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ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

Here’s What Facebook Won’t Let You Post | WIRED – pretty grim read

Now Is The Perfect Time For An RSS Renaissance | Neflabs – great read and a much needed request for a lean web

CIA agents in ‘about 30 countries’ tracked by technology, top official says – CNNPolitics – “Singapore’s been doing it for years,” she told CNN following her keynote speech on Sunday morning at the 2018 GEOINT Symposium, hosted by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Meyerriecks did not elaborate with further examples.

Chinese cult writer Chen Qiufan on pushing the boundaries of sci-fi | FT – good read with the obligatory name check of Liu Cixin (paywall)

g2g, brb, and what the loss of early MSN language means | Dazed – interesting change in consumer behaviour as time spent online creeps upwards with the move towards ubiquitous connectivity

P&G returns to YouTube but with a more selective mindset | Marketing Interactive – ultimately brands are powerless in the face of Google, Facebook and Amazon advertising if they insist on not running with a media neutral approach

China opposes all forms of protectionism, commerce minister says – says market with high levels of implicit and explicit protection

No, a keyboard app can’t ‘prevent tragedy from depression’ | Advertising | Campaign Asia – quite shocking claims

Google’s new video ad format doesn’t need YouTube | Digital | Campaign Asia – interesting move

AI in the UK white paper | House of Lords – (PDF)

Microsoft gives up artificial intelligence sales over ethical concerns – interesting positioning, it would be good to get an understanding on on what the board would define as a bad actor

After Sir Martin Sorrell: The Reckoning | LinkedIn – interesting analysis of the marketing sector, I disagree with the way that some of it hangs together

Gchat could have saved Google the trouble of launching yet another messaging service. | Slate – what this forgets is that GChat ended up having a lot of bots and spam accounts. For me it was worse than Skype or Yahoo! Messenger at the time. I could see business historians highlighting this as a lost opportunity in the story of Alphabet

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The current state of where 2.0

Interesting Churchill Club discussion on location based services. The key take out that I took from it was the slow pace of inside wireless based location services. I know vendors that have been at it for over a decade and companies like EADS and Ruckus Wireless. Yet, it still seems to be an area of relatively slow adoption (at least at the moment). Ultrasound or BlueTooth LE beacons seem to have only esoteric adoption.

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ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

Flickr Takes Another Sad Turn, Gets Bought by Something Called SmugMug | Gizmodo – thankful it hasn’t been shut down but pensive. That’s pretty much me done as an Oath customer then

Do Chinese Luxury Consumers Care About British Heritage? | Jing Daily – In the West, we buy into lifestyle brands—we like brands that can sell us everything. But the Chinese consumer likes to go to a specialist for each item. They like to buy their knitwear from one place and their shoes from another. They value quality and are willing to pay for it. – which is where premium streetwear gets in the door

CLOT Magazine | COLDCUT, a journey through cut and paste and audiovisual innovation – great overview of Coldcult’s creative efforts and an interview with them

Facebook – Bipedal voting | Radio Free Mobile – interesting analysis

EX-99.1 Amazon letter to shareholders – quite a scary document via our Matt

Agency Layoffs Or Agency Calibration? | Forrester Research – examine the characteristics of the players winning creative assignments for digital experiences. Tech consultancies like Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, IBMiX and PwC are successful with system integration and digital experiences. Their combination of data, strategy, implementation and creative is a potent offering for marketers. Yet, their ability to capture the essence of the brand is still developing. For agencies – large or small, public or independent – brand creativity is differentiating

A Renewed Vision For WPP | Forrester Research – I don’t think that a technology leader would get creative businesses and you’d end up with yet another ad tech business with the rest of the value withering away but interesting reading

The Battle for the Gayborhood Has Become A Passive-Aggressive Turf War – I was reading this and thinking about the way Canal Street in Manchester became invaded by hen parties from across the UK from the late 1990s onwards

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Five for Friday | 五日（星期五) | 금요일에 다섯 가지

Things that made my week:

Sir Martin Sorrell’s departure from WPP. I decided not to write a post on his retirement because there were more questions than answers. A couple of things saddened me:

  • His departure was assumed by some outsiders to be part of the #metoo movement. This seems to be a default setting for many now
  • Headlines like the Globe & Mail that talked about Sorrell’s departure as the end of the Mad Man era. You have journalists and the sub-editors that they work with having no understanding of the industry that they cover. Sir Martin was a major factor in the end of the Mad Man era; moving advertising from being the closest thing in business to art, to something that delivers a commercial value. One could argue that technology has moved the bar too far in terms of removing the craftsmanship all together, but that’s a discussion for another day about Google and Facebook rather than about WPP

More information on Sir Martin’s departure from WPP
Why WPP’s Cryptic Handling of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation Is the Wrong Move | AdWeek
WPP Claims It First Learned of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation From His Own Internal Memo on Saturday Night | AdWeek
With Martin Sorrell’s resignation at WPP, the Mad Men era truly seems over | Globe & Mail – (paywall)

Wetherspoons walking away from social media. Again the whys and wherefores of this seems to have as many questions as it does answers. As an outsider, their digital strategy and execution on social channels was patchy at best. It wasn’t something that Tim Martin was that committed to anyway. It probably won’t make that much difference to their business.

Whilst as a marketer I can point to high street brands to who do social really well (Paddy Power, Poundland or Tesco Mobile a number of years ago); there are a lot of mediocre brand accounts.  I can see the argument for going all-in, or not at all.

This week I have been listening to:

Tim Westwood recording of De La Soul freestyle throwback – never heard before! – YouTube – this was apparently done for the Westwood Rap Show sometime in the early 1990s.

This Sould Out tune seems to bridge the gap between disco and the late 1980s / early 1990s Italian house sound popular in the North of England.

Lastly, here’s one of them ads that never got approved by the client. Shinsegae Food is the food manufacturing arm of Samsung in Korea. Samsung is completely vertically integrated with these food products often sold in Samsung owned restaurants and Shinsegae department stores which can be paid for with a Samsung credit card. Mamee is a Malaysian manufacturer of instant noodles. The video is a satirical take on a usual Korean drama trope.

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ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

Director Tony Kaye happy to be working and out of ‘Hollywood jail’ | The Drum  – He says that a story arc doesn’t really matter in six seconds. “I think you can throw anything at it, as long as it’s quite clear what it’s for. If you’re working under 20 minutes, in my opinion, you don’t need any structure. You can be as fragmented or as crazy as you want.”

Hackers stole a casino’s database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank – Business Insider – “It’s probably one area where there’ll likely need to be regulation for minimum security standards because the market isn’t going to correct itself,” he said. “The problem is these devices still work. The fish tank or the CCTV camera still work.” – it’s Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in real life

An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It | New York magazine – this just scratches the surface, but is an interesting read

The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS | Engadget – given the challenges that ZTE faces. Jolla with Sailfish OS would be an ideal technology stack on their foreign handsets, particularly if they can do an English language version of the Yandex app store. That way they won’t have to localise all of their offerings as a replacement for Google Mobile Services (GMS) layer in Android