FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.
Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.
They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.
The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.
I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.
This week has seen a couple of mind boggling marketing moves. First of all Vaseline made Valentine’s themed content that in retrospect probably doesn’t seem like the smartest idea now.
I am not sure what this a parable of:
The decline of corporate communications and legal in a company as reputation guardians?
The decline of critical thinking in brand marketers? It certainly wasn’t culturally appropriate for the UK
The high price of cost reduction in content where the agency folks no longer give f__k? You can’t commoditise heart, but you can kill it
I have been listening to this great mix by Peggy Gou
Munich animal shelter
ZAK Agency’s weekly ‘Cool Sh*t’ newsletter flagged up some lovely videos from a Munich-based animal welfare charity
I love this ‘conspiracy film’ trailer from Taco Bell starring Josh Duhamel. Great content doesn’t need to be constrained by a six-second chunk optimised for social.
One of the key issues of concern for the financial services sector has been the lack progress in passporting. This is where the EU says UK regulations and processes are equivalent to theirs and consequently allow market access. More related content here.
China Smartphone Market 2017: Top 10 Best-selling Models – Counterpoint Research – interesting read, basically Apple is the premium smartphone seller. Huawei’s Honor brand makes the top ten along with Xiaomi. It also explains why Huawei wants to get its main brand into the US as that is the main way it can increase the razor thin profit margins of its smartphone business. The real winner is BBK-related brands OPPO and vivo
ongoing by Tim Bray · Google Memory Loss – the whole Web is crushingly expensive, and getting more so every day. Things like 10+-year-old music reviews that are never updated, no longer accept comments, are lightly if at all linked-to outside their own site, and rarely if ever visited… well, let’s face it, Google’s not going to be selling many ads next to search results that turn them up. So from a business point of view, it’s hard to make a case for Google indexing everything, no matter how old and how obscure – the problem for Google would only be if you started to see search promiscuity
Knock and the door shall be opened unto you | FT Alphaville – in China, the data linked to technology companies is already central to the notion of credit provision. It also plays into the country’s planned social credit system. This has come alongside the rapid development of online payments, especially on WePay, part of WeChat. It would be no exaggeration to say that this is perhaps the most important technological development of the present moment, although, in part because of the impenetrability of the Chinese internet, it currently resonates less than it should
Unilever under fire over Gaytime ice cream in Indonesia | PR | Campaign Asia – no idea where they got that idea, I imagine it could become a cult brand if launched elsewhere. Gaytime ice cream makes me think of a more innocent time in my life when, if I was home from school, I would be sat down with Marie biscuits and a cup of Barry’s tea by my Mum. This was a thinly veiled bribe to be quiet, which wasn’t really needed.
The reason for this ritual would be a soap opera called Harbour Hotel and a chat show called The Gay Byrne Show. Both where on RTÉ Radio 1. Back then gay could mean happy; or in the case of Gay Byrne it was short for Gabriel. The radio meant that voices from home where beamed into our house around the clock via medium wave and long wave.
https://youtu.be/hByFDVwiQq8
Of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it at my English school as there would have been an ocean of sniggers. The Muslim outrage at Gaytime also mirrors the PC revisionist view of The Flintstones ‘we’ll have a gay old time’ lyric in their theme tune. Apparently its original meaning of happy or fun, was interpreted as being intolerant of the LGBTQ community.
The problems that the Labour Party faces with Corbyn and the general distrust of politicians in what should be ‘heartland’ seats
The continued credibility of Nigel Farage
The anti-German sentiment. The EU was seen as a German vehicle to win the war again by stealth – this has almost a Basil Fawlty quality to it. But at least some of the panelists believed it was true
How the political divisions around the societal change driven by Margaret Thatcher’s government reverberated into the Brexit vote
Poundland’s naughty elf campaign which riffed on British smut and the ‘Elf On A Shelf’ franchise affected consumer attitudes to the brand according to YouGov. The research is at odds with the overall positive response it got from Twitter (outside the London media-advertising industrial complex) – YouGov | Poundland’s X-rated ads generated publicity, but consumer perception has dropped
Three Thoughts on Day One at CES 2018 – not surprised that computing is moving to the edge as the network represents latency and potential unreliability – think about how cloud failure when it hit Nest devices and IoT obselescence
Casio AL-1000 – the nixie tube display and ferrite core memory make it a thing of beauty to behold
Huawei’s US market dreams ‘harmed again’ after AT&T walks away from smartphone pact | South China Morning Post – “We have been harmed again,” Huawei’s consumer business unit chief executive officer Richard Yu said in a text message to the South China Morning Post – you can see from later articles how Huawei progressively got their act together in terms of media response though much of the coverage added a thin veneer of analysis whilst repeating the original WSJ article – China’s Huawei hit by last minute collapse of AT&T phone distribution deal | Reuters – the collapse of the deal with AT&T, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, will mean that Huawei will likely struggle to make a hit of its smartphones there as a U.S. mobile carrier would typically promote the products as well as provide subsidies and special package deals
Baidu accuses former staffer of stealing autonomous car technology | FT – interesting case. Presumably it must involve autonomous car technology that falls outside the scope of the Apollo open source software project. Baidu started Apollo as an open source initative on autonomous car technology. Who would the staffer be giving this autonomous car technology to and isn’t there a risk that the Chinese government would get involved against the staffer? Autonomous car technology relies on a series of strategic priority technologies that the Chinese government cares about. In particular automation, machine learning and sensors.
Apple, CALEA and Law Enforcement – Lawfare – Apple is consistently making choices to protect users privacy and security. In the face of the kinds of attacks we’ve been seeing, from the “hack in a box” that Chinese criminals were selling to the sophisticated hacking Jupiter’s VPN, the better security is on phones and in communications, the better off we all are. So while Nick is right on the current vulnerability in iMessage, he has it wrong on both on Apple’s legal obligations under CALEA and how easy it would be for the company to accommodate law enforcement’s demands.
Alexa skills top 25,000 in the U.S. as new launches slow | TechCrunch – I guess its a limitation around the ‘type’ of knowledge taught. There are all kinds of restrictions over IP – so no movie dialogue quotes or sports results for instance unless you are ESPN or a film studio
3D printed Wi-Fi – still getting my head around this (PDF) via our Matt
Upgrade to 5G Costs 200 Billion Dollars a Year, May Not Be Worth It | Advertising Age – this will be interesting. 3G mobile networks were in a similar position at launch. I remember going to a Cap Gemini conference at the time, where research from European mobile operator c-suite opinions was presented. TL;DR no one knew how it was going to make money. Some like Three had ideas of making money on short form media like sports highlights. Three didn’t manage to build a business selling football clips. None of the current ideas look worth $200 billion a year. Not even at the inflated values that we currently have, nothing close to 200 billion dollar markets. More related content here.
Why Is There No Freighter Equivalent of the Airbus A380? – this is explains why Airbus made non-cargo optimised design decisions (like a cockpit on the lower flight deck so you can’t fit a cargo door in the nose). I would be very surprised if Airbus doesn’t make the same mistakes in the future.
Hiroshi Fujiwara Explains Why Fragment Sneakers Are So Hard to Get | GQ – There’s many shoes out there. I want everyone to have it who wants to have it. But it’s hard because so many people buy them just to make money. And I don’t like that. And sometimes it’s good to work hard to get a sneaker, because otherwise you won’t buy it – Fujiwara-san on point as ever
