult to manage, and easier to lose: This is one of the main premises presented by Moisés Naim, ex-executive director of the World Bank and director of the TV program Efecto Naím, in the session “Media and power”, organized by the Catalan Audio-visual Cluster and the Catalan Audio-visual Council (CAC) in La Pedrera of Barcelona.

Political, economic, and business power becomes increasingly more dissoluble. According to Naim, this can be seen in examples such as the emergence of Trump in the Republican Party, or the rise of Podemos in the Spanish political landscape, in defiance of the historical dominance of the PSOE. It can also be seen in the fierce competition within the hotel industry offered by young companies such as AirBNB, or in the audiovisual field, the nightmare that the platform Netflix represents for the big companies such as HBO or CBS.

This dynamic is also affecting the mass media and new media forms, such as the Internet. In fact, the Venezuelan essayist remarked, in a context where the dynamics of power is changing more than ever, the struggle for the control of information is central. Naím gave many examples of the “cyber battle” that the political powers, and business powers as well, are fighting in the field of communication.

The session brought together a hundred people, and was opened by the President of the CAC, Roger Loppacher, and moderated by Xavier Guitart, president of the Cluster.

Watch the VIDEO of the session.

Youtube, business opportunity for brands

Youtube is a business opportunity for brands and a creative opportunity for producers and agencies. It offers a large volume of spectators, a lot of freedom in terms of content creation, and provides a more efficient way to identify, measure and segment the audience (and a target market) than traditional channels. In short, it opens up a whole new range of opportunities for brand positioning.

Carlos Ortet from Zoopa, and Xavier Alabart from UpVideo, both member-companies of the Catalan Audio-visual Cluster, defended this idea in the session, “Youtube, business opportunity for brands”, held at the Foment del Treball headquarters as part of the series Reinventa’t.

During the session,  part of the Digital & Media Forum program (#digitalmediaCAT), the speakers presented various cases studies and strategies illustrating how the new ingredients that Youtube offers, and the new ways of forging relationships with audiences and new content creations, allowed brands, producers, and agencies to successfully position their products and expand their loyalty and sales quotas.

They also warned that there is still a long way to go in exploring the business opportunities offered on Youtube. They stated that, above all, brands need to change their concept of advertising, which is still too rooted in the standard models of the traditional advertising spot.

However, both Carlos Ortet and Xavier Alabart were confident that this transformation would take place, since it is already happening in other countries.