Paul Ashby's Page

After a little thought, most people come up with a definition that is about transmitting and receiving information. A little more thought might produce the word exchange. This is more satisfactory, but still assumes that communication is about moving something about conveying, or sending, or delivering, some commodity called ‘information’.

In fact, the word has quite a different root meaning. It derives from the Latin communis, meaning ‘common’. or ‘shared’. It belongs to the famil… Continue

The Advertising, Marketing and Broadcast community currently reside in a tramline society, a society that has got used to its ruts and its blinkers and prefers its own ways, however dreary, to untrodden paths and new ways of looking at things.

An analogous story is of the Peruvian Indians who, seeing the sails of their Spanish invaders on the horizon simply put it down to a freak in the weather and went on about their business having no concept of sailing ships in their limited experi… Continue

Over the last decade a consensus has formed among researchers that the power of television commercials to affect sales range from the insignificant to the non-existent.

Some of the most acclaimed and memorable ads of all times have been pretty awful at doing what they were created for i.e. sell products.

However that is not the fault of the TV stations, and it is unfair that they should now be the subject of such soul searching.

The commercials sometime loo… Continue

Current conventional mass media are weak conductors of knowledge and comprehension. This is because of a number of factors, however the main reason is; they are non-interactive communications vehicles, in other words ‘conversations’ cannot take place.

Communication research shows that interaction raises a communication’s learning effectiveness.

The one problem facing interactive advertising is the fact that it has become a cliché in recent years, without any ve… Continue