China has had a number of ‘lone wolf’ attacks on the public all of which had a common theme of ‘revenge on society’. It might be that the perpetrator had economic setbacks or a sense of being wronged by a government decision that set them on this direction.
The profiles of the attackers are often middle-aged men. The revenge on society attacks all seem to be driven by people who feel that they have little to lose. While attacks that meet the revenge on society profile have been documented at least as far back as 2004. There seems to have been an acceleration in the occurrence of revenge on society attacks in 2024. Unlike Uighur related incidents of 2013 and 2014, there isn’t a particular group that China can suppress to reduce the incidents easily. Revenge on society attacks are more likely to be dealt with using mass-population surveillance and reporting a la Minority Report’s preventative crime approach and raised security.
Raising security against revenge on society attacks requires a mix of infrastructure investment like bollards
A Suzhou school bus was attacked by a knife-wielding attacker looking to kill and maim Japanese children. He killed the school bus attendant who defended the children from his attack.
September 18th saw a 10-year old Japanese child was stabbed to death by a 44 year-old man. Anti-Japanese sentiment is fanned by Chinese government rhetoric and a constant barrage of content on Chinese media. The attack happened in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong.
On September 31th, 3 were killed and 15 injured by a revenge on society attacker in a Shanghai branch of Walmart. He had been arrested by police who said that he was angry due to a personal financial dispute.
The following day on October 1st, while most were celebrating China’s national day holiday – Chinese man conducted a revenge on society attack in Zurich, Switzerland. He attacked and injured three children near a daycare centre. He was a postgraduate student who publicly expressed extremist nationalist views.
A 60-year old man convicted of previous attacks stabbed two students and one woman outside a primary school in Guangzhou on October 8th.
On October 28th, a 50 year old man attacked and injured three children and two adults in Beijing in an attack that had all the hallmarks of revenge on society.
A revenge on society attack on November 11th killed 35 people and injured 43 more because the 62-year old attacker was unhappy with his divorce settlement. The Chinese government attempted a news blackout of the incident. The incident happened in Zhuhai, a city just across the border from Macau.
On November 16th, a Wuxi third level education college was the site of an revenge on society incident that killed eight people with a knife attack and 17 others injured. A 21 year old male was detained.
On November 19th, the 39 year-old perpetrator drove into students arriving at a primary school in Changde. He was eventually stopped and beaten by a crowd until being taken into custody by the police.
How many toys is too many? | Vox – One reader told Vox recently that her family was “absolutely drowning in toys.” And while adults have been complaining about kids’ junk for generations (please see my father’s fruitless search for my brother’s one-inch-long toy wrench in Los Angeles International Airport circa 1992), many millennial and Gen X parents have the sense that something is different now — that kids have more toys than in past decades, and that they seem to arrive in ways Randall describes as “unintentional” and Parents Are Stressed About Playtime. Their Anxiety Is a Goldmine. – WSJ – same as it ever was
Putin’s «Deathonomics» – Riddle Russia – the Kremlin seriously expects a positive economic outcome from the creation of a high-salaried contract army. If we assume that the number of mobilised and contract-based soldiers ranges from 400,000 to 450,000, then their minimum total allowance will amount to approx. 1 trillion roubles a year. The government will have to allocate about the same amount for compensations in case of killed or wounded soldiers, even if there are 50,000 or 100,000 such people in a year. These sums represent nearly 10% of pre-war federal spending, and some people are already predicting the emergence of a social group of «the young rich» and even making plans for how this money will contribute to long-term investment programmes. – Deathonomics is allowing the Russian government to shape its population pyramid to reduce the burden of the aging population on the economy.
How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never | Teen Vogue – “The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms and say, ‘this is where you belong. If those people don’t understand you, they’re just a bunch of triggered snowflakes or whatever,’” Miller-Idriss says. Another tactic, she says, is to point out the commercialization of the manosphere in which everything is for sale including courses, supplements, and crypto-currencies. Pointing out the profit motive of these influencers can be effective, Miller-Idriss says.
That’s part of what got Tom out of the manosphere, which he says he fell into when he was 27, after leaving the Army and finding himself “stuck trying to look for work consistently, having basically no social support, having no options other than to just work, pay bills, work, pay bills, in an increasingly difficult world to do that.” He was lonely, he says, and the influencers he followed had some pretty good talking points, he thought: men were more affected by things like incarceration rates, workplace death and injury rates, and mental health and no one was taking it seriously.
“The more you shame people for what they’re espousing, the more they’re driven underground deeper into online communities who welcome them with open arms.” Pasha Dashtgard, an assistant professor at the Polarization & Extremism Research and Innovation Lab, says this is a common entry point. “They start their conversations with, ‘men are in crisis and no one’s talking about it. It’s like, that’s true, men are in crisis and we should be talking about it… [but] that opens up, ideologically, the door for them to be like ‘and now, here are the solutions’ and it’s this horrible, toxic nonsense.” But after after a couple months in the manosphere, Tom realized that, while men’s health is a serious subject, he wouldn’t find the answers he was looking for in the manosphere, which was overrun by what he calls “grifters, frauds, or sort of religious zealots.” Now, Tom says he doesn’t actively use the label ‘feminist’ but “considers it part of my worldview.”
Is there a future for personalisation? | WARC – Right person, right place, right time: for over a decade this idea has been an ideal in advertising. But an alternative point of view is that personalisation is self-defeating because advertisers chase a moving target when they are unable to prove return on investment.
Patagonia’s Restructuring Has Led to Employee Fallout – Business Insider – Patagonia’s historic worker commitment is less well known than it’s sustainability credentials which probably explains why recent moves haven’t led to the kind of brand dissonance amongst consumers that the likes of Bud Light or Nike experienced.
Jaguar rebrand
Jaguar’s teaser campaign for its rebrand and new vehicle model prompted immediate feedback. I am not clear on what the ask was by the marketing team, so have kept an open mind. Here offered without comment are some of the related commentary:
The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.
Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.
There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.
Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.
The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.
What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture
Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether
Culture
Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended
Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.
Health
China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire
Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.
2023 has been an eventful year. I thought it made sense to go back and reflect on everything that has gone on this year. I was inspired to do this after coming across a similar post that I had done for 2005.
Contrary to what much of the tech sector believed just six months earlier, 2023 was not going to be the year of the metaverse. In reality, it never was. Sales of VR devices had dropped in 2022, and the technology was years away from the hype.
It was also going to be a bad year for speculators buying and selling on secondary markets. Previous hot properties like Rolex watches, Porsche 911s and the luxury industry in general dip. Rolex watch prices peaked in 2022 and prices normalised during 2023, despite the watch industry’s efforts to sustain artificial demand. The weakness in luxury markets was mirrored by a weakening of the performance of luxury business. Cryptocurrency saw successful legal proceedings brought by the US government against two of its highest profile industry advocates Sam Bankman-Fried and Changpeng Zhao – both former CEOs of trading platforms FTX and Binance, respectively.
LLMs and experiments in using them to generate a wide range of outputs drove technology trends instead. Amazon was noticeable by its absence from being at the forefront of this trend, despite its Alexa service. FOOH (fake out of home) became a marketing fad as clients didn’t have budget and still wanted to creat viral moments.
From a health perspective 2023 was the year of Semaglutide. Novo Nordisk displaced LVMH in the third quarter to become Europe’s most valuable company. FMCG brands and retailers blame the drug (likely falsely) for impacting sales of certain food categories. WW (the brand formerly known as Weight Watchers) jumps into telehealth to offer the treatment direct to patients. Ozempic, Semaglutide or Wegovy were mentioned most days in the media.
January 2023
The rail strikes that had disrupted travel in 2022, continued into 2023.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) kicks off 2023. Themes included narrow throw projectors to replace large panel TV screens. The Displace wireless TV looked to turn the large screen into a giant tablet device – as a gimmick it caught a good deal of media attention.
CES had new areas that weren’t given their own focus just a few years ago around the Internet of Things:
Food technology
Health technology
Sports technology
Harmon showcased a modular solution to car-based computers, allowing an upgrade path. Currently cars might be based on software and processors that are over a decade old. The Wall Street Journal pointed out the forthcoming ‘gadget gap’ due to a drop off in venture capital funding, resulting in less future start-ups.
Brand planning pioneer Jeremy Bullmore dies. Later on in the year so does the last vestiges of J Walter Thompson – the agency where Bullmore had his career.
China ended its COVID-19 related travel restrictions as the world moved to managing the virus as endemic rather than epidemic. COVID ripped through the Chinese population with an estimated 90 percent infection rate. Lunar year related travel had been restricted in previous years under the government’s zero COVID approach. At the time there were great hopes of an economic resurgence, but the Rhodium Group pointed out that progress would be stymied by Chinese corporate and local government debt. In the face of government interference, China’s most famous entrepreneur Jack Ma cedes control of financial services business Ant Group.
I read Adam Fisher’s oral history of Silicon Valley, Valley of Genius. The reality was that technology leaders were viewed in a more complex light during 2023 and the book title was indicative of the hubris infested in many Silicon Valley leaders. The FT highlighted how it felt software leaders were failing in the physical realm. Just writing that sentence made me think of big tech executives as JRR Tolkien’s ring wraiths. IBM loses its historic top spot in US patent filings and Microsoft invests in OpenAI with a view to integrate ChatGPT into their products and services.
Mastodon the federated answer to gets a hard pass from the Financial Times after trying to run their own instance. It was a minefield of legal and regulatory issues.
The US department of justice is investigating Binance – a crypto currency exchange. Already in January 2023, the ongoing legacy of the 2019 protests in Hong Kong carries on as the Hong Kong chief executive is given the right to ban Jimmy Lai’s British barrister from representing him agains the National Security Law charges that he will face. Talking of authoritarian regimes, the UK retail sector embraces facial recognition to try and combat shop lifting and violent crime in their stores.
Huawei patents EUV lithography tools used for making microchips with pathways below 10nm in size. This news was greeted with skepticism. Later on in the year Huawei launches a processor that might have been made using this technique. This raises major questions about proliferation of critical technology.
Meanwhile other Chinese companies look to launder their Chinese identity to be more acceptable for their foreign customer base.
Professor Scott Galloway coins the term ‘Patagonia vest recession‘ to encapsulate how knowledge economy jobs have been impacted more than blue collar roles in late 2022 onwards. I write a post on it and it turns out to be the best performing blog post on my site this year.
Asian communities celebrate the lunar new year (it’s the year of the rabbit).
Work-wise I was enmeshed in a number of marketing and innovation projects for GSK Vaccines.
At the end of the month, Adaline Lau passed away. Adaline was a friend that I made in Hong Kong.
SES Asia: Adaline Lau, Asia Editor of ClickZ asking a question to Douglas Stotland of Facebook. Taken at SES Hong Kong 2011.
Adaline had been living in Singapore and had moved back to Hong Kong. At the time I first met her, she worked reporting on the online media and advertising worlds for ClickZ as their Asian bureau editor.
Prior ClickZ, Adaline had written at Marketing Magazine and The Singapore Marketer. Outside of her professional writing, Adaline was an avid blogger and photographer, constantly seeking out and documenting vegetarian restaurants wherever she travelled. For many years, Adaline’s Doufu Mafia blog, Flickr and Instagram account was the first place I pointed people to, when they asked about vegetarian or vegan fayre.
February 2023
The issue of the day at the start of February 2023 was Chinese spy balloons with a debate that raged for months about whether the balloons were surveilling sensitive military sites or not. The balloon in question had a payload that was 30 feet long.
If the balloon had made it to the UK, it would have found very little to observe as much of the civil service, the NHS and railway unions were on strike.
A freight train accident in Ohio inspires a barrage of online misinformation, a good deal of it happening via Chinese sources. The west and China might be locked in a cold war, but the information war is raging hot.
In Japanese media circles, the last print issue of Popteen magazine marks the transition towards digital media for consumer magazines. Adidas continues its annus horriblis into the early part of 2023 with write downs on both Yeezy and Ivy Park collaborations with Kanye West and Beyonce respectively. Drop sales later on in the year of Yeezy designs help bail Adidas out.
Online NORA (no real answer) or knowledge search is expected to become a thing as Microsoft provides ChatGPT powered search results. The results are a bit underwhelming. The Chinese government bans its own technology companies from providing services based on ChatGPT.
The EU moves to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered cars in 2035, there has been a lot of reflection about whether this is the right thing as Chinese government supported electric vehicle companies eviscerate Europe’s car manufacturers.
Wegovy was launched in the US back in 2021, and by the beginning of 2023, the international discussion about obesity and weight loss management had gone global. Knowledge of the drug amongst patients and the general public spread far faster than the ability to prescribe it as a medicine.
Pharrell Williams signs on as creative director for Louis Vuitton’s men’s collection. Williams has already worked on collections for Billionaire Boys Club and adidas. His appointment reinforces the ongoing links between premium streetwear and luxury. Meanwhile long time technology veteran Susan Wojcicki steps down from the CEO role at YouTube.
Studio Incendo
TV documentary maker and journalist Bao Choy launches The Collective HK, a new news media outlet. The increasing authoritarian nature of the Hong Kong authorities has seen the closure of several media outlets who had a different perspective to the authorities. Her decision shows immense bravery. The Hong Kong government launches its ‘Hello Hong Kong’ tourism campaign which was heavily criticised.
South Park touches a British cultural live wire with their criticism of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in the series episode ‘Worldwide Privacy Tour‘. My Mam and Dad knew far too much about this episode of South Park, it was unnerving.
Nissan America launches a four-hour advert for the Nissan Ariya electric car. It owes a lot to the Lofi Girl YouTube channel.
US television and broadband provider Dish Network gets taken offline by unknown hackers. It is an unprecedented infrastructure attack.
Some UK retailers ration sales of fresh fruit and vegetables due to disrupted supply chains on products imported from southern Europe and north Africa.
This month marked the first anniversary of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the 50th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album.
March 2023
Silicon Valley pioneer and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore dies. Xi Jinping is appointed as the leader of China for a third term. This was considered to be a measure of how much power Mr Xi has consolidated around himself. China mediates a detente of sorts between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran.
US regional bank SVB (Silicon Valley Bank) goes bankrupt dizzyingly fast. Concern about smaller banks ripples throughout the world. Switzerland forces UBS to takeover Credit Suisse to prevent a similar crisis. HSBC picks up SVBs European business catering to start-ups and US technology companies with European offices.
Microsoft shuts down its VR based social network Altspace VR. Altspace has a small engaged and passionate community, but it was all far too small to make a difference to Microsoft as it pivoted to LLM-based artificial intelligence. Open AI launches Chat GPT4, technology pundits and the advertising world lose their shit. Later on in the month Google opens early access to Bard – a ChatGPT competitor which receives much less publicity
The Ford Motor Company patents a particular use case for autonomous vehicles, the ability to self-repossess itself if the owner misses their finance payments. The Chinese government detains members of due diligence research firm The Mintz Group. The more opaque China becomes, the less tenable it becomes to conduct work there, do business with Chinese companies or invest in Chinese companies and the Chinese economy.
In adland, my friend Iain Tait launches a new agency called Food. An academic research paper shows that negativity drives online news consumption. This has important implications, calling into question ad-funded online news media and social platforms used to consume online news.
New York’s iconic I love NY tourism campaign gets an unnecessary makeover to We love NYC. It’s unnecessary and the typographic design is an abomination. Luxury car maker Ferrari gets hacked and its customer data gets leaked online.
In a move that anticipates more office time in the hybrid work mix. Armani advertises bespoke suits and pushes a return to the office.
Adidas’ relationship with Beyoncé finishes. Ivy Park had underwhelmed in its performance, making less than 25 percent of its projected revenue. In China, women who had fallen in love with virtual characters during COVID arrange in real life meet-ups with cos-playing analogues.
On a personal note, I had been using the Yahoo! platform including Yahoo! Mail for 25 years. I had forgotten this fact until Yahoo! emailed me to let me know.
April 2023
Chinese online marketplace app Temu launches in Europe and the UK, seven months after its US launch. It heavily features online advertising across social platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Like Wish it is the usual mix of scam listings, damaged and or late deliveries, incorrect orders and no customer service.
Amazon closes the Book Depository. The service was closed down with just three weeks notice to customers and staff. It seemed a world away from when Amazon had bought the online book store back in 2011. I will miss it. It was a life saver when I lived in Hong Kong due to its free global shipping. It was also a place that I used for gift shopping, sending items to friends based abroad.
Audemars Piguet looks to address rampant watch crime by replacing new watches that are stolen during the first year of ownership. This is a first for the luxury industry. De-influencing – a negative trend for brands used to social media influencers as boosters became a concern for industry marketers who had doubled down on influence as marketing pixie dust. De-influencing is when an influencer provides a negative review of a brand that they don’t like. In luxury beauty L’Oreal buys Aesop to bolster its luxury portfolio. The latest thing in luxury travel is a good nights sleep, with sleep tourism becoming a thing.
Telehealth startup Ro, promotes its ‘Body Program‘ service to Americans. The service prescribes and ships Wegovy the obesity and weight management medicine direct to patients.
Bud Light’s influencer marketing activity with transgender social media personality Dylan Mulvaney; sparks a boycott that sees sales drop by over 20 percent. It acts as a catalyst for a bigger discussion on the merits of brand purpose in marketing circles.
Cloud phone service 3CX gets hacked, leaving lots of large corporates vulnerable to hacking. And in Australia, satellite failures cripple GPS enabled automation on tractors. This is important for sowing crops like wheat and barley. The feature allows the farmer to do the process much more efficiently.
The modern world as we know it exists largely due to the Xerox corporately funded research centre in Palo Alto. Known as Xerox PARC had originally financed it to be ready for future innovation that would disrupt their existing business. In the end they weren’t ready. Innovation continues there to this day, but Xerox but handed over PARC to the SRI International. SRI conducts research and development on behalf of US government departments and companies across a wide range of disciplines. SRI had been where Doug Engelbart had done much of his key work.
Damien Roach, aka patten releases Mirage.FM – the first album made purely with generative AI created sounds. It sits somewhere between early Reese or Juan Atkin electronic tracks and the layered production of The Avalanches. 7-Eleven Hong Kong uses generative AI created backdrops for their TV and video ads supporting their 7-Select food range.
The Russo Brothers launch Citadel – a series on Amazon Prime Video. The show isn’t my cup of tea, but what was notable about it, was the degree of commerce integration. You could buy close to the same outfits the characters wore on screen.
At work, our agency teamed up with online plant seller Plant Drop and researchers from Oxford University to promote the wellbeing and detoxifying nature of house plants. The government shuts down the NHS COVID-19 tracking app as usage had declined.
A product giveaway went wrong for BMW. Not necessarily that big an issue, except this was in China at the Shanghai auto show. The brand had been giving out ice creams to stand attendees. They seem to have ran low and kept the ice creams strictly for foreign attendees. Chinese netizens, ever vigilant for anything they can construe as a slight went wild online. Meanwhile, the Milan Furniture Fair is called out for an exhibition of racist glass sculptures from the 1920s.
May 2023
The WHO had downgraded COVID-19 from its global health emergency.
“This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general, WHO (World Health Organisation)
The regional bank crisis continues. First Republic Bank collapses and gets acquired by JP Morgan Chase. Unlike SVB, the international impact is muted. Part of this is down to First Republic being a true regional bank, whereas SVB had an international footprint that followed its technology client base around the world.
Google demonstrates Bard, a ChatGPT analogue – with a heavy focus on generating software code at Google I/O 2023 – their version of Apple’s WWDC (worldwide developer conference).
Klick Health published research showing that ChatGPT demonstrated 10x more empathy than medical professionals. Meanwhile, WPP announces a partnership with Nvidia to use generative AI in advertising.
Disney continued its trend of poor performance in the box office with the live action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, it was particularly badly received in Asian markets. In the west, views were divided based on how important the viewer thought fidelity to the original films casting was important.
Hublot took the movement in luxury towards a circular economy a little too seriously with a limited edition watch made from recycled Nespresso pods.
The FT’s Cristina Criddle lifts the lid on how Bytedance had accessed her phone through the TikTok app and surveilled her.
June 2023
If there was a word of the month for June 2023, it would be decivilisation. President Macron used the term to encapsulate the widespread civil unrest and radical political action ripping through France in a closed door session with experts. The phrase was leaked and the rest is history. Decivilisation isn’t only a French phenomenon, in New York the beleaguered police department went after car manufacturers rather than car thieves.
Apple unveils its Vision Pro goggles. You won’t be able to buy them in 2023, but Apple wanted to get out its software development kit out to have developers come up with potential killer apps. Apple sought to avoid the traps of the metaverse and comparisons to mixed reality devices with its ‘spatial computing’ concept. Alphabet scraps its next generation of augmented reality (AR) glasses, but continues to develop software for AR devices.
German engineering manufacturer Rheinmetall puts a smart factory in a shipping container, allowing spare parts to be manufactured using additive manufacturing closer to where the parts are needed. There is a clear need in the Ukraine invasion battlefield.
A submersible designed to take tourists to the bottom of the ocean implodes. The Ocean Gate Titan was taking passengers to visit the wreck of the Titanic. Omega chooses to launch the following teaser ad campaign at an inopportune moment.
The Hong Kong government tries to spur consumer consumption with a campaign called ‘Happy Hong Kong‘ – a key element being a series of discounts at several local businesses. The government also sponsors the floating Double Ducks temporary installation by Florentijn Hofman in Victoria Harbour. One duck deflates in the heat. Hofman had previously exhibited one duck in the harbour in 2013.
Disney’s woes continued into June with the commercial failure of Pixar film Elemental.
In advertising, GroupM forecasts low growth in media spend. Meanwhile luxury conglomerate Kering buys British fragrance house Creed.
July 2023
If decivilisation was June’s word of the month, July 2023 would be represented by the term ‘doom loop’. Doom loop hit its zeitgeist as international media including El Pais and the Financial Times discussed multiple problems that are plaguing San Francisco. San Francisco is just the canary in the coal mine, with mayor Eric Adams seeing similar challenges just a couple of months later.
Nintendo launches Pokémon Sleep – a gamified sleep tracker with Tamagotchi-type care requirements. Years of news coverage has been highlighting how insufficient sleep of Japanese workers and students has been harming their health and the economy. Twitter rival Threads is launched by Meta. It joins T2/Pebble, BlueSky Social, Mastodon and Post.news.
The FIFA Women’s World Cup is held in Australia, brands get behind it and the public gets to see great football on the pitch. This sparks a discussion about sports media budgets and football as a business.
Wild fires across Greece disrupt various holiday destinations, just as leisure travel hits its stride post-COVID. July would be eventually found to be the hottest July on record around the world.
Barbeheimer – the act of going to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer one after the other at the cinema becomes a cultural moment. The movies are so different, there contrasting nature of the films, together with the post-COVID novelty of getting back into the cinema creates a box office chimera. In Japan, Barbeheimer was viewed negatively trivialising the crime against humanity inflicted on civilians in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In Hong Kong, McDonald’s Restaurants hold an art exhibition in conjunction with Kevin Poon to celebrate 40 years of the golden arches in the city.
Toyota focuses on solid state battery technology alongside its work on hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles. Dyson’s abortive electric car project failed partly because it was unable to source solid state batteries. Meanwhile, a Reuters investigation found that Tesla cars were designed to lie about their range to their drivers.
August 2023
August felt like the world was on fire. The UK was in the middle of a heatwave. The news had coverage of wild fires in Tenerife, Greece and Canada. The smoke from forest fires in the Northwest Territories of Canada wrapped New York in choking smog. I worried about extended family in Toronto.
The word of the month is gatekeeping – meaning to keep earned knowledge to yourself, such a personal favourite restaurant or life hack.
Wiko stores indicates intent to file for bankruptcy and Clinton’s Cards closed a fifth of their shops. It isn’t only bricks-and-mortar retailers having problems, luxury e-tailer Farfetch closed down its beauty business. Meanwhile Rolex buys international watch retailer Bucherer, though their plans for the group aren’t clear and fire a good deal of speculation.
China’s largest property developer Country Garden defaults on bond debt. Country Garden has been better managed than Evergrande and this shows how systemic problems are in the China property market.
Google has one of the biggest changes that I can remember in its UK management structure; the rationale isn’t immediately apparent. Speculation starts on Meta’s microblogging platform Threads after usage drops off. OpenAI, the company who created ChatGPT is burning through $700,000 a day to run just one of their services with no clear path to profitability.
The APG publish their results of their annual skills survey. Planners are required to have a ridiculously large set of skills, data and technology aspects were considered to be under-estimated.
In a move that feels more like it should have been done in 2020, PayPal launches its own Stablecoin pegged to the US dollar.
Temperatures at the beginning of September went as high as 32 celsius. Stonegate who own the Slug and Lettuce chain of bars introduce ‘dynamic‘ aka surge pricing at the evening and during the weekend.
Following events like the Bud Light boycott, a corresponding ‘anti woke economy‘ is emerging in the US to cater for socially conservative leaning audiences.
The media and advertising sector continue to think that retail media will be the breakout channel for 2023. Meta stops supporting media on its platforms in Europe and faces a backlash from publishers and politicians. Rupert Murdoch announces his retirement and puts the family succession plan in place.
Iconic computer game series Myst celebrates its 30th anniversary. Apple’s Wanderlust event sees new evolutions of its iPhone range and Apple Watch. Meanwhile IDC predicts that global smartphone sales will hit their lowest point in a decade, indicating market maturity and saturation. The UK walks back an attempt to gain access to encrypted messaging services like Signal, iMessage and WhatsApp. Technology vendors had threatened to pull out of the UK rather than attempt to comply with the proposed British regulations. Malcolm Penn’s Future Horizons updated their forecast for the semiconductor industry, predicting a return to growth. Iran’s religious leaders use artificial intelligence to issue fatwas.
Toyota announces plans for mass production of solid state batteries for their vehicles. Production is slated to start in 2027.
Russell Brand faces a criminal investigation, allegations including sexual assault, stalking and harassment. The media don’t bother reflecting on how the had acted as an enabler of Brand’s conduct over the years. Brand wasn’t the only one in trouble, US casino brands MGM Resorts and Caesars suffer from cybersecurity incidents that force the shutdown of their computer systems.
Adidas’ Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1 are running shoes designed to last just one race. They cost $500 a pair.
October 2023
Qualcomm launches a series of processors designed to be used in personal computers. Their performance is supposed to be superior to Apple’s M2 family of processors launched back in January. A few days later Apple launches its M3 family of processors.
Conflict breaks out on the Gaza strip with HAMAS taking hundreds of hostages and killing hundreds more. The event fractures progressive political support throughout the world.
DeBeers resurrects their ‘A Diamond is Forever’ marketing campaign to try and arrest declining sales in both China and America. Studio Ghibli’s The Boy & The Heron has its UK premiere at the London Film Festival. It goes on UK and US general release in December.
The Rugby World Cup is in full swing, but sponsor luxury watch brand Tudor is wrapped up in a dispute with the tournament’s referees over its role as official timekeeper.
LVMH sees a 7 percent single day drop in share price, leading other luxury groups decline in value. Much of this decline is considered to be due to the perceived end to a golden age of luxury good consumption during the 2020s. Time will tell if this marks the luxury sector’s equivalent of the dot com bust.
A Vogue Business research report finds that the fashion industry is still failing on size inclusivity. Meanwhile Nike collaborates with Dove on girl’s body confidence due to the confluence of their brand purpose and the realisation that a combined effort would be beneficial.
Sales of electric cars decline year-on-year in the UK as vehicles don’t meet consumer needs in terms of range and pricing. Retail sales have hit a two year low; implying a broader cyclical downturn.
Intelligence chiefs warn western technology companies about an uptake in Chinese attempts at industrial espionage.
My alma mater Concentric gets acquired by Accenture Song from marketing group Stagwell. TV advertising costs have increased, but there is considerable debate on the degree of the increase. Meanwhile President Biden unveils an executive order to try and provide a regulatory framework for artificial intelligence development and distribution.
November 2023
The month starts with the closure of micro-blogging platform Pebble. Almost a year to the day of the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman Fried is found guilty of criminal charges including fraud. Russian volcano Klyuchevskaya Sopka erupts, while it was largely ignored by the media, the eruption disrupts trans-Pacific flights and air freight, affecting air routes to Korea and Japan in particular.
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and ISBA announce their principles on the use of generative AI in advertising.
The UK hosts 2023 Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit – it probably more important in spurring a direction rather than any ‘hard outcomes’. Despite the media coverage, most of the general public didn’t care. It won’t have burnished the reputation of prime minister Rishi Sunak and his interview with Elon Musk is particularly toe-curling.
10 Downing Street YouTube channel
The interview is part of Musk’s launch plan for Grok – an LLM-based chat bot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Disney+ is to add a ‘with ads‘ subscription option.
Gallup withdraws from China as the communist government closes the country off from the west. The South China Morning Post – historically Hong Kong’s paper of record celebrates its 120th anniversary on November 6, 2023. The English language paper is still important for luxury brand advertisers, alongside the premium end of the food service and beverage sector. How long that will remain the case is open to debate as Hong Kong looks to replace expat talent with mainland Chinese? Hong Kong still has the potential to surprise with its hosting of the 2023 Gay Games. This was the first time that they had been hosted in Asia.
The China Project – a media business of informative podcasts, news and events closes abruptly on the same day as the SCMP 120th anniversary – the timing was pure coincidence. Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn interviewed a plurality of opinions and perspectives on all aspects of China. What did join the SCMP and The China Project was that their respective founders shared a similar vision. As the SCMP founders put it in the first edition of the newspaper:
‘tell the truth for the good of humanity’.
South China Morning Post editorial Friday November 6, 1903
Eurasia Group subsidiary, GZero Media ran a survey of attendees at the 2023 Paris Peace Forum about the state of democracy around the world. Over three quarters of participants surveyed were of the opinion that democratic progress was going backwards.
Humane launches their AI pin. It’s an interesting mix of ideas that represents a challenge to both smartphones ‘pictures under glass’ and AR goggles paradigm, but the use case for the AI pin isn’t apparent at launch.
Russian cyber crime outfit LockBit who managed to affect the Royal Mail’s IT systems in January, net two big whales: legal firm Allen & Overy and China’s largest bank by deposits ICBC. The ICBC infection is supposed to only affect the systems of its New York office. Given the symbiotic relationship that groups like this have with arms of the Russian intelligence services, it’s surprising that they didn’t back away from the ICBC infection.
ICBC is a state-owned bank, in Chinese terms this is like throwing a petrol bomb at a Chinese embassy. Changpeng Zhao, CEO of cryptocurrency platform Binance steps down over money laundering controls and could do prison time.
LinkedIn passes 1 billion registered users. WeWork files for bankruptcy, weirdly the company got additional funding from SoftBank just days before going under. SoftBank lost $16 billion from its investments and loans to WeWork. Meta and Amazon team up to reduce purchase friction between Meta advertising for items on Amazon marketplace. A new in-app experience provides seamless shopping.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III launches to a worldwide marketing blitz, just in time for the Black Friday consumer fest and Christmas shopping for middle-aged Dad gamers.
Eli Lilly has its obesity treatment Zepbound approved by US regulator, the FDA and the UK’s MRHA. The efficacy of the treatment and Eli Lilly’s scale from marketing to operations represent serious competition for Novo Nordisk’s portfolio. (Disclosure: in a past role I worked on global advertising creative campaigns for Novo Nordisk’s obesity products). Expect these medicines to dominate the consumer and media zeitgeist similar to Prozac or Viagra during their respective heydays.
YouTube launches a policy on AI-generated or ‘synthetic content’ as they called it. AI is already used widely in many content videos to provide a consistent narrator experience, such as King Clarence’s inner voice on the Jimmy & Clarence channel which uses Siri. What’s less clear from the policy is how YouTube will detect creators who don’t comply with their rules.
I got to spend time at the FT Future of AI conference, great to see ‘danr‘ as Yahoos knew him on stage. While the complexity of trip planning screams out as an AI use case, the solutions introduced by travel sites aren’t great. Even the Booking.com CEO admitted it to Axios. Sam Altman leaves and returns to OpenAI – the not for profit / ethical control of the business in tatters.
UK inflation drops to 4.6% as economic growth tends towards zero. WHO posts statement on undiagnosed respiratory illnesses breaking out across northern China.
Leica launches the first camera to support the C2PA standard which ‘vouches’ for the integrity of photography and considered as a way of helping authoritative sources to not publish misinformation.
Berkshire Hathaway‘s Charlie Munger dies just shy of his 100th birthday. Henry Kissinger managed to make it to a century, but many people will remember it as the day Shane Magowan left us.
December 2023
If COP 28 had been an instalment of a film franchise, rather than the UN Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, it would have been given a sub-heading of Oil Strikes Back? Ipsos’ Almanac highlights the consumer concerns about the latest generation of artificial intelligence models, the polycrisis, and the advertising keeps failing in numerous aspects of diversity.
The UK high street took another low-key knock, Adrian’s Records – famous to record collectors around the world (and cost-conscious indie music fans of a certain age) shut their high street store. The business is still unwinding their stock via direct sales to the record retail trade and both eBay and Amazon marketplace.
This is more down to the fact that owners Adrian Rondeau and Richard Burke are retiring. Adrian had been running the shop since 1969.
Walmart launches Add to Heart; a short form video series that allows the audience to shop-the-look as they watch. This will run on Roku, TikTok and YouTube. Of course, this is only 18 years after Girlswalker’s Tokyo Girls Collection have been doing it…
Robinhood, abandoned an effort to launch in the UK 3 years ago, it came back at the beginning of December with a waiting list. By comparison, fans of Grand Theft Auto will have to wait until some time in 2025 for the next instalment to drop. The trailer set in contemporary Florida has distinct synthwave vibes.
Games Workshop has partnered with Amazon to bring Warhammer to life. Probably a smart move given how Amazon has sympathetically developed Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher series and Michael Connolly’s Bosch books.
McDonalds delves back into their marketing archive to inspire a new format of restaurant: Cosmcs. They’re probably hope it memes like the Grimace shakes during the summer. Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack has gone from partnerships with McDonalds and Nike to hitting its acme with Audemars Piguet on a set of 200 highly customised Royal Oak watches. They are already on the secondary market for $500,000 within a week of its launch. It’s a bit of a risk, as Scott’s had moments just as controversial as Kanye West, representing brand reputational risk.
Unilever investigated in the UK by CMA over its green claims. Having been on the inside, I can say that the green efforts are genuine. They also involve trade-offs, so refill plastic sachets would have a lower carbon footprint for transport, but they’re still plastic. Being second-guessed by regulators adds to the complexity.
Former proprietor of the Hong Kong Apple Daily newspaper and British citizen Jimmy Lai goes on trial in a case that is expected to take about 80 days to be heard. Lai’s case is the most prominent trial under the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Lai is charged with ‘collusion with foreign forces’ and sedition.
Hong Kong Police announced bounties against five people overseas on on suspicion of inciting secession or colluding with foreign forces. This includes the founder of Hongkongers in Britain, and a US national working for World Liberty Congress.
With courtroom drama taking up much of the oxygen in Hong Kong, it’s not surprising that the top grossing domestic film in 2023 was courtroom comedy drama A Guilty Conscience – which grossed five times more than any other Hong Kong film in the box office this year – and the highest grossing Hong Kong or Chinese film in city to date, surpassing the previous record set in 2022.
The French Competition Authority €91 million ($100 million) fine for Rolex France restricting authorised dealers from selling watches online isn’t likely to benefit multi-brand dealers and instead more likely to drive vertical integration. Vertical integration was partly to blame for the fire sale of Farfetch to Korean online services firm Coupang.
From an adidas perspective, we’re now in a post-Yeezy & post-Ivy Park world. It launched a joint venture with fashion house Fear of God as a long term collaboration a la Y-3 with Yohji Yamamoto. They indicated that they want to move away from the hype drop model that fuels secondary markets (StockX, GOAT etc.) and build something ‘more sustained’.
While we’re on the subject of hype, it started for Christmas adverts started before Hallowe’en. The advertising industry needed a good news and the 4.8% lift (year on year) in UK advertising spend for Q4 was a sorely needed top-up for the sector. This year’s tone through the ads is more downbeat reflecting a subdued economic environment. Loath as I am to nominate one effort over another during the Christmas season; Uncommon Studios for JD Sports ‘a bag for life’ was an acknowledgement of how iconic the draw string bag is, and has been since before Liquid’s Sweet Harmony first rang out. Liquid’s Eamon (aka Ame) works making music for advertising and TV for Clerkenwell Sound Collective while releasing tracks under the Liquid name and Shane (aka Model) is still making music. Perhaps it’s better that they didn’t show how messed up your kicks will be after dancing all night in a basement or industrial unit.
On a more serious note, the small details in this got me and gave me goosebumps; in particular the ever-present sirens of urban Britain in the background at the end. It’s not ‘Christmas’ – it’s a working class Christmas. For me, it’s timeless and adds yet more grist to the mill on thinking about things in terms of life stages rather than ‘generations’ which hides what unites us and creates false divisions.
Midjourneyversion 6 is released, so by the time St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day for UK people) or December 26th for the rest of the world – my LinkedIn feed became flooded with images people were prompting whilst bored post-turkey dinner.
Meanwhile WHSmith, quietly rolls out a rebrand for its shop signage with WHS. I didn’t think I would be writing about a rebrand this late in the year, but it makes sense being able to get shop fitters in during the Christmas holiday.
The new sans serif font and blue background parallelogram confuses the media and consumers due to its resemblance to the NHS logo. While the more design conscious among us may realise that the NHS uses italics to suggest movement, whereas WHSmith uses the box instead, some consumers won’t see the nuance.
At the time of writing, I don’t know what job the rebrand was designed to do. I have a hypothesis that the semiotics of the design were to imply that the stationery shop is a valued service to its customers (like the NHS). The consumer confusion is understandable, given that many town centres had NHS-branded COVID vaccination centres. This is part of a wider change at WHSmith; which is increasingly dependent on its travel terminus business in airports and train stations in the UK, Europe and the US.
The rebrand hadn’t been extended to their online presence so far. If the storefront signage has been confusing, extending the rebrand to mobile web bookmarks and mobile app icons would likely cause even more confusion. Might there be enough time to consider bringing back the WHSmith ‘cube’ icon?
I will finish up on Google’s year in search, though having done these lists for Yahoo! Search in the past, I have a good idea of how sanitised these trends reports are.
The sales pitch
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What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.
Geico advertising – a primer
Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.
Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.
The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising
Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.
Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).
Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset
As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.
There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.
The reasons are cultural in nature:
Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere
Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.
Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.
By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).
The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.
This achieves a few things:
You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand
Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:
Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients
So why was Geico advertising spend cut?
This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.
There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:
There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities
There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.
Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.
Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.
‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories
Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.
I was sparked to lead this post based on footage that I watched about a priest in South India with regards a robotic elephant. Robots in religion have taken off in both Shinto and Hindu ceremonies.
Japan
Academics have widely talked about how the Shinto-based belief system have aided Japanese societal acceptance of robots, in comparison to western society. Secondly, Japanese authors have been exploring what it means to be human and what kind of dilemmas and opportunities do robots and AI bring in a future society. Robots in religion are a natural extension of robots in society.
Buddhism leads the way
What’s less commented on is that Japan’s buddhist temples have been leading robots in religion. The reality is that many Japanese see Shinto and Buddhism as complementary in nature and get involved in both beliefs.
Japan has some unique religious challenges that are interlinked. Temples are struggling as less people are active in their religious practice, the factors for this decline is multi-factorial in nature.
A second challenge that as the population shrinks roles need to be automated. What started in factories is now impacting the food and beverage sector (vending machines and restaurant robo-serving staff), so it was only a matter of time that robots in religion would supplement the clergy.
India
In India robots in religion is about kindness and de-risking religious ceremonies. In South India elephants take part in religious ceremonies. However the conditions that elephants are kept in can be cruel in nature and even result in death. Secondly, elephants can unintentionally kill or injure people involved in a religious celebration. This report on NHK World shows how robots in religion have been adapted to Hindu needs.
Finally, the elephant robot is used in celebrations over a large geographic area and is easily transported around. Robots in religion are likely to make even more sense as India urbanises even further, as the benefits are amplified in the denser environment.
How confucianism, communism (in particular Stalin’s take on Leninism) and an accident of history has led to the nationalistic, fragile, insecure Chinese state with imperial ambitions we know today.
China’s ‘trinket town’ at heart of push for renminbi trade | Financial Times – Yiwu was one of the first cities in China to allow individual merchants to settle larger cross-border deals in renminbi. Most cities have an annual cap of $50,000. Given Yiwu’s reputation for cheap goods and flexible terms, helped by the fact that wholesalers do not pay either corporate tax or market rent, exporters have sufficient bargaining power to request settlement in renminbi. “When you have only one place to go to purchase something, the seller sets the terms on how transactions are settled,” said James Wu, a Yiwu-based furniture exporter who began demanding renminbi payments from Middle Eastern clients last year – the last quote is a great example of
Interesting video from NHK World on how temples are adapting to a lack of new attendees and priests. I am not sure whether this is down to demographic change or the secularisation of society
A Pokémon-Card Crime Spree Jolts Japan – WSJ – Japan has been staggered by a Pokémon crime spree. Stores are now paying for banklike security to ward off villains who go to extraordinary lengths, even rappelling down the side of buildings, to plunder Pokémon. Hosaka was working in senior care when he had the idea of opening a cozy card shop in the suburb of Machida where customers could mingle at tables. Instead, he says, the little cards, “have become like Rolex watches, gold, silver, platinum or used cars.” – It makes sense when you think of the cards being ‘real life NFTs’
Criminal Rolex Gangs and Traveling with Watches, Part I – WOE – crime affecting luxury consumption. Interesting that London is a crime centre is prominently name checked alongside Johannesburg, South Africa. This will impact luxury retailers, luxury travel and hospitality and auction houses
Luxury
Bay Area Lawsuit Alleges Man Spent $220,000 To Get A Watch He Never Got – there’s also the added complexity of Shreve recently losing its status as a Patek AD. The lawsuit brings some ten causes of action against Shreve, including breach of contract, intentional and negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, false promise, and unfair business practices, pursuant to California’s Unfair Competition Law – this was only a matter of time. Its the same in the UK
Ad agencies and clients clash: tension over transparency in fees, services | Ad Age – a talent shortage has left agencies without enough senior executives to service accounts. Combined, such factors contribute to what marketers see as an increasing lack of transparency. One executive who leads procurement across marketing and content for a major consumer goods company said the discounts and rebates that media agencies, in particular, get from a media buy have always been “murky,” but one area agencies have always been transparent in is breaking down their fees. The brand executive said auditors, working on behalf of the marketers, have previously been able to get agencies to disclose their margins, overheads and salaries without protest—it’s standard practice and allows clients to know they are being charged a fair price. But that’s starting to change, they said, having run into issues with getting shops to break down their fees in the recent agency review their company underwent
Media
This Year Next Year: 2023 Global Mid-Year Forecast – GroupM – calls the end of radio’s global growth story. Even taking into account streaming, WPP says that, globally, ad-supported audio has peaked. It will grow just 0.3% this year, says GroupM then “remain roughly flat over the next five years”. It’s about to join newspapers, magazines and broadcast television in a downward trajectory. GroupM also tackles the impact of AI on the industry. It reckons that within five years, the portion of “AI-enabled” advertising revenue globally will be worth $800bn. What is impossible to quantify is whether any of that is new money. Most likely, none of it. What is also impossible to quantify is just how dramatic the AI-driven reductions in cost of production will be. That sounds a relatively benign question until one realises that all those reduced costs are human jobs. GroupM identifies five key themes: Regulation (particularly around data privacy); connected TV (and an annualised 10%+ growth in the segment)’; AI “is likely to inform, or touch in some way, at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023”; retail media to overtake TV by 2028; and “new business growth” (which sounds like the sort of thing an agency person would put in their predictions). Most importantly though, the GroupM outlook points to a more more significant factor. We’re at the end of a cycle that was defined by shifts between advertising channels, and then the disruption of Covid. “We are at an inflection point where the secular drivers of advertising growth above and beyond GDP growth are maturing, the pandemic upheaval is receding and the dynamic rise of digital advertising has slowed. This is the basis of our underlying forecast of mid-single-digit advertising growth over the next five years. However, the pervasive impact of AI on the world of advertising could change that.”
AI at Work: What People Are Saying | BCG – leaders love it, workers don’t. Businesses have only addressed the needs of leaders, which probably dialled up the anxiety with a sense that AI is something that happens to you and your career rather like a bad car accident
Beeper — All your chats in one app. Yes, really. – clients like Adium became less useful as Google and other services went away from common protocols and the IM giants AOL, MSN and Yahoo! disappeared. Beeper are trying to address this
