Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • Living with the Apple Watch

    I got the first iteration of the Apple Watch and managed to put up with it for about 48 hours before giving up on it. I have managed to persevere with the the Apple Watch 2.

    Apple managed to speed up the performance of glanceable content, but it still doesn’t have the use case nailed. Watch 2 tries to go hard into fitness, which is a mixed bag in terms of data and accuracy. I am not convinced that it is any better than Fitbit and similar devices.

    They did improve the product in two design areas. The Nike straps make the watch less sweaty to wear on your wrist. It is now comparable to wearing a G-Shock. They also managed to life-proof the Watch. You can now wear it swimming (but I wouldn’t advise snorkelling or scuba diving) and in the shower.  The battery life is still meh.

    I upgraded the OS to watchOS 4 public beta but haven’t managed to use the Siri powered contextual face yet. As a concept it promises to be a step in the right direction to provide the kind of transformation wearables needed.

    watchOS 4 made me realise something that had been nagging me for a while.

    The Apple Watch doesn’t have any personality, or at least traits of a personality that I’d care about. It’s a detail that disappoints me. Mostly it’s invisible as a device, with the occasional glances. It gives me the occasional messages that sound like a vaguely resistant teen or like bursts of micro-aggression.

    1

    It wouldn’t take that much effort to have a bit more manners or personality in the copywriting. How about some icons?

    Susan Kare was the icon designer for original Apple Mac, back in 1984. She came up with icons that were useful and gave the machine a personality. You got a sense of the personality behind the developers who created the machine. This was the kind of detail that Apple was known to obsess over.

    dogcow

    Some of the icons like the dogcow, the bomb and the sad mac became iconic shorthand amongst Mac users. The dogcow was used in printer utility to show page orientation.

    Like the early Mac, the Apple Watch doesn’t have a clear killer app and defined use case. It would benefit from manners, humour or even a bit of Siri wit. What’s more using well designed icons would reduce the effort in terms of product localisation.

    You could argue that limited device resources don’t allow it. But I don’t buy that theory, an Apple Watch has more memory and computing power than the original Mac. I think its about that legendary attention to detail that Steve Jobs had (and drove everyone else made with. Apple has tried to codify this in their process, but you can’t bake in quirky obsession.

    I guess I am old school Apple. I use an iPhone because it works well with my Mac, rather than the other way around. I still come across things where I see ‘Ahh, Apple’s thought about…’ in my Mac. My iPhone is a portable extension of my data, and doubles as a mobile modem for the Mac as needed; it gets in as the Mac’s plus 1.

    By comparison the Apple Watch has less of a connection to the Mac and leeches off the iPhone. For a product that has little use case, it needs to work harder at building loyalty through my relationship with it as a device.

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

  • Samsung smartphone + more

    Samsung smartphone sales

    Samsung Smartphone Sales – Korean analysts report that the Galaxy S8 is Selling 20% below last year’s S7 – not terribly surprising. The market is mature and Samsung smartphone sales will be losing ground to the Chinese Android players like OnePlus, Huawei and ZTE. Samsung smartphone sales are caught between two prongs. On the one hand the Samsung smartphone has fast-followed Apple. On the other hand Samsung smartphone value proposition is getting trumped by Chinese late followers.

    Business

    Bell Pottinger Dismisses Lead Partner & Apologises For Gupta Scandal | Holmes Report – At various points throughout the tenure of the Oakbay account, senior management have been misled about what has been done. For it to be done in South Africa, a country which has become an international beacon of hope for its progress towards racial reconciliation, is a matter of profound regret and in no way reflects the values of Bell Pottinger.

    China

    China Disrupts WhatsApp Service in Online Clampdown – The New York Times – I didn’t realise that WhatsApp worked in China unless you were roaming on a foreign SIM

    Consumer behaviour

    Why Some Men Don’t Work: Video Games Have Gotten Really Good – The New York Times – this is frightening

    Economics

    Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates For The United States by Piketty, Saez and Zucman – interesting data on economic distribution

    Innovation

    A bank replaced a fax machine with blockchain. Was it worth it? | Quartz

    Conference speakers are now presenting during attendees’ flights to the events | Quartz – why not just stay at home and watch it on YouTube in this case

    What NASA Could Teach Tesla about Autopilot’s Limits – Scientific American  – “What we heard from pilots is that they had trouble following along [with the automation],” Casner says. “If you’re sitting there watching the system and it’s doing great, it’s very tiring.” In fact, it’s extremely difficult for humans to accurately monitor a repetitive process for long periods of time. This so-called “vigilance decrement” was first identified and measured in 1948 by psychologist Robert Mackworth, who asked British radar operators to spend two hours watching for errors in the sweep of a rigged analog clock. Mackworth found that the radar operators’ accuracy plummeted after 30 minutes; more recent versions of the experiment have documented similar vigilance decrements after just 15 minutes. – human factors 1, technology nil

    Marketing

    Malaysia Airlines ties up with LINE | Marketing Interactive

    Media

    The real fight in the TV streaming wars is not over you. It’s over your kids. | Quartz – its the medium rather than the content in reality

    Making media fun again: why we must free our industry from outdated models | Campaign Live – The threat to agencies is not the ANA or procurement or consultants, it is their own addiction to dated models and an inability to conquer the three rants and create something new.

    The clients don’t want a world that dwells solely in the lower funnel. Any new business model embraces both upper and lower funnel, both brand and demand. It is both about the big idea and the 1,000s of iterations of that big idea – it’s just that the vast majority of clients aren’t doing that very well or systemically. They don’t want us building a data monster dwelling in the lower-funnel data lake. (paywall) – well worth a read

    Myanmar

    A new candidate for world’s worst media law – Columbia Journalism Review – reputatiion management must be a doddle in Myanmar

    Online

    Twitter lets you avoid trolls by muting new users and strangers | TechCrunch – interesting implications for trying to grow account follower numbers organically

    Software

    Apollo – Baidu’s automotive OS for self driving cars

    AI and Wall Street | WSJ City – Robotic Hogwash! Artificial Intelligence Will Not Take Over Wall Street. I guess it depends which Wall Street jobs that you mean

    Google’s research chief questions value of ‘Explainable AI’ – Computerworld – but that won’t deal with the legal and regulatory challenges

    Web of no web

    Facebook Slashes Oculus Price For Second Time As World Refuses To Adopt Virtual Reality | Zero Hedge – the problem is supporting hardware and content. Oculus requires way to high a spec machine and there isn’t compelling content. More related content here.

  • Perkbox + more things

    Perkbox

    Perkbox raises $8.6 million for its employee engagement platform | Tech.eu – well deserved funding round that isn’t Tech City BS. Disclosure: Perkbox was co-founded by my friend and former colleague Chieu. They pivoted the business a few times and managed to land on a formula that works with Perkbox. I can vouch for the Perkbox service, as I used to have a ‘friend’ account thanks to Chieu.

    Business

    US and European leaders finally agree on something: suspicion of Chinese takeovers | Quartz

    Economics

    France wants hardest Brexit, says City envoy to EU | FT – makes sense. At least some countries would see the negotiations as something closer to a zero-sum game for a few reasons. Holding the EU together, and the opportunities for at least some new jobs in their country. As the UK economy slows down, the country becomes less attractive as a market for exports. So the calculus moves from partnership to strip mining. Finally, it will be traumatic for supply chains so there is an incentive to rebuild them in your favour (paywall)

    China’s economy grows 6.9 per cent in second quarter, beating market expectations | South China Morning Post – mixed news here. Top line number is good, the problem is that it’s reliant on steel production (where China has a glut in capacity) and construction – further inflating the property bubble. Coal production also picked up – again contrary to the direction the government has outlined in terms of high value growth

    Gadget

    This Is Why China Hasn’t Jumped on the Smart Speaker Bandwagon – Bloomberg – interesting comments on conversational Chinese, AI also struggles with many variants of conversational English

    Most popular iPhone models in the wild: CHART – Business Insider – a couple of things on this. The iPhone is obviously a durable item, many of these handsets will be secondhand or hand me downs. Many people’s upgrade will be a newer secondhand model

    Apple’s ‘installed base’ of iPhones has stopped growing, says Deutsche Bank (AAPL) | Business Insider – basically the market is saturated and has reached its equilibrium

    Innovation

    What was it like to be at Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs visited? – Quora – I hadn’t realised that Alto and the other Xerox PARC technologies had been so widely discussed in the mainstream media prior to the visits by Microsoft and Apple respectively

    Legal

    The iPhone Is an Ideal Machine for Exerting Intellectual Property Control – Motherboard – interesting piece to read, with valid points BUT diminishes itself by playing fast and loose with some of the facts

    Luxury

    Paris-Based “it” Store Colette to Close its Doors | The Fashion Law – this is sad. I love their carefully curated website and shop.

    Weak pound helps bring record tally of tourists | Business | The Times – so basically tourism hasn’t improved the country is an arbitrage play for travellers

    Marketing

    brandchannel: Mercedes-Benz and SXSW Bring meConvention to Europe – is it just me or does this feel like marketing festivals have jumped the shark?

    Under the Hood of Shell’s $100 Million Loyalty Program | CMO Strategy Columns – AdAge – interesting read, especially on the decline in geographic penetration at the pump of (other) oil companies (reg wall)

    Confessions of a former agency innovation head: ‘It’s all smoke and mirrors to get more money’ – elements of the truth with a dose of skepticism

    Media

    How Baidu Maps Leads People to a Privately Owned Hospital | Whats on Weibo – Baidu can’t catch a break

    Publishers are switching affections from Snapchat to Instagram | Digiday – similar moves with creators

    The Influence of the KPM Music Library | WhoSampled – great guide to the famous library music label

    The music industry according to super-producer Jimmy Iovine | FT – no amazing business insights but interesting commentary on Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run album – which Iovine engineered. Apparently getting the drum sound perfect had been an issue. Born To Run ended up being Springsteen’s breakthrough album

    Retailing

    Amazon Prime does more for northern food security than federal subsidies, say Iqaluit residents – North – CBC News – positive PR for Amazon, the question is whether it is worth their while providing Prime as a universal service or not?

    Technology

    Hard Drives Started Out as Massive Machines That Were Rented by the Month | Vice – and the industry is moving back to this approach with cloud services. A number of PC era technology executives had their first computing experience on time-sharing computing services

    Web of no web

    Facebook Plans to Unveil a $200 Wireless Oculus VR Headset for 2018 – Bloomberg – scaling down from the gaming PC powered rig to compete with Google Daydream and the myriad VR headsets out of Shenzhen

    QR code takes a baby step in world conquest as group adopts global cashless payment format | SCMP – interesting counterpoint to NFC solutions from Google and Apple

  • Of time and networks

    Time and networks are intertwined and have been forever. Communities have marked time in different ways. It used to be marked by the bells of a church or the clock on a local factory. At that time, it didn’t matter that the clock told the precise time, but that it was consistent. This meant that different ‘time zones’ existed in areas separated by little distance.

    The amount of reference time pieces expanded as mechanical clocks were installed in churches, farm estates and early factories. In the case of factories the change of shift was often punctuated by the blast of a fog horn or a steam powered whistle.

    I can remember this being the case even during my early childhood at the nearby Unilever factory. The change of shift signal marked my walk to infant school.

    Over the centuries canals sprang up throughout the country as the first mass transport link, facilitating the movement of heavy goods such as coal and iron ore in a more efficient manner. Canals were transformative, but the boats still only moved at the speed of the horse. Railways broke the ‘horse speed’ barrier.

    This was transformative because it suddenly shone a light on inconsistent time keeping across the country. Railway timetables couldn’t incorporate all the variations in time zones between stations, so it became the arbiter of accurate time.

    Over time radio and television played their part, audiences could set their watch by the start of key news programmes, for instance the time pips in the run into BBC Radio 4’s today programme or the Angelus chimes on RTE Radio  1.

    The telephone came into play when looking for an exact time (to reset a watch or alarm clock) outside the broadcast schedule.

    The popularity of mobile phone networks didn’t have as much of an impact as one would have thought. NITZ (Network Identity and Time Zone) was an optional standard for GSM networks. It has an accuracy in the order of minutes. A competing standard on CDMA 2000 networks used GPS enabled time codes that were far more accurate.

    Modern timekeeping for the smartphone toting average person goes back to NTP; one of the earliest protocols in for the early internet that was created some time before 1985.

    1

    Back in 2001 when I installed the earliest version of macOS (then known as OSX 10.0 ‘Cheetah’) the date and time settings made reference to Apple owned NTP servers that were used to calibrate time on the computer. This infrastructure has since provided time to Apple’s other computing devices such as the iPhone and the and the iPad.

    We are are now living on the same time. Time synchronisation happens seamlessly. We tend to only realise it when there is a problem.

    SaveSave

  • Cannes and VidCon outtakes

    Cannes and VidCon – I had the chance to read around a lot of the stuff around the events and listened to Ogilvy’s webinar. Here were the key things that struck me.

    There is blind faith amongst brand about the benefits of influencers and social.  I find this particularly interesting because it represents a number of challenges to the status quo:

    • This first struck me when I saw Heather Mitchell on a panel at the In2 Innovation Summit in May. Mitchell works in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well
    • The default ethos for most brand marketers is Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Most consumer brands are in mature categories, engagement is unimportant; being top of mind (reach and repetition) is what matters
    • Brands were looking to directly engage with influencers at VidCon with trade stands and giveaways at the expo. This was brands like Dove. Again, I’d wonder about the targeting and ROI

    Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

    Publicis and Marcel. Well it certainly got them noticed. There has been obligatory trolling (some of which was very funny). I tried to make a sombre look at it here: Thinking About Marcel (its about a nine minute read) – TL;DR version – its a huge challenge that Publicis has set itself. One interesting aspect to point out is the differing view point between WPP and Publicis. WPP has spent a lot of time, effort and money into building a complete advertising technology stack including advanced programmatic platforms and analytics.

    WPP hoped that this would provide them with an unassailable competitive advantage. The challenge is that the bulk of growth in online spend is going to Facebook and Google – who also happen to have substantive advertising technology stacks.

    I can’t help but wonder if this shaping is Publicis’ top line thinking? Scott Galloway posted a very sombre chart about this. If Google and Facebook hit their combined revenue targets this year, it will have a dramatic effect on the number of people employed in the major advertising groups.

    1707 - ad industry

    To put Galloway’s numbers into context, the projected number of jobs lost in the advertising industry  this year would be roughly the equivalent of every man and woman around the world currently employed at vehicle maker Nissan. And that’s just 2017.

    If you paid attention to the Marcel concept film you would have noticed that the client service director is partly displaced when a client uses Marcel to directly reach out to Publicis experts.

    If Marcel, just makes information easier to access internally; it could save the equivalent time  equating to almost 1,600 employees (out of Publicis’s current 80,000 around the world).

    People equate to billings as these marketing conglomerates are basically body shops in the way they operate. So it will adversely affect the value of the major marketing groups.

    If that isn’t grim enough, Galloway doesn’t even bother to take into account the Chinese ecosystems which is digitising at a faster rate than the West. China also has a longer history of platforms and clients being directly connected – cutting out the media agency.

    These changes in the advertising eco-system has huge implications about the erosion in brand equity over time. Amazon’s move to surpass other retailers also is about the erosion of brand power. Combine this with the increasing ubiquity of Prime and all brands start to look the same as private labels.

    Thankfully the disciples of Byron Sharp still realise that there is power (and lower CPMs) in using television as a mass-advertising medium which is why FMCG product still spend 90% of their budget offline.

    The best thing IPG, WPP, Omnicom and Publicis could do right now is spend a lot of money ensuring that every marketing and MBA student have copies of Mr Sharp’s books. If they haven’t been translated into Chinese, that might be an idea as well.

    SnapChat is in its difficult ‘second album’ phase. Back when music came on physical media and record labels invested in developing artists as a longer term proposition than a reality TV series there was the ‘second album’ phase. Artists often struggled to bottle the lightning that gave them a successful first album. They usually had the money and resources to throw at it, but it was hard to be a consistent performer.

    For example Bruce Springsteen only really became successful in the U.S. with his third album Born To Run – that level of record label support wouldn’t happen now.

    On one level SnapChat has matured. It had a big presence at Cannes and its Snap glasses displaced VR technology as the worn product. It has been under assault. Major content providers like the BBC are choosing Instagram’s stories over SnapChat’s offerings. Even Twitter is getting back in the picture. Ogilvy’s team at VidCon talked about how Twitter had been successfully engaging with influencers and offering them support and attractive content monetisation offers.

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

    SaveSave

    SaveSave