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By now Iamp8217m sure everyone reading this has seen the photo of the body of the little Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach At the time the photo appeared here comparisons in terms of probable effect on political and public opinion were drawn with the famous photo by Nick Ut of the 9year old Vietnamese child running down the road with napalm sticking to her naked bodyThe Aylan Kurdi photo in one or other variation appeared on the front pages of many UK newspapers It was incredibly impactful of course The photo was shown baldly powerfully What editorial there was there was very short and took little space The majority by far of the space was taken up by the photo Needless to say there were no commercial messages anywhere near itI wondered how the newspapers were going to deal with the story and the photo online So I checked amp8216The Independentamp8217 amp8211 one of the few papers here to carry the most graphic of the photosThe first thing I noticed was that the front page took between 1 and 2 minutes to load I should say that I live in central London within yards of a junction box and my broadband speed is pretty good My laptop where I did this experiment is one foot from my routerThe reason for the delay was easy to spot amp8211 numerous adtech suppliers processing my details and then loading imagesOnce the page loaded the photo was certainly there but surrounded by ads and promotional messages from the publisher Right under the photo was a video ad for Bulmers CiderA couple of months ago Felix Salmon wrote a piece in amp8216The Guardianamp8217 called amp8216Adtech is killing the online experienceamp8217Salmon quotes an Apple blogger called John Gruber who amp8220noted that a 537word text post on the website iMorecom weighed in at 14 megabytes Fourteen megabytes of text should correspond to about 7m words or about 10 times the combined length of the Old and New Testamentsamp8221Noone wants to wait for what seems like an age to receive messages they almost certainly donamp8217t want to receiveThe photo of Aylan got its message across in the extraordinarily powerful way that it did as a result of appearing isolated on a physical page without any distractionWhat the various digital channels did of course was give the photo legs It distributed it far faster far wider and far more effectively than any other methodThis combination of impact channel and distribution network is nothing new amp160One famous war photographer used to flypost images from photos he had taken and which had already appeared in his newspaper to ensure they were more widely seen and their impact more widely feltWe are in danger of losing the shades of grading within these distinctions Media forms are defined more and more by what are increasingly meaningless metrics connected to the distribution mechanism and less and less by their contextItamp8217s an easy sell too Any advertiser can understand that medium A has a billion more users than medium B Why bother to understand what the metric actually means let alone try to appreciate and put some kind of value on the power of medium A over medium BWeamp8217ve become an industry obsessed by numbers and nervous of creative thought in any sense And weamp8217re the poorer for itThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecom MyersBizNet Inc management or associated bloggers

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Brian Jacobs

Empowering Women in Media: Insights from Industry Leaders (Video) - By E.B. Moss

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