Ged Carroll

Category: hong kong | 香港 | 홍콩 | 香港

哈囉 – here you’ll find posts related to Hong Kong. That includes the territory, the culture, business, creativity and history. I lived and travelled to Hong Kong a number of times, so sometimes the content can be quite random.

In addition, I have long loved Cantonese culture and cuisine, so these might make more appearances on this category. I am saddened by the decline in the film and music production sectors.

I tend to avoid discussing local politics, and the external influence of China’s interference in said politics beyond how it relates to business and consumer behaviour in its broadest context.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Apple Daily launched a new ad format that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Hong Kong.

If there are subjects that you think would fit with this category of the blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Meng Wenzhou & things from last week

    Meng Wanzhou and China

    I’ve made a conscious decision to ignore Sabrina Meng Wanzhou and her forthcoming extradition to the US. I had met Meng Wenzhou when she was called Cathy. I also decided to ignore Starwood’s database of really private data allegedly being pwnd by Chinese intelligence. Unsurprisingly Brexit – which at the moment looks like an Austin Allegro hitting a brick wall at a moderate speed, collapsing like a crisp packet and killing its union jack clad occupants

    On to things that made up my week:

    Back in the day, consumer products brands used to do a lot of advertising to build brand equity. It is interesting that marketing thinking is starting to sway back to that being a good idea again. Reality check, it never was a bad idea, but marketers focused too much on short term effectiveness in isolation. Agencies were fine with this due to the profits available on digital media sales.

    An example of the power in brand advertising was work by McCann Worldgroup in Hong Kong for Nescafe Black. Which paid homage to a well known hair dye advert from the 1980s. Bigen hair dye went big on reach and repetition during the 1980s; its recall and memorability helps Nescafe’s ad work 30 years later. Actor Kenneth Tsang is probably not disappointed by the ongoing work either.

    This video on Amazon sponsored brands ad format reminds me a lot of the arbitrage opportunities that used to be common in early search advertising. It goes to underscore how much Amazon has taken away from Google et al in terms of product and shopping related searches.

    MIT released a video on how self driving cars can work on country roads (without the complex prebuilt LIDAR maps associated with current driverless cars efforts)

    Neopets was one of them child oriented social environments with games of a similar vintage to Habbo Hotel and Disney’s Club Penguin. It also has an odd startup story behind it. Watch the video and be amazed. More online related stories here.

    Wu-Tang Clan celebrate the 25th anniversary of their break out album 36 Chambers  with an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert.

  • High production values & things from last week

    If there was one theme that ran through most of the things in this week’s post its high production values in content creation

    The thing that blew me about this advert is how old school it feels and I mean it in a good way. High production values, great copywriting and beautifully shot. Pretty much everything that modern day adverts tend not to be with production being commoditised with the constant focus on how it can be used on Istagram / Facebook / Snap / Twitter Video – good enough rather than doing things well. These changes are symptomatic of all the forces affecting the ad industry at the moment. More on quality related issues here.

    While we’re talking about ad making, I also love this ad done for McDonalds Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Such a simple idea really well executed – you don’t need to speak Cantonese to get it. It is apparently based on this advert screened during the Super Bowl in the US. The creative was done during Leo Burnett’s 35-year run as creative agency for the fast food chain.

    Scott Galloway tends to polarise opinions, so I’d ask you to put aside any feelings you have and listen to this interview with Mr Bags – one of the biggest influencers in the luxury sector for Chinese netizens at the moment.

    Amazing photos and insight into the Yakuza life: Behind the Yakuza: documenting the women of Japan’s mafia | Dazed Digital

    Currently reading City of Devils : A Shanghai Noir by Paul French. It is a true crime story about Shanghai during the Warlord period prior to World War Two. I’m only a little bit into the book but it’s very obvious why the young Chinese Communist Party would have held a passionate dislike for western powers interfering in their country.

  • Brand actions library & things from last week

    I’ve spent a bit of time this week contributing to the next edition of Planning Dirty’s Brand Actions Library. This is a collection of inspirational case studies by vertical market for planners and strategists at marketing agencies. I’ll let you know when the brand actions library is available in the meantime you could do worse than going and subscribing to the Planning Dirty newsletter.  I’ll let you know when it comes out.

    Finally, let’s down to business and cover the things that have made my day this week:

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    Nick DeWolf was the co-founder of Teradyne; a provider of automatic test equipment for technology companies. He served as its CEO until 1971, when he travelled and continued his lifelong passion for photography. His son-in-law has built up an archive of his photography on Flickr. He’s got some amazing shots of Hong Kong in the early 1970s. There is enough distance between the time he was there and the 1967 riots to show the city on the rise. You can see the genesis of the modern Hong Kong, but also it still has touches of tradition including the floating villages in the typhoon shelters. Check them out.

    Interesting documentary on global capitalism by Deutsche Welle. It is interesting to see the way the editorial team framed the story. Germany has seen its news media break big stories on financial capitialism based stories. Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung has been a key driver in this.

    House music producer Kerri Chandler has given away 2GB of never digitised before tracks via WeTransfer, get them before they’re gone. You have less than five days to download them.

    Elsewhere electro legend Egyptian Lover picks his favourite Roland TR-808 songs

    Lastly Star Alliance highlight their connection service. It’s hard to get differentiation between OneWorld, SkyTeam etc. So I thought that this ad did a really nice job of it

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiU9A1S6cg0

  • RXBar + more things

    RXBar runs anti-ad with quirky campaign featuring Ice-T | CMO Strategy – Ad Age – the brutal honesty is likely to get old fast, but shows how breaking the rules works. RXBar being a challenger brand can afford to get away with this in order to build (temporary) brand salience

    From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly | Reuters – The scanners are hand-held or desktop devices that can break into smartphones and extract and analyze contact lists, photos, videos, social media posts and email. – Apparently works on iPhones as well as domestic Android handsets

    CEO pay: How the pay-for-performance model fails — Quartz at Work – In the 1970s, shareholders took out about 50% of a company’s profits, while the rest was reinvested in the productive capacity of the firm, including R&D to employee training and rewards. Today, the shareholder gets over 90% between dividends and share buybacks. Today, a 60% or greater weight on equity or equivalents is the norm in pay packages. – this isn’t new Will Hutton was writing about this in The State We’re In over two decades ago

    Hong Kong separatist party leader Andy Chan Ho-tin calls China ‘a threat to all free peoples in the world’ in fiery Foreign Correspondents’ Club speech | South China Morning Post  – The FCC website was down on Tuesday afternoon because of a suspected malware attack. – subtle China, subtle. I’d be very surprised if China doesn’t dial up emphasis on China patriotism over Hong Kong patriotism. More related posts here.

    A $40 Billion Plan to Cash Out Of Bitcoin – Bloomberg – Bitcoin: A digital currency that’s spent nowhere, a commodity that’s used for nothing, and a libertarian dream that’s effectively run by elites. – Bitmain’s chips are apparently more of interest to machine learning processes in the future than the bitcoin mining that they currently do. They also run the biggest bitcoin mining collectives. There is also a key concern over rising energy requirement per bitcoin ‘mind’

  • Self doubt + more things

    Why social media and selfies are filling Hong Kong’s young women with self-doubt | South China Morning Post – 10 per cent of women in the 16 to 24 age group attributed their negative feelings to social media, while 31 per cent said it was due to friends and 28 per cent pointed to health. For older women, only 5 per cent cited social media, 18 per cent said friends and 40 per cent named health as an issue – survey of 1,010 respondents by think tank MWYO. Sample size is a little low. I suspect that self doubt and low self esteem due to social media is more than a Hong Kong phenomenon. There is a Dove brand marketing campaign in these insights. Filters and beautification camera apps probably drive this process even harder.  More on social media related topics here

    Ric Flair aka Nature Boy the veteran American wrestler from WWE appears in these ads. I love it for the nostalgia if nothing else. What’s amazing is the longevity in wrestling personality brands. World Wrestling Entertainment has an undervalued skill in building brands and sub-brand through storytelling that is timeless in nature. WWE is right up there with Disney in my book.

    Will China Let Google Back in? – MacroPolo – not likely, because China doesn’t need Alphabet.

    This is how Dutch police know you’re buying drugs online – interesting how transactions that don’t go through escrow can be compromised and how the police seem to be getting good intelligence on where the servers are located. This could be conventional police work, bad server set up or a compromise in the infrastruce of the dark web

    What does QAnon have to do with leftist Italian authors Wu Ming — Quartz – fascinating read. QAnon is definitely a pre-meditated construct, but beyond that we don’t know anything more about its creation.