Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • Facebook Canvas + more news

    Facebook Canvas

    Creating Facebook Canvas ads: step-by-step guide | The Digiterati – great step-by-step guide by Marie Page. Facebook Canvas. Facebook Canvas are full screen mobile adverts.

    Facebook Officially Launches Canvas Ads That Load Full-Screen Rich Media Pages In-App | TechCrunch – Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads. Facebook wants to give advertisers an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network

    Business

    Is Taking Yahoo Private An Option? | MediaPost – does it make sense taking Yahoo private? – Probably yes, getting the activist shareholders off the company’s back would have benefits. All be it ending up with a highly leveraged business. Does it make sense to have the current team do it? That’s a much trickier call to make, there is a strong argument to say no. But you would struggle to find a qualified management team who could step up to take it on

    Morgan Stanley Marks Down Its Stake In Palantir, Dropbox – Fortune – not terribly surprising clipping of the unicorns. Palantir seems to be a solution looking for a problem. This is a common issue with enterprise software. Given its defence connections and the need for extensive consultancy and software one has to wonder about breakout use cases

    Ideas

    The Information Revolution’s Dark Turn – Tech – GovExec.com – interesting article discussion on whether technology frees us or dominates us

    Kiddle – Ask Jeeves mark II? Will Kiddle finally be the people to get natural language search to work well consistently?

    Reactions: Not everything in life is Likable — Facebook Design — Medium – interesting breakdown in methodology

    Media

    Warner Bros to buy Korean-focused DramaFever – BBC News – they have been taking a kicking from Viki (Korean based) owned by Rakuten

    Most Germans Think the Press Is Lying to Them About Refugees – SPIEGEL ONLINE – as if the media doesn’t have enough on its plate, a lack of belief in its core proposition could kill it entirely. More German related topics here

    Wireless

    Demand for heat pipes for smartphones may emerge – DigiTimes – suggests a lack of die size and power saving improvements. Interesting technology through. Will heat pipes for smartphones reduce the localisation of heat on shells and how will cases affect their efficacy?

    Web of no web

    【双语】Shenzhen pilots vehicle ID chips 深圳八类车上将安装“电子车证” – The chips will be installed in 200,000 vehicles in Shenzhen-mostly commercial vehicles and public buses-and allow officers to access vehicle data

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.

  • Come to Singapore + more

    Come to Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque in terms of editorial style. Come to Singpore! is very different to the Conde Naste Traveller type editorial. Singapore is aiming at developing a start-up culture so targetingWired (US) readers make a good deal of sense. More Singapore related posts here.

    Decline of cyberspace

    William Gibson on the decline of cyberspace. It is fascinating in terms of how Gibson’s inspiration has evolved over time. He was reacting against genres that he didn’t want to write as much as ideas he wanted to convey. The ability to say no, is a very interesting creative process and it reminds me of an interview I saw with an Apple executive talking about why the iPod didn’t have an FM radio.

    Renault Alpine Vision

    Interesting to see Renault going back to Alpine’s sports roots with the Vision sports coupe. It is made to a similar formula to the original 1960s cars that made Alpine famous. A light, small car, a rear-mid engine placement with a highly tuned small capacity engine. Performance is viewed by the Alpine team in much more holistically with an equal focus on handling and breaking.

    Tesla Model X

    I am a sucker for well done manufacturing and process films. The first one up is from Tesla, highlighting robots working in a manufacturing cell on their X model vehicle. Tesla has had problems around areas like panel fit. I am not sure if they have resolved those quality issues, but robots should provide them with a very consistent process and higher throughput.

  • Monster Hunt & more news

    Monster Hunt

    China’s highest-grossing film of all time Monster Hunt flops in US, takes in $21,000 during opening weekend: Shanghaiist – interesting that they didn’t bother to put some marketing wallop behind Monster Hunt, they had enough time to do a good English dub (great way to get Asian Americans on board) and push it out to a more general audience in the US. It would have been a great China soft power vehicle. Instead a China soft power opportunity was lost.

    Then there is the other view, that Monster Hunt performed to expectations. There is a possibility that its Chinese ticket sales were inflated. I and others that I know have gone to see a western film on more than one occasion in a Chinese cinema. The ticket is rang out as a local film and then the screen number is crossed out and the western movie screen number written on by the assistant.

    Secondly, Monster Hunt didn’t spawn a Toy Story-esque merchandise avalanche in China and other Asian markets. Which indicates it wasn’t that much of a cultural moment and ergo, not as successful as one would believe. More China related posts here.

    Consumer behaviour

    Blu-ray Isn’t Going Anywhere – Park Associates – interesting demographic pattern of ownership – “Owners have higher incomes than the overall broadband household population as well as a strong preference for the highest-quality video.“

    Hillary Clinton is losing young voters to Bernie Sanders. | Slate – not scientific but interesting. It also gives an interesting viewpoint on Corbyn’s political chances.

    Design

    Arriving at San Francisco – interesting delve into Apple’s new system font. Unfortunately I can’t download it in a format to use it in documents

    Gadgets

    StarTech Unveils Dual-Display Thunderbolt 2 Docking Station with 12 Ports – AnandTech – this looks like all my peripheral prayers were answered. I ended up with two of these. They work well for handling by two Apple Cinema displays

    Ideas

    Who Killed Nokia? Nokia Did | INSEAD Alumni Magazine – Despite being an exemplar of strategic agility, the fearful emotional climate prevailing at Nokia during the rise of the iPhone froze coordination between top and middle managers

    Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era – The New Yorker – the irony is that they got on mobile services early. Yahoo! Go had been launched when I was there at the beginning of 2006. It was a one stop shop to search, access email, share photos on Flickr, get news and access Yahoo! Finance. Christian Lindholm was at Yahoo! back then. He was the director in charge of the S60 operating system interface at Nokia prior to

    Innovation

    LLVM Patches Confirm Google Has Its Own In-House Processor – Phoronix – interesting that they have a custom processor, it is related to their internal network infrastructure

    Media

    Why Jeep’s $10M Super Bowl Ad Only Used a Third of the Screen | WIRED – interesting example of online considerations driving TV creative decisions – mobile devices

    Telemundo to Build New $250 Million Miami Headquarters – The Wrap – which indicates how big the Latin media market is

    On the hypothetical eventuality of no more free internet – FT – interesting discussion of Internet economics and how it relates to  the commons (paywall)

    CBS Says Super Bowl 50 Broke Streaming Records With 3.96 Million Unique Viewers | TechCrunch – which is still relatively small compared to broadcast TV audiences for major events such as this

    Online

    Akamai earnings call hints at Apple CDN – Business Insider – not terribly surprising, Akamai has strategic partnerships with Apple rivals as well. Akamai earnings hint at the service’s ubiquity

    Security

    US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you | Technology | The Guardian – not terribly surprising, each technological frontier represents opportunities and IoT won’t be any different in that respect. The very pervasiveness of IoT is what makes it such a security risk

    Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque content on Singapore

    Web of no web

    This Google app could forever change the way you travel – Google’s translation app has a new feature that will come in handy for travelers. You point your smartphone’s camera at a sign printed in a foreign language, and Google’s translation technology

  • What does ZBB mean for agencies?

    After talking with a friend I pulled together a brief presentation for them which explained what Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) practices at a client were likely to mean for an agency.

    The key takeout for me are is one of attitude. ZBB isn’t about cost cutting but about spending the money in the most effective way,  where it matters the most. ZBB has benefits that can applied outside marketing on complex projects. 

    And there in lies the problem with the way ZBB has been adapted by some consumer brands. Looking from the outside in at 3G Capital and its work at Kraft and Heinz brands, it seems that ZBB is being used for short term cost cutting, rather than resource allocation. 

    Whilst this might be justified in terms of Jack Welsh-style shareholder value. The reality is short term pay-offs robbing long term potential. This is what happens when you let finance focused MBA graduates a la Scrooge McDuck attempt to do a brand marketers job. What looks good on their spreadsheet looks retarded when viewed through the lens of marketing science. 

    For agencies, ZBB means that the client is making an active effort to keep marketing thinking fresh. It means a pragmatic approach to innovation based on benefit rather than running around screaming innovation. 

    It also means knowing when you’re not the right agency for the job and having partners that you can work with. Which is why we’ve seen ad agencies like Mullen Lowe bulk up on digital and earned media chops. Finally if you see that your client is using ZBB just to cut, cut, cut. Plan for another client because at least one of two things are happening:

    • You aren’t coming up with ideas that meet the needs of the business, so ZBB dictates that investment will be moved away from your programmes
    • The client has a short-termist mindset in using ZBB. You might not be in danger of losing your business, but they might be in danger of losing theirs to the competition