Ged Carroll

Category: china | 中國 | 중국 | 中華

Ni hao – this category features any blog posts that relate to the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese communist party, Chinese citizens, consumer behaviour, business, and Chinese business abroad.

It is likely the post will also in other categories too.  For example a post about Tong Ren Tang might end up in the business section as well. Inevitably everything is inherently political in nature. At the moment, I don’t take suggestions for subject areas or comments on content for this category, it just isn’t worth the hassle.

Why have posts on China? I have been involved in projects there and had Chinese clients. China has some interesting things happening in art, advertising, architecture, design and manufacturing. I have managed to experience some great and not so great aspects of the country and its businesses.

Opinions have been managed by the omnipresent party and this has affected consumer behaviour. Lotte was boycotted and harassed out of the country. Toyota and Honda cars occasionally go through damage by consumer action during particularly high tensions with Japan.

I put stuff here to allow readers to make up their own  minds about the PRC. The size of the place makes things complicated and the only constants are change, death, taxes and the party. Things get even more complicated on the global stage.

The unique nature of the Chinese internet and sheltered business sectors means that interesting Galapagos syndrome type things happen.

I have separate sections for Taiwan and Hong Kong, for posts that are specific to them.

  • Family funeral & things from last week

    I spent the weekend travelling back to Ireland for a family funeral. Despite the fact that it was a family funeral it was good to see some members of the family whom I haven’t seen since I was a teenager. It also cause me to reflect on some things, it inspired my post ‘Ramblings on consumption‘ and you might see similarly inspired future posts. I thought back to my childhood playing cards with my uncle and I have been been getting online practice of the card game Twenty Five. Twenty five had the same impact in rural Irish society that mahjong has for Chinese communities. If any of you want a game let me know.

    I came across an interesting case study on Chevrolet’s celebration of Children’s Day in China. I have put the video below so that you  can see the project, its a nice piece of work. Secondly it is worth reflecting on how this project fits into the changing media landscape. This exemplifies the cross over between brand advertising and corporate communications work that is now happening around the world. Brand advertising is leading this charge into PR’s heartland and taking some of PR’s largest budgets. In a separate note The Holmes Report found that the industry’s top inhouse PR leaders have had their budgets halved over the past six years.

    Enjoy the case study

    Winston Sterzel on shooting with China Central Television (CCTV) – think of it as PBS or the domestic BBC television service with Chinese characteristics.

    Heathrow Express’ advert featuring The Krankies was an interesting choice of creative. It’s very consistent with their brand and mildly subversive.

    GUCCI – Why are you scared of me WeChat campaign features a robot built by Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University clad from head to toe in Gucci. When is the last time you saw a Chanel talking about:

    • What it means to be human
    • Ray Kurzweil’s concept of the singularity, where machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence?

    It then reflects on the benefits that technology have brought to date:

    Because of technology, we have turned fairy tales into animations and created memories of countless human childhoods.Because of technology, home entertainment equipment brings joy to the family, which has inspired many children’s future dreams and aspirations. Even two strangers, when they talk about the common memories they used to have because of the popularity of technology, can seem to understand each other in an instant.

    The implication being that new forms of shared memories may bond robotics in spite of negative factors like the ‘uncanny valley’.

  • Self doubt + more things

    Why social media and selfies are filling Hong Kong’s young women with self-doubt | South China Morning Post – 10 per cent of women in the 16 to 24 age group attributed their negative feelings to social media, while 31 per cent said it was due to friends and 28 per cent pointed to health. For older women, only 5 per cent cited social media, 18 per cent said friends and 40 per cent named health as an issue – survey of 1,010 respondents by think tank MWYO. Sample size is a little low. I suspect that self doubt and low self esteem due to social media is more than a Hong Kong phenomenon. There is a Dove brand marketing campaign in these insights. Filters and beautification camera apps probably drive this process even harder.  More on social media related topics here

    Ric Flair aka Nature Boy the veteran American wrestler from WWE appears in these ads. I love it for the nostalgia if nothing else. What’s amazing is the longevity in wrestling personality brands. World Wrestling Entertainment has an undervalued skill in building brands and sub-brand through storytelling that is timeless in nature. WWE is right up there with Disney in my book.

    Will China Let Google Back in? – MacroPolo – not likely, because China doesn’t need Alphabet.

    This is how Dutch police know you’re buying drugs online – interesting how transactions that don’t go through escrow can be compromised and how the police seem to be getting good intelligence on where the servers are located. This could be conventional police work, bad server set up or a compromise in the infrastruce of the dark web

    What does QAnon have to do with leftist Italian authors Wu Ming — Quartz – fascinating read. QAnon is definitely a pre-meditated construct, but beyond that we don’t know anything more about its creation.

  • Jane Pong & things from last week

    Check out these beautiful infographics by Jane Pong. She previously worked at the South China Morning Post. Jane Pong comes up with amazing ways to visualise information in an easy-to-digest format that works equally well in print and digital. More design related content here.

    How the ideogram structure and smartphones are affecting Chinese literacy. Chinese people learn thousands of characters as part of their literacy in their own language. But unlike alphabets in languages like English or Russian; you can’t guess at a lot of words. This is especially problematic because of the tonal nature of the languages as well.

    Electronic character input tries to get around this by suggesting characters based on pinyin or character auto-prediction. This means that if you haven’t written the character in a long time, due to auto suggestion in apps, they lose handwriting muscle memory.

    Trendwatching on the future of retail. What’s coming through this is the importance of retail in terms of culture and experience as well as consumption.

    Saul Bass on Why Man Creates via Jed Hallam’s newsletter. Bass made his reputation in developing branding design for US companies from the post war years, well into the 1980s. You might not know his name, but you will recognise his work.

    Movie posters for:

    • Vertigo
    • Psycho

    Movie title sequences for:

    • Broadcast News
    • Goodfellas
    • Cape Fear
    • Casino

    His logo designs include:

    • AT&T
    • Quaker Oats
    • United Airlines
    • Warner Communications
    • General Foods

    Saul Bass’ logo designs were seen as an unusually good investment for brands. The average life of a Saul Bass logo is more than 34 years. The logo was most often retired because the company was merged or disappeared. More here.

    Ogilvy Consulting on buyer behaviour

  • Kevin King + more things

    Digital Chief Kevin King Quits Edelman After 14 Years – More recently, sources familiar with the situation also point to ongoing questions regarding the agency’s investment priorities. Famously, Edelman has hired more than 600 creatives and planners over the last three years, in a bid to better compete with agencies across the paid and earned media spectrum – I don’t know Kevin King, but I do know that he was a long term fixture at Edelman and helped build their digital capability. Kevin King will likely turn up at one of the new agency groups in the near future – Edelman non-compete clause allowing. More Edelman related content here.

    CSL on Fifa 19: not quite fantasy football but you can see why the China league is joining the EA party | South China Morning Post – unsurprising given the Chinese government’s aspirations for soccer and the domestic league. EA can’t ignore the size of gaming in China either

    Natural Cycles: ASA investigates marketing for contraception app | The Guardian – The Family Planning Association is also concerned about the app. A spokeswoman said: “The use of the word ‘certified’ suggests that there is independent evidence supporting these claims, whereas in fact the only evidence is from the company itself. It has amassed a vast database, which is very interesting, but that is not the same as verified independent evidence. – and there is the challenge of a blind faith in big data. If they get this wrong the individual consequences are huge

    The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine – IEEE Spectrum – the interesting bit about about this is that in sea turbines aren’t considered instead of wind. Wind’s economics problem is their consistency, turbines are actually only doing work less than half them time – that’s the problem that’s driving size. If you put the the turbines in the water to take advantage of currents instead energy transference, more consistent power and size becomes a civil engineering problem like a dam rather than space programme style construction. How are super conductors supposed to even work?

    Britain’s Fake News Inquiry Says Facebook And Google’s Algorithms Should Be Audited By UK Regulators – if this goes through its the thin end of the wedge. The UK is much more beholden to commercial interests than even the US. The record industry the the English Premier League have managed to bring down the full force of government censorship with the Digital Economy Act. And both Facebook and Alphabet only have themselves to blame. China’s concept of cyber sovereignty starts to look prescient; and we all look as if we might be living in a darker world

  • Crimson Hexagon + more things

    Facebook Suspends Analytics Firm Crimson Hexagon on Concerns About Sharing of Public User-Data – WSJ – Crimson Hexagon will likely get out of the penalty box soon, the co-founder works at a joint Facebook academic research partnership… Its also not that surprising what Crimson Hexagon did, given how crap Facebook is at providing data to social insights platforms like Crimson Hexagon or Brandwatch

    Congress is wrong to question Huawei’s academic partnerships | FT – op-ed by Eric Xu of Huawei, you could cynically interpret it as a plea for easier espionage and an interesting use of ‘freedom’ (paywall)

    INTERNET: Baidu Sambas Out of Brazil | Young’s China Business – There are lots of reasons for the inability of China’s Internet companies to succeed outside their home market. One is simply inexperience. But another is really the direct result of Beijing’s determination to set up what almost amounts to a parallel Internet in China that in some ways is identical to the global Internet but in others is very different. That strategy has helped to keep out most of the major global competitors in any meaningful way, allowing Chinese companies to thrive on their home turf thanks to their booming local economy. But that approach has also made these companies quite unprepared to compete globally, since they engage in many practices that are either unacceptable outside or simply undermine trust of local people. – China’s Galapagos syndrome: WeChat has NO end-to-end encryption, is censored worldwide for instance. Will only succeed in low risk categories – photo altering apps or casual games

    Why Hong Kong’s property bubble won’t burst anytime soon | HKEJ Insights – Hong Kong’s property market no longer serves only the city’s seven million people. We now must also serve a country of 1.3 billion with a growing number of rich people anxious to get their wealth out. Hong Kong’s red-hot property sector is a perfect place for rich mainlanders and international investors to park their money. Their hot money, combined with the local psyche that prices will continue to climb means the bubble will never burst. – You could substitute most of the world’s major cities as hot money from fast developing economy entrepreneurs and rent seek oligarchs park their hot money in property safe havens. Hong Kong isn’t going to see a tailing off of house prices until China deals with corruption.

    Amazon’s new Part Finder helps you shop for those odd nuts and bolts | TechCrunch – so cool,  I am just really scared that if I showed this to my Dad this ‘tinkerer’ element of his character would go into overdrive

    Publicis Groupe: First Half 2018 Results | Publicis Groupe – poor job done at controlling market expectations

    Android has created more choice, not less | Google Blog – yeah right. Basically we can’t get paid in data so pay us a licence fee. I wonder how much Google will have to pay to keep Google Search in the device if they do that. It could also create an opportunity for Oxygen, Yandex app store, Jolla and home grown distributions by the likes of Huawei instead

    Mark Penn on his update to MicroTrends

    Media – Twitter’s guide to getting the most out of the platform

    MEDIA Protocol – WTF

    Looking Through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State – The New York Times  – I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man’s face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. Seconds later, the people scattered. Their reaction was somewhat surprising. Chinese people often report that they’re comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched

    Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day | The Drum – makes you wonder about AWS availability and uptime…