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.

 

  • Hong Kong banks + more

    Hong Kong banks

    Hackers threaten to take down websites of Hong Kong banks unless they pay bitcoin ransoms – interesting move and good PR by Akamai, the block chain has allowed researchers to see which Hong Kong banks are paying up.

    Business

    Chinese Soccer Prepares to ‘Fly Alone’: Will Success Follow? | WSJ – moving away from government. It will be interesting to see if China can displace the European teams in the world’s sports media markets. I suspect that a key component of that, which hasn’t been addressed yet, would be changes in sports betting

    Design

    Should Your Logo Be a Wordmark or a Symbol? + Subtraction.com – app design space predictates going with a brand symbol which has its own risks. But wordmarks work in other media like word-of-mouth

    Gallery: A practical, low-tech Japan | Ars Technica – really clever product design

    How to

    BeeCanvas – Collect and share your information visually – great for assembling mood boards

    Innovation

    LINE Maps for Indoor – Android Apps on Google Play – Japan only indoor mapping. More related posts here.

    Glove-like socks are made from material stronger than Kevlar – Swiss Barefoot Company. It is interesting that so much effort is put into materials technology for glove-like socks.

    Ireland

    Direct flights from Hong Kong to Ireland would really see bilateral trade take off, says Irish consul general | South China Morning Post – it would also affect the role as Heathrow as the long haul hub for Irish flights

    Marketing

    3M Builds an Impressive Branded Rube Goldberg Machine From a Variety of Its Products – absolutely nails the brand positioning of 3M as a business and is a good profile raiser amongst technical specifiers

    Selfridges puts Apple Watch at the center in floral window display | Luxury Daily – interesting targeting strategy by Selfridges, focusing on Apple Watch sales to women, rather than men. It reinforces the devices status as a fashion device that happens to have health benefits

    Online

    LinkedIn Lookup app replaces company intranets – Business Insider – defensive move against Facebook for Work

    Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation – interesting move by Tencent to invest in Nik

    Vlogger Chyaz on product placement online – BBC News – ASA clarifying yet again

    Retailing

    Smartphone-Owning Millennials Say Most of Their Retail Browsing Occurs In-Store | Marketing Charts – so retailers need to put in free wi-fi without a reg wall

    Wireless

    China’s smartphone sales slide 10% year-on-year (but not for the reason you think) | Techinasia – consumers going for premium handsets and keeping them for longer than changing cheap handsets. Is it total cost of ownership or status driven?

  • Cultural Strategy

    I was recommended Cultural Strategy by a client to ‘better help understand their business’. The book is an accessible easy read as business books go. Cultural Strategy is written as a mix of theory and illustrative case studies. In the book, it’s authors Holt and Cameron propose that culture can be a key defining factor in business success:

    • An organisation culture can make it more resilient or innovative providing a clearly differentiated experience between a brand and its competitors in the eyes of consumers. Their concept of cultural orthodoxy is similar to the red ocean strategy, where companies in mature sectors tend to look alike.
    • By understanding consumers and the cultural context of the product or service, a market opportunity can be found. This is essentially what a good planner does in an advertising agency, but the Doug’s look to bake this into the organisation rather than having it as a wrapper at the end of the product process

    This meshes in quite neatly with work by marketers like Byron Sharp, Les Binet and Peter Fields that show a distinctive differentiated brand is key to success. It would make sense for the company culture to be part of the brand. An example of this would be someone like Patagonia. But it could also be applied to the B2B space. Salesforce would be a good exemplar.

    Where is might fall down is when you have a ‘house of brands’ company; like usually happen in the FMCG sector. And this is why there has been so much focus on brand purpose.

    After reading the book, I am still no wiser about my client was trying to say about their business; but that was more about them than my reading material. This story however emphasises an important point, what may be perceived as a cultural innovation internally in a company may not manifest itself as brand innovation or even a differentiated position. More related book reviews here.

    More information

    Cultural Strategy by Holt and Cameron
    Cultural Strategy Group

  • The changing culture of Silicon Valley

    I have have been thinking about how platform changes are marking a changing culture in Silicon Valley. This changing culture will play not only into innovation but workplace practices.

    1990s

    When I was in college I interviewed for a few placements, one was with Hewlett-Packard in Germany. They wanted a marketing student to look after their printing brochures on demand initiative for their UNIX product line. This was going to save them a mint in terms of marketing spend using an Indigo Digital Press rather than brochure runs on litho printing, reducing waste, storage needs and allow for faster document updates. (HP went on to buy Indigo in 2001).

    Commercial adoption of the web was around the corner, I was already using it in college, but its ubiquity still seemed quite far away. I decided I didn’t want to go for the job primarily because I wanted to get my degree over and done with. Also HP weren’t paying that much for the role.

    We were interviewed by a succession of people, the only one who was memorable  was a guy called Tim Nolte who wore a Grateful Dead ‘dancing bears’ tie and had a Jerry Garcia mouse mat in his cubicle.

    At that time HP, had the dressing of the company man but had more than a few hippies on the payroll who permeated its culture. Reading Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires made me realise that technology was as much a culture war as technological upheaval.

    Counterculture

    If one looks at the icons of the technology sector up to and including the early noughties many of the people were influenced by the counterculture movement if not part of it. The  Grateful Dead where one of the first bands to have their own website at dead.net. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by John Perry Barlow, a lyricist with The Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs was influenced by Indian mystics and his experiences using LSD.

    Stewart Brand who founded WIRED magazine and The WeLL was the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to useful things for people who wanted to get back to the land. He was influential in the early environmentalist movement and had been involved in the counterculture of 1960s San Francisco.
    Members of the Golden Circle Senior Citizens Club of Fairmont holding quilt they made. The quilt was raffled off during the Fairmont centennial, May 1973
    Ideas from open APIs and creative commons came from their libertarian values. Open Source Software again comes from academic and countercultural attitudes to information and has had to defend itself from accusations of communism, yet it now runs most of the world’s web services and gadgets from smartphones to Google’s search engine.

    Reading the Cluetrain Manifesto is like reading a screed that could have come from an alternative Haight Ashbury.

    Aeon magazine wrote an article on how yuppies have hacked the hacker ethos, but the truth is they’ve got behind the steering wheel as web2.0 declined. The move from open web API’s and the walled garden approach of Facebook and their ilk marked a changing of the guard of sorts.

    Flickr had and ability to move your photos as a matter of pride in their product. Just a few clicks kept them honest and kept them innovating. Joshua Schachter’s similar approach on del.icio.us allowed me to move to pinboard.in when Yahoo! announced that it would be sunset.

    Government always is the last to catch up, which is the reason why open data only really gained mainstream political currency in the past five years.

    Yuppies

    Were now in a changing culture that sees a Silicon Valley whose values are closer to the Reagan years and I am not too sure that it will be a positive development.

    I suspect that the change won’t be positive for a number of reasons. Greed will be good. There will be no lines that won’t be crossed in the name of shareholder value. Innovation will be viewed as a cost. Silicon Valley’s imperfect meritocracy will be undermined by a boy’s club mentality.

    More information
    Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date by Robert X Cringely
    Don’t listen to Bill Gates. The open-source movement isn’t communism. | Slate
    How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos – Aeon

  • The limits of Google

    Earlier I wrote a post on the work blog: Alphabet: what does it all mean? – which I have republished below. One thing that came through to me from this exercise was the growth limits of Google and by extension the growth limits of online advertising. The ceiling on advertising is limited by a number of factors:

    • Cost of acquisition – the most obvious ceiling is tat advertisers generally won’t pay more than their profit margin is wort to acquire customers. Search advertising did see bubbles of a sort around mortgages and insurance, but as performance marketing has improved measurement of attribution in the customer journey buying stratagems have become more efficient. More efficient the purchaser, the less profits for Google
    • Supply – when Google rolled out search advertising there was only really display advertising as competition. Now there is a plethora of social platforms and advertising technology behind display advertising that provides better data and a more nuanced understanding for media agencies
    • Context – ten years ago Morgan Stanley claimed that seven out of ten web journeys start with search. This knocked the guts out of the portals: Yahoo!, Excite and MSN. Now social and mobile advertising platforms via for Google’s lock on context. Google’s stewardship of Android facilitated some of these competitors. Now Google is prevented from even from access to the Chinese marketplace, one of the fastest growing internet markets in absolute terms. Amazon has ended up having such a lock on retail that many consumers don’t go to Google first but instead use the search box on the Amazon store for many of their purchases. Every search on Google is a potential loss of advertising opportunity
    • Screwing the channel – marketing groups such as WPP have facilitated and many cases bought a whole sector of media buying ‘middleware’, or what the industry calls ‘ad tech’ platforms. Google has stopped playing nicely with them and their largest customers publicly view them as co-opertition – behind closed doors the sentiment is likely to be less amiable

    Social media went into overdrive on Monday evening UK time when Google announced a formal restructure of all its businesses, creating a new company called Alphabet. For the man on the street, Google means Search, YouTube, Drive (including Docs, Sheets etc.), email and Android. For the average marketer you can throw various advertising products and Google Analytics into the mix. For business IT managers, it is everything from productivity, software-as-a-service and possibly as a supplier of a search appliance for its internal servers.

    Three different customer types exist and a product set that grows layer-by-layer like an onion. The bulk of Google’s revenue currently comes from advertising due to the clever technology behind it. One can see from Microsoft’s move to the cloud that there is less revenue in cloud computing than in Google’s current business, so when advertising reaches a natural ceiling for growth, services will provide an incremental benefit at best.

    Android was designed as a conduit to Google services and for advertising to venture out into the mobile space. But the world’s most popular mobile operating system is not without its own issues. Despite all phones essentially looking the same, there is a massive amount of fragmentation in the Android marketplace, which makes life harder for developers. Google is also a developer, so building applications that it can build loyalty through and make money from becomes more difficult.

    Secondly, an appreciable amount of Android devices (those sold in China) and many sold in Russia don’t use Google services and provide little to no opportunity for Google advertising.

    This means that Google is forced to make big bets in very different sectors. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, partly because of their entrepreneurial nature to explore new opportunities, built in an ability to scale Google beyond the business lines that I have outlined above. This was apparent from their original IPO share prospectus and accompanying letter. Xerox is famous in Silicon Valley lore for fumbling the future, by inventing lots of products that would be recognisable to us today in the late 1960s and early 1970s, only to see a corporate head office miss the boat. Brin and Page would have had some awareness of this. Microsoft’s inability to leapfrog beyond its core business successfully is probably also a factor for consideration.

    Alphabet formalises the framework that Page and Brin had been working to for a number of years.

    So what does this mean to Google?

    For the foreseeable future it will be more of the same for Google. We’ve the seen the business scale back services; by September last year Google had closed down 30 services. It has cut back the functionality of Google Adplanner as a reference tool, to just focus on sales. Google has continued to prune back services such as Google+ (a challenging task given the tentacles + has across Google’s services). The changes inside Google for staffers also reflect similar moves towards profit optimisation, move away from experimentation and being a ‘mensch’.

    The biggest move was to get rid of the 20% of time engineers could devote to projects that interested them. The truth is since at least 2009, the Google myth of people working there to change the world rather than delivering profit hasn’t held sway for a great deal of their staff.

    On the outside Google will still likely have playful swag and cool offices, but the reality is that it will be more of a ‘normal’ business. That means that we won’t see the next Facebook coming from within Google and that whilst the speed of evolution will continue to run along at the same pace, substantial innovation probably won’t. This kind of business requires a different kind of leader to Page, and by appointing Sundar Pichai, will create a cultural break from the past. Pichai is likely to be able to get more revenue out of the Google ‘cash cow’ to help drive innovation in these other areas.

    Page and Brin are freer to bring their energy to the other businesses in Alphabet. For instance, keeping Nest out of Google allows it to work easier with Google competitors like Apple and Microsoft as part of a wider eco-system.

    Lastly, it could be an effort to ring fence Google’s anti-trust woes within the existing business and prevent restrictions being imposed against its newer businesses because of the past sins of the core business.

    So what does this mean for marketers?

    Google is likely to pursue a steady as she goes approach. The focus will be to optimise revenue, so there will be tension with agencies on advertising practices. We’ve already seen this, with Google restricting methods of buying YouTube advertising. These changes will impact the advertising technology business around programmatic advertising.

    The picture with SEO is more about slow and steady change; Google has evolved its Panda index changes to a rolling change rather than the massive shake-ups of old.

    More information
    Android Fragmentation Report August 2015 – OpenSignal
    2004 Founders’ IPO Letter – Investor Relations – Google
    Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
    What’s eating Google’s brand | renaissance chambara
    Why Google Employees Quit? | TechCrunch
    Google Tightens How Advertisers Buy YouTube Ads | AdWeek
    Google’s $6 billion miscalculation on the EU | Bloomberg Businessweek

  • Ice Cube and other things that caught my eye this week

    Ice Cube appearing in a video for Vanity Fair, critiquing interpretations of NWA lyrics on Rap Genius. Its great the way Ice Cube handles it with such good humour.