The Grateful Dead Wall of Sound. An amazing documentary about the sound system that The Grateful Dead used to tour with.
Grateful Dead at the Warfield 10/09/1980 by Chris Stone
The scale of it is very impressive. Having listened to Grateful Dead bootleg recordings, the sound system is also extremely impressive for the high fidelity sound that came from it.
Fantastic case study from TBWA\Chiat\Day for Adidas. Billie Jean King your shoes. The background was that Billie Jean King played her iconic game against Bobby Riggs in a pair of blue Adidas shoes back in 1973.
To celebrate this win, Adidas would spray paint whatever trainers you had to look like King’s. There is also a connotation of ‘ownership’ in the graffiti world by overspraying someone else’s work. That makes this campaign work on a number of levels, in particular when you see a Nike Air Force 1 ‘Kinged’.
The North Face Japan put out this great video that shows how to make a wallet from cardboard packaging. It is interesting the way it strays straight into Patagonia territory and taps into the spare time that people would have self-isolating. It keeps a brand aligned to the great outdoors engaging prospective customers indoors.
RZA goes in-depth on the Wu-Tang Clan’s love of vintage Hong Kong wishu films and how the influenced their music. It also works as a great tour of all the classics in Hong Kong cinema. I am surprised that this hasn’t been done earlier.
Great vintage recording of Kraftwerk. What I like about it is how the simple instruments that Kraftwerk had fabricated and played allow the mix to ‘breathe’. There is clear space allowing each instrument to be heard. This was partly due to the simplicity of the technology. It was also influenced by a wider movement in Germany to define how the country should define itself moving forwards. Kraftwerk looked at a modernism as a way to redefine what it meant to be German. The music is somewhat influenced by the Bauhaus school of design.
Is This the End of Drop Shipping from China? | Jing Daily – The profitability and success of the drop shipping model comes from a price disparity between the products manufactured in the Western Hemisphere and those from China, but also from a shipping price disparity. In other words, if the US government increases tariffs on Chinese products, or raises shipping rates for packages arriving from China, the whole model becomes noncompetitive. And this is exactly what has happened. This makes the likes of Shopify look like a Ponzi scheme facilitator. The UK edition of Wired magazine had an interesting article on the weird world of drop shipping: ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of drop shipping | WIRED UK – In some ways drop shipping feels old to the likes of me. It reminds me a lot of TV shopping and multi-level marketing in terms of persistent agile middle men. This article goes into the get rich quick culture of drop shipping. What struck me was the extraordinarily negative view of the future that these people had. There was a dystopian emptiness at centre of everything that the drop shipping bros did. From this perspective drop shipping bros are different to their peers that would have sold time shares, life insurance, photocopier leases or even crypto currency. It also shows that Chinese manufacturing and business practices haven’t improved over the last decade. The only piece that these two articles miss is the the supply side postal subsidy that the Chinese government gives to domestic exporters. This fuels everything from drop shipping to Chinese Amazon marketplace vendors and Chinese DTC apparel vendors who advertise on Facebook. More on Chinese online marketplaces that fuel drop shipping here.
Mediatel: Mediatel News: “Mind-boggling”: the industry reacts to ISBA/PwC report – In a study of the “premium parts of the programmatic market”, including fifteen major advertisers, 300 distinct supply chains and 12 premium publishers, just 51% of advertiser spend on digital inventory was going to the working media. Meanwhile, 15% of marketing spend was disappearing into an “unknown delta”, and was unattributable anywhere in the supply chain. In response to the report’s findings, the market was warned that if it could not deliver standards and transparency, advertisers may take their money elsewhere and the Competition and Markets Authority might even intervene – the content came as little surprise, though it is nice to have numbers put to this. Timing-wise this is a body blow to the media industry. Its also concerning given the disruption-driven flight to digital by marketers – I don’t think you’ll see better multi-channel brand building media plans, but a greater focus on direct response instead. More here Mediatel: Mediatel News: ISBA/PwC: 15% of programmatic supply chain costs ‘unattributable’
Hamilton Bohannon: Disco Disciple & House Precursor | Attack Magazine – Bohannon was essentially creating dub mixes of soul records for club DJs. Except he created them with a band, not via studio equipment. In pioneering this minimal, dance-floor focused aesthetic, Bohannon pre-dated loop-based house records and the repetition of acid house and loop techno. On his Worldwide.fm tribute to Bohannon, Francois Kevorkian described the drummer as: “One of the most brilliant and original artists of his time who helped define as well as forge the template for the sound of dance music”. Bohannon, along with many other innovators, contributed to the development of what would lead to house and techno a decade later
How China Has Capitalized on the Coronavirus | The National Interest – Chinese government’s alleged efforts to hide the facts about the coronavirus. This process is necessary. Equally important, is the imperative to fix a national security vulnerability that the pandemic has revealed: China’s quiet net of influence over the agencies and international bodies that America has relied upon in the post–World War II era. Here, the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) early response to the coronavirus is an unfortunate object lesson. Bad assumptions about the good faith of the Chinese government can have devastating consequences – this is going to bring all kinds of unintended consequences
Apple’s repair policies are utterly shameful and should be outlawed – Digital waste is a huge problem, and Apple is a major contributor toit. All of these old MacBooks, iPhones, iPads and other products just sit around in the deep recesses of our closets, or worse, at the bottom of landfills. The fact that the FTC is willing to listen to right-to-repair advocates and examine the potential for policy change is promising
The Quietus | Features | Tome On The Range | Split: What Love Island Tells Us About Culture & Class In Modern Britain – researchers from the London School of Economics, Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, published a book called The Class Ceiling, summing up years of research on exactly this relationship between cultural aspects of class and social mobility. They were given unparalleled access to Channel 4 and interviewed a top senior commissioner at the broadcaster to find out how he got to the top of the company. Mark (not his real name) was honest about many of the economic privileges that helped him along the way: a private school education, a place at a top university and the ‘bank of Mum and Dad’ to secure London rent while he navigated the precarious world of the creative arts. He recounts how those without this crucial safety net ended up having to take safer and more stable jobs within the industry, such as more administrative roles but with less career progression. In his own words, without such privileges the risk of going for the top job would have been like ‘sky diving without a parachute’
What happens when a major media empire shuts overnight? | Digital | Campaign Asia – “Primetime segments, which aired key programmes aligned with the advertising of prominent brands, are now no longer available. Brands will feel the pinch with the redistribution of advertising spend, loss of audience reach and reallocation of audiences against different channels.”
HONG KONG: What NXT did next… | What Hi-Fi? – 3M uses its bending wave touch screens in the development of advertising and kiosk touch panels, while with its partner Qinetiq NXT’s producing solutions for use in transport applications such as high-end ex ecutive jets and even some locations on the London Underground.Work is also going on with printed electronics and other unusual applications: luxury birthday cards from Hallmark now use NXT technology to play high-quality greetings music when they’re opened! – NXT originally came out of work done on Saab fighter aircraft to reduce cockpit noise
Nintendo: Switch it up | Financial Times – interesting analysis on Animal Crossing and the Nintendo Switch. If the Wii taught us anything , it is that Nintendo marches to its own beat. Its games and audience are different to PlayStation and Xbox
Tencent surveils foreign accounts to aid domestic censorship | Financial Times – surveillance of private messages is also applied to accounts registered to foreign mobile numbers, in order to build up its repository of sensitive files and thus better censor China-registered accounts. The research shows how Tencent not only conducts censorship, but also informs and develops its own censorship strategies. In addition, the company is likely to support the government’s political research. “If the Chinese government has any need to regulate public opinion, they will certainly use the database of politically sensitive content by WeChat” to learn from, said a Beijing-based professional who has worked closely with the government. The professional added that WeChat’s database of sensitive content was “probably the most comprehensive and updated one in China”.
360 Deep Dive: Today’s Broadcast TV | Park Associates – TV antenna usage in US broadband households jumped to 25% in 2019 and is expected to grow as COVID-19 has kept consumers at home. Content styles and genres grow and change, while business models and transmission technologies evolve and cause disruption, but nothing changes the end consumers’ goal: to find video that they want to watch. Secondarily, consumers want to find that content in a manner that is affordable and easy
Future of Our Global Economy: The Beginning of De-Globalization – DER SPIEGEL – Industrial machine producers, of the kind that make a huge contribution to the German economy, have begun shifting priorities from making the supply chain as cheap as possible to making it as secure as possible – this sounds more like an acceleration in change rather than radical change due to COVID’19
Britain’s wartime generation are almost as pro-EU as millennials | LSE BREXIT – the prevailing political environment shapes the long-term opinions of those in their formative years. Given the current ubiquity of the Brexit debate, today’s arguments and events surrounding integration will almost certainly have a significant impact on the most recent generation, namely those born after the millennium. In exactly what way these debates will shape public opinion, however, remains to be seen. – Hmm, when I think back to the nasty Tory narrative of the Thatcher years that put Blair and Brown into power, I wonder if this won’t make them even more right wing….
WPP wins Unilever media duties in China | Media | Campaign Asia – Unilever and WPP also have a long history. More recent connections include a WPP ‘Team Unilever’ in-house partnership launched in Singapore in 2018 and led by Mindshare’s Sudipto Roy, and the appointment of former Unilever CMO Keith Weed to the WPP board in 2019.
Judge Timothy Kelly Stunned by Facebook’s Violation of Law | Law & Crime – The allegations in the Complaint reflect many ways in which Facebook purportedly acted improperly. Some of these allegations represent discrete and poorly considered decisions, such as allegedly encouraging users to provide phone numbers to better secure their accounts, but then using those same numbers for advertising without telling users beforehand. Others appear to reflect Facebook’s willingness to deceive its users outright, such as allegedly telling the public that it would not share their personal information with third parties when it was continuing to do so. And still others represent systemic oversight failures, such as allegedly allowing third parties to access users’ personal information without the users’ knowledge and without controlling how those third parties would use the information. Most of these allegations represent violations of the 2012 Order; several are new violations of law. But all of them suggest that the privacy-related decision making of Facebook’s executives was subject to grossly insufficient transparency and accountability
Demand fall offers glimpse into oil industry’s future | Financial Times – what this story about fuel demand fall fails to take into account is feedstocks. Feedstocks are precursor chemicals derived from oil and gas that go into materials for pretty much everything we make from medicines, electronics and food packaging to stretchy yoga slacks
What we Learnt From Accidentally Printing Over a Billion QR codes on Cadbury Chocolate | LinkedIn – market leaders ultimately didn’t see how this potentially large ongoing investment would truly deliver on their biggest challenges (like most brands, driving penetration into relatively light users) and so they pulled the plug on funding what felt like had become a bloated concept. – found via Matt Muir’s Web Curios newsletter. Less a meditation on the woes of QR codes. China and other markets have demonstrated that used in the right way QR codes can be of enormous benefit in bridging the real world / online interface. Instead it highlights the kludgy dodgy business cases in terms of digitalisation of FMCG products.
Start Chatting | Reddit Help – back before I joined Yahoo!, the major internet companies (outside of Aol) had moved away from operating chat rooms themselves – allowing Lycos to largely have the business to itself. Lycos even had white labelled offers for some of the other firms, or a transfer of customer base put in place. The reason was the fear that somehow the internet would generate the Pete Townsend effect and make us all ‘curious’ about child porn and bring down the end of the world – or something similar. Yes, I am being a bit sarcastic, but at the time it was a PR issue for these businesses and the gains from chat rooms were marginal. It is interesting that Reddit are expanding into chat rooms, presumably trying to find even meagre veins of revenue with the demand fall in brand advertising both online and offline. It will be interesting to see how things go
My urge to splurge is over and won’t be returning soon | Financial Times – when he thinks back to his public bout of destruction in 2001, he mentions two things that seem relevant to today’s unsettling times. First, a lot of the thousands of people who came to gawk at him began to talk unprompted about their own possessions, and how they really only cared about photos, gifts or things they had made themselves. I suspect a lot of us have thought about what really matters lately. Second, he says people were unexpectedly kind to him.
Facebook may lose seal of approval that gives ad buyers confidence they get what they buy in advertising, WSJ reports – The company failed to address advertiser concerns arising from a 2019 audit, concerning how Facebook measures and reports data about video advertisements, the Journal reported, citing a notice from the Media Rating Council (MRC). “These exchanges are part of the audit process. We will continue working with MRC on accreditation, as we have since 2016,” a Facebook spokesperson said. The MRC confirmed that the audit of Facebook is in process but did not provide details, citing its policy.
Marketers’ strategic responsibilities are eroding away to nothing | Marketing Week – Marketers are becoming more and more responsible for the communication aspects of the marketing mix – with social media, PR, CRM and e-commerce all increasingly under their control as the other tactical and strategic challenges dissipate. By my best estimate, communications should be about 8% of the marketing function’s duties. It increasingly appears to take up almost all of it. I can’t say I am that surprised by this. For all the fetishisation of big data, there is a lot of dodgy decisions being made out there. Brand tracking surveys are not being done, you have major FMCG brands relying on past correlation with Twitter opinions to substitute for more expensive surveys. The marketing communications mix isn’t based on research data but the fear of digital disruption
This Should Be V.R.’s Moment. Why Is It Still So Niche? – The New York Times – The bad news is that V.R. is still not what sci-fi movies taught us to hope for — a fully immersive experience that transports us to another dimension and gives us all kinds of virtual superpowers. Even the leading systems still lack some basic features and, outside of gaming, there isn’t much you can do on a V.R. headset that you can’t do more easily on another device. Is this a technology issue or a lack of a killer application or compelling content?
China, Offline Retail Isn’t Going Back to Normal | Gartner L2 – electronics retailer Gome adopted a common strategy for combating the virus in its more than one thousand stores—all customers must undergo temperature checks, masks are mandatory, and the entire big box store will be periodically disinfected. Local beauty retailer Wow Colour similarly mandated that all employees undergo regular temperature checks and wash hands, and specified the disinfectants that will be used to regularly clean its stores. JD even mandated that only three hundred customers are allowed in a store at a time
The success of the Macintosh idea – The Mac emboldened a new breed of nonconformists (a composite community of intellectuals, artists, designers, independent developers, mavericks in corporations, etc.) and spurred the creation of powerful Macintosh user groups, such as the BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh User Group), which had a sort of double mission. On the one hand, it was a resurgence of the 60’s counterculture with “roots in The Hacker Ethic and Berkeley Radicalism,” as Stephen Howard and Raines Cohen put it. On the other, it was a pedagogical platform, as Reese Jones explained: “I see two different sets of people in our group: those with computer experience who are just now seeing new avenues to follow in computing, and those with little or no experience who are just now seeing what computing can do. We must provide for the different needs of both, but we have in common that our eyes are just being opened to something new and different.”
Accepting, suffering or resisting: study groups Britons’ response to coronavirus lockdown – Reuters – King’s found 93% of the suffering said they were following lockdown rules completely or nearly all the time, compared to just 49% of the resisting. The latter were around 10 times more likely than the other groups to say they had met up with friends or family outside their home. – The resisting group skewed young.
The meticulous design of Japanese environmental sounds – ‘kankyō ongaku’ – a strand of Japanese minimalism that emerged in the 1980s to soundtrack the architectural wonders and commercial advancements of the country’s economic boom years. In the west we put up with muzak; but the Japanese environmental sounds are highly engineered minimalistic experiences
The Internet Used to Make Us Smarter. Now, Not So Much. | Douglas Rushkoff – we too easily lose sight of what it is that’s truly revolutionary. By focusing on the shiny new toys and ignoring the human empowerment potentiated by these new media — the political and social capabilities they are retrieving — we end up surrendering them to the powers that be – I think this is as much about how is online as the online tools
Imagination Commits to Keeping U.K. HQ – For Now | EE Times – underlying this is very likely to be a worry for Imagination that a move to China could end up with its intellectual property owned by China. And that could worry its major customers, including Apple — a customer that the now former CEO Ron Black worked hard to win back
Luckin fraud admission leaves more questions than answers · TechNode – using part of his handsomely-valued Luckin shares as collateral to take out loans, Lu Zhengyao has made away with in excess of $500 million. That amount would have been much, much smaller if Luckin’s numbers were accurately reported. All this makes it hard to believe that COO Liu Jian would commit fraud without the actual or constructive knowledge Chairman Lu Zhengyao, CEO Qian Zhiya and CFO Reinout Hendrik Schakel. My present hypothesis is that Liu, as a long time errand boy for Chairman Lu Zhengyao, has taken the fall to buy time for Luckin’s management to work out their next move – interesting read. It does make you wonder about other Chinese firms
Booking Holdings to announce lay-offs after securing $4bn loan | Financial Times – (Glenn) Fogel told the 530 employees on the call, which was first reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC, that bookings on the travel company’s platforms had dropped 85 per cent year-on-year in the preceding week and that the loss in revenue because of reduced rates at hotels was even greater. – I’d imagine that’s going to blitz their Google advertising spend reputedly 10 billion dollars a year pre-COVID
Why China is losing the coronavirus narrative | Financial Times – just wow, it won’t affect public opinion that much, but will affect government and wonks : When Roger Roth received an email from the Chinese government asking him to sponsor a bill in the Wisconsin state legislature praising China’s response to coronavirus, he thought it must be a hoax. The sender had even appended a pre-written resolution full of Communist party talking points and dubious claims for the Wisconsin senate president to put to a vote. “I’ve never heard of a foreign government approaching a state legislature and asking them to pass a piece of legislation,” Sen Roth told me last week. “I thought this couldn’t be real.” Then he discovered it was indeed sent by China’s consul-general in Chicago. “I was astonished . . .[and] wrote a letter back: ‘dear consul general, NUTS’.”
I have been listening to this mix of Princes music. Prince had a diverse song book and the mix covers Princes music catalogue in some depth. It gives a great sampling of the talent we lost when Prince died
YouTube has a cornucopia of content including this great documentary on house music interviewing a succession of insiders to tell the story of how house music became a global phenomena.
Spoon + Tamago had an article about how public baths in Japan were providing online videos for the locked-down customers. Whilst one might not be able to enjoy a good soak, they can enjoy at least some of the ambience. It rather reminded me of the slow TV programming that Norwegian channel NRK, (if you get a chance to watch them, they are remarkably soothing). More on Japanese related topics here.
A quick film on the Hyman Archive of magazines. Reputedly the world’s largest collection of magazines according to the Guinness Book of Records. It is more important as a source of cultural insight over time. I do feel that something is lost in the digitising of the archive. Vogue Italia or Japan isn’t only about the pictures but the overall heft and feeling that you have holding the magazine. Digitisation only gets you so far.
A good presentation to listen to on emerging marketing trends. It calls BS on crypto. I’d have been a bit more skeptical on digital and marketing effectiveness. Terence Kawaja and Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer provides some great data points to back up their opinions on emerging marketing trends. It is refreshing to hear them shred crypto. Their approach to trends is very sensible. I always think about Robert X Cringely’s discussion of trends in terms of surfing. That if you go too early you fail to catch the wave.
