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Mooncakes + more things
Mooncakes

Mooncakes were a big part of my time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This year, mid-September marked mid-autumn festival across Asia or known as Chuseok in Korea. It is similar to harvest festivals that happen elsewhere in the world.

It is celebrated in Chinese communities with mooncakes. Mooncakes traditionally have been made of fat filled pastry cases and lids filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and a salted dried egg yolk.

Mooncakes are moulded and have auspicious messages or symbols embossed on the top, like the double happiness ideogram which also appears on new year decorations and at weddings.

In the past mooncakes have been used to make political statements in Hong Kong where they were embossed with messages against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019. This mirrored mooncake history, where concealed messages were alleged to have been used to ferment rebellion against Mongolian rule in China centuries ago.

China saw a halving of mooncakes sold this year, compared to last year. This is a mix of fast-moving events like the state of consumer spending and longer term factors including gifting culture and attitudes to health and fitness.

The economy

The consumer economy seems to be doing worse than industrial output. Youth unemployment is still an issue.

Gifting culture

China saw a crackdown on premium priced mooncakes as part of a government move against ‘excessive consumption‘ driven by societal excess and ‘money worship’. This overall movement has dampened luxury sales. The Chinese government stopped officials buying mooncakes a decade ago as part of a crackdown on corruption.

Some consumers just aren’t into them

They were as divisive as Christmas cake is in Irish and British households. Brands like Haagen-Daz and Starbucks have looked to reinvent mooncakes into something more palatable.

Health and fitness

Health and fitness has been steadily growing as a trend in China. A number of reasons have been at play including changing beauty standards. Chinese women are still going to favour slimness over muscle, but home workouts and running have been increasing in popularity. The fitness industry has been growing and the Chinese government has also tried to foster interest in winter sports. So there would be a good reason to avoid ruining all the hard work that you put in by eating mooncakes.

Business

Nike CEO John Donahoe to Step Down | BoF

Economics

Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs* by Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian and Christina Patterson – workers must take costly actions (“conflict”) to have nominal wages catch up with inflation, meaning there are welfare costs even if real wages do not fall as inflation rises. We study a menu-cost style model, where workers choose whether to engage in conflict with employers to secure a wage increase. We show that, following a rise in inflation, wage catchup resulting from more frequent conflict does not raise welfare. Instead, the impact of inflation on worker welfare is determined by what we term “wage erosion”—how inflation would lower real wages if workers’ conflict decisions did not respond to inflation. As a result, measuring welfare using observed wage growth understates the costs of inflation. We conduct a survey showing that workers are willing to sacrifice 1.75% of their wages to avoid conflict. Calibrating the model to the survey data, the aggregate costs of inflation incorporating conflict more than double the costs of inflation via falling real wages alone

FMCG

Unilever ends up as a punching bag for Greenpeace and having their purpose blown up. As a campaign idea, the public celebration by the Dove brand team of the 20th anniversary of Dove’s real beauty positioning and creative left themselves open to this. Greenpeace used a skilful reframing in this creative.

The reason why the developing world seems to be disproportionately affected by plastic waste highlighted is for a number of reasons:
- A lot of and paper and plastic recycling is shipped abroad. It used to go to China, but they declined to accept waste to recycle from 2018 onwards. So this waste went to other markets.
- Developing markets have single portion packaging so that FMCG companies can distribute via neighbourhood shops and sell the product for the price a consumer can afford.
- Plastic is easier to colour, manufacture, package and transport than glass, metal or coated paper. Biodegradable or effective post-use supply chains are well behind where they should be. And even if you were open to recycling, there may be brand issues.
Innovation

Chinese scientists claim they can use Starlink satellites to detect stealth aircraft | BGR

Japan

AI will help Sony expand Japanese anime’s growing fan base | FT – but would also help competitors out-produce Sony. Expect a Chinese anime avalanche.

Marketing

Campbell’s drops the ‘soup’: what the evidence says about adapting brand fundamentals | WARC

Media

OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum | WIRED

Retail media frenzy muddies negotiations with brands, who agency execs say must spend or ‘suffer the consequences’ – Digiday and Retail media networks put the squeeze on brands | WARC – Spending on RMNs could be seen as part of normal partnership agreements between brands and retailers that have traditionally included marketing commitments. That shades into a grey area if retailers become focused primarily on growing their ad business, but those same retailers can’t expect brands to spend more unless they can demonstrate results. At the same time, brands have their wider media mix to consider.

In context
- The pairing of advertisers with consumers close to the point of purchase via rich, first-party data is leading to better ROI relative to other channels for some advertisers and is cited as a key driver of increasing retail media investment.
- Retail media is growing in double digits every year; it currently accounts for around 14% of global ad spend and is projected to account for 22.7% of online advertising by 2026.
- Retail media is no longer a ‘medium’ in the conventional sense but is instead evolving into an infrastructure underpinning the entire digital advertising ecosystem.
Content Creators in the Adult Industry Want a Say in AI Rules | WIRED

Security

JLR’s letter: what Land Rover’s doing to stop your older car getting nicked | CAR Magazine – update on JLR’s security crisis

Software

A brief history of QuickTime – The Eclectic Light Company

Technology

NTT Data builds a mainframe cloud for Banks • The Register – mainframes are still amazing for large scale batch processing
September 25, 2024
AI two-step
The phrase AI two-step is something I first heard from my friend Antony Mayfield. He used it to talk about how companies were adopting the latest developments in AI for business processes. And then reduce headcount to reflect the newly AI derived tasks instead.

The AI two-step isn’t necessarily a new concept, companies like Pegasystems were using rules-based systems to take away the drudgery of back office work in banking and fund management for decades.

Further back, companies like Experian, through their access to CCS’ CardPac software provided a service for credit card issuers in the UK using rules-based credit scoring and applications approval. This ran on time-shared mainframe computing resources, which also provided Experian with a good source of ongoing credit worthiness data. All of which reduced the back office work and employees needed by the credit card company. MBNA used to make a virtue out of having every decision reviewed by real live credit analyst, who could overwrite a scoring decision if they saw a compelling reason to do so. (CCS became part of First Data and eventually part of Fiserv).

As these services were being rolled out, there was a corresponding cut in jobs.

Examples

Here are just a few examples of businesses adopting AI, some of which are prime examples of the AI two-step.

IBM

While IBM may no longer trumpeting its Watson AI service as loudly as it used to, AI methods are dispensing with the need to replace staff who leave the technology company.

Pfizer’s Charlie

One might think in the UK that Pfizer should have thought a bit more carefully about the name Charlie, but the aspiration behind the platform is interesting. Charlie was noted to be helping with content creation, fact checking and legal reviews. Research by Bain & Company have found that it isn’t just Pfizer in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector that are taking this approach. Some 40 percent of executives who were surveyed said that uses of generative AI were factored into their 2024 budgets.

Bain indicated uses across a wide range of business functions within pharma:
- IT programming code review
- Competitive intelligence
- Research and biomedical literature review
- Marketing copy
- Augmenting the selling process as a sales co-pilot and contact centre automation
Publicis

French listed marketing combine Publicis made a high profile adoption of machine learning and AI-based services back in 2017 under the moniker Marcel. Back then Marcel was being used for workflow type tasks and organisation of data. This year Publicis rebranded its approach to the less playful CoreAI, so far it has cut the use of freelance staff – which are usually essential for project delivery in ad agencies, rather than the usual AI two-step of lay-offs.

UPS

UPS adoption of AI techniques in everything from workflow to customer service allowed the logistics company to make the largest lay-offs in its 116-year history.

Clear analogues to the AI two-step?

Various commentators compare the AI two-step happening to the dot com boom of the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The comparison with the dot com boom is easy at first. You have businesses that have phenomenal share price growth, widespread interest and experimentation. Business sectors from advertising to Hollywood are concerned about massive disruption.

The examples I would think about would be factory automation and business process re-engineering. In factor automation, over decades companies used machines to negate the need for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. A friend of mine worked in Huddersfield in a textile mill. He was one of just a couple of people who worked a shift. None of them were weavers, they were engineers and an IT admin who maintained the lines of machines turning out high-end suiting fabric that was mostly sold to Japanese clothing manufacturers. This came very close to being a ‘lights out production line‘ where the product is handmade by robots as they used to say in the old Fiat car advertisements.

Weavers and machine operators were replaced by a lot fewer, but more expensive roles.

Business process re-engineering was driven by enterprises implementing enterprise software to drive efficiencies and automate workflows. This was a lucrative time for consultancies who were brought in to shape a company’s workforce and processes to fit a software company’s pre-defined template for that industry. This was usually based on average industry standards. Software giant SAP have been building and refining these templates for the best part of 50 years, each industry template draws on individual units that might cover a business function like HR, finance or asset management.

A bit of software customisation was needed to fit a given business, and it might have to interface with third party products to handle market complexities such as different tax regimes.

The consultancy teams also laid-off employees that didn’t fit the framework. That’s what business process re-engineering actually meant.

Automation was responsible for putting up to 47% of American jobs at risk. However other research indicates that new forms of skilled or professional jobs are being created. One of the big problems with this data is that they are speculative models. More positive takes from businesses fuelling automation like McKinsey and Company versus more critical predictions from government think tanks and academics.

Factory automation and business process engineering are both similar to the use of AI in business, in that they are primarily helping mature businesses maintain their position and drive efficiency. The dot com boom on the other hand was much more disruptive and spawning more upstart businesses – some of which were very successful and leaving mature businesses struggling to cope. From financial services to media – pre-internet businesses are still struggling to cope with the innovation and disruption that begat the dot com boom.

Optimists versus pessimists

The optimists highlight a number of nuances that they think mediates the impact of automation and machine learning over time.

Tasks over jobs.

It’s tasks rather than whole jobs are being lost. Yet if you look at the data that Scott Galloway shared in his newsletter and the speedy ‘these job losses aren’t down to AI denials’ this optimistic assumption is pure fiction. The jobs being lost are the second part of the AI two-step.

Creative destruction.

Jobs are being created too and it’s often about ‘skill shifts’ rather than ‘job shifts’. While there are redundancies being made, there is a requirement (at the moment) for people skilled in writing ‘prompts’ to get the most out of the AI models created.

Overconfidence.

Overconfidence in technology and what it can do. An extension of this is a belief in the perfectibility of technology. A classic example of this is Air Canada’s recently aborted use of an AI-powered customer service chatbot. The airline quietly pulled its chatbot offline after being found legally liable for bad advice given by the customer service bot to a customer.

Moffatt booked airfares and retrospectively submitted an application for a refund to the reduced bereavement fare after travelling. Air Canada denied the request. Moffatt challenged that decision, saying he was owed the refund because he had relied on the information provided to him by the chatbot on Air Canada’s website. Air Canada admitted that the information provided by the chatbot was “misleading”, but it contested Moffatt’s right to a refund, highlighting that he had been provided with the correct information via the link the chatbot shared in its message.

The Civil Resolution Tribunal considered whether Air Canda was liable for negligent misrepresentation, which arises under Canadian law when a seller does not exercise reasonable care to ensure its representations are accurate and not misleading. Moffatt was required to show that Air Canada owed him a duty of care, that its representation was untrue, inaccurate or misleading, that Air Canada made the representation negligently, that he reasonably relied on it, and that that reliance resulted in damages. The court held that Moffatt met those requirements.

The Civil Resolution Tribunal noted that Air Canada had argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants or representatives, including a chatbot, but had not explained the basis for that suggestion. The Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected as a “remarkable submission” Air Canada’s suggestion that the chatbot was a separate legal entity that was responsible for its own actions.
Air Canada chatbot case highlights AI liability risks by Meghan Higgins, Pinsent Masons

Demographic change.

Demographics – the idea that aging countries from the west to China, Japan and Korea have skills deficits due to population decline. Automation is one of the coping mechanisms alongside globalisation and migration that have been suggested solutions. The Chinese are also looking at building factories in countries like Ethiopia, who have a young and growing population. Automation makes sense where migration would adversely affect social cohesion and the cost of globalisation would be more expensive than automation technologies. Workers in the global south are dependent on being cheaper than machines, rather like the American legend of John Henry versus the steam engine.

Companies like Automata have been looking to help businesses automate repetitive low skilled work, such as sandwich making in food service factories or low volume manufacturing tasks.

The state of automation in different roles is running along at different rates of progress. While John Deere have managed to make the most of arable farmland through the use of telematics and GPS guidance of tractors, automating farming for tasks like harvesting is proving more difficult. This is exasperated in the UK at least by the challenge of getting sustained v enture capital for hardware. Technology automation in other sectors such as construction and healthcare continues to move at a slow pace.

In an area like consumer electronics we have seen benefits and declines in automation. Benefits in the way a company like Apple can manage a sophisticated global supply chain workflow via automated software. Apple has also pioneered the use of robotics in dismantling its more modern smartphones when they are brought in to be recycled.

The declining area has been one of design choice. Prior to the smartphone and broadband internet, companies like Panasonic designed circuit boards that were less dense with components. The reason for this was to facilitate automated board manufacture through the use of ‘pick and place’.

Nokia used similar techniques for its cellphones and smartphones until the business was disrupted. Apple iPhones needed much more manual assembly because of the tightly packed components in their phones. Young women were valued for their small hands and manual dexterity leading to concerns about worker conditions.

More work to be done.

Creation of new jobs seems to be a matter of faith. IT in businesses drove an increased amount of management, the move online drove a need for webmasters, web designers and online marketers. There is an assumption that over time AI will have a similar effect, beyond people who can write prompts.

Limiting factors

Technology

While GPT based models have surprised both in terms of what they can do and fail to do, there is a belief amongst experts that:

Data sets will only get you so far. There is no clear path to a new technique, or what older techniques would need to be combined with GPT-based systems. Of the data sets out there, a significant minority could be filled with ‘poison’ data like nightshade.

That there isn’t enough data to train models in a lot of cases and synthetic data is often used instead. Others believe that this will corrupt and stunt future AI models rather than help them.

Resources

AI systems like crypto mining consume a lot of energy and require a lot of water for cooling which is already straining data centres and infrastructure. All of which will impact corporates ESG profile and larger investor relations health. You could have an amazing AI model, but if you have as bad an ESG rating as Exxon you willl struggle to raise funds.

More information

Corporate Ozempic | No mercy / no malice

No, Robots Aren’t Destroying Half of All Jobs | London School of Economics (LSE)

Antony Mayfield – Antonym newsletter

AI feedback loop will spell death for future generative models | TechSpot

Mixtral 8x7B: Quality, Performance & Price Analysis | Artificial Analysis

AI-poisoning tool Nightshade now available for artists to use | VentureBeat

AI sucks at telling jokes — but it’s great at analyzing them | The Next Web

At WEF in Davos, Sam Altman and Will.i.am differ on AI | Quartz
March 26, 2024
Brand clichés

Brand clichés have been in the background of my career in agencies, all the way through. I am sure that brand clichés will continue long after my career is over.

I started off writing copy for technology clients. Short pithy marketing copy and longer thought leadership pieces, opinion editorials and white papers.

Back when I first started working on technology, media and telecoms brands we had a raft of clichés. These brand clichés were in the product and vendor descriptors.

Broken technology marketing

These weren’t the most sophisticated brand marketers. Marketing was sales support. There maybe some brand equity at the corporate brand level. But that was often down to user passion, rather than skilful brand marketing. You can still see that mindset at work in ingredient brands like AMD, Broadcom, Intel, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Oracle or SAP.

Created using Dall-E

Part of this was down to history, marketers were often engineers who had been promoted out of pre-sales consulting. Their corporate and product communications was often run by people who were ‘vested’ having worked early on in the companies life in an admin role. A personal assistant or an office manager, probably with a liberal arts degree from a university or community college.

The modern iteration of this dearth of marketing experience is the broken adtech space and a legion of growth hacker profiles on LinkedIn. Once you understand this broad brush picture of the technology sector the brand clichés start to make sense.

Technology brand clichés

A leading… – we compete in the following market for sector, but there isn’t anything to separate us from our peers. High fives happen in the office if we end up in the right part of the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports.

Best – Someone somewhere said that they thought we were better than our competitors based on their particular view at that time. We’ve paid an analyst firm a large amount of money for digital reprints where they said it. We will give you this as PDF if you give us all of your personal information and opt-in to being in constant contact with our marketing automation application.

Best-of-breed – we cobble together bits of technology from a number of sources, all of which are good. We usually have competitors who are vertically integrated and do everything reasonably competently in-house. It tells you more about market dynamics than it does about benefits. See ‘end-to-end’ used by vertically integrated businesses.

… compatible – usually a hygiene factor in areas were there are clear open standards like email and web browsing. It used to be that back-in-the-day a peripheral that was Mac compatible would cost double the price of PC compatible products. USB was a major change in this. Where there aren’t open standards, then beware of ‘lock-in’ where you get bled dry by vendors, rather like the Mac users of old. A second aspect of compatability is where vendors built super-standards on top of the ‘open standards’. Adding additional features over the top, if they can get their client to adopt them it can increase lock-in without having to go to the hassle of creating a completely bespoke standard. For example, POP and IMAP email doesn’t support being able to delete an email after you’ve sent it, unlike sending email from and to a Microsoft Exchange email server.

Cutting edge – will be obsolete, but not just yet.

Disruptive – we have an incumbent competitor and we hope you’ll change for the sake of change.

Enabler – we provide part of what you need, but we know that the majority of IT projects fail to reach the objectives that businesses have in mind. A classic example of this truth would be the NPfIT (national programme for IT) done by the NHS, Post Office Horizon project or most implementations from the likes of Autonomy to Adobe Workfront.

End-to-end – usually followed by solution or solutions provider. This was trying to make a virtue out of vertical integration of the corporate parent (think about the way HP used to do everything from servers to printer paper), in a market that was likely orientated towards horizontal integration (a classic example would be Windows running on an Intel or AMD processor, or Google Android running on a MediaTek or Qualcomm processor). The reality is that it’s barely a feature, let alone a benefit.

Fastest – the devil really is in the details of fastest. The measure of speed depends on what you want to measure. In technology real world speeds are difficult to capture and you can’t benchmark across systems. Way before Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal chip companies like Intel and Nvidia were routinely doing conceptually similar design tricks to recognise and optimise for benchmarking tests, often to the detriment of real-world use.

First – this would be then followed by a really arcane descriptor. For example ‘Product X is the first tree-based database structure in cloud services that supports MUMPS database language instructions aimed at industry 5.0 applications’.

Innovative – we spent money on design and putting things together. Appreciate it. Often used to support disruptive.

… ready – usually this is about a technology that might be in the news but is years away from the standards being developed being ready for commercialisation, or the standards may not even exist. In 2023, we saw several blockchain based companies talk about their technology being metaverse ready. You can read here about how far away and uncertain that statement is. The reality is often that this is pure hype.

Scaleable – it will work with more of our stuff. It might even work with other people’s products. If by any chance your business grows, we want to sell more stuff.

Solution – a mix of web hosting, other vendors products, our products and consulting time as a kludge to make things work. Think of every collaboration in streetwear and luxury fashion that was a dog’s dinner – this is exactly the same, but in IT.

The world’s leading… – this might be supported by either market share data for one quarter’s sales, or a number of analyst reports. Basically ‘a leading…’ but with a bit more confidence. Usually you will find that the brand has some visibility within their market sector and is likely considered. So when green tech company 1pointFive announced an agreement with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) – BCG was described as:

Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the world’s leading management consulting firms
1PointFive and Boston Consulting Group Announce Strategic Agreement for Direct Air Capture Carbon Removal Credits

Yes business people are likely to have heard about BCG, but that doesn’t mean that they would prefer to hire them over McKinsey, Teneo, Bain, Accenture etc.

Value-added – a synonym for expensive and complex.

Bland brand clichés

Now the key ones I see, tend to be throughout the brand book. A good proportion of the reason why these have become brand clichés is down to over-use. In a world where brands are the above average equivalent of the children in Lake Woebegon.

Authentic – we do what we say (most of the time). Unless it has implications for our bottom line. Often used interchangeably with principled and brand purpose. The latter two often look at higher order ambitions than the business.

Dedicated – more about the focus of the business than the quality of the product or services. Through to the 1980s in western countries, there were companies called conglomerates which were a mass of disparate businesses. Originally they may have started off as looking to integrate businesses into their offering. So if you sold hardware to businesses, you might want to provide software that those businesses would want. You might help them put it all together, which then meant you had a professional services business. All of this doesn’t come cheap, so you might add a finance business to help them spread the payments rather than an overly expensive bank loan. All of a sudden you are a conglomerate. Being a conglomerate makes it harder for you to focus on what you do well. Being dedicated means that in theory you have that focus.

Helpful – We do enough so that you will probably do business with us again.

Passionate – we behave in a professional manner. Basically they weren’t the guy in the coffee shop I went to on Saturday, where he let us wait in a queue to be served while he finished rolling out five cigarettes. He then asked ‘what do you want?’. He demonstrated authenticity, but not dedication or helpfulness.

Trusted – customers pay us for what we do. Some of them do this on a repeat basis.

It’s even been spoofed in ‘The Bland Book‘ (PDF).

That’s me for today, happy St Patrick’s Day to my fellow Hibernians out there.

March 17, 2024
SCART + more things

SCART

I had used SCART for a long time. The large parallel port plugs and stiff coaxial cables that looked as if they were limbs that had fallen of a cyberpunk twisted oak, were just part of the living room. Even if you hadn’t looked behind the TV cabinet, you maybe seen them as part of the flight cased TV and laser disc combo back when karaoke first took off as an activity in your local pub. Or the connection between a pub’s TV for Sky Sports and the set-top box held up high on the pub wall for punters to enjoy the game with their drink.

That was up until their replacement by HDMI cables, TOSLINK and ethernet cables in my home TV set-up over the past ten years. SCART was actually the name of the French radio and television makers association who developed the standard back in the mid-1970s. SCART came along as TVs were becoming more reliable and one started to see the decline of the TV rental market.

My parents first TV that they bought in the UK was a HMV-branded set with glowing vacuum tubes in the back despite a relatively modern looking TV case with push buttons similar to this one. SCART came along just a few years later.

A lot of the SCART features assumed that consumers would move to larger TVs with better displays and sound that would come to dominate the living room of European homes. And they were right, though through much of the 1980s many homes still had a 13″ colour portable TV.

SCART became compulsory for televisions sold in France from 1980 onwards. The standard was sufficiently robust and scalable for it to be used in transmitting 1080p high definition video as HDMI came to prominence. France eventually revoked their compulsory adoption of SCART in 2015.

Things that we take as standard on HDMI like using the VCR, set-top box or disc player to turn on the TV, were also standard on SCART from the late 1970s. You could daisy chain equipment together, which was important for people who were early adopters of satellite receivers, cable TV boxes and laser disc players.

SCART came at a time when globalisation moved the gravity of consumer electronics further east. First to Japan, then Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and eventually China. Brands like Philips, Grundig, Nokia, Nordmende, Thomson and Ferguson were swept to the side by likes of Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, LG and Samsung.

The SCART socket and plug were clever designs. You could only put them in the right way around and for something with 21 pins in they were not only robust but easy to plug and plug out again. Though once you had a SCART connection set up, you left it well alone.

China

Over 75% of foreign money invested into Chinese stocks in 2023 has left | FT

Nvidia investors weigh risks from US’s China chip rules ahead of earnings | FT

China’s property crisis is stirring protests across the country – Nikkei Asia – Around 50 to 70 demonstrations are now occurring monthly, though August saw about 100 worker-led protests, three times as many as the same month a year earlier. Since June 2022, demonstrations have occurred in 276 cities nationwide. The protests have been somewhat concentrated in wealthier cities, particularly Shenzhen, Xi’an and Zhengzhou, and together have involved tens of thousands of people.

Consumer behaviour

Inside the Cabbage Patch Kids frenzy and Black Friday riots of 1983 | Fast Company

Gen Z Subcultures | Horizon Catalyst

Culture

How Liverpool’s legendary Club 051 was brought back from the brink of demolition – Features – Mixmag – “The nightclub in itself is a thing of the past,” he continues. “Most of the stuff people class as nightclubs now are bars or bar-restaraunts that have DJs playing in there and it’s booze culture. There is industrial clubs, especially in London – but in Liverpool, there isn’t really any.” It’s difficult to disagree with Lee, being in this space with its pillars and it’s expansive-yet-intimate atmosphere feels markedly different to being in the kind of modern venues that tend to be of a similar capacity in the UK — converted warehouses and industrial spaces, with a routine approach of sticking decks and the end of the room alongside the soundsystem and a bar at the back

Design

Language Log » Eddie Bauer – young people either can’t read or don’t want cursive fonts according to this Eddie Bauer rebrand

Finance

Orange introduces its super-app, Max it, to simplify everyday life for people in Africa and the Middle East – Newsroom Orange Groupe

Binance chief Changpeng Zhao resigns after US guilty plea | FT

Gadgets

First camera that uses C2PA to assure the fidelity of the images taken: Leica M11-P | Leica Camera AG more here: ongoing by Tim Bray · On C2PA

Health

As Hong Kong’s elderly face loneliness epidemic, carers hope dogs and disco will keep post-Covid isolation at bay – Hong Kong Free Press HKFP

Men May Die Quicker, but Women Don’t Have to Get Sicker | Muse by Clio – great content on better health for women. The reality is that men DO die quicker and a good deal of it doesn’t need to happen either – Men, Health, Life Expectancy, and Healthy Changes | Lifespan

Novo rations Ozempic starter kits amid surge in use for weight loss | Reuters

Hong Kong

Plight of workless Hongkongers in the UK reveals a skills mismatch | FT

Luxury

Quiet fashion sweeps China as economy cools | Jing Daily

Maison Margiela just dropped a hot haute couture flip phone | Dazed – harking back to the early 2000s when Prada had a co-branded phone with LG and Motorola did a special gold Dolce & Gabanna branded RAZR handset.

Case Study | Fashion’s New Rules For Sports Marketing | BoF – When the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games kick off in July 2024, the millions of global fans watching will see far more than just athletes. LVMH brands such as Louis Vuitton, Dior and Berluti will provide uniforms for select teams, while the medals will be the work of its high jewellery label, Chaumet. For the first time ever, the games will feature LVMH-sponsored athletes, including world-champion swimmer Léon Marchand, European champion in artistic gymnastics Mélanie de Jesus dos Santos and Olympic gold-medalist fencer Ezno Lefort. The “premium” partnership between LVMH and the Olympics marks the biggest indication to date of sport’s newfound importance to fashion. Until recently, sport was one of the remaining cultural arenas in which fashion, with a few exceptions, had failed to forge long-lasting and meaningful relationships. That has changed. Fashion brands are waking up to the commercial value of sports like basketball, football, tennis and Formula 1 as they look to be part of the booming sports-sponsorship market, which is projected to grow from $63.1 billion in 2021 to $109.1 billion by 2030, according to PwC.

What Antoine Arnault’s departure from Berluti could mean for LVMH | Vogue Business

Decoding China’s young luxury watch consumer | Vogue Business

Marketing

Revealed: how top PR firm uses ‘trust barometer’ to promote world’s autocrats | US news | The Guardian – the reality is that its more of a door-opener a la McKinsey rather than reputation washing Middle Eastern governments

Why the future of Planning is Opera, Only Fans, God, and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods

Modelling short-and long-term marketing effects in the consumer purchase journey – ScienceDirect – rituals can increase repeat purchase

Materials

Ford Walks Fine Line as It Builds Gigafactory—With CATL – EE Times and Ambarella CEO: ‘Chinese OEMs Are Copying the Tesla Model’ – EE Times

Media

Survey reveals surprising age trend among paid subscribers of electronic comics in Japan | SoraNews24 – an Internet survey conducted by Oricon ME between May 17 and June 7 of this year revealed. According to 10,438 e-comic reader respondents between the ages of 15-79 who read e-comics at least once per week, the age demographic that subscribed most frequently for these services, at 50.5 percent, was those in their 50s. Conversely, the age group that subscribed least frequently, at 6.2 percent, was those between 10 to 19 years old.

Can Hong Kong libraries win back readers? Public facilities try every trick in the book to lose ‘boring’ label amid rise of e-texts, pandemic habits | South China Morning Post – Libraries are struggling to woo visitors despite pulling out the stops with new offerings, including more open areas and digital services. Residents made 18 million visits to public libraries in first 10 months of year, well below 34.7 million recorded for whole of 2019 – censorship related to the National Security law and the departure of young middle class professionals won’t have helped either. More Hong Kong-related content here.

WPP Open X Opens Up On Coca-Cola Partnership, Which Is Fizzing Away Nicely After 2 Years | The Drum

DouYu CEO Chen Shaojie arrested in latest executive crackdown in China | CNN Business – DouYu is kind of similar to Twitch

Online

Singing from the CCP’s songsheet | Australian Strategic Policy Institute | ASPI

The FT on how life is getting increasingly difficult for the creator economy

Retailing

Amazon newsroom: Hyundai and Amazon Partner to Deliver Innovative Customer Experiences and Cloud Transformation

Security

“Here to stay” – Chinese state-affiliated hacking for strategic goals | Merics

Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians | The New Republic – “It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist,” said Eli Pinko, the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, in 2021. “I would like to see each of you face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the other country.’” Under this ethos, the Israeli economy quickly “abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” as one critic memorably quipped. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when the 19-year-old nation launched a preemptive strike on its neighbors—taking over the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—a new era in Israeli politics began

The Russian Way of War | Foreign Affairs – Russia has long been home to creative thinking in both conventional and nonconventional warfare. In the conventional arena, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet military thinkers generated novel ideas such as the concept of deep battle—breaking through enemy lines and creating a continuous moving front. These ideas shaped, and continue to shape, NATO thinking. In the unconventional space, Soviet influence was even more profound. From its founding days, Soviet leaders developed a body of ideas and practices about subversive conflict, including forging documents, co-opting agents abroad, and establishing disinformation campaigns. An early example was the groundbreaking Operation Trest. Carried out in the 1920s, Trest operatives established fictitious underground political cells in Europe in the 1920s to infiltrate anti-Bolshevik groups and lure their members back to the Soviet Union.

Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED – The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified”

Software

Microsoft’s Copilot AI Rises From the Ashes of Bob and Clippy

Doomer vs Accelerationist: the two tribes fighting for the future of AI | Dazed and The ‘AI doomers’ have lost this battle | FT on the outcome of OpenAI and its likely pivot towards a neo-liberal hell-for-leather charge to singularity. Whether they will get there is a bigger question, I have my doubts – Garden Pathing AI – by Erik J Larson – Colligo – LLMs are a technological dead end

How does Stable Diffusion work?

Style

Why have people looked the same for the last 20 years? | Dazed

Following the Silk Road, Les Benjamins readies for global expansion | Vogue Business

Technology

How Micro-AUVs Are Revolutionizing Ocean Exploration – EE Times

Wireless

Consumer Cellular’s Iris Flip isn’t just your grandma’s dumb phone | Fast Company

January 6, 2024
Chinese bank risk+ more things
Chinese bank risk

A story caught my eye in Hong Kong’s English language establishment paper related to Chinese bank risk. Goldman Sachs issued a report on (maybe) five Chinese banks, changing their ratings to neutral and sell. Eastmoney.com is a subsidiary of government newspaper People’s Daily, came out to stoutly defend the banks against concern about Chinese bank risk.

Communist Party mouthpiece takes issue with Goldman Sachs report calling a ‘sell’ on some major Chinese bank stocks | South China Morning Post – I had a look at the article in question. From a Chinese bank risk aspect of things a number of things caught my eye:
- Ping An Bank and China Merchants Bank have the largest exposure to real estate, accounting for 8% and 6% of total assets which the report authors are flagging as a canary in the coal mine for Chinese bank risk
- CMB real estate loans accounted for 5.61% of about of total loans and advances
- Ping An Bank real estate-related business bearing credit risk totalled 322.093 billion yuan, also down from the end of the previous year, and if this is taken as the numerator and divided by its total assets of 5.456 trillion yuan, it yields a share of about 5.9% – interesting choice of wording
- Overall, the non-performing rate of the mainland real estate industry is still in a period of accelerated exposure in 2022, and the overall non-performing rate of listed banks for public real estate continues to rise to over 4.3%
- There was a reference to “Industrial Bank” that has “deteriorating assets and liabilities” – I think that this is Industrial and Commerce Bank of China better known as ICBC. ICBC is recognised as a systemically important bank
Systemically important bank means that Chinese bank risk becomes global economic risk. While it is state-owned (being one four original institutions that spun out of the Bank of China in 1979), it still exposes retail shareholders and bond holders around the world. Word on the grapevine is that a number of Goldman Sachs partners had long term holdings in ICBC for well over a decade, which explains the banks irrational exuberance for China AND means it would have been extremely hard for the analysts to name check ICBC in this kind of report. During the 2006 IPO, Goldman Sachs purchased a 5.75% stake for US$2.6 billion, this apparently was the largest sum Goldman Sachs has ever invested at the time.

ICBC. Foggy night. – QuantFoto released under a CC licence

Of course issuing this kind of report in China means that they can’t talk about associated Chinese bank risk. For instance:
- Property development company bonds which just a few months ago Goldman Sachs thought would deliver high returns partly down to Chinese government support in the sector.
- Local governments depend on property development for their main source of revenue and have issued a lot of debt which they may now find harder to pay off resulting in further Chinese bank risk. Given that this is more directly linked to government, it may get less scrutiny
- Finally China’s industrial and services economic growth seems to be an issue with youth unemployment running very high at 20%
Business

Scaling up or selling out: a German take on a corporate dilemma | Financial Times

China

The ‘Curse of 35’ in China: Job-hunters battle age discrimination — Radio Free Asia

Consumer behaviour

Meet the Psychedelic Boom’s First Responders | WIRED– this is likely to end very badly for some people. Having known p eople who had bad experiences growing up, I am leery of the trend towards psychedelics

Interesting research from IPSOS, it sounds like the Cold War all over again circa early 1970s through to the mid-1980s.

Economics

Did supply constraints tilt the Phillips Curve? – Bank Underground – trying to understand global supply chains

Trying to get reliable economic data on China as the government data tends to ‘harmonised’. Part of the problem is the information that local governments provide the central government and part of it is central government choosing to ‘tell the best China story’.

Energy

Will Toyota’s solid-state battery win bring back the magic? | Financial Times

Clean public transport: Consortium pioneering hydrogen-fuelled buses in Hong Kong set to build city’s second refilling station | South China Morning Post

Expect China to increase solar panel dumping due to massive over-capacity. In addition these panels seem to be of low quality with a lower than expected panel life. Given the challenges that the Chinese are experiencing recycling the materials, they represent an environmental problem with a substantial risk of pollution.

Finance

Another nail in the coffin for private sector pension capitalism? | Financial Times

Don’t lose the exponential benefits of fractional share trading | Financial Times

Hong Kong

Hong Kong national security law: who are the 8 targeted with HK$1 million bounties? Calls for sanctions, links to 2019 protests among alleged offences | South China Morning Post

Hong Kong police arrest five for helping exiled activists — Radio Free Asia

Hong Kong government ‘spends millions’ to advance Beijing’s interests in Washington — Radio Free Asia

Innovation

Military briefing: Ukraine provides ideal ‘testing ground’ for western weaponry | Financial Times

Ireland

Changing demographics in Northern Ireland and unification

Korea

South Korea allows new bank entrants for first time in 30 years | Financial Times – echoes UK government criticism of banking sector

Marketing

Beyond belt-tightening: How marketing can drive resiliency during uncertain times | McKinsey – interesting read that’s about 50 percent right, probably too much of a bottom funnel focus and a more critical consideration of the marketing technology stack McKinsey are about 50 percent right. One thing that they haven’t done is leverage the marketing science research supported by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising on relative marketing spend and relative impact on market share. Also in-house agencies have serious problems due to cultural issues in clients.

Tech brand TCL hands BCW global comms duties | Marketing-Interactive – makes sense given BCW’s history taking Chinese brands abroad with Huawei and DJI

FTC Finalizes Revisions to the Endorsement Guides, Proposes New Rule for Consumer Reviews and Testimonials and Updates FTC Staff Guidance | Retail Trend Spotter

Materials

Toyota claims battery breakthrough in potential boost for electric cars | Automotive industry | The Guardian

Start-ups: smart clothes have been wearing experience for investors | Financial Times – smart fabrics didn’t win out over wearables

Why is China blocking graphite exports to Sweden? | The Economist – China was trying to cripple Sweden’s electric battery industry before it even got off the ground. This wasn’t about national security but economic domination

Stella McCartney-backed leather alternative Mylo halts production | Vogue Business – US startup Bolt Threads has called time on its mycelium-based leather alternative Mylo — backed by Stella McCartney, Kering and Adidas — after failing to secure the funding necessary to scale

Media

The Eagles Announce ‘Final’ Tour Dates – Variety – following the lifecycle of their customer base. The Eagles attitude to covers, remixes and sampling always sat badly with me which is why I never bought any of their music new. I am sure this tour will keep them wealthy for the rest of their lives however

TikTok for Business | Marketing & Advertising on TikTok

Nineteen minutes inside Sir Martin Sorrell’s head | Unmade – interesting comments on media planning, will this range of technology actually get programmatic right?

Irish Voice newspaper ceases print after 36 years | Irish Central – print edition finishes with the publication continuing online only as Irish Central

Daring Fireball: GQ Shits the Bed

Online

Who’s behind all those weird product ads on Twitter? | Financial Times – fascinating bit of investigative journalism that ends up with a Vietnam based company that fuels drop shipping

Daring Fireball: Threads

Retailing

Japan Airlines gives tourists chance to reduce baggage by renting clothes | Financial Times – this could impact Japanese companies like Uniqlo tourist sales.

Interesting to see the reasons why US retailers have failed when looking to expand internationally. Target’s failure in Canada is fascinating.

Security

Russia deploys ‘Albatross’ made in Iran-backed drone factory | Financial Times

Daring Fireball: Le Monde: ‘France Set to Allow Police to Spy Through Phones’

Software

The environmentally conscious Fairphone 4 is finally coming to the US – The Verge – interesting focus on privacy within the software that Fairphone is using for the US market launch

Interesting YouTube clip about how open source software is being used to extend the lives of Nissan Leaf electric cars. It raises interesting points for consideration about the right to repair debates that have been happening in areas like agricultural machinery through to Apple smartphones.

The devil is in the details of the claims and the research with regards ChatGPT driven trading. TL;DR ChatGPT didn’t trade any better and ChatGPT 4 did worse than earlier versions, implying random chance rather than ability

Style

Highsnobiety to cut 10 percent of jobs in cost-cutting measures | Fashion United
July 8, 2023

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