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.

 

  • The Dentsu Way by Sugiyama

    The Dentsu Way highlights a very integrated approach to marketing communications. When I first started off in public relations Japan was described as a ‘backward’ market. This was supposed to be because PR wasn’t highly valued and Japanese advertising agencies like Dentsu would run an end-game around PR agencies. There wasn’t a specialism in the industry to the same extent as the US or EU. Of course, the reality was rather more complex. In the same way that the division of media and creative adversely affected the advertising industry, so has the division of earned and paid media. One agency, one integrated strategy has a better chance of delivering results.

    Of course, whilst the observations were true the facts drawn from them weren’t. Dentsu is one of the world’s biggest marketing communications groups not because it is backwards. The company has raised its profile in London due to the stand out work of Dentsu London over the past 12 months or so.

    Dentsu’s cross-communication offering looks remarkably prescient in many respects: insight-based planning is used to drive all activity. It is also interesting how closely psychology is linked to public relations campaigns looking to achieve product preference through attitudinal change. Whilst Bernays talked about this in his original work in the public relations field. The reality is that its used surprisingly little.

    For example a large PR agency pitching a vertical dinosaur-shaped lawn to be displayed in the middle of the Broadgate centre. The rationale was ‘its about plants’. This was while I was working inhouse on an FMCG relaunch, and the memory will forever stay with me.

    The Dentsu Way explains their organisation and an approach in an exhaustive manner and manages to quote Bruce Lee along the way with regards their approach to campaign planning. The book is easy to read and informative with great case studies from the Japanese market. I liked the book that I included it on bookshelf page of recommendations.

  • CES 2011

    I have been watching the coverage of CES 2011 in Las Vegas with a greater degree of detachment than usual. Partly because I am not in the office. But also because most of the product announcements at CES 2011 didn’t really felt like news. The only one that did was Microsoft’s move to support Windows on ARM.

    Why the main computing OS haven’t moved to a real-time OS a la WindRiver or QNX (now part of Blackberry) years ago is one of life’s great mysteries, however iOS seems to have brought that to a head now. With non-PC devices the concern is now about computing power versus power consumption, something that real-time OS’ have been doing for decades.

    Otherwise CES 2011 seems to be about lots of companies playing catch-up with Apple and the consumer electronics companies trying to jump-start the big-screen television market. LCD television sales have peaked in developed markets and growth will be driven by emerging markets, which means higher volume of sets sold; but lower revenues as the margins are much smaller. This is what the whole 3D home cinema efforts all about.

    As for the competitors to Apple, it says a lot that one of the big stories at was covers for the forthcoming iPad being shown at CES 2011 by their manufacturer.

    Finally I find the trend for celebrity-endorsed gadgets a bit disturbing. Back in the day I was involved in launching the Palm Vx Claudia Schiffer edition. The key difference was the the fascia was anodised with a powder blue colour. It was also the point at which I started to get a real sense of the imminent decline of Palm as a company and a platform. I am amazed that Dr Dre’s headphones with Monster go for more than a decent pair of Beyerdynamic DT-150 or Sennheiser HD-25s. So my heart sank when I read about Lady Gaga and Polaroid.

  • What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

    What Technology Wants is written by Kevin Kelly. If anyone deserves the term digerati its Kevin Kelly. Kelly worked on the Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy guide to useful stuff, he was involved in The WELL and was a founder of Wired magazine.

    What Technology Wants follows on from previous works that Kelly had written. Out of Control looked at how software created a parallel infrastructure to the real world. At the time ‘software agents’ were a thing and artificial intelligence was here but unevenly distributed. Out of Control was written in 1992, yet forecast ideas like ‘digital twins’ – software simulations that are currently in vogue.

    His book New Rules for the New Economy looked at the economic principles that technology and and web directly impacted. This seemed to build on work done to also write the Encyclopedia of the New Economy, which was published as a three part series in Wired magazine, the same year.

    So it seems appropriate that Kelly took a long term viewpoint and wrote What Technology Wants as a historical, economic and philosophical analysis of technological progress.

    Kelly puts forth the case that technological momentum, what he calls the technium has a momentum of its own and that it is inevitable. The idea that every innovation has its time. This is why innovation can seem lumpy and why innovations like television and the light bulb can claim to have dozens of inventors.

    The technium seems to build momentum with each key development put in place across fields science, technology and information theory.

    Short of societal collapse, it is not something that can be fought or turned back but can be managed to get the best from it. It also isn’t the kind of starry-eyed futurism that the likes of George Gilder had turned out in his book Telecosm. Kelly appreciates the double edged sword that technology represents.

    This then poses questions around a number of areas from economics to ecology.  I would expect this book to be dinner party fodder as a kind of thinking man’s Malcolm Gladwell. More book reviews here.

  • How to on Mac + more things

    How to

    A couple of Apple related how to articles that deal with some problems that I have been having

    Ideas

    The Morrow Project – interesting project by Intel using authors as futurologists

    How many of your employees love your products? (And why it matters.) – Empowered – good point. Back in the day one of the first signs that the HP-150 was going to bomb was that no engineer wanted to use it

    Japan

    J-List side blog: Understanding Japan: Tatemae and Honne – interesting aspect of human behaviour. More related content here

    Creative Industries (Cool Japan!)/METI Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry – promoting Japanese sources of soft power

    Luxury

    Interview With Cartier’s Nigel Luk on Jewelry Brands Plans for Expansion in China – China Real Time Report – WSJ – interesting insights into the Asian luxury goods market

    Marketing

    Why spreadable doesn’t equal viral: A conversation with Henry Jenkins » Nieman Journalism Lab – Jenkin’s concept of spreadable media “is media which travels across media platforms at least in part because the people take it in their own hands and share it with their social networks.”

    Big brands focus on customer service – Warc News – cheaper than new customer acquisition

    Media

    Creative Review – Saville and Kelly’s memorial to Tony Wilson – the debate fired up by Tony Wilson’s headstone designed by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly is as fierce as the debate Mr Wilson prompted in real life. We need more divisive people

    Oxford Academics: Web Not To Blame For Newspapers’ Slide | paidContent:UK – business model, not internet responsible for newspaper decline in many countries. No real surprise there

    Let me pirate that for you – whatever will they think of next? A metasearch engine to piracy. Whilst it could be of help to media owners trying to get a handle on how far their content has spread I think it will soon be taken down by the RIAA | MPAA

    Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Scientific American – Facebook is the great satan

    Technology

    The Future of Prison Technology: Not As Scary As It Seems? | Fast Company – interesting smart fear of unintentional consequences keeping technology usage very pragmatic

    Can Hunch’s Algorithm Improve Your Gift-Giving Skills?: Tech News « – looks like Hunch has managed to move product search forward

    Today’s Novell Deal Helps Microsoft Continue Linux Fight – good analysis of the Novell acquisition

    Telecoms

    Verizon proposes wholesale rewrite of US telecom law — Engadget – no one is happy with the US legislative framework

    Tools

    Snap Bird – search twitter’s history

    Free Your Friends’ Contact Info From Facebook’s Grip – currently attempting this and failing miserably

  • Zero History by William Gibson

    Zero History is an ideal book If you enjoyed William Gibson’s previous two works Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like the previous two books it dwells in the now, which is appropriate given Gibson’s oft quoted koan:

    ‘The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed’.

    I have written the review in terms of general themes so that I don’t put in any plot spoilers.

    It brings many of the major protagonists from the previous books in the Pattern Recognition series back and ties the plot together quite neatly. There are two ways to look at Zero History, in terms of chronology it arrives at the end of a logical order of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country; but in terms of its themes Zero History sits between Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Like Pattern Recognition it questions the nature of brands, design and art. It borrows elements of locative art from Spook Country and throws private military companies and the military industrial complex into the mix.

    Marketing is portrayed as amoral, understanding the price of everything, yet having the value of nothing outside its grasp. The discussion of brands in Zero History is less about a well-designed logo and more about the brand authenticity – the way it matches the product – how much truth from it is designed into the product.

    There is also a sense that the quality of manufactured goods is in decline and creatives are trying to recapture this quality by going vintage and re-manufacturing old products. This creative effort is then concealed from marketers who would despoil it. Gibson forces the reader to think about how they relate to the brands they like and the marketing that they see around them, he also uses the story to address the rise of the corporation as a military entity a la AEGIS, Xe or Halliburton. More book reviews can be found here.