Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Folding phones + other things

    CNET took a look at the mechanics behind Motorola’s new folding phone. Other vendors have launched folding phones. Some of which have folded with the screen on the outside to not have too tight a kink on the screen. Motorola’s folding phones have their screen fold inwards, this is down the space provided by a cam mechanism and supporting metal plates that keep the screen in place and unstressed.

    Its good old-fashioned mechanical engineering rather than software that is facilitating mobile phones and it is a joy to behold. More design related posts here.

    watts towers
    Watts Towers by Paul Narvaez

    Before Ferguson, black lives matter or the Rodney King beating there was the Watts riots. Wattstax was a festival that addressed the underlying issues that kicked off the riots. It was put on by Stax Records. The accompanying documentary is amazing. Richard Pryor provides a narrative, beautiful photography and brilliant performances.

    More from Open Culture here: Wattstax Documents the “Black Woodstock” Concert Held 7 Years After the Watts Riots (1973)

    My computer monitor packed up. I couldn’t get it repaired through my usual suppliers so I got a refurbished monitor through Secondbyte Micro. I am getting rid of my dead monitor on eBay here.

    Tim Hwang has written a book comparing online advertising to the 2007-08 financial crash. Subprime Attention Crisis and I’ve pre-ordered a copy. Hoang reckons that there will be a big crash when marketers at large work up to two things:

    • Micro-targeting doesn’t work
    • Online ads were taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway through the ‘selection effect’. Basically the reason why performance marketing has fallen out of balance with brand marketing

    I am not convinced that there will be a big crash. I don’t think that anyone would be surprised that: tech companies don’t get marketing and don’t tell the truth. Previous generations would have sold shonky enterprise software and vapourware.

    I think budgets will try to be adjusted by marketers more towards brands. But at the rate that boards seem to go through marketing leaders; you first have to convince the C-suite to think about marketing strategically. Which ain’t going to happen thanks to the pervasiveness of Jack Welch’s blinkered perception of shareholder value.

    Finally, I think that this is the first time I have seen a manufacturer teardown its own product pre-launch for consumer audiences. I love that its done by one of Sony’s own engineers.

    The user serviceable dust traps were a particularly interesting touch to the device.

  • Sony Walkman ads + other things

    An amazing collection of advertising for the Sony Walkman from 1979/80 – 1990. These were Japanese domestic market adverts. They are chock of full of creativity in them. TV advertising seems to have been much more prevalent in Japan for the Sony Walkman. I would imagine that the adverts also had a halo effect on the Sony brand.

    By comparison this US market advert for the Sony Walkman is much more what I would have expected. Though it interesting that Sony did a 30 second TV spot for a particular model. The Sony WM-10 ‘Super Walkman’ was the smallest cassette Walkman that Sony ever made.

    It’s like a consumer electronics equivalent of a Faberge egg, as illustrated by this service video.

    While we’re on the subject of media players. French anime blogger Catsuka put together this amazing player of over 5,000 short films, adverts and music videos that draw on anime techniques.

    This cajun track by Blind Uncle Gaspard sounds more Bob Dylan than Dylan himself. The first time I heard it, it gave me goosebumps. The recording was apparently made on March 5, 1929 in New Orleans. Alcide Gaspard aka Blind Uncle Gaspard released five shellac records before he died. All were recorded in a few sessions in 1929 in Chicago and New Orleans. He died eight years later.

    Some recordings of his work have appeared throughout the years. Folk archivist Harry Smith released a recording in 1952 on the album The Anthology of American Folk Music of La Danseuse. Lan Danseuse was played with violinist Delma Lachney, whom Gaspard was known to perform with. His records didn’t sell when he was alive and it took decades for his work to reach a wider audience.

    Ogilvy’s DAVID have been doing a good deal of work tapping into gaming audiences for Burger King. This has had mixed results with the King of Stream campaign attracting a lot of negative attention. Burger King and DAVID seem to be focusing on the low cost of impressions, rather than a brand action. This is the latest case study that they have put online.

    One comment on the video stood out for me though:

    I picked Steve O as my under dog team without knowing this, i only found out today when a mate showed me lol

    YouTube user BADBOY

    How long can Burger King continue to mine gaming as a source of ‘cheap marketing’?

    Finally, I found this ‘making of’ video for a giant prototype nixie tube fascinating. Nixie tubes display numbers using cold cathode technology (fluorescent light bulbs). They are gloriously intricate which is shown in this video where they attempt to make a giant prototype.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Frank Herbert was interviewed in 1965 about the origins of Dune. He started researching an article on the control of sand dunes. He makes the fluid mechanics of sand dunes sound fascinating. That was the start point for him creating a science fiction epic. In the interview he covers a wide range of issues including environmentalism, colonialism and philosophy. He also talks about his process of working through is copy as an oral product that happened to be in books.

    Herbert is very self aware of his own writing and analytical in his process. He is also critical of people recording, rather than experiencing events. This was fascinating to read some four decades before Instagram culture.

    Here is a later talk at UCLA from 1985 with Frank Herbert as a bonus.

    Palace the streetwear brand have collaborated with the Happy Mondays for a capsule collection. It’s interesting to see Shaun Ryder and Bez still inspiring and being relevant some 25 years after the peak of their cultural relevance. More streetwear related content here.

    https://vimeo.com/457691937

    COVID comes to Sesame Street. Oscar The Grouch stars in a mask etiquette. Admittedly this comes with a grouchy reason: that he doesn’t want to see children’s happy smiling faces. Sesame Street hits out of the park again on content.

    Sesame Street – wear a mask with Oscar PSA

    George Carlin mashed up with Mad Max: Fury Road. It completely changes the feel of the film and is a stinging indictment of human behaviour.

    Finally an amazing collection of 1980s TV advertisements and station idents Beta MAX – YouTube. What struck me about this channel was the variety of categories that used television advertising extensively for brand building and activation. Some of the creative would still stand up today and were strikingly similar to work that I did for Unilever.

  • Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg

    Hidden Hand is written by two academics. Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic, who is currently professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. Mareike Ohlberg is a senior fellow in the Asia Programme of the German Marshall Fund. Prior to that she worked for the German think tank; the Mercator Institute of China Studies.

    Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg
    Hidden Hand by Hamilton & Ohlberg (US hardback edition)

    Hidden Hand interest piqued

    Both of them are seasoned China watchers. China is a popular subject and Hidden Hand would have just gone into my Amazon wishlist but for the 48 Group Club. The 48 Group Club is a British China-orientated association that fosters cultural and social ties. It had threatened legal action over content that they alleged was incorrect or defamatory. My interest in Hidden Hand was piqued.

    So What’s it like?

    Hamilton and Ohlberg have pulled together an account of China’s relationships with various elites in countries around the world and intergovernmental bodies such as WHO. Having kept an eye on China for over a decade, little of the content was new for me.

    What I found was new, was the the way it is woven together in a cohesive pattern of activity in the Hidden Hand. A sustained, pervasive bid for global influence on a scale that most people couldn’t imagine. And those that could imagine would likely be thought of as excessively paranoid.

    One thing that immediately comes across is the depth of research that the Hidden Hand contains. The index and bibliography are a big chunk of the book. The facts come thick and fast, but delivered in a dispassionate manner.

    The reframe

    This book wouldn’t be as well received if it had been published 12 months ago. A split between Wall Street and manufacturing company CEOs, COVID and the steady drip of diplomatic clashes that China has had with western countries have reframed the view for Hidden Hand. Now you have an audience that is more receptive. They are more willing to take an objective, critical analysis of China rather than give them the benefit of the doubt like an errant teenager.

    Missing answers

    Hidden Hand tries to come up with starting points for answers. Holding elites accountable. Engaging members of the Chinese diaspora. Taking a multilateral stand. All of which are hard to do. There are changes happening to espionage related laws in the UK. The EU is taking a more policy-based approach and Trump administration officials have talked about US CEOs as being unregistered foreign agents. This is a long term battle, something that will go for decades.

    The Wall Street CEOs will be hunkering down; hoping to out wait Trump. In Europe and the UK, the root and branch work required to inoculate their countries are not yet underway.

    The final missing piece is understanding the first generation Chinese diaspora. In particular the way the communist party has successfully grafted itself into the very centre of what it means to be Chinese. And then thinking carefully about how to decouple that idea. It’s happened already in places like Taiwan (and young Hong Kongers), yet many first generation diaspora and older Chinese Malaysians are wedded to the idea.

    I think that would take a lot more research. China must be doing some things right in order to get that level of belief. But there was obviously a problem with the opportunities that China offered. Otherwise why would they come to the West? It must have offered more advantages; how are they opportunities highlighted and put in conflict with the belief in party/ Understanding this will then help the work on protecting the liberal democratic system from infiltration, subversion and exploitation.

    An example of that might come from Singapore, which managed to forge a distinct Singaporean identity, whilst still holding the best bits of cultural background. Though there are risks in trying to replicate the Singapore process. More China related content here and more book reviews here.

  • Marketing, president, apocalypse – the good, bad and the ugly

    Marketing, president apocalypse – what’s going on Ged? Years ago I used to write a periodic section on this blog: Good, Bad and the Ugly. I have been doing ongoing maintenance of this blog in the background and was inspired to bring this back after visiting old posts.

    • This time I looked at marketing, president, apocalypse. Specifically: Marketing as practiced in agencies and clients
    • A president represented in media because the run up to the US presidential election in November means things are pretty strange.
    • A fictional apocalypse – because global warming, COVID19, populism, Brexit and the rise of China under Xi Jingping

    Good, Bad and the Ugly was originally inspired by my love of two magazine sections:

    • Wired magazine’s Wired, Tired, Expired – which used to be a great zeitgeist measure in a pre-brogrammer Silicon Valley. Back when the excitement of the new, new thing was conveyed through the written word and brave choices in neon and metallic inks with challenging typographic design. Wired, Tired, Expired inspired the spirit of where I wanted to go with it
    • UK motoring publication Car Magazine. Car was a pioneering publication. It invented the idea of a ‘car of the year’ back in the 1960s. As a spotty teenager I loved to leaf through its pages. The writing of the late great L. J. K. Setright who combined a love engineering and the written word in each of his articles. (Setright’s book The Designers is a particularly good read.) Beautifully photographed cars and adverts of luxury brands that I hadn’t heard of like Panerai. It was a heady mix of Esquire and petrol. I fell out of love with Car magazine as driving became less relevant to me. But the concept behind their Good, Bad Ugly classification of cars stuck with me
    GoodBadUgly
    Long and short term marketing thinking. In the past decade Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA based research, together with findings from the Ehrensberg-Bass institute have shaken up marketing. No self respecting marketer now doesn’t thinking about the importance of brand marketing. Last touch attribution. Performance (digital) marketers have used last touch attribution to burn marketing dollars at the altars of Google and Facebook for too long. Mark Read of WPP – whose ill-considered comments on digital marketing and ageism in agency life showed an extreme dose of short term thinking. It probably explains the WPP share price….
    President Bartlet – The West Wing was a touchstone of political fiction for friends of mine who worked in public affairs. The West Wing captured the tension and excitement of a high functioning political machine. I had the pleasure to chat over dinner with Don Baer. Baer was a former Clinton staffer, whom the character Toby Ziegler was based on.

    Bartlet also contrasts sharply with the bland Joe Biden and president Trump. Unfortunately neither of them have the kind of dialogue coming out of their mouths that Aaron Sorkin could provide Bartlet    		While Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men is justifiably famous. Their second book Final Days captures the implosion of president Nixon and makes a more tragic read on a presidential administration.The House of Cards quickly went from being sharp biting satire that thrilled, to repulsion. The story built up on and created something new from original UK source material. But the show rested too heavily on the shoulders to Kevin Spacey as president Underwood. When Spacey’s reputation fell, so did the show. Robin Wright did a valiant effort to resurrect it which is worthwhile watching.
    The Jackpot – in William Gibson’s books The Peripheral and Agency a key part of the plot line is the apocalypse. This is called the Jackpot. There is not one inciting incident. Instead the world is gradually eroded to just 20 per cent of its population. The causes are very familiar to us: climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors. Given that the world population is still heading upwards. The Jackpot is either a way off or still in its early stagesThe Atomic Wars – the atomic wars occur the back story of the Judge Dredd universe. The modern world is destroyed by the cold war going hot. Authoritarianism and large cities offer relative safety compared to the cursed earth outside.Avengers Infinity Wars / Endgame. Thanos has a malthusian world view. He unites the infinity stones, snaps his finger and half the universe’s population disappears. Endgame then tries to give it a happy-ever-after finish because Hollywood. Yes it conforms to the idea of an ‘end of an age’ but it just doesn’t feel that disastrous in the grand scheme of things

    Marketing, president, apocalypse choices, let me know what you think in the comments section. More versions of the Good, Bad and The Ugly here.