The Advertising Standards Association (ASA) recently announced that they were going to consider investigating eight complaints made against a Marks & Spencer TV ad - the issue being that the combination of (fictional character!) Gene Hunt's comments linked to the appearance of an underwear model were offensive and demeaning to women. The Daily Mash produced quite a brilliant satirical take on this in its "M&S Ad Offensive to Everyone" article.

Ofcom lists the number of audience complaints, although it does not list complaints (excluding those that refer to fairness or privacy) where there were fewer than ten complainants, on their website. The BBC has its own complaints procedures and received a whopping fifteen thousand in September, although entirely separate issues on Nick Griffin and Terry Wogan made it an unusually high month.

All of this has led me to consider the question on when should one take complaints seriously? Is there a statistically significant number that might be considered representative of a significant number of members of the public? Ten complaints hardly seems to be statistically significant (although of course they could just be the visible manifestation of a wider group), but how many hundreds or thousands of people offended should we judge to be sufficient to allow a complaint to be taken seriously? One of the issues with any number-driven complaints procedure is that anyone who is sufficiently cranky, or any public group that is sufficiently organised can have a disproportionately high impact in terms of being taken seriously.

For all the people who get offended by particular language sexual images or religious views, there are usually equal numbers of other people who have no problems with them. However, those views generally tend not to be voiced - hard though it may be to believe, there are those of us who know how to use the remote to switch away from things that offend us. There are even those of us who as parents are prepared to make our own judgements about what we allow our children to watch, rather than relying on those of the Daily Mail. Mainly we don't spend our times complaining, because we have better things to do with our lives than get in a froth about what is on TV. If we don't find anything we want to watch, either because we are offended by language, violence or sex, or because X-Factor is on, then we can always find something to watch from our LoveFilm subscription, Sky+ box, iPlayer or YouTube. And even then if we can't find anything to watch, then we could listen to the radio, read a book, write a blog or maybe even talk to our families.

So basically, we don't have the complaints unit of each broadcaster or Ofcom on speed dial to register constant complaints, because we have choices, and we know how to exercise them. I started getting annoyed with AA Gill's restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times because he seemed to spend less and less time on actually reviewing a restaurant than prattling on about some inconsequential aspect of his journey to get there, or something "The Blonde" said. So now I just skipped the review. Sadly the AA Gill syndrome has extended to other feature writers and now Clarkson seems to forget that generally speaking, a motoring review should actually include some information about the car. But I didn't phone up News International to make a complaint, I just switched to the FT Weekend.

So here is my suggestion - instead of figuring out what is the right number of complaints to take seriously, or how do to counterbalance the sane people with the chronic whingers, why not just get rid of all complaints procedures that relate to offensive material? Bin the lot of them, and let the money currently spent on complaints procedures go back into programming, "offensive" or not. I can see a continued role for dealing with genuine complaints about factually incorrect content or impartiality issues, where an objective arbitration process could be applied. If a person is not capable of changing a channel if they get offended then they should not be taken seriously full stop. For the really seriously offensive stuff, like the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross scandal, the BBC Trust were perfectly capable of responding to the public without the need for a process, and indeed the broadcasters should be trusted to manage this process themselves, because as they surely know,more offended viewers will ultimately mean fewer of them.

What I want to do today is the first in what will no doubt be a random series of in-depth posts about some of the technologies, companies and products that we at Mediasmiths find interesting, and which we think are going to have a real impact on the media industry.

When we first started Mediasmiths, one of the values that we wanted the company to become known for was independence - freedom to help clients make the right technology choices, without feeling obligated to push them towards "partner" solutions. We've been quite successful at this, and have taken a number of clients now through our technology selection process leading to recommendations that have sometimes surprised both of us. We'll be talking about that approach no doubt, but I just wanted to set a context - things that we talk about on this blog are things that really interest us as individuals and as a company - any of our clients reading this should rest assured that we're not giving advance warning for what we're going to be trying to push down your throats..!

Media is not an industry that is known for being polite or even civil to the Tories at times, but Jeremy Hunt made a strong showing at The Media Festival in Manchester last week. This may be as much to do with the rather sensible line that he has been taking, as the lack of any substantive vision or policy from the current government - contrast the innovative, short and sharp-thinking paper on local media companies that Roger Parry produced for Mr Hunt with Lord Carter's stale, turgid and rather lengthy Digital Britain report - very much a product of Labour's over-regulatory approach.

Mr Hunt started with an observation that is highly apparent to those of us who work in technology, but not apparently by media policy makers, namely that the media industry is the technology industry. Whereas Ofcom in the past has wrangled with the issues of new technology platforms and how to extend media regulation, Mr Hunt's point is the opposite - extend the regulatory approaches in the technology industry into media, not the other way around. The implication is that media regulation should be light touch and reward innovation, which is not characteristic of the current regulator (particularly if you are BSkyB). This has got to be good news for the industry, as it means greater freedom to operate, with commercially mind people making decisions based on consumer behaviour.

Mediasmiths are sponsoring The Media Festival in Manchester this week.  The Media Festival is new, this is only its second year, and that freshness is one of the key reasons why we have chosen to support it.  The Media Festival captures two trends that we see emerging in media: the first is the greater emphasis on creative communities working outside of London, and the second is the need for a better understanding of creative production and changing technology.

There has always been a vibrant media scene outside of London, but too often it has been seen as secondary to London or acting as  feeder channel to London based media organisations.  Despite the BBC's past efforts, and maybe because of ITV's, there remains a concentration of money, talent and decision making in London.  It is questionable whether this is a good thing . Some economists may argue that such a concentration of people produces a strong "network" effect , where the proximity encourages more collaboration and the generation of better ideas.  Given the isolation in which many media professionals exist, and social networking technology enabling more virtual communication, this does not sound compelling. More likely is that the people who hold the purse strings like their flats in London, and homes in Oxford a bit too much.