Ben Liebmann’s Post

“I should be Employ’d in Greater things,” William Blake groaned in 1802 as he churned out hack work for a benefactor. Does this sound familiar? Who in advertising hasn’t worked on something that we all did simply because we needed to make ends meet not because we wanted to put the work in our book? Or how should we think about the disconnect between the realpolitik of lobbying and the idealism of marketing when talking about purpose? Does this defeat the notion of a purity test? It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t engage in what you feel is right (please by all means do it, make social impact) but maybe you shouldn’t impose purity tests or there is only one side to history on others who don’t share your beliefs. Or don’t have the luxury to afford them. We live in a complicated world, with a lot of compromises on the way through it. If you wanted purity overall would you have chosen advertising as a way to be pure? Here’s the article where the Blake quote comes from that gets into the long-standing fraught relationship between Art and Mammon. All views my own. All conclusions your own.

This article raises important questions about the future of community-driven media and its role in a digitally dominant world. But it also brings our attention to the challenges it currently faces in aligning with the government policies, despite their potential for grassroots development. What changes do you think are necessary to better support community radio? I'd love to hear your thoughts! https://lnkd.in/gRJr9E2t 

Brixton is a guiding light to the Night Time Economy and what happens here is the vanguard of our industry; both innovations and challenges. There needs to be a re-dress of the events that have damaged our brilliance. Brexit damage, town centre underfunding, policing cuts, excessive rent demands, cost of utilities are all external factors that any operator has no control over. Too many great businesses have gone or face extinction through no fault of their own with heavy repercussions to local communities. So what can be done? MayorofLondon, Amy Lamé, Night Time Industries Association, and every hospitality and events organisation must ignite the flame and force change. #savenightlife

They say, to win an award, you need to shed your blood, sweat and tears — news flash, that may just be the thing. In the grueling world of advertising, winning awards definitely defines you as a top notch creative. But keep in mind that it could be addicting too. So, how can you balance such desire and to stay sanely on your feet while squeezing your creative juice? In this video, Jasper Ilagan candidly shares the secret formula on how to bag tons of awards, especially with ideas that are not only conventional but way beyond what the audience expects. Curious to find out? Go on and click this video!

https://lnkd.in/eppQyiPB Vote for the AUDIENCE STAR! Make a difference in choosing the winner! We invite everyone to participate in the voting and choose the AUDIENCE STAR! This is a unique opportunity for your vote to decide who will win this prestigious award. How to vote? 1. Visit the website wyspa.tv | Stars Night 2024 tab 2. Register using the COUPON: STARSNIGHT2024 https://lnkd.in/excGsV_c 3. Cast your vote for your chosen candidate! Why vote? Transparency and fairness: Voting on our website is clear and visible to everyone. YOU CANNOT BUY LIKES, as in social media. Data verification: Each voter must provide an email address and other sensitive data, ensuring the contest's fairness. The COUPON: STARSNIGHT2024 allows you to vote for free. https://lnkd.in/excGsV_c Remember! The COUPON is valid for 1 month from the date of activation. During this time, you can cast your vote for a candidate. Links: Voting: https://lnkd.in/eMtd-8z2 Award rules: https://lnkd.in/eKAV29eA Don't wait! Your vote matters!

Why Did Keir Starmer Take a Month to Register £4,000 Worth of Taylor Swift Tickets from the FA? In regulated industries, gifts and hospitality are scrutinised to avoid any hint of impropriety. So why should politicians, especially the Prime Minister, be any different? Keir Starmer accepted £4,000 worth of Taylor Swift concert tickets, including hospitality, from the Premier League on 21 June 2024, yet waited nearly a month—until 22 July 2024, after his election as Prime Minister—to declare them. This delay raises serious questions about transparency and ethics. Should a politician, let alone the Prime Minister, be accepting such lavish gifts in the first place? The role of a public servant is to act in the public’s interest, not to benefit from exclusive, high-value perks like concert tickets, luxury accommodations, and football match hospitality. Failing to declare these gifts promptly only exacerbates the problem. If politicians are expected to set the highest standards of accountability, Starmer’s delay in declaring this gift suggests a worrying lack of transparency. Over the last four months, Starmer has accepted gifts and hospitality valued at £49,258.28, including £20,437.28 for luxury accommodation, £16,200 in work clothing, and the £4,000 Taylor Swift tickets. He has also received numerous high-value football tickets. Should our Prime Minister really be benefiting from this kind of genorosity while claiming to represent the public? These types of gifts create an appearance of privilege and disconnect from the everyday realities of the voters. The public deserves to know—should our politicians be accepting gifts like these at all? And why the delay in disclosure? When leaders are not transparent, it erodes trust, and accountability is non-negotiable for those in public office. For more details, check out his financial disclosure here: [Keir Starmer's Financial Disclosure](https://lnkd.in/etyrAf95). #TransparencyMatters #PoliticalEthics #AccountabilityInLeadership #GiftsAndHospitality #PublicTrust #LeadershipStandards #IntegrityInPolitics #PoliticalTransparency #TrustInLeadership #EthicsInPublicOffice

New Post: Match Your Grammy Knowledge Against Last Night’s ‘Jeopardy!’ Contestants - https://lnkd.in/gKt4ZR9H - Jeopardy! contestants are expected to know a little bit about everything. They can be a leading authority on the World Series, but that doesn’t do them a bit of good if the categories before them are Shakespeare, U.S. History and 20th Century Women. Related Fetty Wap Becomes ‘Jeopardy’ Answer 11/10/2015 On Wednesday (Sept. 25), one of the categories was Grammy Winners for Album of the Year. The first sign that the contestants were not music experts was that they steered clear of the category for much of the game. When they finally did go there, they collectively came up with just two correct questions. If you’re a music expert, you would probably have gotten four or five right. (One of them was hard, for reasons we’ll explain.) But then, we’re all music fans here. Give us Ancient Greece as a category and it will be our turn to struggle. Here are the two the contestants collectively got right. Would you have also gotten them? “This Whitney Houston soundtrack won the award in 1994.” The correct question: “What is The Bodyguard?” “The first woman to win the category, Ms. Garland, took the prize for Judy at this New York City venue.” The correct question: “What is Carnegie Hall?” And here are two where no one even ventured a guess. “The first of Taylor Swift’s record four album of the year Grammys was for this album in 2010.” The correct question: “What is Fearless?” “Billy Joel was a ‘Big Shot’ in 1980, winning for this album that bears of the name of a thoroughfare.” The correct question: “What is 52nd Street?” Here’s one where a contestant took a crack at it and missed. “Dreamland by Glass Animals might be the response to this album that made Billie Eilish the category’s youngest winner ever.” The correct question: “What is When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?’ The convoluted phrasing of this question — The Glass Animals reference was meant to be a clue, but it probably just threw the contestants off — made this a hard one. One of the contestants ventured, ‘What is Sleep?’ Another factor: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is a long title, and even if you know it, it’s hard to get all those words exactly right – especially under such pressure. (Professional editors have been known to have to double-check it, even all these years later, to make sure they have it right!) Jeopardy! was created by TV legend Merv Griffin, who had a top 10 hit on Billboard’s Best Sellers pop chart in 194

Bruce Springsteen, the pending election and deindustrialization in the Midwest https://lnkd.in/gHKhfUi4 So, I am interviewed in this article on Bruce Springsteen, as someone who is also a son of Freehold (though not actually born there as the article states). The piece is by a new Midwestern non-profit media outlet Midstory, with a focus on stories out of the Midwest at a time when more journalism focus needs to be done on the middle of this country with media shrinking overall and increasingly run out of only NYC, LA and DC. It looks at the issues of Springsteen’s rise as a working-class hero, while the actual working class fell into freefall with massive deindustrialization, especially as I point out in this with NAFTA which was horrifically destructive to the working class in the Midwest leading to many of the problems we have now politically. As the working class collapsed, Bruce did increasingly make more money singing about them, one of the disconnects brought out in this piece by the young journalist Xander Constantine – and I talk about how many of us who are journalists and academics have no understanding of these issues – one, because as journalists, we are often only in these big cities, and as academics, even when we are in the Midwest, we are in these wealthy blue-bubble college towns isolated from reality and the problems of the states we are in – in 2016, for me that was Ann Arbor, Michigan, when I was trying to point this out to editors in New York at one of the major dailies I usually write for, one of whom actually called me “nuts” for thinking Donald Trump would actually win anything, that’s how much NYC did not understand the Midwest - and now in 2024 in West Lafayette, Indiana, even if decidedly less blue a place. I think in the prelude to the elections, what are we not understanding about how much destructive economic policies that leave people behind are impacting the turmoil we are in, even if for many of us, the economy does seem very rosy under Biden? Let me know your thoughts on this, with November soon upon us.

https://lnkd.in/ecCHAWrv This would NEVER happen in France and the UK. Because all European collecting societies are state institutions, factually speaking, although they pretend otherwise. I much prefer the US system because competing collecting societies mean that they MUST be efficient

New Post: Why More Songs Are Succeeding at More Radio Formats In the Streaming Era - https://lnkd.in/gXfYp-cA - Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” has been inescapable this year: Only two songs, Benson Boone‘s “Beautiful Things” and Zach Bryan‘s “I Remember Everything,” amassed more on-demand audio streams in the first six months of 2024 in the U.S., according to Luminate. Swims’ breakout single has also been embraced by five different radio formats, ranging from pop to Adult R&B to mainstream R&B/hip-hop.  Related Inside the Ambitious Radio Strategy That Tipped Shaboozey’s ‘A Bar Song’ Into the… 07/25/2024 Historically, it’s not unusual for the biggest hits to perform well at multiple radio formats. Before the streaming era, in fact, this was basically a prerequisite to becoming a runaway smash. But while songs often used to move gradually from one format to the next, conquering fresh territory on the airwaves over a period of many months, this process can now happen all at once. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” made history by hitting the top 10 in four formats simultaneously, becoming the first song to reach that mark on Billboard‘s Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, Rhythmic Airplay and Country Airplay charts. Beyoncé, who helped introduce Shaboozey to a wide audience by featuring him on her Cowboy Carter album, was also top 15 in four formats for a week in April. As labels push fewer songs to radio, veteran programmers believe it’s likely that more hit singles will be played heavily by multiple formats simultaneously. This potentially makes individual formats less exclusive, but it also allows radio to flex what remains of its mass-market power in an era dominated by streaming.  “Right now, we’re pretty desperate for hits that everyone agrees on,” says Matt Johnson, program director for WPLW, a top 40 station in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Streaming has changed how people consume music, and they’re not as siloed as they were 10 or 15 years ago. So if it’s a quality record, they tend to have a wider footprint across multiple formats.” “When a song moves at the speed of TikTok, it’s almost like deliberately choosing to lose momentum by going to one format and then going to another two months later,” adds Sean Ross, author of the weekly Ross on Radio newsletter. Now, “It’s less about songs crossing from one format to another,” and more about songs “crossing from streaming to radio.” Before the streaming era, some superstars promoted different singles to different formats, wooing Top 40 stations with straight-ahead pop, for example, but courting R&B radio wit