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.

 

  • Marketing, president, apocalypse – the good, bad and the ugly

    Marketing, president apocalypse – what’s going on Ged? Years ago I used to write a periodic section on this blog: Good, Bad and the Ugly. I have been doing ongoing maintenance of this blog in the background and was inspired to bring this back after visiting old posts.

    • This time I looked at marketing, president, apocalypse. Specifically: Marketing as practiced in agencies and clients
    • A president represented in media because the run up to the US presidential election in November means things are pretty strange.
    • A fictional apocalypse – because global warming, COVID19, populism, Brexit and the rise of China under Xi Jingping

    Good, Bad and the Ugly was originally inspired by my love of two magazine sections:

    • Wired magazine’s Wired, Tired, Expired – which used to be a great zeitgeist measure in a pre-brogrammer Silicon Valley. Back when the excitement of the new, new thing was conveyed through the written word and brave choices in neon and metallic inks with challenging typographic design. Wired, Tired, Expired inspired the spirit of where I wanted to go with it
    • UK motoring publication Car Magazine. Car was a pioneering publication. It invented the idea of a ‘car of the year’ back in the 1960s. As a spotty teenager I loved to leaf through its pages. The writing of the late great L. J. K. Setright who combined a love engineering and the written word in each of his articles. (Setright’s book The Designers is a particularly good read.) Beautifully photographed cars and adverts of luxury brands that I hadn’t heard of like Panerai. It was a heady mix of Esquire and petrol. I fell out of love with Car magazine as driving became less relevant to me. But the concept behind their Good, Bad Ugly classification of cars stuck with me
    GoodBadUgly
    Long and short term marketing thinking. In the past decade Les Binet and Peter Field’s IPA based research, together with findings from the Ehrensberg-Bass institute have shaken up marketing. No self respecting marketer now doesn’t thinking about the importance of brand marketing. Last touch attribution. Performance (digital) marketers have used last touch attribution to burn marketing dollars at the altars of Google and Facebook for too long. Mark Read of WPP – whose ill-considered comments on digital marketing and ageism in agency life showed an extreme dose of short term thinking. It probably explains the WPP share price….
    President Bartlet – The West Wing was a touchstone of political fiction for friends of mine who worked in public affairs. The West Wing captured the tension and excitement of a high functioning political machine. I had the pleasure to chat over dinner with Don Baer. Baer was a former Clinton staffer, whom the character Toby Ziegler was based on.

    Bartlet also contrasts sharply with the bland Joe Biden and president Trump. Unfortunately neither of them have the kind of dialogue coming out of their mouths that Aaron Sorkin could provide Bartlet    		While Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book All The President’s Men is justifiably famous. Their second book Final Days captures the implosion of president Nixon and makes a more tragic read on a presidential administration.The House of Cards quickly went from being sharp biting satire that thrilled, to repulsion. The story built up on and created something new from original UK source material. But the show rested too heavily on the shoulders to Kevin Spacey as president Underwood. When Spacey’s reputation fell, so did the show. Robin Wright did a valiant effort to resurrect it which is worthwhile watching.
    The Jackpot – in William Gibson’s books The Peripheral and Agency a key part of the plot line is the apocalypse. This is called the Jackpot. There is not one inciting incident. Instead the world is gradually eroded to just 20 per cent of its population. The causes are very familiar to us: climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors. Given that the world population is still heading upwards. The Jackpot is either a way off or still in its early stagesThe Atomic Wars – the atomic wars occur the back story of the Judge Dredd universe. The modern world is destroyed by the cold war going hot. Authoritarianism and large cities offer relative safety compared to the cursed earth outside.Avengers Infinity Wars / Endgame. Thanos has a malthusian world view. He unites the infinity stones, snaps his finger and half the universe’s population disappears. Endgame then tries to give it a happy-ever-after finish because Hollywood. Yes it conforms to the idea of an ‘end of an age’ but it just doesn’t feel that disastrous in the grand scheme of things

    Marketing, president, apocalypse choices, let me know what you think in the comments section. More versions of the Good, Bad and The Ugly here.

  • Tech cold war + more things

    The US-China tech cold war has turned hot – but would a Biden presidency change things for Huawei and others? | South China Morning Post – “No president will want to be accused of being soft on China,” said James Andrew Lewis, senior vice-president and director of the technology policy programme at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Trump’s policies are disorganised, but consistently move to cut economic ties with China. Biden’s policies will be better coordinated, less abrupt, but move in the same direction.” – the tech cold war isn’t new. You could trace it back to the beginning with coercive IP transfer and massive industrial espionage. It kicked off in earnest with the Golden Shield Project 金盾 工程 censorship system. Where we are now was not a case of if, but when

    TikTok becomes a case study for Chinese companies planning global expansion | South China Morning Post – Zhang’s relationship with the ruling Communist Party is complicated. He must walk a fine line between keeping Beijing happy but not be seen as too close to raise concerns outside China. Zhang, who told Atlantic magazine in July that he was not a party member, was approached by Beijing a year ago with an offer to help when TikTok faced political troubles in India. However, Zhang sent mid-level staff to meet government officials, signalling he did not want Beijing to get involved – whether entrepreneurs like it or not, they’re likely to find the government inserted into the business like a helicopter parent. You’re likely to see coercive business development as part of Chinese diplomats wolf warrior patter; a la Huawei 5G network equipment and the Faroe Islands

    Allegations of deception dog Nikola’s lofty aims | Financial Times – my worst fear is that this will tarnish hydrogen fuel cells in the market. Hyundai are already doing interesting things with hydrogen fuel cell wagons

    Interesting report from Watches & Wonders (aka SIHH), Shanghai – Watches & Wonders Shanghai: The Future of Fine Watchmaking? | Luxury Society – more luxury related posts here.

    BJ Fogg on this old but good video explaining persuasion through technology in very simple terms

    FAA, Boeing Blasted Over 737 MAX Failures in Democratic Report – WSJ – really nice oral history of the Boeing 737 Max scandal

    Money-launderers use Chinese online shopping sites to funnel cash offshore | Financial Times – Money launderers have used some of China’s leading online shopping sites to transfer billions of dollars to offshore gambling sites, police raids have revealed. People wishing to evade China’s strict capital controls, for example to gamble on offshore websites, have been placing fake orders on the shopping sites, including on Pinduoduo, China’s second-largest platform by users. A corresponding sum is then credited to their gaming account.

    Kraft Heinz sells parts of cheese business for $3.2bn | Financial Times – surprised if more assets aren’t sold as the 3G Capital model isn’t working

    EU tests platform to link up coronavirus tracing apps | Reuters – really interesting development in interoperability

  • Dark stores and coercive diplomacy

    I came across a couple of interesting terms recently: dark stores and coercive diplomacy.

    Dark stores

    Gartner for Marketing (formerly L2 Inc.) were talking about a new development at Amazon’s Whole Foods subsidiary. It was what Gartner called digital dark stores. The first one has been established in Industry City to serve much of Brooklyn, New York.

    Amazon themselves called it a ‘permanent online-only store‘ on their blog.

    So whats the difference between dark stores and the ‘last mile’ warehouses that Amazon uses for fulfilment in places like London?

    • Looking at the limited amount of photos available, this doesn’t feel warehouse-like. There wasn’t obvious automation in the pictures. Instead it feels like a supermarket that’s well stocked, but lacking price tags and shopper marketing accoutrements. Gartner describe it as ‘technically a grocery store’, which implies that there might be zoning or planning regulations that they might be working around
    • It is only for the Whole Foods brand; rather than fulfilling Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime Now items

    This isn’t just an Amazon thing. Gartner points out that American supermarket brands Kroger and Giant Eagle have also embraced the order-only store model. More at Gartner for Marketing here.

    Coercive diplomacy

    The Australian Strategic Policy Institute published a report on September 1, 2020 called The Chinese Communist Party’s coercive diplomacy. It was written by Fergus Hanson, Emilia Currey and Tracy Beattie. Hanson, Currey and Beattie analysed ten years of Chinese government diplomacy. In there words:

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly deploying coercive diplomacy against foreign governments and companies. Coercive diplomacy isn’t well understood, and countries and companies have struggled to develop an effective toolkit to push back against and resist it.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is increasingly deploying coercive diplomacy against foreign governments and companies. Coercive diplomacy isn’t well understood, and countries and companies have struggled to develop an effective toolkit to push back against and resist it.

    This report tracks the CCP’s use of coercive diplomacy over the past 10 years, recording 152 cases of coercive diplomacy affecting 27 countries as well as the European Union. The data shows that there’s been a sharp escalation in these tactics since 2018. The regions and countries that recorded the most instances of coercive diplomacy over the last decade include Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and East Asia.

    There seems to be an escalation of economic and non-economic measures deployed. Economic measures would include:

    • Trade sanctions – such as the recent ban on German pork products. This was rolled out just a few days in advance of a trade negotiation meeting between China and the European Union
    • Investment restrictions in strategic industries such as the ‘agreement‘ that Yahoo!, Softbank and Alibaba had over Alipay (which included what would now be Ant Group). Strategic industries like state security is notoriously (and deliberately) ill-defined in China
    • Tourism bans
    • Popular boycotts such as Korean corporate Lotte being driven out of China and the 2012 anti-Japan protests where the public smashed Japanese stores, attacked factories and burned Japanese cars

    Coercive pressure is also applied at below state level on businesses. It may also be applied on individuals, based on the data leak provided from Zhenhua Data seems to imply.

    Non economic measures include:

    • Arbitrary detention. The best example of this would be Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor detained as part of China’s dispute with Canada. Another example might be Australian citizen Karm Gilespie. China didn’t admit it had detained him for over six years, until they announced his death sentence in the summer
    • Restrictions on official travel
    • State-issued threats which are usually issued on a regular basis as part of wolf warrior diplomacy. (Wolf Warrior is a set of two films with a Chinese action hero, a la Rambo – but with less humour).

    Some of the imputus for coercive diplomacy might come from the Chinese Communist Party’s continued rancour over Qing dynasty-era unequal treaties. More China related content here and more on retailing here.

  • Orchestrated media

    I decided to revisit the idea of orchestrated media recently. I had been working on the SEO of a post from 2011. This post linked out to an article by BBC research and development on orchestrated media.

    Picture of a test card from CCTV in Beijing
    Test card from Chinese public broadcaster CCTV.

    The BBC where aware that media consumption had become more complicated. Attention whilst watching the TV at one time competed with the occasional trip to the kettle; or flicking through a newspaper that was to hand but otherwise undivided. What became the TV changed with the advent of content distributed over internet connections to the web and mobile devices. But it wasn’t only about the proliferations of screens, but also how it interplayed with other media.

    It doesn’t necessarily imply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms. Nor does it imply the consumed content is related across the screens (e.g. an audience member may be using Facebook or Twitter for a completely unrelated purpose, while paying less attention to the TV show).


    Thinking in those terms is perhaps unnecessarily limiting in scope and misses the broader picture around the opportunities of social media, creating more seamless media experiences, and how these flow from home environment to beyond.

    Jerry Kramskoy on the BBC R&D blog on ‘orchestrated media‘

    This gives marketers a number of interesting things to think about. When is TV not TV. Think about live event programmes like The Apprentice or Britain’s Got Talent where social acts a ‘giant sofa’ as viewers share their opinions on what they see on screen. Twitter has tried to tap into this link between TV and discussion in its marketing efforts.

    As broadcasters, the BBC started to think of the potential in a two-way conversation that was far more democratic than SMS polling, email or letter bags and phone-ins.

    Orchestrated Media (OM)to refer to this experience of interaction, synchronisation, and collaboration of programme and companion content across devices. OM creates a new form of audience engagement with the broadcaster. Let’s start with some high level goals

    • Enable interactivity around the content (voting, games) and synchronisation thereof, based on time and/or events (such as a producer-console triggered “button push”)
    • Enable richer exploration of programme
    • Enable social network interactions through sync-related information and content identifiers for replay purposes
    • Migrate content between the TV and mobile devices (such as a load-and-go service that runs overnight to load the mobile with video corresponding to the unwatched portion of a program, or a resume-for-home service that picks up viewing on the TV from where it left off on mobile)

    Some of the necessary components in reaching these goals include
    • Visual feedback of shared interactions on TV screen
    • Private interactions on mobile screens
    • Support for not only live experience but also time-shifted and on-demand and pay-per-view ones
    • A back-channel to broadcaster for interactions, behaviour etc
    • Audio for different languages, directors commentary, clean audio etc, selectable per individual, synchronised to the programme
    • Accessibility for all above
    • Application life-cycle and runtime management

    Orchestrated Media – beyond second and third screen (II)

    This seems to be aimed to provide a seamless anytime, everywhere experience. Think of the way services work in the background as part of Apple’s ‘Continuity’ service layer. As marketers, if we’re thinking about an orchestrated media landscape, how do we hand off between channels and provide prospective customers a similar kind of seamless experience. How do we manage long term and short term attribution and feed these insights into proportion of media spend?

  • Science, Strategy and War by Frans P.B. Osinga

    Science, Strategy and War isn’t a book that would have normally made it on to my reading list, but we’re living in strange times. The book is an analysis of the history and strategic theory created over time by John Boyd.

    Boyd’s thinking led to the development of post-Vietnam, pre-stealth fighter aircraft that dominated the world’s skies. Boyd employed his experience and the insight that a ‘Swiss Army knife’ approach seldom provided an adequate design solution. A lesson that the US failed to learn when it created the F-35.

    Boyd was also responsible for creating the ideas that encouraged the US to move war into the IT space. Boyd’s thinking on strategy has shaped military thinking on tools, structure, integration and responsibility. What military-types call network-centric warfare. This seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage.

    We saw the potential of this thinking in the first Gulf War when sensors, missiles and satellite imagery changed the face of modern warfare. What was less appreciated at the time by commentators is that this form of warfare was uniquely aided by Iraq’s flat terrain; which aided remote sensors and wireless networks. But the network-centric aspect really came into its own with William Owens’ paper on the system-of-systems which was emerging as the military followed Boyd’s approach.

    Ok, whilst there is some crossover with technology concepts such as Kevin Kelly’s ‘mirrorworld‘; where AR knits together networked information with location this is all pretty arcane stuff.

    Boyd breaks out of military circles

    John Boyd is particularly famous for a model called OODA which has broken out from its military origins. Probably the most high profile fan at the moment is Dominic Cummings – the special advisor to Boris Johnson and political activist.

    Cummings has talked about Boyd in terms of disruption and marketing of his political messages – through getting inside their OODA loop.

    Boyd’s ideas have also been picked up by sports coaches and even litigation teams in the US.

    OODA

    OODA or observe–orient–decide–act, is often described as a ‘loop’ and shown that way. However this deceives the audience of its true nature. As Osinga correctly points out; observe and orient are continual flows of information that feed into the decide and act functions. Strategists talk about ‘getting inside the enemies OODA loop’; that is disrupting their intelligence, understanding of their situational awareness and ability to act.

    Osinga’s critique of Boyd

    In Science, Strategy and War, Osinga sets out to do achieve a number of things with regards John Boyd’s ideas.

    First of all Osinga provides context, by providing a history of Boyd’s career in military service and as a retired service member and academic. Osinga brings a great deal of understanding to this part of the book as he also served in an air force and is an academic.

    John Boyd Climbing out of F-86 Cockpit, circa 1953
    John Boyd standing up in the cockpit of the F-86 Sabre that he few during his military service.

    Secondly, he explains how Boyd developed and honed his ideas over time. Boyd’s OODA model was borne out of empirical experience as a combat pilot. It was first used to change fighter pilots about engaging with the enemy. Use of it then expanded to encompass bigger strategic outlooks.

    Boyd read widely and had a deep understanding fo scientific principles due to his engineering background. He applied meta analysis to the great strategies and military campaigns of history and the literature describing them. He drew on his understanding of science to try and provide analogies for the many areas of uncertainty in implementing a strategy. He drew on the social sciences and concepts like post-modernism.

    Whilst Boyd was technical; Science, Strategy and War makes it clear that he wasn’t technocratic in nature. Boyd was keenly aware of human factors including the different aspect of moral power. I think that this one of the least understood aspects of Boyd’s thinking.

    I don’t think that Osinga’s book is essential reading for marketing. It was never meant to be. Instead, it provides a good insight into how many of our thinkers operate only at the surface level without truly understanding the concepts they talk about. Boyd was not a surface player, he thought deeply about things and read widely. In that respect I think he can be an example to us all. Osinga did a really good job at bringing this to light in an accessible way.

    More on strategy here, more strategy related book reviews here.