Armed with better perspective, Sir Martin Sorrell vows to ‘start again’ | Marketing Interactive – this is interesting, particularly as a number of clients put WPP on review after he left. I am not sure that he will be able to build another WPP; but he could build a great consultancy for procurement departments at major brands. I hope that he doesn’t go digital only, or go and work for a platform like Google or Facebook; selling Facebook video advertising
The Netflix generation doesn’t do compromise | The Times – a few things about the media consumption in this. There are still shared experiences: landmark shows like Sherlock, McMafia, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, or Black Mirror. Fragmentation of audiences didn’t start with Netflix but with video cassette recorders, multiplex cinemas, Channel 4 and cable and satellite TV. There was a certain delicious irony reading about how media plurality is ‘bad’ in a paper owned by the Murdoch media empire. I committed a greater sin than the Netflix millennials and opted out of watching TV quite happily for seven years until I was gifted a Sony Trinitron TV set by a friend who was getting a flat screen – which would probably count as even more ill tempered. The comments on online discussion are natural. Do Times readers invite objectionable opinions around to dinner parties in the name of diverse thinking? I would imagine not that often unless there are other ties (like familial links). (Paywall)
A ZFS developer’s analysis of the good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system | Ars Technica – this is a good guide by Adam Levanthal. The thing that puzzles me is this. Apple had a working implementation of ZFS running on early beta versions of OS X and then decided not to implement it. Apple adoption of ZFS would be a major boost (it is already supported on Linux and Solaris). It takes about a decade for a file system to mature sufficiently; ZFS has that maturity and is still bleeding edge tech. Apple has a good relationship with Oracle so that wouldn’t be a problem, Larry Ellison is still the shot-caller over there and he still hates Microsoft and Google. Instead they build their own version, which has nice encryption facilities but lacks the data integrity features that ZFS has. It doesn’t seem to be about squeezing the footprint of ZFS for mobile devices either. Apple just decided to go it alone for reasons that aren’t readily apparent at the moment with APFS.
Huawei sees building alternative to Android as insurance amid US-China trade tensions | SCMP – not a big leap from an OS point of view. The big jump would be the app store since both Google and Amazon’s app stores would be out of reach if Huawei were found guilty. A way around this would be the likes of SailfishOS which would also deal with lingering security concerns about Huawei handsets. More Huawei related content here.
APAC markets exceed global benchmarks for viewability, brand safety | Digital | Campaign Asia – fraud rates for campaigns that optimised against fraud remained relatively flat, showing optimisation efforts are paying off by keeping fraud rates low. Singapore and Hong Kong had higher fraud risk at 20.7% and 14.0% respectively, because ad fraudsters tend to follow where the digital spend goes and where CPMs are higher.
U.S. DoJ probing Huawei for possible Iran sanctions violations: WSJ – interesting that they are getting dinged for similar things to ZTE. Stopping US vendors from selling to Huawei would be a bit less impactful than on ZTE. But it would retarget the Huawei R&D budget away from innovation to replacing American component technology and engineering services currently provided by the likes of Ciena or Qualcomm. This actually fits neatly with Mr Xi’s China 2025 manufacturing initiative that is designed to free the country from relying on international suppliers.
Electric Autos – Long life – I think it’s more complex, depending on vehicle range and driving patterns will factor into demand. Of course the shit is really going to hit the fan when lithium ion technology fails to provide for transport needs like long distance heavy goods vehicles, becomes too expensive and essential materials become too rare. There is likely to be a pivot to hydrogen combustion engines or hydrogen fuel cells due to superior energy density. The economics around risk, infrastructure and other capital costs will change.
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.
The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.
The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.
Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.
Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.
What Siri creator Norman Winarsky thinks of Apple’s Siri now — Quartz – not terribly surprising. Norman Winarsky is now a partner at a number of Silicon Valley venture firms. Whilst he is better known in business space now as a lecturer on business, entrepreneur and VC, he is an academic at heart.
Norman Winarsky via the TechCrunch account on Flickr
Norman Winarsky studied and eventually ended up with a doctorate in mathematics. He started his private sector career at RCA Research (RCA’s answer to Xerox PARC or IBM Research), he had a career there for a number of decade as that moved through various owners. Eventually it became the east coast campus of SRI. Norman Winarsky went on to help found the SRI process for spinning off businesses and technology licensing. He was a co-founder of one of those businesses: Siri – that was bought by Apple. It will be interesting to see if Norman Winarsky has another high impact idea in him moving forwards. More related content here.
That’s the key finding from an analysis of regional and global agency deals by global marketing management consultancy Trinity P3 and Mark Ritson
Alibaba rival JD.com posts first annual profit as a public company | TechCrunch – The company’s fiscal profit was helped by a surprise $35 million profit in Q1 and a lucrative Q3 quarter in which it posted a RMB 1 billion ($151 million) profit thanks to its own efforts on Single’s Day, China’s online shopping bonanza. The company posted a RMB 909.2 million (US$139.7 million) loss for Q4, but that marked a 28 percent decrease year-on-year.
While Alibaba has a higher profile — with enormously profitable quarters — JD.com has quietly built out its e-commerce by expanding into financial services, offline retail and more
Consumer behaviour
This Chinese billionaire felt lost in US without WeChat, mobile payments | South China Morning Post – The chairman of Legend Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Lenovo, said China was now comparable to Japan and ahead of the US in terms of mobile internet technology, digital content and innovative business models.“If you haven’t stayed abroad for a long time, you might not understand [the difference],” said Liu, citing his recent experience in the US. His insights give credence to how Chinese technology companies have cultivated a hi-tech universe so large that it exists almost exclusively on its own – sustained by the country’s 1.4 billion people – but cut off from the rest of the world by Beijing’s Great Firewall, which blocks content not approved by the government. – the problem is that Chinese systems are ‘Galapagos’ technologies
BlackBerry suing Facebook for patent infringement | CNBC – “Blackberry’s suit sadly reflects the current state of its messaging business. Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others. We intend to fight,” Facebook general counsel Paul Grewal said – you see Facebook has sucked the blood out of other businesses for too long. I have little sympathy with them in this suit. It will be interesting to see how robust BlackBerry’s patents are and whether it would be cheaper for Facebook to pay them off or buy the business outright. The question is who is next after Facebook in Blackberry’s legal sights?
Luxury
Balenciaga is Putting its Money Where its Logo-Covered Hoodie Is for F/W 2018 | The Fashion Law – garments on the brand’s runway bore a phone number, +33156528799, which turns out to be Balenciaga’s “new hotline.” Call the number and you can answer a 20-question survey, inquiring about your age, primary language, height, and shoe size, as well as your favorite form of transportation, type of music, season, taste (your options are: Bitter, Salty, Sour, Sweet, or Umami), and so on.
A way for Balenciaga to better understand its customers? Maybe. Considering that the message is ends with the following note: “Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. All data will be erased now,” I, for one, am guessing this is more interactive experience than fact gathering mission. If we have learned anything over the past several years, it is that “experiences” are everything to the modern-day consumer – I can imagine a choir of marketers howling in a symphony of pain about this
Meet the billionaire millennial pouring money into British fashion… and she’s only 27 | Telegraph Online – ‘My generation has completely different shopping habits,’ says Yu. ‘People born in the 1960s and ’70s buy into established brands such as Dior and Chanel. For them, it’s about showing status and where they fit into society. But my generation isn’t into logos – it’s not cool, it’s too obvious. [And] we prefer to shop online. We’ve become very interested and hungry for young, emerging designers.’
P&G’s Marc Pritchard calls for ‘fewer project managers’ at agencies as he vows to destroy ‘maze of complexity’ – “For media, data and analytics is enabling us to bring more media planning in-house, replacing multiple layers,” said Pritchard. “When it comes to buying, our purchasing people can negotiate with the best of them, so we’re doing more private marketplace deals in-house. And if entrepreneurs can buy digital media, why can’t the brand team on Tide, Dawn and Crest be entrepreneurs and do the same? They can, and they will.”
He explained that P&G wants and needs brilliant creatives, and will invest in such talent. But “creatives represent less than half of agency resources, because they’re surrounded by excess management, buildings and overhead.”
Media
Time for news to fight back | The Australian – Mark Ritson arguing that that agencies may be pushing clients into digital media because it can result in greater commissions for the agencies — in some cases almost 3 times greater than for traditional media (paywall)
Retailing
Smartphone users are spending more money each time they visit a website – Recode – The amount of money people spent per visit to online retailers has increased 27 percent since the beginning of 2015, according to new data from Adobe Analytics. Meanwhile, the length of smartphone website visits has actually declined 10 percent
Silicon Valley Is Over, Says Silicon Valley – The New York Times – In recent months, a growing number of tech leaders have been flirting with the idea of leaving Silicon Valley. Some cite the exorbitant cost of living in San Francisco and its suburbs, where even a million-dollar salary can feel middle class. Others complain about local criticism of the tech industry and a left-wing echo chamber that stifles opposing views. And yet others feel that better innovation is happening elsewhere – like Shenzhen? I think a lot of the problem with Silicon Valley is that it doesn’t build hardware any more. Bright people are mobile for the right pay, what you can’t easily do is the kind of commercialisation and manufacturing speed as a feedback loop like you see in Southern China
