Kraft, the American food and confectionary business, have made an initial offer to buy Cadbury as it feels that the joining together of the two firms would be strategically perfect in its quest to take on Master Foods (Mars) and other big players in the market. If Kraft were to be successful with their bid for the confectionary and drinks business, they would have a global powerhouse with sales of over $31 billion annually.

The question is: how can you value a company like Cadbury? Kraft made an offer of just over £10 billion. However, with over a hundred years of trading, a global mega-brand and millions of loyal consumers, what figure can possibly be appropriate for such a business?

When we think of the dot com boom and the ludicrous numbers that were bandied about when people thought that web companies were the answer to a rich future, it seems bizarre that a company like Cadbury with such a long  history – and a proven track record of profitable success – would be valued at such a relatively low figure. When one considers the potential revenues of such a company over the next hundred years, £10bn seems somehow wrong. Especially when there are tech companies like Facebook and Twitter which both have perceived values far higher, but no clear revenue model for sustainable profit over the next year, let alone one hundred.

Cadbury is very close to the nation’s hearts. No one wants Cadbury to be sold to make a conglomerate organisation that will no doubt be looking to cut costs, and therefore jobs.

Cadbury have redirected all of their web properties to  thier investors site, where they have published a statement suggesting that they are not considering any offers at the moment and that they feel Kraft’s proposal massively undervalues the group. It now remains to be seen whether Cadbury will be more willing to consider an offer at a higher level.

There are now more and more online companies offering TV services over the internet. There is free video available everywhere online. Is it the case that people are soon going to tire of traditional TV viewing and turn to their laptops instead?

Not only is everthing readily available online, but once you have found what you want to watch, it is now possible to connect your laptop to the TV. This almost eliminates the need to have access to TV channels.

The TV companies have people’s ignorance in their favour at the moment. Most wouldn’t even know that it was possible to connect their laptop to their TV, and more importantly, even if they did they wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it. Similarly, very few people know of everything that the internet has to offer. Because the internet is very much diluted with rubbish, it is difficult to see the really good bits sometimes. If more people knew of what was available it could well be that the TV services we have available to us today would decrease very rapidly.

Sky+ and other similar products now mean that users never actually have to watch any adverts. So if the TV companies cannot get viewers for the adverts that they run throughout programming schedules in order to fund the making of those programmes, how can they exist? The BBC obviously has the license fee (although their budgeting hasn’t been shown to be prefect of late), but the other operators have no real way of making very much money without their adverts.

There is now a requirement for the TV companies to be really innovative, really quickly. Time is still on their side, but if they fail to connect with the viewing public the ramifications could be catastrophic for certain media businesses.

I intend to try and provide some interesting opinions and personal views on various marketing topics, as the subject is a big part of my life; both at work and as a personal interest.

Anyway, this is day one and I’m already too tired to keep writing so we shall see what this site looks like in six months I reckon. I wrote this on the 25th June 2009, by the way, so if you’re reading this as the first poston the 25th of December (which you probably wouldn’t be doing anyway) then I haven’t really done very well!