Search results for: “simon peel”

Subprime attention crisis
Subprime attention crisis is a short book, or a long essay depending on the way you want to look at it. It was written by Tim Hwang.

About Tim Hwang

Hwang is a lawyer working for email newsletter platform Substack. Prior to this he worked in a US think tank attached to Georgetown University: Center for Security and Emerging Technology and in public policy at Google focused on machine learning. So he brings a deep set of knowledge to writing Subprime attention crisis. One also has to bear in mind that his current employee Substack is based on the online media model moving from online advertising driven to subscription driven.

Timing is everything

I read this book over a couple of days at the beginning of this month. By this time, Meta and Alphabet has published quarterly results that were below what investors expected with falling sales. Add into the mix that the problems that Twitter and Snap have had (which are are bigger issues than just down to the dynamics of the online advertising market), all of which makes this book feel timely.

On the other hand, one could also argue that much of the crisis had already landed. Ad tech businesses like Rubicon Project have either gone under or merged with their peers creating a massive amount of consolidation. The latest wave of consolidation happened in 2020 – 2021.

Meta-specific issues

Even with Meta and Alphabet there are business specific issues. Meta has struggled to compete effectively with TikTok. The poisonous nature of debates on Facebook, together with an aging audience on the platform hasn’t helped. In fact it’s a wonder that the context collapse that the platform has suffered from for at least the past six years hadn’t dragged it down yet. WhatsApp has helped enrich Facebook data and provided a channel for business services. At the time Facebook bought the business partly because Zuckerberg needed a brain trust for the future. The brain trust is gone and Zuckerberg’s dive into the Metaverse looks very similar to Apple’s peak John Sculley moment with the Knowledge Navigator concept. You can see glimpses of the Knowledge Navigator in the smartphone, the iPad, the now abandoned WikiReader product or the use of contextual information and national language processing like Siri. Apple didn’t waste the kind of money that Meta has spent chasing an illusory vision of the future.

Alphabet-specific issues

I was surprised that Alphabet growth had lasted this long based on the following considerations:

With mobile, Google also pivoted a different type of search from product search to where is my nearest coffee shop with free wifi and has managed to sell search ads against them. This meant that Amazon and eBay managed to capture a lot of product searches, with consumers only hitting up Google afterwards and Amazon’s advertising has been eating Google’s lunch. Secondly a lot of the high street and neighbourhood shops have been eaten alive by food delivery services and this was then exasperated by the COVID which has changed at least some people’s consumer behaviour

Historically, Google has been too focused on looking for multi-billion dollar opportunities which haven’t panned out and closed down smaller services that were making money and bringing in attention. In essence, over the years they have thought Google Reader, the Google Search Appliance, Google Health, Boston Dynamics and several other projects were the big payday. They weren’t, but they were respectable business opportunities, just too small for Google to want to pursue. In its wake Google had destroyed entire sectors, or turned them into cottage industries such as enterprise search and knowledge management, RSS newsreaders autonomous robots

Web search in general has become less effective at doing deep research for consumer and B2B needs – no more support for boolean operators is a case in point. This has had some tech forward netizens wondering if the likes of Reddit fulfils the vision of knowledge search in place of Google and Alphabet being concerned about young people using TikTok as their local search box instead

“something like almost 40% of young people when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.”
Google internal report quoted by Business Insider

YouTube seems to struggle getting brand building advertising dollars in the face of TikTok, Instagram and this explains why you saw a decline in sales over 2 percent. Instead you see a lot of D2C product ads a la day trading and drop shipping courses advertised. Part of this might be down to the product. YouTube has been screwing over creators and creators have made it clear that they’re not happy. You don’t need to go to YouTube if you get the directors cut of your favourite creators content on Patreon or Curiosity Stream. Censorship of political analysis content around China or Ukraine seems to be particularly bad.

Back to Subprime attention crisis

Hwang in Subprime attention crisis points out many of the things that agency employees and owners have known for years:
- Online advertising effectiveness has declined compared to its performance 25 years ago
- Audiences don’t see a lot of the ads that are displayed. Different reports will give you different numbers on this
- Online advertising is destroying the very media industry that its content is shown on
- Online advertising fraud is a big problem
- Online advertising business practices are an even bigger problem with up to 70 percent of of online programmatic advertising spend going to advertising technology intermediaries such as The Rubicon Project (now Magnite) and Xaxis
- This has allowed businesses like Procter & Gamble and adidas to reduce advertising spend at no loss in effectiveness. In the case of P&G Subprime attention crisis highlights how they cut $200 million in online advertising spend, moved that spend on to offline media like radio and print AND managed to increase their reach by 10 percent.
More on adidas via its inhouse head of media Simon Peel

One of the most notable things for me was being introduced to the work of Australian based academic Nico Neumann who has done some great research on online advertising effectiveness related areas including Frontiers: How Effective Is Third-Party Consumer Profiling? Evidence from Field Studies.

So nothing surprising for insiders, but….

Hwang marshals his facts well. Which is what you would expect from a lawyer. He uses analogous examples from the US financial services sector including the 2008 financial crisis. The book itself is 141 pages in length and there is a substantial section detailing his sources. Subprime attention crisis is based exclusively on desk research.

More on the book here.
November 7, 2022
SITA + more things

SITA

SITA | SITA statement about security incident – this gave limited and basic information – specifically your name, membership number and tier, seating preferences and a code corresponding to your meal preferences. – according to Cathay Pacific. It looks like this attack on SITA was more about tracking the travel of persons of interest around the world; so more likely to be a state actor rather than commercial motives. China is known to use this kind of data to track and harass its enemies

Business

If you read nothing else here, read this piece of investigative journalism. It reads like something out of a post-Smiley John LeCarre novel – British American Tobacco Fights Dirty In West Africa – OCCRP

Like China, The West Needs National Champions

China

Jack Ma personifies the contradiction of China’s ideology | Financial Times – interesting end to the article, with a question about whether Goldman Sachs, BlackRock et al will be able to convincingly align themselves “politically, intellectually and emotionally” with Xi Jingping? How will the west regard Communist party cells in their management decision structures?

China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows – I would imagine that this is a bigger problem for China than Russia. I think will continue to be a big issue for China and would be mirrored across other western countries across Europe. Worth reading alongside Xi Jinping turned me into a China hawk – POLITICO

The Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’ – Sixth Tone – interesting read on ‘peoples palace’ public spaces

Luxury

Kering bets on first-mover advantage with resale | Vogue Business – pretty much all the major houses now have a resale brand of sorts

H. MOSER & CIE SWISS ALP WATCH FINAL UPGRADE | Watches News – I do like the sense of humour in the design

LOEWE | The Loewe Show Has Been Cancelled – Loewe’s approach to marketing its spring and summer collection aped a newspaper to create a cookbook.

Website screenshot

Marketing

An Oral History of Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby Super Bowl Ad – this feels like the creative was done before the strategy which sounds completely out of whack

Airbnb slashes spend in permanent shift from performance marketing to brand | Campaign – makes sense since AirBnB is ‘verging’ as Faris Yakob would say. And here comes the why: Why you need a strong brand to win in e-commerce: Adidas’ Simon Peel | WARC. More from Simon Peel here.

Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – I was reading this by Nigel Scott. I suspect that he’ll be right. My main concern as a marketer is the piss-poor job that the martech stack players do, supporting brand building. The fundamental problem is they only view things from a performance marketing perspective because engineers, programme managers and even the company CMOs don’t get brand. These are the people that brought us growth hacking. Their model is a secondhand car lot salesman.

Shoppertainment & Livestreaming Gain Steam in Europe’s E-Commerce | Alizila – QVC on your mobile…..

Russia

Why the Europeans Don’t Have a Russia Policy – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – the belief held by the older generation of German Social Democrats—and Christian Democrats—that Russia should not be isolated. This was the thinking behind Germany’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, which was begun by the Social Democrats in the late 1960s. That policy was based not only on the idea of dialogue with Russia but also on the notion of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through

Technology

Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Countdown | The Science Behind the Sound | Qualcomm – I think that this sits between two stools. It isn’t hi-fi and it won’t be cheap.

Wave Goodbye, Hello MIPS as Chapter 11 Resolved | EE Times – still has a strategic focus on the RISC-based processor architectures. They are looking to support a mix of legacy MIPS technology and a new “standards-based 8th generation architecture,” based on the open source RISC-V processor standard

Can WhatsApp stop misinformation without compromising encryption? — Quartz

Don’t know how to train your dog? This device will do it for you – CNET

Tools

I have been playing with this for a few days now and could definitely see a use for it – flowchart.fun

March 7, 2021
Frys Electronics + more things

The disappearing history of the Bay Area’s themed Frys Electronics stores | SF Gate – there couldn’t have been hardware startups without Frys electronics stores. As Frys goes, so does Silicon Valley and I don’t think that loss of hardware hacking is a good thing. Frys is odd and idiosyncratic, but that’s part of the charm in it. Silicon Valley is now the home of media companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) rather than technology companies which seems like the end state outlined by Judy Estrin in her book Closing The Innovation Gap

Court Rules Deliveroo Used ‘Discriminatory’ Algorithm – according to the ordinance, if a rider failed to cancel a shift pre-booked through the app at least 24 hours before its start, their “reliability index” would be negatively affected. Since riders deemed more reliable by the algorithm were first to be offered shifts in busier timeblocks, this effectively meant that riders who can’t make their shifts—even if it’s because of a serious emergency or illness—would have fewer job opportunities in the future.According to the court, the algorithm’s failure to take into account the reasons behind a cancellation amounts to discrimation and unjustly penalizes riders with legally legitimate reasons for not working. Deliveroo was ordered to pay €50,000 (~$61,400) to the suing parties.

Unilever taps seaweed to create self-cleaning surfaces | Financial Times

Schaudenfreude Alert: Bezos-Buffet-Dimon Health Care Industry Disruptor Haven Makes Faceplant, Announces Closure | naked capitalism – The press is now curiously awash with experts commenting on the Haven closure, saying they knew it would never work. Although some may be able to produce press clips to substantiate their claims, health care industry investors and incumbents were freaked out enough by the prospect of squillionaires swooping in to squeeze their margins that health care company stock prices fell sharply and broadly upon the announcement. And remember, this was 2018, close to Peak Unicorn. Even if the three lords of lucre couldn’t necessarily come up with a health care “innovation” concept that made money, Uber and Lyft had demonstrated that was no obstacle to getting oodles of funding. The play could wind up being like the building of the railroads, where the profit in the enterprise wasn’t in moving stock but selling shares. And only now are tech writers finally admitting that self-driving cars are not only not coming any time soon, but when they do, they will likely have narrow uses, including requiring dedicated lanes

‘We need a real policy for China’: Germany ponders post-Merkel shift | Financial Times – Ms Merkel personifies old ideals of western rapprochement with China — the principle that ever deepening economic ties with the west would encourage political change in Beijing, and a shift to liberalism and western values. “Wandel durch Handel” — change through trade — was for years a key precept of German policy – and this was written before the Hong Kong 53 and China blocking WHO yet again. And more here Greens accuse Merkel of forcing pact with China | The Times

Streaming Tutorial – or how Kpop fans can do a better job of hacking the YouTube algorithm

194: Historic Ad Fraud at Uber with Kevin Frisch – Marketing Today with Alan B. Hart – if you’ve watched this presentation by Frisch’s peer (Simon Peel) at adidas, you’ll start to notice a pattern

Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian – we make it easy to migrate and difficult to leave. If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don’t want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data

Forget actors, footballers are the new fashion icons | Vogue Business – a lot of this is down to Roc Nation UK

‘Peak hype’: why the driverless car revolution has stalled | Technology | The Guardian – is this the sign of a wider AI winter?

January 7, 2021
Carhartt Labor Day + more things
Carhartt Labor Day colouring book – the American workwear brand put together a great children’s colouring book for labor day weekend. It allows parents to explain what they do for their kids and provides an activity for a socially isolated public holiday. You can download your Carhartt Labor Day colouring book here.

Vox Media have done a great video on rotoscoping and animation. Rotoscoping as a technique allowed animation to have life-like motion, but the creativity of animation.

I was introduced to rotoscoping with the Ralph Bakshi Lord of The Rings animated movie. Peter Jackson’s live action version borrowed from this version shot for shot, but I find the animated version more enthralling because of Bakshi’s use of rotoscoping.

Video shot from an original 35mm trailer print

Simon Peel of Adidas’ now famous speech that recommended a healthy skepticism on short term performance marketing and the impact of longer term brand marketing. He realises digital is important, but lays out why marketers should ask why? Peel talked honestly about marketing effectiveness, marketing efficiency and misleading metrics. I had read the articles, but this is the first time that I’d seen his talk. More on marketing effectiveness here.

IPA Eff Week talk 2019 by Simon Peel of Adidas

Microsoft had been experimenting with sealed underwater data centres to see if they were possible and what the benefits were. Prior to the project starting there would be some predetermined benefits:
- Reduced energy costs as refrigeration wouldn’t be needed. (You could achieve a similar effect, if you buried the data centre deep enough)
- Reduced data centre costs. Internet hotels and server farms can cost a lot if built in cities with expensive real estate
But there were questions over corrosion, damage and reliability. Microsoft got around corrosion by filling a submerged data centre with a nitrogen atmosphere. They found that a data centre without human intervention had much less faults than a matching data centre on-shore.

Microsoft are now working on how the end of life process would work for an underwater data centre.

Microsoft’s Natick project on underwater data centres
September 18, 2020
Gartner Predicts 2020
Gartner’s ‘Predicts 2020’ report has started to get pick-up across the marketing media.

The reports top-line predictions of most interest to me in the report are:
- By 2022, 25% of marketing departments will have a dedicated behavioural scientist or ethnographer as part of their full-time staff
- By 2023, CMO budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third
- By 2025, 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon their efforts due to lack of ROI, the perils of customer data management or both, according to Gartner, Inc
Let’s break down these predictions one by one.

Behavioural scientists and ethnographers

It’s no surprise to us that marketing organisations will incorporate behavioural science expertise into their teams. At the height of its success Nokia famously employed Jan Chipchase as a leader of ethnographers focused on understanding the underlying trends in behaviours related to mobile devices. This in turn fed into Nokia’s design thinking and product marketing.

Over the past ten years we’ve seen public service providers such as the NHS roll out behavioural thinking into service design – such as signing citizens up for organ donation programmes or improving appointment attendance. We have seen the learnings of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab used for good and bad applications. The thinking is used in digital healthcare services, which is where Professor Fogg focuses his efforts. But it has also been used to the detriment of the public in designing non-healthcare related apps from mobile games to dating app Tinder. ‘Addictive’ apps usually rely on some of the concepts and model developed by Professor Fogg and his team.

From a marketing perspective there is an increasing understanding that communications tend to work most effectively when understood through the lens of audience bias’ and ‘cultural imprinting’ – the idea that we all want to be part of what is culturally acceptable.

Behavioural science and ethnography helps get to the ‘human truth’ at the centre of a creative campaigns. Campaigns is built around understanding the bias’ that have to be addressed in order to initiate the call to action, whether its driving purchase or behavioural change.

Influencer marketing

CMO budget allocation on influencer marketing will decrease by a third
Gartner Predict 2020

Surely this statistic is bad news for the marketing industry?

In a word: No.

It’s a market correction. It is a reflection of a few things that have been happening in consumer marketing:
- There was an over-enthusiasm for consumer marketers in influencer marketing without any focus on efficiency or effectiveness. The power of influencer marketing as a paid discipline was taken as gospel. So, some of that spend reduction is a market correction rather than a ‘problem’ with influencer marketing. Where consumer marketing was done as earned media without a paid budget there was a focus on size of audience, without asking some key questions. Was the audience actually real? Was the audience actually relevant
- There was a large amount of inflation in in the cost of reaching a given audience for consumer brands using an influencer strategy. Influencers got an over inflated sense of their self-worth and charged accordingly. When large scale influencers declined in engagement due to the large of large numbers, and were more expensive to use per user – marketers went down the influence line. They then heralded ‘micro’ influencers and latterly ‘nano’ influencers. Something had to give
- Finally, influencer commerce for consumer brands has been a minefield. Western markets haven’t been able to replicate the same level of success that brands have had working with Chinese influencers. Secondly even agencies don’t know what definitively makes a successful unit-shifting influencer. We were at a PR Week’s ‘What does the future hold for influencer marketing’ event at the end of September. Social agency Goat made an interesting disclosure. They’ve worked with about 100,000 influencers and found that the vast majority didn’t deliver sales for their clients. But more interestingly there was no data about which influencer was more likely to work in social commerce, or what were their reasons for success
Some sectors have approached influencers in a different way. For instance, no one aspires to be an influencer in a given disease area, it is something that happens as part of a coping strategy and a desire to help peers.

Abandoning marketing personalised data

Gartner’s prediction on personalisation is a bit less clear. Some of the media coverage has a fundamental misunderstanding of what data personalisation is in marketing. This makes me a bit leery of Gartner’s claims, based on a presumption that this was sold in as a story to those journalists by Gartner.

Consumer brands have embraced complex technology stacks in order to enrich campaigns and drive efficiency. Marketing personalisation is part of this process.

But the issue has been the imbalance in consumer marketing in terms of focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness. Adidas’ global media director Simon Peel admitted that they had spent too much on digital advertising due to their over-zealous focus on marketing efficiency. Peel is looking to move Adidas back to a more balanced marketing mix.

Secondly, marketing personalisation is turning into a problematic issue for companies when sentiment like Shoshana Zuboff’s is becoming normalised

‘My view is that all of the data that people celebrate as big data is threaded with stolen assets. As law comes on stream, these assets are going to be reinterpreted as toxic assets. Just like the sub-prime mortgages that threaded through the derivatives market and all these financial products were reinterpreted as toxic assets and tanked the market in those financial products.

I believe that day is coming.’
Shoshana Zuboff, author and Harvard Business School professor, Contagious Magazine issue 6

I am unconvinced about Gartner’s move to behavioural / emotional data and AI created ads due to similar privacy concerns. It won’t provide cultural imprinting, talkability or effective campaigns. Secondly, there is a lot of AI snake oil being sold which could leave it more trouble than ever.
December 6, 2019

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