Ged Carroll

Category: ethics | 倫理 | 윤리학

Ethics: moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. I went to school with people who ended up on the wrong side of the law. I knew more of them when I used to DJ which was my hobby since before I went to college.

I probably still have some post-it notes around the place that I used as bookmarks from when I used to work at a call centre but that was about the extent of my ethical transgressions.

My business experience meant that I dealt with a lot of unpleasant unprofessional clients, but didn’t necessarily see anything unethical in nature. When I started writing this blog I was thinking about culture rather than ethics and the most part still do.

But business and work changed. Ethics became more important:

  • When I started in social and digital campaigns I didn’t think about ethics as a standalone thing. It was just part of doing a good job. It went without saying.
  • I don’t think any of us back then would have foreseen slut shaming, trolling, online bullying, dark patterns and misinformation

Now things are different. The lack of ethics is impacting all parts of business life.

  • How ad tech data is used
  • How content is created
  • How services are designed
  • How products are made

I think that much of the problems with ethics is cultural and generational in nature. The current generation of entrepreneurs have perverted knowledge in the quest of growth hacking and continual improvement and change for its own sake. Its a sickness at the centre of technology

  • Omakase and luxury futures

    Omakase and luxury seem made for each other. Think about the core elements of omakase:

    • An expert provides a personalised experience that is about quality, ceremony and theatre.
    • The expert decides what you will have and prepares it for you. You are there from selection to the provision of the item.
    • The ingredients are of fine quality (and often locally sourced).
    Tokyo
    Marc Veraart

    As a trend omakase has expanded geographically with Japanese cuisine. But it has also expanded in terms of categories covered.

    Koreans have taken omakase and pushed it into other areas:

    • Coffee
    • Dessert tasting
    • Barbecue restaurants which are normally a local neighbourhood staple
    • Wine and champagne-tasting

    So how can omakase and luxury come together in the future?

    In order to understand how omakase and luxury in the future it is worthwhile paying a good deal of attention to the pressures that the luxury industry is currently under.

    Luxury is under pressure

    Undoing the mistakes of the past

    Luxury has expanded to be the size of industry it currently is due to ‘massification’ by most of the maisons. The exceptions to this would be the likes of Hermés.

    Massification

    Massification means lowering quality, using globalisation in the supply chain as well as the retail network to manufacture products cheaper. Massification occurred over a three decade period and was covered extensively by former fashion editor Dana Thomas in her book Deluxe.

    Around about 2014, Gucci led the way for luxury brands to do streetwear, leading to a more accessible luxury product. Louis Vuitton did the archetypical collection with its 2017 Supreme collaboration.

    Contrary to what most people believe luxury is aimed at the middle classes rather than the wealthy. But targeting middle class customers rather than the wealthy poses a number of problems:

    • Increased capital outlay due to the scale required.
    • Scale brings challenges in terms of supply chain management and consistency of customer experience. Greater control can be obtained by vertical integration within the supply chain and owning the retail channels. But all of this requires greater expertise and management oversight.
    • Increased economic sensitivity to shocks such as interest rate and cost of living rises.
    • Increased risk of devalued stock during an economic downturn. Gucci earnings were down 20 percent alone in Q1, 2024.

    Bigger might not always be better over a longer view.

    Secondary markets

    Secondary markets have been both a boon and a bane for the luxury sector. At one time pre-owned was seen as an ‘entry-level’ product. I bought my first nice watch secondhand once it had depreciated. It was often said that the best entry-level Porsche was a secondhand one.

    But gone are the days when you may buy a pre-owned Louis Vuitton purse on a second hand market stall in Paris. Now that will be on Vinted, Vestaire or some other platform.

    Secondary market inflated pricing affected luxury businesses in a number of ways

    • You would be interviewed to go on the waiting list for a Porsche or a Rolex.
    • Authorised dealers became order takers and dealer customer service slipped.
    • Your purchasing history would acquire you the rights to buy a Hermés bag over time.

    Luxury groups extended their businesses into the pre-owned market. LVMH owned part of secondhand watch retailer Hodinkee. Richemont owned Watchfinder and Yoox-Net-a-Porter who sold a mix of new lines and vintage preowned items. Rolex rolled out its ‘CPO’ programme selling inspected pre-owned Rolex watches through its authorised dealer network.

    Things looked really good for the luxury industry, they managed to managed to scale, to a point that LVMH is one of the largest companies in the world:

    • Massification through global manufacturing supply chains.
    • Keeping margins high, while letting quality go low.
    • Address a rising middle class in China, Korea, Japan, the Gulf countries and Russia to counteract the hollowing out of the middle class in the US and western Europe.
    • Maximising margins through controlling costs via vertical integration up and down the supply chain, from raw materials to retail.

    Market change

    A few things underpinned the craziness of COVID:

    • Money was put in consumer pockets, for which they had few outlets.
    • Supply chains were disrupted as factories closed down or pivoted to manufacturing essential products. For instances Perfums Christian Dior made hand sanitiser for hospitals for free.

    A Forrester effect (also known as a bull whip effect) resulted, driving inflation that the world’s economies are coming to terms with now. Secondary effects of this event were the increased interest rates used to reduce demand driven inflation.

    Other secondary effects include increased crime levels. London has gone from a luxury shoppers paradise, to having a global reputation amongst elites of being plagued by violent watch and bag robberies. COVID-19 isn’t the only driver of this crime wave, but is a contributing factor.

    It has also had a catalysing effect on reducing globalisation to increase national resilience.

    Consumers know that a good deal of luxury goods don’t match up with the European artisan heritage story that brands try to sell them. Experts like William Lasry has made public which brands make what kind of products where. Luxury brands often make in places like China due to capability and scale – similar reasons to why Apple products are designed in California and assembled in China. (Seriously, check out William Lasry’s channels, I love some of his visits to high-end Japanese manufacturers).

    China

    China has been a key focus for luxury brand, but it has changed in a number of different ways:

    • Chinese consumers have changed in their confidence of native brands and have a lower opinion of many foreign brands. This is partly down to a change in attitudes called guo chao. Guo chao can be traced back to the increased confidence in the run up to the 2008 olympics in Beijing. This was partly fuelled by a series of essays published in 1996 by the likes of academic Wang Xiaodong called China Can Say Now which advocated a modern robust form of Chinese nationalism, which was in stark contrast to the Deng-era vision of globalisation and biding one’s time. In the April before the olympics Chinese consumers boycotted French supermarket brand Carrefour. Over time the negativity of these boycotts have become more-and-more performative and extra-territorial in nature. The current Xi administration has seen fit to weaponise this nationalist sentiment by directing (wrangling is a more accurate term, like cowboys with a cattle train in the Old West) public opinion to further its own ends. A more positive aspect of it has been a more open market for domestic ateliers and brands than had been seen previously. Since before 2019, there have been Chinese efforts to build a rival luxury groups to LVMH and Kering and this fits in with Xi’s distaste for irrational worship of the west.
    • Xi-era growth. China under Xi Jinping faces multiple challenges around growth. The population is aging and in decline which has implications for declining consumption. Secondly economic growth has slowed compared to the double digit annual economic growth of the Deng, Jiang and Hu administrations. Foreign direct investment in China has declined for a mix of reasons including unattractive Chinese government policies, decline in China’s country brand and long term economic growth forecasts.

    Regulatory change

    I know what you’re thinking ok, this is very well Ged, but what does it have to do with omakase and luxury futures? Give me a little bit more time and all will be revealed.

    While China is an economic superpower with a desire to export its world view and the United States is a hard and soft power super power; the European Union’s super power is legislative in nature.

    European regulation drove the globalisation of the GSM mobile telephony standards during the 1990s and 2000s. They have also driven increasing internet privacy standards on web services, much to the chagrin of Alphabet, Meta and Twitter.

    Now they are driving environmental standards across a range of areas including:

    • A carbon tax to take into account the use of fossil fuels in extraction of raw materials, transportation, energy as an input to manufacturing and processing materials.
    • Product passports from raw materials to product end-of-life encouraging a circular economy and sustainable manufacturing.

    This means that the luxury sector has new restrictions on how it operates in the future.

    In summary:

    • We’ve likely reached peak massification due to economic and trade changes.
    • Market share in China looks uncertain due to changes in consumer sentiment and tastes, meaning, a more local approach might be required or a strategic withdrawal.
    • Secondary markets show that consumers are open to ownership beyond pristine new products.
    • Product passports and European legislation means re-examining the whole supply chain and the data to better control it through an entire product life.

    Finally, omakase and luxury futures!

    Omakase and luxury look like a happy meeting in the future. Think about the tenets of omakase.

    • An expert provides a personalised experience that is about quality, ceremony and theatre.
    • The expert decides what you will have and prepares it for you. You are there from selection to the provision of the item.
    • The ingredients are of fine quality (and often locally sourced).

    Going back to go forward.

    The future of luxury is about looking back. Tailors who suited generations of families and made alterations to Grandfather’s suit that the son is now wearing. The shirt maker replacing the collars and cuffs. The shoe-maker who refurbishes your shoes and has a set of lasts with your name on, for when he has to make a new set. Getting measured, having your foot cast for a last or getting your watch could be memorable events once again. So there this a precedence for expertise and service levels. But it implies a retail experience that will change dramatically.

    New techniques and questions.

    Previously with the exception of measuring sessions, these processes were largely concealed from the consumer and were difficult to scale. So it’s worthwhile thinking about how luxury’s omakase future could be extended with modern technology? We have some experiments that might give us some ideas. First up, L’Oreal has showcased bespoke make-up manufacture for a while.

    How could high-end perfume makers adapt for products beyond make-up? Improved analysis equipment from the likes of Oxford Nanopore could facilitate individually formulated fragrance products based on skin chemistry.

    Adidas experimented with its Speedfactory concept that blended the retail and shoe assembly together.

    Technologically there is a lot of promising ideas. Adidas have worked with up-cycled plastics retrieved from the debris brought together by an ocean gyre made into 3d printed soles and fibres. (Look for the Parley label, who Adidas partnered with on this.)

    How can additive or automated manufacturing and other processes feel luxe? In what way could they add to the theatre?

    This hybridisation of retail and manufacturing changes the nature of both offline and online retail completely. Would even the largest concession in Selfridges or a shopping mall be big enough, or would fashion houses need a single purpose brand experience?

    Given that there is likely to be a bit more time between manufacture and presentation of the product than there would be in a sashimi restaurant, what else would go into the maison experience? LVMH is already investing in hotels and resorts like Cheval Blanc which gives it a better understanding of more areas in luxury experience and service.

    Localisation would likely to be needed to handle omakase and luxury due to culture and the need for local materials. This might include new materials, such as fungus-derived leather. Of course, this might have negative implications for luxury house supply chains, whether it’s Louis Vuitton’s iconic plastic coated leather, or the Hermés crocodile farm.

    Which means that product line-ups could no longer be global in nature. So luxury companies may revisit that the creative process looks like. Should there be a single global vision anymore? Luxury maisons instincts would be to say yes, but could this be an opportunity to own local ateliers in markets like China or the US?

    • Will there be more local brands instead?
    • What will a maison’s heritage mean in the future? A luxury maison is about what remains the same as much as what changes. What will happen to long-standing motifs?
    • Will there be a greater opportunity for more auteurs who are closer to the customers?
    • How to bridge the tension in terms of choosing for the customer and creativity as well as quality?

    We’re talking a very different profile of creative in terms of thinking, attitudes and skills compared to the present.

    Service, repair and reuse could learn a lot lessons from traditional tailors and the service networks of watchmakers like Rolex or luggage maker Rimowa.

    I could not think of a more exciting or scary time to be setting the brand direction for a luxury maison, let alone the overall direction or the likes of LVMH. But by wrapping local materials, expertise, ritual and a bit of theatre the future could look like a fusion of omakase and luxury.

    More information

  • AI two-step

    The phrase AI two-step is something I first heard from my friend Antony Mayfield. He used it to talk about how companies were adopting the latest developments in AI for business processes. And then reduce headcount to reflect the newly AI derived tasks instead.

    The AI two-step isn’t necessarily a new concept, companies like Pegasystems were using rules-based systems to take away the drudgery of back office work in banking and fund management for decades.

    Further back, companies like Experian, through their access to CCS’ CardPac software provided a service for credit card issuers in the UK using rules-based credit scoring and applications approval. This ran on time-shared mainframe computing resources, which also provided Experian with a good source of ongoing credit worthiness data. All of which reduced the back office work and employees needed by the credit card company. MBNA used to make a virtue out of having every decision reviewed by real live credit analyst, who could overwrite a scoring decision if they saw a compelling reason to do so. (CCS became part of First Data and eventually part of Fiserv).

    HAL 9000

    As these services were being rolled out, there was a corresponding cut in jobs.

    Examples

    Here are just a few examples of businesses adopting AI, some of which are prime examples of the AI two-step.

    IBM

    While IBM may no longer trumpeting its Watson AI service as loudly as it used to, AI methods are dispensing with the need to replace staff who leave the technology company.

    Pfizer’s Charlie

    One might think in the UK that Pfizer should have thought a bit more carefully about the name Charlie, but the aspiration behind the platform is interesting. Charlie was noted to be helping with content creation, fact checking and legal reviews. Research by Bain & Company have found that it isn’t just Pfizer in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector that are taking this approach. Some 40 percent of executives who were surveyed said that uses of generative AI were factored into their 2024 budgets.

    Bain indicated uses across a wide range of business functions within pharma:

    • IT programming code review
    • Competitive intelligence
    • Research and biomedical literature review
    • Marketing copy
    • Augmenting the selling process as a sales co-pilot and contact centre automation

    Publicis

    French listed marketing combine Publicis made a high profile adoption of machine learning and AI-based services back in 2017 under the moniker Marcel. Back then Marcel was being used for workflow type tasks and organisation of data. This year Publicis rebranded its approach to the less playful CoreAI, so far it has cut the use of freelance staff – which are usually essential for project delivery in ad agencies, rather than the usual AI two-step of lay-offs.

    UPS

    UPS adoption of AI techniques in everything from workflow to customer service allowed the logistics company to make the largest lay-offs in its 116-year history.

    Clear analogues to the AI two-step?

    Various commentators compare the AI two-step happening to the dot com boom of the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The comparison with the dot com boom is easy at first. You have businesses that have phenomenal share price growth, widespread interest and experimentation. Business sectors from advertising to Hollywood are concerned about massive disruption.

    The examples I would think about would be factory automation and business process re-engineering. In factor automation, over decades companies used machines to negate the need for unskilled and semi-skilled workers. A friend of mine worked in Huddersfield in a textile mill. He was one of just a couple of people who worked a shift. None of them were weavers, they were engineers and an IT admin who maintained the lines of machines turning out high-end suiting fabric that was mostly sold to Japanese clothing manufacturers. This came very close to being a ‘lights out production line‘ where the product is handmade by robots as they used to say in the old Fiat car advertisements.

    Weavers and machine operators were replaced by a lot fewer, but more expensive roles.

    Business process re-engineering was driven by enterprises implementing enterprise software to drive efficiencies and automate workflows. This was a lucrative time for consultancies who were brought in to shape a company’s workforce and processes to fit a software company’s pre-defined template for that industry. This was usually based on average industry standards. Software giant SAP have been building and refining these templates for the best part of 50 years, each industry template draws on individual units that might cover a business function like HR, finance or asset management.

    A bit of software customisation was needed to fit a given business, and it might have to interface with third party products to handle market complexities such as different tax regimes.

    The consultancy teams also laid-off employees that didn’t fit the framework. That’s what business process re-engineering actually meant.

    Automation was responsible for putting up to 47% of American jobs at risk. However other research indicates that new forms of skilled or professional jobs are being created. One of the big problems with this data is that they are speculative models. More positive takes from businesses fuelling automation like McKinsey and Company versus more critical predictions from government think tanks and academics.

    Factory automation and business process engineering are both similar to the use of AI in business, in that they are primarily helping mature businesses maintain their position and drive efficiency. The dot com boom on the other hand was much more disruptive and spawning more upstart businesses – some of which were very successful and leaving mature businesses struggling to cope. From financial services to media – pre-internet businesses are still struggling to cope with the innovation and disruption that begat the dot com boom.

    Optimists versus pessimists

    The optimists highlight a number of nuances that they think mediates the impact of automation and machine learning over time.

    Tasks over jobs.

    It’s tasks rather than whole jobs are being lost. Yet if you look at the data that Scott Galloway shared in his newsletter and the speedy ‘these job losses aren’t down to AI denials’ this optimistic assumption is pure fiction. The jobs being lost are the second part of the AI two-step.

    Creative destruction.

    Jobs are being created too and it’s often about ‘skill shifts’ rather than ‘job shifts’. While there are redundancies being made, there is a requirement (at the moment) for people skilled in writing ‘prompts’ to get the most out of the AI models created.

    Overconfidence.

    Overconfidence in technology and what it can do. An extension of this is a belief in the perfectibility of technology. A classic example of this is Air Canada’s recently aborted use of an AI-powered customer service chatbot. The airline quietly pulled its chatbot offline after being found legally liable for bad advice given by the customer service bot to a customer.

    Moffatt booked airfares and retrospectively submitted an application for a refund to the reduced bereavement fare after travelling. Air Canada denied the request. Moffatt challenged that decision, saying he was owed the refund because he had relied on the information provided to him by the chatbot on Air Canada’s website. Air Canada admitted that the information provided by the chatbot was “misleading”, but it contested Moffatt’s right to a refund, highlighting that he had been provided with the correct information via the link the chatbot shared in its message.

    The Civil Resolution Tribunal considered whether Air Canda was liable for negligent misrepresentation, which arises under Canadian law when a seller does not exercise reasonable care to ensure its representations are accurate and not misleading. Moffatt was required to show that Air Canada owed him a duty of care, that its representation was untrue, inaccurate or misleading, that Air Canada made the representation negligently, that he reasonably relied on it, and that that reliance resulted in damages. The court held that Moffatt met those requirements.

    The Civil Resolution Tribunal noted that Air Canada had argued that it could not be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants or representatives, including a chatbot, but had not explained the basis for that suggestion. The Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected as a “remarkable submission” Air Canada’s suggestion that the chatbot was a separate legal entity that was responsible for its own actions.

    Air Canada chatbot case highlights AI liability risks by Meghan Higgins, Pinsent Masons

    Demographic change.

    Demographics – the idea that aging countries from the west to China, Japan and Korea have skills deficits due to population decline. Automation is one of the coping mechanisms alongside globalisation and migration that have been suggested solutions. The Chinese are also looking at building factories in countries like Ethiopia, who have a young and growing population. Automation makes sense where migration would adversely affect social cohesion and the cost of globalisation would be more expensive than automation technologies. Workers in the global south are dependent on being cheaper than machines, rather like the American legend of John Henry versus the steam engine.

    Companies like Automata have been looking to help businesses automate repetitive low skilled work, such as sandwich making in food service factories or low volume manufacturing tasks.

    John Henry Statue

    The state of automation in different roles is running along at different rates of progress. While John Deere have managed to make the most of arable farmland through the use of telematics and GPS guidance of tractors, automating farming for tasks like harvesting is proving more difficult. This is exasperated in the UK at least by the challenge of getting sustained venture capital for hardware. Technology automation in other sectors such as construction and healthcare continues to move at a slow pace.

    In an area like consumer electronics we have seen benefits and declines in automation. Benefits in the way a company like Apple can manage a sophisticated global supply chain workflow via automated software. Apple has also pioneered the use of robotics in dismantling its more modern smartphones when they are brought in to be recycled.

    The declining area has been one of design choice. Prior to the smartphone and broadband internet, companies like Panasonic designed circuit boards that were less dense with components. The reason for this was to facilitate automated board manufacture through the use of ‘pick and place’.

    Nokia used similar techniques for its cellphones and smartphones until the business was disrupted. Apple iPhones needed much more manual assembly because of the tightly packed components in their phones. Young women were valued for their small hands and manual dexterity leading to concerns about worker conditions.

    More work to be done.

    Creation of new jobs seems to be a matter of faith. IT in businesses drove an increased amount of management, the move online drove a need for webmasters, web designers and online marketers. There is an assumption that over time AI will have a similar effect, beyond people who can write prompts.

    Limiting factors

    Technology

    While GPT based models have surprised both in terms of what they can do and fail to do, there is a belief amongst experts that:

    Data sets will only get you so far. There is no clear path to a new technique, or what older techniques would need to be combined with GPT-based systems. Of the data sets out there, a significant minority could be filled with ‘poison’ data like nightshade.

    That there isn’t enough data to train models in a lot of cases and synthetic data is often used instead. Others believe that this will corrupt and stunt future AI models rather than help them.

    Resources

    AI systems like crypto mining consume a lot of energy and require a lot of water for cooling which is already straining data centres and infrastructure. All of which will impact corporates ESG profile and larger investor relations health. You could have an amazing AI model, but if you have as bad an ESG rating as Exxon you willl struggle to raise funds.

    More information

    Corporate Ozempic | No mercy / no malice

    No, Robots Aren’t Destroying Half of All Jobs | London School of Economics (LSE)

    Antony Mayfield – Antonym newsletter

    AI feedback loop will spell death for future generative models | TechSpot 

    Mixtral 8x7B: Quality, Performance & Price Analysis | Artificial Analysis 

    AI-poisoning tool Nightshade now available for artists to use | VentureBeat 

    AI sucks at telling jokes — but it’s great at analyzing them | The Next Web 

    At WEF in Davos, Sam Altman and Will.i.am differ on AI | Quartz 

  • Complaint resolution + more things

    Complaint resolution

    My mind cast back to one of the first modules I studied at college. There was a lecture on the role of complaint resolution as part of customer services. The idea was that effective complaint resolution engendered trust in a customer service function and was more likely to increase brand loyalty and recommendation to other people. In reality Ehrensberg-Bass Institute have explored this area in more depth and found that customer penetration is more important than customer loyalty.

    Approaching Logan Airport
    US National Archives: Approaching Logan Airport. 05/1973 by Michael Manheim

    I suspect that the benefit in complaint resolution is more around a premium brand positioning rather than the business benefits of loyalty. This is an interesting frame to consider AirHelp’s global airline ranking. Unlike SkyTrax that focuses on experience, AirHelp weighs its ranking heavily on complaint resolution.

    British Airways came 82nd out of 83 airlines assessed, which won’t be a surprise to anyone who has flown with them over the past four years.

    Many airlines that would have a high SkyTrax service ranking, didn’t perform as well on complaint resolution.

    So there wasn’t a clear correlation between experience resolving lots of customer complaints or a highly evolved service offering.

    Beauty

    Asia’s beauty triangle and why L’Oréal wants to harness it to ‘uncover the future’ | Cosmectics Design Asia – focus on the ‘beauty triangle of China, Japan and Korea for innovation

    Consumer behaviour

    The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter – written back in 1973 and still just as valid.

    Energy

    Emerging car brands scrutinised by Bloomberg and Grant Thornton | Manufacturer – “Chinese brands are dominating the scene with good products, big screens, and impressive interfaces.” However, the challenge arises when considering pricing, as Chinese EVs like the XPeng’s G9 SUV was 72,000 euros competing against the likes of BMW and Mercedes. So they’re going to find it very, difficult and it’s going to come down to price.” Dean pointed out MG’s success in the UK market was achieved by hitting exactly the right sweet spot in terms of pricing. The MG ZS, the second-best-selling battery electric vehicle in the UK, is priced at an average of £31,000, making it compelling in terms of competitive pricing especially in a country where consumers are not fiercely loyal to specific brands. – interesting reading. The way for Chinese vendors to win would be to have Chinese incentivised lease financing, particularly in a time of higher interest rates a la Huawei in the telecoms markets.

    Honda will cease production of its first EV e car after dismal sales | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

    Ethics

    Bee Respect: Guerlain – interesting full-featured sustainability policy

    Staff rebel at consultancy behind VW review of Xinjiang rights abuse | FT – Volkswagen using sketchy data practices, haven’t we heard this somewhere before?

    Finance

    China Turns the Tables on Wall Street – WSJ – I am not surprised, just wait until they see how Chinese overseas debt is handled let alone 3rd world sovereign debt

    FMCG

    China overtakes US as branded coffee shop capital of the world | Starbucks | The Guardian

    Health

    American men are dying younger. – by Richard V Reeves – I just don’t think this can be addressed in the current climate of othering and privilege. It would be like trying to hold a meaningful discussion on immigration a few decades ago.

    How Taiwan’s disease detectives are keeping tabs on China | Telegraph Online

    Hong Kong

    Xi in Nanning; Shanghai and Beijing real estate tweaks; More Hong Kong bounties; Sim Love | Sinocism – the Hong Kong puts bounty on the head of US citizen who has criticised the Hong Kong government in the US. They are all ethic Chinese. So China and the Hong Kong government think that ethnic Chinese wherever they are should be loyal to their respective administrations – in essence their face is their passport. Not even Israel does something similar with the the world’s Jewish community, or Ireland with our diaspora.

    Innovation

    Quantum Breakthrough: Caltech Scientists Unveil New Way To Erase Quantum Computer Errors – Researchers from Caltech have developed a quantum eraser to correct “erasure” errors in quantum computing systems. This technique, which involves manipulating alkaline-earth neutral atoms in laser light “tweezers,” allows for the detection and correction of errors through fluorescence. The innovation leads to a tenfold improvement in entanglement rates in Rydberg neutral atom systems, representing a crucial step forward in making quantum computers more reliable and scalable.

    Luxury

    LVMH takes VivaTech 2023 visitors on a journey in its Dream Box and LVMH Court – LVMH

    Suntory to double prices for premium whiskies in April | The Asahi Shimbun: Breaking News, Japan News and Analysis

    South Korea’s Coupang to acquire online luxury retailer Farfetch | FT

    Marketing

    The best of the Jay Chiat Awards: Campaigns that broke habits and reframed perceptions | WARC

    Panadol chief marketer: How healthcare is ‘hotting up’, consolidating agency partners and why purpose can go ‘too far | Campaign Asia – rational for not spreading agency spend ‘too thin’ which explains holding company partnerships

    Media

    What the Epic vs Google case means for content | Ian Betteridge – well worth reading

    Online

    Meta forced to apologise to Qatari billionaire over crypto scams | FT

    TikTok car confessionals are the new YouTube bedroom vlogs | TechCrunch – a combination of factors going on here. Here’s my top hypotheses:

    • It is supposed to look ‘off-the-cuff’. I guess the keyword in that sentence is supposed.
    • It feels less structured and less staged than the YouTube bedroom trope.
    • Its a half-way house between being confident enough to film in public and filming in your bedroom.
    • Many cars have smartphone stands, or have owners who have installed them.
    • Cars offer some benefits in terms of acoustics. This would be particularly important if the content creator lives in a multiple occupancy household.

    WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg asked people to blog as a way of celebrating his 40th birthday.

    Retailing

    Brands are blaming Temu & Shein for poor business performance | Modern Retail – you probably have a problem with marketing and communicating value if this is the case.

    Technology

    What leading Apple-in-the-enterprise execs expect in ’24 | Computerworld

    GV Co-Leads Funding Round for Photonic Computing Startup Lightmatter – Bloomberg

    Web of no web

    How Meta’s New Face Camera Heralds a New Age of Surveillance – The New York Times

    Wireless

    6G: network operators want profitable returns on 5G first | FT

  • FOOH (and John Holmes)

    The inspiration for this post on FOOH (fake out of home advertising) was Ryan Wallman’s marketing predictions for 2024 on LinkedIn. In particular two of his five predictions

    2. Someone will post a viral ad that is a) fake and b) terrible. Hundreds of people will comment: ‘Genius!”

    5. Marketers will try to emulate the success of Barbie but will completely misconstrue its relevance to their brand, culminating in a series of fucking stupid and totally unsuccessful stunts.

    Ryan Wallman

    As with many marketing predictions, they are equally applicable for 2023 as well as next year (and probably several years on).

    These two particularly resonated with me, due to the current trend of FOOH. This is where a creative agency has put together photography or video showing an out of home execution that doesn’t exist.

    These aren’t concepts that have been mocked up for a client to show them how indicate how their campaign would look when activated. Or as a creative calling card by an agency or team to catch the eye of a new client a la the famous Volkswagen Polo car bomb advert which leaked out on to the general public.

    Instead, they are created with the express intent with fooling a good deal of the public that the execution is real. In the case of Maybelline, it was pushed out on third party influencer accounts on TikTok and YouTube as ‘truth’.

    Other examples

    The Popeyes and Truff collaboration campaign can be seen here. British Airways mocked up a billboard at the Glastonbury festival, but wouldn’t have been able to buy the space even if it wanted to.

    The Independent were fooled by Jacquemus with these FOOH-ed giant handbags. It is particularly interesting that a mainstream news media channel was fooled.

    And I find that troubling for a number of reasons. And let’s illustrate this through a quick thought experiment.

    The John Holmes thought experiment

    You probably don’t know me, I am an overweight white male with a shaven head and distinctly average in every physical way.

    A quick John Holmes primer

    John C Holmes via Wikipedia

    The late Mr Holmes was taller than me. He was an army veteran and then worked a number of blue collar jobs from ambulance driver to factory worker and forklift truck driver. He eventually hit a patch of unemployment and agreed to do nude modeling and appear in pornographic films. At the time these films were closely linked with organised crime in the US. Times things changed. During the early 1970s the industry saw a golden age where porn films became mainstream culture. Roger Ebert reviewed these films for the Chicago Sun-Times and his peers did similar at the likes of the New York Times.

    Holmes became a popular culture figure and his name spread far wider than the viewership of his films. Mark Wahlberg’s character in Boogie Nights is heavily influnced by John Holmes. He was famous for his penis size.

    For the latter part of his adult life he was an addict, which affected his ability to work. The movie Wonderland dramatises a low point in Holmes life and his association with murder of the Wonderland drug gang.

    Back to the thought experiment

    By some strange incident, a video of me stepping out of the shower and then putting a towel happens to be made. A creative chum decides to make lemonade from these lemons and uses <insert generative AI video tool du jour here> to create a realistic looking, but fake, appendage.

    Nothing has changed, I am still as I introduced myself earlier, distinctly average in every physical way. Then I add it to a dating profile. In my opinion it would be both unedifying and distinctly dishonest. This is what brands are doing when they create FOOH campaigns to generate social currency (virality, talkability etc).

    Authenticity

    These videos and photos are demonstrations of creative craft and creativity, but good judgement asks not only can something be done, but should it be done. It’s often not part of an ad format that makes it clear that the image isn’t ‘real’ and there is no ‘wink-wink’ moment to bring the audience in on the truth. This isn’t ‘truth well-told’ as advertising as McCann the advertising agency would have put it.

    Brands step across the line of believability, inevitably letting consumers down.

    Authenticity vs. fakery

    While FOOH showcases the incredible capabilities of CGI and digital storytelling, so do 3D digital billboards. 3D billboards do it in a more honest, authentic and entertaining way. The Air Max Day billboard campaign in Tokyo would be genuinely memorable, creating a sense of wonder and generate talkability.

    By comparison FOOH is a fiction cosplaying as reality. FOOH raises questions about the authenticity of the brand experience itself. Advertisers push the boundaries of what is possible with a minimum spend. These simulations of awe-inspiring moments dilute the credible real-life experiences we’ve come to appreciate. Authenticity is a pivotal factor in establishing trust between a brand and its audience. What does it say about the brand as a corporate citizen, when they are normalising fraud, lies and astro-turfing on social platforms? We have enough problems in the media eco-system already, without brands making it worse. FOOH can be seen as a manifestation of brand sociopathy.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Padel + more things

    Padel

    The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.

    Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.

    There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.

    Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.

    The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.

    How to play padel

    More on the basics of how to play padel here.

    Business

    British American Tobacco writes down $31.5 billion as it shifts its business away from cigarettes

    China

    “He Always Talks About the West”-Former University President Sentenced to 11 Years in Prison in China and Who’s Afraid of Chizuko Ueno? The Party’s Ongoing Counteroffensive against Feminism in the Xi Era don’t inspire investor confidence in China

    China’s Xi goes full Stalin with purge – POLITICO – the narrative feels wrong around this article, even though the purge is on

    Bloomberg New Economy: China’s Economic Heft Sinks for First Time Since 1994 – Bloomberg

    Consumer behaviour

    Firewater | No Mercy / No Malice – on young people and risk

    What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture

    Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether

    Culture

    Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended

    Design

    Sony Access Controller Review: A Beautiful Addition for All Gamers | WIRED

    Is the flat design trend finally over? | by Chan Karunaratne | Dec, 2023 | UX Collective

    Economics

    China’s accelerating rise in consumer defaults | FT – inspite of the social credit scores and lack of opportunity to declare personal bankruptcy

    China challenge is too much for Republican market fundamentalism | FT

    Energy

    Audi to build all-electric rugged 4×4 to rival Defender and G-Class | CAR Magazine – differentiating from the SUV field. Interesting that the Land Cruiser and Ineos doesn’t make the comparison list, yet the G-Wagen does.

    China uranium grab poses threat to western energy supply, warns Yellow Cake | FT

    Ethics

    After $500m Zuckerberg donation, Harvard university gutted its disinfo team studying Facebook | Boing Boing

    AI’s carbon footprint is bigger than you think

    Are fashion’s buying practices really improving? | Vogue Business – buyers think that they are taking a long term more collaborative approach, supplier feedback reflects an unchanged reality

    Finance

    Blockchains are entering their “broadband era” | Visa – I was surprised by the amount of faith that Visa has in the future of Blockchain technology

    Against the odds, China’s push to internationalise its currency is making gains

    Gadgets

    Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.

    Health

    China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong migrants revel in Cantopop concerts, films from home as tears flow, emotions high in ‘collective healing’ at venues in Canada, UK | South China Morning Post

    Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire

    Ideas

    A simple theory of cancel culture – by Joseph Heath

    Innovation

    The first humanoid robot factory is about to open | Axios

    Japan

    “Hoarder Hygge” is the Anti-Zen – Matt Alt’s Pure Invention – this applies equally well to Hong Kong as well, presumably for similar reasons

    London

    Outernet now London’s most visited tourist attraction | The Times

    Luxury

    Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.

    New 2024 Porsche Macan EV: we reveal tech secrets of Stuttgart’s first electric SUV | CAR Magazine

    Marketing

    How One Campaign Changed Everything for Coca-Cola | AdWeek

    Stop focusing on ‘Gen Z’: we’re missing the true audience challenge – The Media Leader

    Behind the Pop Culture Roots of Pepsi’s Modern Retro Redesign – so Pepsi’s own advertising over 30 years had less impact than films from the 1980s and 1990s with younger consumers – that’s a damning indictment if ever I heard one

    Media

    Spotify Is Screwed | WIRED

    Disney global ads president: expect streaming consolidation – The Media Leader – and presumably they think Disney will be a winner?

    Meme

    When My Dog Died, I Turned to a Specific Image for Comfort. Many Do. | Slate – how the idea of the ‘rainbow bridge’ heaven analogue for dogs came about.

    Online

    Techrights — CNN Contributes to Demolition of the Open Web

    Quality

    You are never taught how to build quality software | Florian Bellmann | Be curious, explore and meditate.

    Retailing

    The EU is taking on fashion’s open secret: Destroying unsold goods | Vogue Business

    McDonald’s Launching Spinoff Restaurant Chain Called CosMc’s | Today – I’ll write more about Cosmc’s once I have collected my thoughts on it.

    Security

    Daring Fireball: 23andMe Confirms Hackers Stole Ancestry Data on 6.9 Million Users

    UK’s data regulator resists call to investigate China’s BGI over genomic concerns | Reuters

    Stealing AI models

    Software

    Warning from OpenAI leaders helped trigger Sam Altman’s ouster – The Washington Post

    Practical Ways To Increase Product Velocity | Stay SaaSy

    How it’s Made: Interacting with Gemini through multimodal prompting – Google for Developers

    Apple Makes a Quiet AI Move – On my Om

    Putting China’s Top LLMs to the Test – by Irene Zhang

    Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech | MIT Technology Review

    Documentary on the state of AI

    Technology

    GPU Cloud Economics Explained – The Hidden Truth

    Chipmaking Amid War in Israel – by Nicholas Welch – everything is political.

    ASML axes CTO role with new CEO | EE Times – given that the next stage technology path is rocky to say the least and innovation needs to be a key focus for ASML this made me nervous.

    Broadcom first to add AI to network switch chip | EE Times

    Wireless

    Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are staying connected to the world via donated eSIMs

    Report: 5G global mobile data traffic set to triple in six years | EE News Europe