The Long and Short of it by Les Binet & Peter Field is one of the most important pieces of advertising insight published in the recent years. Here’s a quick 3 minute video with an overview of one of their key messages. This industry research along with other respected papers and surveys form the foundations of the industry intelligence which is one of the engines that power Buymedia. Enjoy!

My name is Ben Rowland, and I’m an American University student. This past summer, I’ve had the privilege of working with the Buymedia team in Dublin. Back home, I attend Arizona State University. I’m currently pursuing a degree in Communication (B.S.) and a minor in journalism/media analysis. I came to Dublin through a program called Sage Corps.

Sage Corps is a global entrepreneurship program that sends top college students and post-grads to study abroad and work with tech startups. They offer programs in Dublin, Amsterdam, Australia, Berlin, Singapore, and even Bangkok. At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to Ireland or Australia. However, after doing some research, I quickly realised that Dublin was the right choice. Spending the summer walking down cobblestone streets and sipping Guinness seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up.

The program consisted of about 20 other students from all over the U.S. With majors spanding from communication, all the way to computer science and chemical engineering. Despite the vast differences in schools, majors, and hometowns, everyone was excited to become friends and motivated to spend the summer working hard.

Working at Buymedia is one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. Working for a startup company is both exciting and challenging. No matter how simple or difficult, there is always something that needs to be done. I spent my summer working as a content marketing intern. Some of my tasks included, researching and analysing SME businesses who could potentially become future clients, logging client base into our CRM database, reaching out to sales and marketing directors/managers, and reaching out to media companies to discuss rates and create specific media packages. Even though a lot of my tasks were difficult at times, I really enjoy working with the Buymedia team. I am extremely grateful for this opportunity and can’t wait to see where Buymedia goes in the future.

Intern: Patrick Calvey
Course: Bachelor of Business
Work Experience Coordinator: Celene Dunphy

Patrick Calvey, is a second year student studying for a Bachelor of Business (Hons) at GMIT. He is currently interning with Buymedia as a system administrator tasked with researching publication data and data entry into the Buymedia platform.

According to Patrick; “During my work experience I have learned what it is really like to work in a marketing start-up, which presents interesting challenges on a daily basis. I find working with Fergal and Norah Ellen fun and beneficial because they make me feel like one of the team and value my input. I have been able to see how the theory in my course is applied in the real world and got to experience a conference in Dublin showcasing start-ups which I found particularly interesting.”

Said Fergal O’Conor, CEO and Founder of the multi award winning Buymedia; “Our office in the iHubs has many advantages but a key advantage is the proximity and relationship with a third level institution, GMIT. Access to talent is always a challenge for start-ups but with the talent pool on your doorstep from GMIT, their high quality of students in terms of ability and work rate, has been a huge benefit to our business. Patrick is an intelligent and adaptable business student with a can do attitude. His ability to quickly fit into our business and contribute meaningfully from the start is a tribute to both himself as an individual and GMIT as an institute of learning.”

Work experience is invaluable to our students, allowing them to apply what they have learnt in the classroom to the real world. Students particularly appreciate the opportunity to work with innovative businesses in the GMIT Mayo iHub and we look forward to building on our close relationships with iHub businesses in the future. – Celene Dunphy, Lecturer, GMIT

CEO and founder of Buymedia Fergal O’Connor takes us through his journey through industries as he went from Radio to Press to TV to Digital and now enters the world of Innovation and startups with buymedia.

This is fantastic news, a huge honour and showcases all our hard work to date. Since its creation in September 2015, our aim has been for Buymedia to bridge that gap from advertiser to media provider. Making the process easier and more efficient for all, with this concept in mind Buymedia was born. Buymedia enables advertisers to purchase their advertising online managing and supervising all the company’s advertising efforts in the one place.

Buymedia’s CEO Fergal O’Connor, joined John Magee for a chat with the Local Enterprise Office to discuss the award and its value to the company. “It is a huge honour to be selected from all the great businesses in Mayo to represent the county at the National Enterprise Awards 2018. The fact that it is the twentieth anniversary makes it even more special and we hope that we can raise the profile of our business and the innovative businesses in the county both nationally and internationally.”; Fergal O’Connor. Read more about what Fergal said here.

Buymedia have recently welcomed several high-profile advertising clients and have also secured all major media providers and are continuously working to ensure all regional, national and international options are accessible via the platform. Our aim for 2018 is to help 40 to 50 businesses manage an advertising budget of between €50-€100K per annum and help them achieve a better return on their advertising budget. We are looking beyond Ireland also with client interest in the UK, Australia, US and South America.

2018 has started off as a fantastic year for Buymedia and promises great things still…read more about the National Enterprise award here. If you’re interested in getting some support with your advertising spend please contact us by emailing; hello@buymediahq.com or completing our enquiry form at www.buymediahq.com.

Fergal O’Connor, CEO & Founder at Buymedia talks at Digital West Event about Marketing and Advertising for business. Buymedia is a technology company developing an innovative advertising planning, procurement, measuring and monitoring software for SMEs – buymedia.ie – that will save time and money for businesses. Buymedia is an advertising platform that utilises 50 years of advertising buying & selling experience to connect print, radio, ohh and digital advertising with small, medium & large businesses & advertisers.

Sometimes the biggest difficulty is where to start, you have a product or service you want to sell, you know you have to do some advertising but you’re not sure where to start. Above all, you know you want to get value for your advertising spend. In this business podcast, we ask Fergal O’Connor The CEO and founder of BuyMedia to walk us through the steps a business should consider taking when spending money on advertising.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

– Albert Einstein

Some others questions we asked:

• How do I know what the best advertising channel for my business?
• How much money should I spend on advertising of my products or services?
• How do I know I am getting a return on my investment?
• Should we do the same advertising we always do, if I feel it is working?

He answers all of our questions and more on this business podcast “Getting value for your advertising spend”.

Madness or Human – Doing the same thing over & over, expecting different results.

I love gadgets and innovation. From ZX Spectrum, Atari, Nintendo, Nokia, Creative Nomad Jukebox, Sony Clié, Dell, Grunge, iPhone, Apple Mac, Bluetooth, Apps, Wifi, One Plus, Indie, Canon, Motorola 360, Fitbit, AI, Data analytics. Chatbots, AR, VR and much more. I’ve been lucky to embrace an amazing array of gadgets and live through the fast paced world of cool innovation over the last 40 plus years.

I never grow tired of the latest new thing and embrace it with the enthusiasm of a child on Christmas morning. I remember when apps became a thing and the 400 plus apps I had on my iPhone of which I probably used 10. I just couldn’t bring myself uninstall the other 390 just in case one day I needed an app that could translate my voice into animal sounds (it’s an app trust me).

I embrace innovation and change with boundless enthusiasm and in my naivety I expect everyone to be pretty much the same. However since I’ve moved more into the tech world I’ve discovered a populous of sceptics and a tech weary public that are much more careful about what they will download and maybe one day love.

Innovation has become hard and no longer will the allure of the next new shiny thing guarantee success. Yes we’re looking at you Juicero. In 2017 there are 2.8 million apps in the Android store and 2.2 million in the Apple app store. That’s a lot of ‘innovation’ to chose from and people are becoming far more discerning and protective of their own personal data.

People are by nature inherently lazy. By that I mean that they are slow to change from their routine, what they know. Cognitive ease means that the human brain prefers to perform the most comfortable or routine activities. The activities that it has become used to, that it knows and understands, even if this is not always the best outcome for the individual or the corporation. As Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman stated, “Laziness is built deep into our nature.”

In a recent Forbes article by Edward D Hess, Hess muses, Thinking differently is also hard emotionally. Many neuroscientists, including Antonio Damasio and Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, believe that our emotions influence and are integrally intertwined in most of our cognitive processing. In other words, rationality is a myth. Emotionally, we seek to affirm our self-image (our ego) and we use the 3Ds—deny, defend, and deflect—to ward off challenges to it and to our views of the world. Fear is one of the emotions that comes all too naturally to most of us—and makes it hard for us to engage in the messy work of innovation. Fear of failure, fear of looking bad, and fear of losing our job if we make mistakes all can lead to what Chris Argyris called “defensive reasoning”: the tendency to defend what we believe. This makes it hard to get outside of ourselves in order to “think out of the box.”

All of my professional career has been in media, an area once considered cutting edge and innovative has in the last few years been tarnished with a deathly moniker, contrary to innovative – ‘traditional’. Print, radio & TV have all suffered in a wave of digital dominance. Although I have also worked with ‘new’ media, in the world of digital transformation my grá for ‘traditional’ media seems to conflict with my enthusiasm for innovation.

When I started our company buymedia in 2016 part of our mission was to vaporise the word ‘traditional’, transform media, make it cool again and not the creepy guy that no-one wants to hang out with at parties. Although €144 billion is spent annually on ‘traditional’ media advertising by SMEs this is in slow decline while growth in digital and mobile advertising is experiencing double digit annual growth.

We spent over a year examining the players and processes in this market and discovered that the move from traditional to digital was driven by a number of factors. Firstly there was a huge lack of market intelligence available to SMEs when making advertising decisions in either type of media. 76% of SME advertisers were unhappy with the results of their advertising campaigns in traditional media. There was limited visibility of all the opportunities available in that market. No easy way to plan or purchase traditional media ad campaigns online, while 80% of B2B business was researched online before making a purchase. Finally, there was no easy way to find solid information on what has worked for other businesses and data analytics to help calibrate future campaigns against past performance. So lots of burning pain to address.

So we aimed for the stars with twin goals of helping SMEs worldwide (starting in Ireland) to get a better return on their advertising make the process easier and digitally transform media sales for the collective good of both businesses who advertise and media companies who sell advertising. Sounds easy, right and if you look at the stats on digital transformation of industries the speed of growth of businesses in recent years is phenomenal. Accenture research shows that it has taken a typical Fortune 500 company on average 20 years to reach a valuation of $1 Billiion or more. It took Google 8.1 years, Facebook 6.2 years, AirBnB 2.8 years and Xiaomi 1.7 Years. So innovation and digital transformation is the way to go if an industry, particularly one in decline, wants to reverse it’s fortunes and experience growth.

In testing our innovative processes, by streamlining advertising procurement we saved a business on average 25% of their time when planning & purchasing ad campaigns. By delivering market intelligence and data analytics we increased their advertising return on investment by 30%. Huge savings and impressive gains.

So when faced with all these global industry facts, our own primary research, customer discovery and test results surely everyone would realise the errors of their ways, jump on board and join the buymedia revolution.

Then we remembered that ‘rationality is a myth’ and ‘laziness is built deep into our nature’. My 15 year old son informed me that there is also a physiological state called homeostasis – the tendency towards a relatively stable equilibrium between interdependent elements (clever boy).

We also discovered a piece in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Colbert, ‘Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds’ – New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason. This remarkable piece examines ‘confirmation bias’ through numerous psychological studies examining the area of how ‘once formed impressions are remarkably perseverant’. It quotes extensively from the new book “The Enigma of Reason” (Harvard), written by the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The main conclusion – Humans are wired with an inability to reason. A recent McKinsey report found that while 84% of corporate executives think innovation is key to achieving growth objectives, only 6% are satisfied with the innovation performance of their firms.

Innovation that talks to reason may be more difficult to attract mass adoption. We’re on the start of our journey, we know we have reason on our side, we’re aware of the bias of the human condition. We hope for the sake of the people that we aim to serve that as we gain trust they don’t continue to do what they have always done and expect different results. We sincerely hope that they give innovation a chance and if we can help even a small percentage of the people that need our help then our innovation journey will have been a worthwhile crusade. What we and all other innovators should realise is that the challenge to innovate will not necessarily be technology, it will more likely be human behaviour and our hardwired brain.