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.

 

  • Micro influencers

    Micro influencers – much of the social marketing today for consumer brand is done through what is called influencer marketing. For a number of these influencers who have a large social following, working with brand has become very lucrative. But one of the hottest tickets at the moment within communications agencies are ‘micro-influencers’; Edelman Digital lists it as a key area in Digital Trends Report . There is widely cited research by Marketly that claims there is an engagement ceiling (at least on Instagram). Once a follower count gets beyond that, engagement rates decline. This micro-influencer sweet spot is apparently 1,000 – 100,000 followers.

    What are micro influencers?

    Brown & Fiorella (2013) described micro influencers

    Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

    Brown & Fiorella wanted to focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion. It sounds like an adjunct to integrating marketing automation from the likes of Hubspot and Marketo into a public relations campaign.

    This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances:

    • Low barrier to conversion (e-tailing)
    • Business-to-business marketing – for instance Quocirca did some interesting research back in 2006 that showed endorsements by a finance directors peers at other companies was likely to have a positive effect on a prospective supplier

    Brown & Fiorella’s thinking tends to fall down, when you deploy their approach to:

    • Consumer marketing
    • Mature product sectors
    • Mature brands

    Brand preference and purchase is much more dependent on reach and repetition to build familiarity and being ‘top-of-mind’ as a product.

    Most money in influence marketing is spent in the consumer space as B2B marketing tends to struggle with:

    • Reach
    • Volume of conversation interaction

    (At least outside of the US).

    Brown and Fiorella are 180 degrees away from the approach of consumer marketing maven Byron Sharp and his ‘smart’ mass marketing approach. This means that PR and social agencies are often out-of-step with the thinking of marketing clients, their media planners and other agency partners.

    Engagement matters less than reach or repetition of brand message for mature sectors or brands. For many consumer brands the drop off in engagement amongst macro-influencers is a non-issue, a red herring.

    The only part of the engagement measure that I would be concerned about in that case would be content propagation amongst my defined target audience – how widely had it been repeatedly shared as this would affect total reach.

    If the client and planner are using Sharp’s thinking then this audience would be wide, but a certain amount of the propagation would be wasted – for instance outside targeted geographies.

    From the perspective of communications agencies I can understand the obsession with engagement being part of their DNA. Micro influencers are an extension of this, as macro-influencers value is increasingly out of whack with their marketing benefits. These businesses are in the offline world are engagement agencies; whether its politicians, regulators, fashion stylists, movie set designers, editors, journalists, TV producers or DJs.

    Why are micro influencers a hot topic now?

    The most obvious reason is that more popular ‘macro-influencers’ are well informed about their commercial value which has been driven up to a point where they look expensive in terms of cost, even if you charitably look at it on a ‘per follower’ basis.

    On the supply side of the equation, influencer representation benefit from having more ‘inventory’ that can be sold at various price points to marketers. So in some respects micro influencers fulfil a market supply need.

    Challenges in influencer marketing

    From a marketing perspective there are a number of issues in influencer marketing – these factors are either unknown data points or represent an issue with the brand experience

    • Quality of brand placement
    • Cost per reach
    • Consistency of reach (how confident is the media planner that the influencer will achieve a certain level of reach)
    • Message repetition amongst the audience that I want to reach

    Which makes it harder to factor into an econometric model that would help justify the investment in influencer marketing as a contribution to sales.

    Let’s have a look at data around a campaign for smartphone manufacturer Huawei. This has been touted as successful by the agency involved, Social Chain. We don’t know the cost as its likely to be client confidential.

    • 2 million YouTube views (we don’t know how many of these were driven by advertising)

    • 75,000 likes

    • 13,587,159 impressions driven by 6 influencers

    • 10,689 clicks from 90 posts

    • 10 million impressions for the promotion of a colour variant of the smartphone model and 92,320 engaged

    • 4.6% engagement rate (which we’re assured is 41% higher than the industry average for branded content)

    What this doesn’t tell us:

    • Reach amongst target audience
    • Repetition amongst target audience

    Which could then be used to provide an estimate of its contributory factor to sales if you had an econometrics model. You can’t access how it works next to other tactics and there are limited outtakes for the learning marketing organisation.

    Quality of brand placement

    Many brands have struggled to get their brand in the influencers content in a way that:

    • Represents it in a meaningful way (for example beyond unboxing videos, one smartphone looks rather like another)
    • Doesn’t feel ad-hoc or awkward

    Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. (It’s obviously an oversight on their part that I haven’t had an invite yet.)

    De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the best of both worlds: influencer marketing but with a high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the achieved reach.

    There is a school of thought that micro influencers will be easier to manage in order to assure quality of brand placement. However, micro-influencers are likely to be aspiring macro-influencers and each will have a clear line of demarcation in their own head that they won’t cross. The reality is one of complexity dependent on:

    • Brand power
    • Relationships
    • Credibility of proposed idea
    • Impact on aspirations – could they get more followers by taking a stand and strategically burning a brand?
    Cost per reach

    Influencers tend to talk about themselves in terms of the number of followers that they have. However many followers seldom engage with the influencers content. This happens for a number of reasons:

    • The follow button is often used as a book mark or a like button
    • Algorithmic changes to social platforms and the volume of the social firehouse itself drown out brands (and these influencers are all about the brand of ‘me’). Whatley and Manson’s research at Ogilvy on the decline of organic reach in Facebook pages  is worthwhile having a look at

    Followers as a data point is not the straight analogue of reach that the industry and influencers would have you believe based on how they present their data.

    Reach numbers that are presented are often not that much more useful:

    follower

    (Data via Golin, TapInfluence and Marriott)

    Consistency of reach

    So influencers may give us follower numbers or ‘total reach’ calculations but how do we know what reach their brand placement content is likely to achieve? At the moment, I don’t know how consistent influencers are, I have a ‘personal time’ data project currently in progress on it. More on that hopefully in a later post. There isn’t off-the-peg data that I know of, so I am pulling together a data set.

    Message repetition

    Until we understand the ‘quality of brand placement’ we wouldn’t be able to understand whether a piece of influencer content was a point of content delivery. We’d also need to know do audiences of influencer A also look at media channels or other influencers that we have in our overall media plan. There often isn’t an overall media plan and there often isn’t sufficient quality of audience data for influencers.

    More on influence here.

    More information

    Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
    Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
    Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
    Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach

  • Lights out production lines

    Lights out production lines reminded me of my childhood. If you are of a certain age, ‘hand made by robots’ brings to mind the Fiat Strada / Ritmo a thirtysomething year old hatchback design that was built in a factory with a high degree of automation for the time.

    Fiat subsidiary Comau created Robogate, a highly automated system that speeds up body assembly. Robogate was eventually replaced in 2000. The reality is that ‘hand made by robots’ had a liberal amount of creative licence. Also it didn’t enable Fiat to shake off its rust bucket image. Beneath the skin, the car was essentially a Fiat 127. Car factories still aren’t fully automated.

    Foxconn is looking to automate its own production lines and create products that truly are ‘hand-built by robots’. Like Fiat it has its own robots firm which is manufacturing 10,000 robots per year.

    Foxconn has so far focused on production lines for larger product final assembly (like televisions) and workflow on automated machine lines: many consumer products use CNC (computer numeric control) machines. That’s how Apple iPhone and Macs chassis’ are made. These totally automated lines are called ‘lights out production lines’ by Foxconn.

    Foxconn is looking to automate production because China is undergoing a labour shortfall as the population getting older. Foxconn uses a lot of manual workers for final assembly of devices Apple’s iPhone because the components are tightly packed together.

    Forty years ago, Japanese manufacturers conquered high end and low end consumer electronics with pick-and-place machines to automate electronics production, Nokia went on to build its phone business on similar automated lines. Globalisation ironically facilitated hand assembly of exceptionally dense electronics devices.

    It will be a while before Foxconn manages to automate this as robotic motor control isn’t fine enough to achieve this yet. In order for that to happen you need a major leap forward in harmonic gearing. This isn’t a problem that software or machine learning can solve easily. More related pieces of jargon can be found here.

    More information
    Foxconn boosting automated production in China | DigiTimes – (paywall)

  • Brand communications

    Opportunities for brand communications – 2016 has been a watershed year in the western world. Political forces that were simmering, but previously untapped manifested themselves in populist victories. Political norms that were common currency for the past two decades have been brought into question and there will be societal impacts and changes in consumer tastes.

    Businesses are being buffeted by these changes and so will their business. In the case of the UK; supply chains will be re-engineered over the next two years to address the country’s departure from the European economic bloc. It will mean recalibrating the values of some brand communications. Most companies that I have spoken to are working on the assumption of the hardest Brexit:

    • No trade agreement with the EU
    • No customs union with the EU
    • No passporting for services such as banking
    • No agreement on storage of EU or US personal data in the UK
    • No free movement of EU talent
    • Problems with the WTO as countries look to settle scores like ownership of the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar

    This presents brand communications teams with opportunities and challenges:

    • There will be new regulatory and legal environments for companies to navigate
    • Corporate and social responsibility programmes will need to be recalibrated
    • There will be change management as jobs are moved abroad and facilities closed
    • Brands will have to work smarter with less
    • Consumer data based systems will need to be redesigned to meet the new legal and country boundaries imposed upon it
    • UK businesses will need to prepare for permanent handicap on their profits

    There is also a wave of change for consumer businesses. Whole categories of products – carbonated drinks, cereals and spreads are losing market share to substitute products. This is hitting the large FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands including:

    • Unilever
    • Coca-Cola
    • General Mills
    • Nestle
    • Kelloggs

    Consumer brands have looked to counteract this in a number of ways:

    • Putting their spend where it will do the best work by using zero-based budgeting (ZBB)
    • Restructuring brand architectures – moving away from preventing brand damage through brand extension to brand consolidation to maximise the benefit of marketing spend. Coca-Cola is a prime example of this
    • Brand architecture will create a tension in the organisation. On the one hand the societal norm will be for local brands rather than global, on the other you have the corporate desire to cut and simplify to maintain margins. Whilst some companies may kill brands, others may sell them on to local companies, which will then try to squeeze as much value out of the brand equity as they can
    • Move away from micro-targeting to ‘smart’ mass-marketing – the key exponent of this is Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia

    Opportunities in terms of new products that communications agencies can offer

    • Internal communications programme – site shutdown or company shutdown as a product
    • CSR audit as product
    • CRM (customer relationship management) audit as product

    Brand communications vs. ZBB

    Focus on clients based on their strategic intent if they are implementing ZBB, here’s a quick guide I did earlier this year.

    Businesses have six paths to growth
    Zero-Based Budgeting

    Path versus agency discipline
    Zero-Based Budgeting

    If your client programme lies in parts of the spectrum where you won’t benefit, then as an agency you have a few choices:

    • Identify and grow your business within other brands of a clients business
    • Look at rivals for opportunities
    • Treat the current business as a cash cow

    Effect of agency consolidation on brand communications

    A second aspect of risk analysis is brand consolidation. There is not much that an agency can do with the change in brand architecture like Coca-Cola. The clients are likely to cut costs.

    A clearer source of risk will be ‘local gems’ this is a consumer brand that is only sold in one country (it may be known under a different name in other countries). These brands are likely to be closed down or sold on, particularly if they are in declining growth sectors such as margarine spreads, cereals or carbonated drinks.

    If you have only started planning about looking for replacement brands in your portfolio, it may already be too late. Best case scenario is that the brand is bought by a local FMCG company.

    Looking at previous brand sales like Radion washing powder as an example the acquirers will not support it with significant marketing spend. Instead, they will look to maximise their investment by mining existing brand loyalty and awareness.  Depending on the product category and the target audience will depend on how fast inevitable brand decline will be.

    Either way it is not a particularly attractive piece of business or large or medium-sized agencies. An incumbent agency will have to repitch for the work as it will fall outside the purview of existing contracts and business relationships.

    Advertising agencies have a head start in terms of their planners having a clear grip on what Sharp’s concept of smart mass marketing means for their discipline. PR agencies need to articulate this and reflect it in their account planning. They are still struggling to get to grips with social and are championing concepts like ‘micro-influencers’; that don’t fit into Sharp’s world view. They are effectively burning client respect.

    PR agencies need to think much more in terms of programme audience reach and repetition for audiences, rather than the current focus on influence. More marketing related content here.

  • Smartwatches & more news

    Smartwatches

    Let’s Face It: Smartwatches Are Dead | Variety – interesting that Variety covered smartwatches. Apple is king of smartwatches. That market is at best immature, at worst dead in the water. Of course all this could change in an instant with a compelling use smartwatches case from a killer app – rather like Apple’s LaserWriter and Aldus’ PageMaker software completely changed things for the Apple Macintosh. Luxury as a sector has fallen down for smartwatches, health looks like a better candidate.

    Business

    Lessons from the Kingston Smith’s annual agency profitably survey | Chris Merrington | Pulse | LinkedIn – The top 30 independent digital agencies’ margin declined to 4.9%. 30% of them are making a loss

    Will Hong Kong’s OOCL be eaten up by the world’s biggest container lines? | Hongkong Business – expect further consolidation, Hamburg Sud has been acquired by Mearsk.

    China

    VIDEO: Embattled LeEco Sued in HK as Bills Pile Up | Young’s China Business – fascinating rise and probable fall.

    Consumer behaviour

    Men, Please Stop Manthreading | Gizmodo – errr no, this isn’t a gender issue despite the weak rationale

    Economics

    WSJ City – US Businesses Reconsider UK and EU Investment – interesting reading; serious implications for agencies who act as a hub or work on global briefs

    Major cut in EU migrants risks long-term damage to UK economy – report | The Guardian – and this all doesn’t seem to be taking into account automation and foreign competition reducing demand…

    As Brexit approaches, signs of a gathering economic storm for Britain – The Washington Post – “I can’t see any circumstance in which we’re going to get a good deal,” he said, noting the E.U.’s incentive to deter future defections by driving a hard bargain with Britain. “The U.K. is going to come out of this very badly. The impact hasn’t even started yet.” 

    Gadget

    Apple Extends Discounts on USB-C Adapters and Accessories Until March 31 – Mac Rumors – the MacBook Pro disaster continues. Having blown fortune on dongles to make my laptop work. I am now faced with 10 years of battery chargers, power adaptors for planes and automobiles and a variety of connectors that are now up for the scrap heap. Not exactly environmentally friendly design. A second thing is that the MagSafe connector is far safer than the new USB C connectors.

    Ideas

    Perfecting Cross-Pollination | HBR – research on more than 17,000 patents suggests that the financial value of the innovations resulting from such cross-pollination is lower, on average, than the value of those that come out of more conventional, siloed approaches. In other words, as the distance between the team members’ fields or disciplines increases, the overall quality of their innovations falls. But my research also suggests that the breakthroughs that do arise from such multidisciplinary work, though extremely rare, are frequently of unusually high value—superior to the best innovations achieved by conventional approaches

    Innovation

    The Sunk Cost Fallacy and the Future of Silicon Valley — The Information – an oblique criticism of Silicon Valley no longer being known for ‘hard’ innovation (paywall)

    AI Winter Isn’t Coming – Despite plenty of hype and frantic investment, a leading artificial intelligence expert says hardware advances will keep AI breakthroughs coming – hmmm not so convinced most of it is building on 1980s work rather than really moving things forward

    Japan

    Tokyo Thrift special: ‘It’s a Sony’ exhibit shows off decades of decadent design – The Verge – basically a love letter to Sony’s product design and obsession for engineering

    Korea

    Tour guides accuse South Korean departmental store of exploiting expatriates | SCMP – interesting given who Chinese shoppers are overwhelming large parts of central Seoul

    Legal

    The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act allows the State to tell lies in court • The Register – Section 56(1)(b) creates a legally guaranteed ability – nay, duty – to lie about even the potential for State hacking to take place, and to tell juries a wholly fictitious story about the true origins of hacked material used against defendants in order to secure criminal convictions. This is incredibly dangerous. Even if you know that the story being told in court is false, you and your legal representatives are now banned from being able to question those falsehoods and cast doubt upon the prosecution story. 

    Potentially, you could be legally bound to go along with lies told in court about your communications – lies told by people whose sole task is to weave a story that will get you sent to prison or fined thousands of pounds.

    Luxury

    Luxury Daily – Unwed, digitally savvy millennials affecting luxury jewellery business – and the luxury digital devices generally look hideous

    Marketing

    Harvard Business Review – whiteboard videos on Facebook – apparently successful tactics with roughly 100,000 views per video

    Media

    Vice Media Forms Alliance With Guardian Newspaper | Variety – interesting move in terms of media

    The Methbot operation | Whiteops – video ad fraud business worth $3-5m/day (PDF) Well worth reading despite the bot network name….

    Europe Presses American Tech Companies to Tackle Hate Speech – The New York Times – only 40 percent of material flagged as possible hate speech online (albeit in a relatively small sample of 600 posts, videos and other online material) had been reviewed by the Silicon Valley companies within 24 hours. Of those 600 postings, just over a quarter was eventually taken down

    China e-sports industry entering golden age, says IDC | DigiTimes – (paywall)

    Finding New Ways To Be Fearless | Media Post – content before channel – interesting take I would see them as having equal footing

    Case study: 3 years, 5M WeChat followers, and 300M RMB valuation – Uncle Tongdao, a WeChat Official Account about astrology just had an exit at a RMB 300 million valuation – character licensing. LINE (Brown and Cony) and WeChat are the platforms for the new Hello Kitty or Mickey Mouse

    Mr. Robot Killed the Hollywood Hacker | MIT Technology Review – a certain amount of conceit as the author is a sci-fi writer, but a great read

    China, new economies driving ad market growth: GroupM | Advertising | Campaign Asia – China continues to exceed expectations, with GroupM China revising upwards its initial forecast of 6.6 percent growth to 7.8 percent. This contrasts with the Magna report, released yesterday by IPG Mediabrands, which initially forecast China’s ad market growth at 8.4 percent and revised it down to 7.2 percent

    Online

    Vine Update – Medium – Vine becomes a feature (officially). Vine made the classic web 2.0 mistake of confusing being a feature with being a fully featured but minimal service for optimal user experience design. This is a hard line to walk during the web 2.0 era, let alone in the face of super-apps like WeChat that compress a whole operating environment into one app at a moderate sacrifice in usability

    Security

    OONI – urandom.pcap: Belarus (finally) bans Tor – double edged sword. On one hand good for a government that wants oversight like Investigatory Powers act; on the other Tor users flag themselves interesting by their use of it. I would expect an MP driven ban in the UK at some point

    Freedom of Press Foundation Asks Canon, Nikon, and Other Camera Manufacturers to Sell Encrypted Cameras | WIRED – another issue is that cameras are more likely consumer electronics than computers – firmware updates are often not used and cameras have a long life

    Congressional group says backdoor laws would do more harm than good – The Verge – smarter approach to cryptography than many politicians. There is a clear dichotomy between politicians desire for personal privacy and their clear advocacy against it in the name of national security. This sense of the other highlights the gap between politicians and the people. The congressional group conclusions are refreshing.

    YouGov | The risk of Britain being attacked by another country in the next 30 years; Websites used/ trusted – website data is interesting but I bet the self reporting percentages aren’t backed up by observed behaviour

    Software

    Tencent: Inside China’s ‘killer app’ factory | FT – (paywall)

    Technology

    MacBook Pro Launch: Perplexing | MondayNote – quite shocking review by Jean-Louis Gassée of his experience with the new MacBook Pro – less than 5 hours of battery life, buggy peripherals and software glitches don’t inspire confidence

    Web of no web

    Protecting the Apple iWatch Standby screenshot as a trademark Device in China? Sorry not possible. – too complex to be protected as a trademark: WTF. China still has ambitions with smartwatches, as part of a wider emphasis on wearables and 5G. Apple’s smartwatches are the only ones that are distinctive in nature and this could bring about copycats. More related posts here.

    Wireless

    Apple Explores Dual-SIM Capability in iPhones, Patent Filing Reveals – Slashdot – I’d have been more surprised if they didn’t look at it

    iPhone Camera Quality: Flickr Data Shows How Insanely Popular It Is | BGR – interesting that Flickr skews towards iPhone users

    Apple (AAPL) is opening up a bit on the state of its AI research — Quartz – still governed by Apple’s focus on computing power per watt

    Above Avalon: Milking the iPhone – interesting analysis

  • Beme & more news

    Beme

    CNN Brings In the Social App Beme to Cultivate a Millennial Audience – The New York Times – major news site suffering from lack of consumer trust (election coverage, fake news environment etc) buys YouTube V-logger to get some baes – and people wonder why the news media appears broken. Beme was founded by Casey Neistat was one of the first generation of YouTube bloggers. Beme rolled out a mobile app to syndicate their content

    Business

    The taxi unicorn’s new clothes | FT Alphaville – is sadly symptomatic of the emperor’s new clothes groupthink dominating the sector. Though it does explain the sector’s obsession with popularising the idea that public transport can be done away with. (Less investment in public transport will lead to fewer competitively priced alternatives, empowering the Uber monopoly in the long run)

    The Truth About Uber’s Otto Deal — The Information – hedged against the Otto founders, Sir Martin Sorrell could learn something ;-)

    Economics

    The Eurodollar Market: It All Starts Here | Zero Hedge – this is what keeps the UK afloat

    Brexit negotiators identify UK’s aces in the hole | FT – interesting read, ultimately the UK doesn’t have leverage across all the other 27 countries on the same things so could bounce out with nothing resolved

    Ideas

    ‘Millennials’ is a useless term | Jed Hallam | Pulse | LinkedIn – interesting that this had to be written. Whatever happened to tribes? More related content here.

    This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet – BuzzFeed News – Facebook’s influence in Myanmar is hard to quantify, but its domination is so complete that people in Myanmar use “internet” and “Facebook” interchangeably. According to Amara Digital, a Yangon-based marketing agency, Facebook has doubled its local base in the last year to 9.7 million monthly users. That number is likely to spike again, after Facebook launched its Free Basics program, a free, streamlined version of Facebook and a handful of other sites.

    Innovation

    Apple’s China R&D effort could fail to move the needle | FT – I still think that Apple needs the lab there because of the unique Chinese internet eco-system and the hardware design excellence in China

    Luxury

    No Price Like Home: Big Spenders Reappear in China — The Fashion Law – sales picking up in Mainland China

    Porsche Macan owners in China vent their anger at copycat maker – The owners are being asked whether the vehicles are genuine German cars or just Zotye SR9s with a Porsche badge stuck on the front hood.

    Media

    Creative Hub – Facebook – great ad examples

    Apple expert panel on shift from a hit-driven to services business – Business Insider – “I’ll play both sides of it for you, Steve. On the one hand, they haven’t had innovation for a long time and it looks really bleak and it’s been six years [if you measure by the iPad, which was introduced in 2010]. On the other hand, if after eight years they do something as big as the iPhone or the iPad or the iPod, then we’ll forget about, we’ll forget about those doubts.”

    Facebook To Target Streaming Viewers By Linking User Profiles With IP Addresses | IPG Media Lab – big potential targeting opportunities

    WeChat censorship offers a blueprint for Facebook, but it still shouldn’t enter China | Techinasia – I think Facebook wouldn’t be able to cope with the competition

    Online

    Facebook has cut off Prisma’s Live Video access | TechCrunch – Facebook doing vintage Microsoft

    Do China’s Celebrities or Influencers Have More Power? | L2 – traditional celebrities still win out

    An update on Google’s feature-phone crawling & indexing | Google Webmaster Blog – this is big news for the mobile web and will encourage feature phone services to fall back on SMS

    Security

    Infineon joins Chinese IoT security push | Electronics EETimes – to develop security technologies for smart home appliances that are manufactured and used in China

    ‘Tesco Bank’s major vulnerability is its ownership by Tesco,’ claims ex-employee • The Register – You’re probably only as secure as your least secure system

    Technology

    RISC-V Expands its Audience | EE Times – open source hardware design

    The Macintosh Endgame | MondayNote – interesting analysis, the problem is that iOS doesn’t have a user experience conducive to knowledge work like typing all day long

    Web of no web

    Fitbit To Buy Pebble — The Information – consolidation as the sector folds in on itself in the face of limited demands

    Watching the World Rot at Europe’s Largest Tech Conference – The Atlantic – the ennui of conferences in general

    Curiosity | Merck Group – interesting spin on the usual innovation corporate positioning