Ged Carroll

Category: event | 事件 | 그룹 회의 | 出来事

If you look at the dictionary definition for event it comes out as:

  • A thing that happens or takes place, especially one of importance
  • A planned public or social occasion.

It’s also a synonym for contests that might be part of a larger sports competition. I can’t think of any event that I have covered in this blog on the basis of my being a speaker or attendee would really qualify as one of importance.

Event is a category that I get to use sporadically. You will find a mixed bag of posts in here.

Social media marketing conferences that I spoke at or attended, particularly when social media was immature sector. The ironic thing is the lack memory in the sector. The problems that people are having are still the problems that were being had on social media marketing over a decade and a half ago.

In that respect I feel that conferences were a poor investment of my time. The benefit from the events were the people that I met and got to have sidebar conversations with. Thats were the most interesting conversations happened, some of which influenced thinking that I have shared here down the line.

I also managed to go to a few talks including one by the likes of Charles Dunstone who was then the head of Carphone Warehouse. Carphone Warehouse were a major retail presence in the UK, Ireland and some continental European countries as an intermediary between the mobile network provider and the customer.

That business now seems to be largely gone. And my record of his speech is of historical interest only.

  • eSports discussion

    The rise of eSports as a form of entertainment is a popular discussion area in both media and technology. Brandon Beck is the co-founder of Riot Games (best known for League of Legends) on the rise of eSports from a cultural and business perspectives.  His ideas what online gaming future looks like; are interesting, if a little self-serving.

    eSports takeouts:

    • Interesting that Riot are trying to give players a better base to build their careers. How will this affect teams over individual player talent?  How long is their professional life? When do they burn out? What does post-eSports athlete life look like?
    • They acknowledge that competitive gaming will have a long runway to adoption rather than the hockey stick models predicted by financiers in this area. Traditional sports management professionals see eSports as a new opportunity.
    • Professional athletes come out of second and third generation gamers and parents who pursued traditional sports at a competitive level
    •  The new nature of competitive gaming has an exclusively young audience. The vast majority of content is streaming. The audience is cable cutters, which implies that they didn’t have traditional sports as a substitute content
    • Player access and the Asian ‘idol’ phenomenon seems to be very similar with ‘around game’ content. There is an immediacy to it. There is also a grey zone between the athlete and online influencers, I could see a crossover
    • I found it concerning that it revolves so much around China, given the rule by law approach to things that the Communist Party of China takes. It would take nothing to crush competitive gaming in China. Comments on the negative social impact of gaming doesn’t bode well

    More on professional online gaming here and more on Riot Games here. It will be interesting to see how Riot Games continues to develop under the ownership of Chinese technology company Tencent.

  • September 11

    15 years ago on September 11, 2001 I worked agency side in Haymarket in London’s west end  for Edelman. It was a normal day. Well as normal is it gets when you are in the middle of the dot com bust fallout. It was a mix of mobile businesses trying to ride the mobile internet wave and service providers for the soon to launch 3G mobile networks. Alongside this was helping dot com businesses try to find their place in the new world.

    My job meant working on communications programmes for the European subsidiaries of technology companies. This was to reflect a ‘business as usual’ face to their customers. This allowed the European subsidiaries to keep their businesses largely intact so that they could be sold off to help bail out the financial hole that the US parent company had made.

    The businesses had grown on generous venture capital payments, share placements and bank loans. The dot com bust suddenly meant that there was a surplus of servers, network switches, bandwidth, commercial space and Herman Miller Aeron chairs.

    Due to the nature of the business I worked closely with colleagues on the finance team because I spoke ‘geek’ and understood how screwed these clients happened to be.

    The financial and corporate teams worked for a number of clients, notably Cantor Fitzgerald. They were to lose two thirds of their personnel by the end of the day.

    It was early afternoon, when I realised that something was up. We had TVs around the agency that often weren’t on. This time they were all turned to Sky News, which was running the footage. After the troubles and bombings in Beirut, it wasn’t a complete surprise to see another landmark attack – at least at first.

    Once the scale sunk in, then the realisation of how different the world was going to be after September 11 started to dawn on me. More related content here.

  • 2016 Apple event

    In a now annual ritual its 2016 Apple event held on September 7 left me a lot to reflect on.

    Style

    • The presentation was telling a hard story to an audience that were likely to be underwhelmed. Phil Schiller rather than Tim Cook carried the most difficult parts of the keynote.
    • The piano finish device was an obvious attempt to provide a style angle to the new iPhone and mask the aerial sections. However it is a class action waiting to happen as it will dull over time with micro-scratches
    • The story that the audience was told didn’t feel right. Lets talk about the headphone jack. The double camera only appears in the Plus, so the requirement for room isn’t a credible argument on its own, other vendors have managed to waterproof handsets with headphone jacks. I suspect that Apple isn’t sure that its backing the right horse. Its the least aggressive change they’ve made in a while. The inclusion of an adaptor shows that their user aggression still isn’t as high compared to when they got rid of: SCSI, Apple Desktop Bus (ADB), iPod 30 pin port (still pissed about that one), AppleTalk, floppy disks or optical disk playback and storage – I suspect that they are fearfully waiting to see what the pre-order numbers will be like and they should be. A straw poll of AdAge readers (core Apple user demographic) showed overwhelming disappointment
      AdAge readers on new iPhone
    • There is a lot of really nice features in iOS 10 – I’ve been using it for a while, why didn’t they make more of this and macOS Sierra?

    Substance

    • Innovation in the smartphone category has flattened out. The iPhone 7 provides reasons for laggard iPhone users to upgrade, but nothing for 6 and 6S series users. There are few if any innovations for the likes of Huawei to ape in their new models
    • Innovation in smartwatches has plateaued. Apple is coalescing around fitness and dedicated products are much more cost effective for consumers. In China Xiaomi’s fitness band sells for about £15, for many consumers it would be enough. Fitbit is doing well – Apple’s wrist computer (alongside Samsung Gear etc) looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut
    • Apple have done nothing to address the latent demand for new laptops amongst consumers (I am still happy with my 13″ Retina MacBook Pro). There was no replacement for the Cinema display (again, I am happy with my current set-up, but where is the pro-user love)
    • Apple abandoned its flirtation with luxury by discontinuing the gold Watch. They are still holding out to be viewed as stylish by doubling down with Hermes and a white ceramic device – it would work on the opposite wrist to a Chanel J12
    • It was curious that Apple moved away from talking about security and privacy; the collaborative document working using iWork which could be seen as a potential attack vector on to the desktop. The Air Pods that sync seamlessly with a device without visible security precautions.  iPhone security was addressed in the James Corden car karaoke skit at the beginning of the show rather than woven through the materials.
    • The speech about the app store was to try and bolster developer support, I suspect that services will shore up the Apple financial numbers over the next 12 months
    • The Nike branded Apple Watch was part of a broader move reposition the Apple Watch 2 as a fitness device and probably the biggest transition of the 2016 Apple event.

    More related content can be found here.

  • Brexit part 1

    Why I am writing a post called Brexit part 1? Generally I find politics a bit too grubby and dirty for this blog and have only touched it when I absolutely, positively didn’t have a choice. So expect Brexit Part 1 and Brexit Part 2.

    On June 23, 2016 the UK goes to the polls to vote on whether the country should stay in or leave the European Union.

    Over the next few days I will be writing two posts (this is the first one). The first of which is about how it has all been presented. The second post will be a guide for my non-UK based friends on what the hell it all means.

    Political marketing generally isn’t the most amazing work, though there have been iconic campaigns. Given the momentous decision ahead of voters you would think that there would be a creative advertising campaign.

    The US has led the way in iconic political campaigns. My favourites being the ‘Daisy’ ad used by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

    Ronald Reagan’s ‘It’s morning in America again’ which is curiously soothing yet exceptionally emotive

    Barack Obama’s simple messages of ‘Hope’, ‘Change You Can Believe In’ and ‘Yes We Can’ together with a focus on repetition and reach brought out the vote in his favour.

    The UK has come up with good campaigns too; the Saatchi brothers ‘Britain Isn’t Working’ that helped get Margaret Thatcher the first time around. Ironically the poster doesn’t contain real unemployed people, but 20 Conservative party members shot over and over again to create the ‘conga line’.
    Labour isn't working
    It is such an iconic poster that the Labour party still has to jump over the hurdle of proving it wrong 30 years after its publication.

    By comparison Vote In’s adverts lack… creativity and any sort of emotion to pull the audience in. It is like they are selling machine parts to procurement professionals, not a life-changing decision.

    Ryanair’s campaign discounted flights for expats to come back to the UK and vote to remain has more engaging creative. WTF.
    ryanair

    Vote Leave isn’t much better. Let’s start off with their domain strategy ‘voteleavetakecontrol.org’ – Google’s Adwords team must have been rubbing their hands with joy. For a campaign the ideal URL would have been voteleave.co.uk (which is a rick roll link) or brexit.com. According to redirect on brexit.com

    www.Brexit.com & www.Brexit.co.uk were offered to the various national Out campaign groups for no charge.
    After no contact was offered in response it is now up for sale.
    £3500

    School boy error. If you look at their content, they have managed to latch on to emotive themes, but the production values of the material look as it has been done by Dave in Doncaster who does wedding videos on the weekend.

    And as we have less than a week to go to the polls the quality of the marketing isn’t likely to get any better.
    Around London
    In fact, the best piece of advertising for either side that I have seen was in Whitechapel. It is simple, snappy, emotive and likely done by an art student given the lack of declaration of campaign affiliation (i.e. a call to action to visit strongerin.co.uk or a claim that it was done on behalf of ‘Stronger In’ or ‘The In Campaign Limited’).

    One last thought to ponder in this post

    WPP in particular has a reputation for hiring marketing talent from political campaigns, and these people are sold on to clients as fresh thinkers and doers for their brands. Positive examples of this would be Obama campaign veterans Thomas Gensemer and Amy Gershkoff, or my old colleague Pat Ford who worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign.

    There will be marketers getting jobs with serious salaries on the back of this work and the designer of ‘Brits Don’t Quit’ will be working in an intern farm somewhere if they’re lucky. Life just isn’t fair.

    You can read Brexit part 2 here.

    More Information
    Campaign on Labour Isn’t Working.
    Ryanair’s EU referendum ad investigated by police | The Guardian – it might be illegal, but at least it has a pulse.
    Thomas Gensemer LinkedIn profile
    Amy Gershkoff LinkedIn profile
    Patrick Ford LinkedIn profile

  • Google I/O 2016

    Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20.  There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

    Giving apps a second chance

    Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.
    apps
    Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

    The reasons for an expanded app usage include:

    • A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
    • Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
    • Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
    • In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools

    Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

    More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

    Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

    The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

    Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

    Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

    Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

    Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

    Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation 

    Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

    More information
    Google I/O 2016 event page
    A16hz on Google I/O 2016
    Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
    Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
    The Limits of Google
    If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
    ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard