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.

  • Rotterdam + more news

    Rotterdam

    Unilever Sets Up U.K.-Netherlands Clash in Search for New Home – Bloomberg – It is unsurprising expect Shell to look at similar moves, given its dual listing in London and The Hague. Rotterdam makes more sense as from a real estate point of view the London headquarters at 1 Victoria Embankment is too cramped, the Rotterdam headquarters . From the economics Rotterdam also makes more sense due to Brexit. The only thing that can stop the move is London based institutional investors

    Unilever to restructure and slash ad spend | Marketing Interactive – I suspect that this is misreading the picture. Unilever had been rolling out ZBB when I was there and were looking at the spreads business for even longer. I see this more in terms of the lens of the London – Rotterdam discussion

    Design

    Apple tumbles down laptop brand survey after tepid reaction to new MacBooks | BGR  – Stop this size zero design bullshit and gimmickry

    Ethics

    The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI – MIT Technology Review – which challenges regulation

    Hong Kong

    “Ghost in the Shell” is a poem to Hong Kong as it faces the 20th anniversary of its handover to China – the original Ghost in the Shell animators drove around Hong Kong to get a feel of mixing old with new

    Legal

    【蘋果踢爆】眾籌走數咖啡機兄弟再爆醜聞 今次係智能多士爐！ | 2017-04-01 | | 蘋果日報 – Hong Kong’s Apple Daily on serial Kickstarter scammers

    Report: China to Overtake U.S. as Digital Market Leader for Luxury Watch Brands | Jing Daily – surprised that it hadn’t already

    Luxury

    Daring Fireball: The Swiss Watch Industry Should Double Down on Mechanical Watches – there is a certain arrogance that Silicon Valley knows everything, but I also believe smart watches are a fad, a companion device not a watch replacement

    Marketing

    Why that Pepsi ad isn’t as bad as you think it is – Mumbrella – if you don’t get it, you’re not the target audience

    Media

    Google and Facebook will take 70 per cent of all money spent on digital advertising by 2020 | The Sun – why is News Corp providing a compelling narrative to short their own stock in such an orchestrated way

    Bots are the newest form of new media — Quartz – interesting take. I see them as continuation of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ type text adventures

    YouTube won’t show ads on channels with fewer than 10K views | siliconangle – huge for B2B own brand channels who will be free of ‘competitive spamming’

    SXSW Video: Nick Denton Is Getting Into Messaging | Special: SXSW – AdAge

    How China keeps gay people off TV | Dazed Digital – interesting insights into Chinese media law that content providers need to consider

    Too much diversity? Disney’s Marvel (DIS) says that comics readers have had enough of relaunched titles like Ms. Marvel, Ironheart, and Spider-Man — Quartz – #comicgate just waiting to happen

    WeChat Expands in Europe in Bid for Global Advertisers, Payments – Bloomberg – mostly about the Chinese diaspora

    Security

    Samsung’s Android Replacement Is a Hacker’s Dream – Motherboard – But most of the vulnerabilities he found were actually in new code written specifically for Tizen within the last two years. Many of them are the kind of mistakes programmers were making twenty years ago, indicating that Samsung lacks basic code development and review practices to prevent and catch such flaws. – interesting that the faults aren’t in the Nokia and Intel originated code that Tizen builds on top of. This hits after the Note 7 debacle

    Software

    Jolla adds support for Sailfish OS on Sony Mobile’s XperiaTM devices – interesting that this didn’t cut through during GSMA

    Apple’s New File System: Who Cares? | Monday Note – I do this is huge news

    Web of no web

    Not on my watch: Huawei CEO sees no future for wearable smart devices | SCMP – pretty much the same argument that people made against (low and mid market) watches used against smart watches. Wise words

    Wireless

    Samsung Smartphone Shipments Tops Chart in Q1 due to Flooding the Market with Massive Low-End Model Shipments – Patently Apple – the growth is in low end devices

    Apple Held Back Most Advanced Wireless Tech, Says Qualcomm – Tech Trader Daily – Apple has more influence in many countries than Qualcomm? I’m calling bullshit on that statement at least. Qualcomm meddles in lots of regulatory things including mobile carrier consolidation in markets around the world, they have a strong regulatory team

    Huawei mystery memo (and phone strategy) confirmed • The Register – not terribly surprised by this, guessing turning back on brand advertising and carrier subsidies with a focus on the SIM only market? The ad and marketing spend was very uncharacteristic of the brand. The problem is that the spend is needed in a mature consumer market category. More related content here.

  • Richie Hawtin + more things

    Richie Hawtin

    I enjoyed listening to  a set Richie Hawtin for Calvin Klein. Raf Simons, the current creative director of Calvin Klein has known Richie Hawtin for a while. More related content here.

    Earning attention in the digital age

    Earning attention in the digital age. This a great panel at the  Market Research Society conference 2017. The panel was chaired Jay Owens, research director, Pulsar the social listening platform. Presenters included:

    Jo Tenzer, Research Lead, Facebook Adam Isaacson, director, Ipsos MORI who talked about thinks like ad blockers.

    Olesya Moosman, head of research, Twitter UK talked about making content human in nature.

    Then there was a panel discussion that included Matt Muir, freelance communications consultant and ‘generic media tart’. Matt is the author behind the Web Curios newsletter.

    Toyota Hi-Lux

    One of them marketing ideas which so makes sense when you see it. Toyota Australia have tricked out a Hi-Lux as a Tonka toy and are taking it around the country. The Hi-Lux (or what Americans called the Toyota Pickup) has become a cult vehicle. It is Tonka Toy tough with reliable mechanicals were favoured over the latest technology. A frame on body chassis and a drive train that just works.

    Introducing the #HiluxTonka concept car – toughness is in its DNA. 💪

    A post shared by Toyota Australia (@toyota_aus) on

    Classic techno playlist from Magnetic magazine

    Classic techno playlist from Magnetic magazine with a heavy bias towards early and Detroit techno, which is no bad thing in my opinion.

    GHOST IN THE SHELL : Ash Thorp – don’t bother watching Ghost in The Shell because it’s gutted the meaning out of the original and whitewashed the characters. Instead look at this to enjoy the high production values. If you want an engaging film in Ghost In The Shell universe, stay with the Production IG animated films instead.

  • Pam Edstrom

    PR Week and The Holmes Report carried an obituary for Pam Edstrom who passed away last night. I worked at her agency for a few years and came across her a few times.

    Pam had an intensity and an energy to her. She was also a true believer; you could break her open like a stick of rock and there would be the Windows squares running through her. For many years Pam Edstrom was the media voice of Microsoft. She had a tremendous belief in the ability of IT to deliver tremendous things. If you’ve read this blog you’d realise that I’m not a true believer in the same way that Pam Edstrom was; we were on opposite sides of the Windows | Mac (and Unix) religious divide.

    Pam had an absolute focus on controlling the message and organisational process (optimised for alignment to Microsoft) and championed ‘gold standard’ delivery. Over time Microsoft came to represent more than half the agency billings.

    My Pam Edstrom story

    When I worked at the agency building digital capability, I also was assigned to keeping the company name in the usual industry debates. I found it handy to do as it kept my PR skills warm as I did the nascent digital work at the time. I managed to keep a constant drip feed of coverage in the industry media.

    At the last minute I was asked to arrange a profile of Pam. Clare O’Connor who worked at PR Week at the time agreed to write a profile – Pam Edstrom, the doyenne of tech PR.  Give it a read as it captures Pam quite well.

    The article was taking ages to come out as it was ‘evergreen’ appearing some six months after the interview had taken place. Clare asked Pam for the name of a journalist who she interview for colour about Pam Edstrom. 

    The article threw a bit of a curveball when a longtime journalist contact was asked about Pam Edstrom and referred to her daughter Jennifer’s book Barbarians led by Bill Gates. The initial reaction from Pam Edstrom was to tell PR Week that if they ran a story mentioning ‘the book’, they would never get a Waggener Edstrom story again. I pointed out that we  didn’t have that outsize an impact in the marketing press, that Microsoft had in the enterprise tech press and PR Week wouldn’t care.

    I never did  hear if Pam got to thank the New York Times’ Steve Lohr for bringing up that book. More information here.

  • Jump Around – 25 years later

    It’s hard to believe that the House of Pain’s Jump Around turned 25 last week. The iconic intro from ‘Harlem Shuffle’ used to be a call to the dance floor when I used to play it on Wednesday night sets at a late closing wine bar in the North West of England.

    The video fired my love of American workwear, previously I’d only really seen this worn on African-American  artists. I loved the form follows function, timeless style and burly nature of the garments. I hunted down supplies of Carhartt and Dickies in Leeds and Covent Garden – it’s kept me warm and dry ever since.

    More importantly it was emblematic of an Irish blue collar swagger that the UK Irish community just didn’t have. The closest thing we had was the shambolic Pogues or wit of Dave Allen which he welded like a katana in the hands of a samurai. We were much more heads down as the troubles in Northern Ireland and sectarianism impacted our lives.

    This was a spectacularly mean-spirited time; where the government used the police to beat the miner’s strike into submission and wilfully demolished the weak industrial base to build the financial services sector. Acid house and rave were created partly because the youth wanted to escape through hedonism.

    The post Good Friday Irish experience of Irish emigrants just a few years later was rather different. Britain was on its way to Cool Britannia liberalism – when being in an Irish pub, no longer meant keeping an eye out for Special Branch agent provocateurs or well-known grasses.

    Jump Around cemented Irish Americans in modern culture. While the community has diffused throughout the US and new migrants are more likely to be IT and financial professionals than construction workers, our mark has been made. More related content can be found here.

  • The World as Design: Writings of Design by Otl Aicher

    The World as Design author Aicher was a German designer. He is most famous of his graphic design and typography. His most famous font is Rotis  His impact was far wider. Aicher was a co-founder of the short-lived Ulm School of Design. Over its 15 years it developed a legacy that continues to echo through design education.

    He worked with prominent German brands including Braun, Lufthansa and ERCO the lighting firm.

    Aicher’s design language for the Munich Olympics was ground breaking. He designed the first Olympic mascot: Waldi a dachshund with multicoloured bands on his body. The posters for the Munich Olympics were hyper coloured designs that still had a system wrapped around them and now trade for hundreds of pounds.

    You can blame him for single handedly kicking off the use of stickmen pictograms on public signage in buildings like airports.

    Aicher and his colleagues at Ulm were about more than making things look pretty on their medium of choice, they thought about systems. Aicher’s holistic approach to systems influenced modern brand design.  Mark Holt, a co-founder of 8vo; who worked on everything from Factory Records to billing systems for mobile carrier Orange cited Aicher as a major influence.

    otl aicher

    Aicher’s book The World of Design collects a series of his essays across a wide spectrum of topics. Culture and political essays sit alongside examinations on the process of design and typography. Design and art do not exist in isolation but as part of the wider world. Something that you become keenly aware of as being central to his thinking – alongside his advocacy of reinvigorating modernism.

    Probably most striking is Aicher’s delivery and style of writing. He writes with absolute confidence as each item has been thought about, despite feeling like a stream of consciousness in the way those mulled over thoughts are put down. He also completely dispenses with capital letters, sentences flow into each other from a visual perspective. This gives his work a sense of urgency and authenticity – but doesn’t make it any easier to read.

    Theses essays felt as if they were born on the internet not written sometime before Aicher died in 1991, which says a lot about how fresh and contemporary his work still is.