Ged Carroll | renaissance chambara
east asia ^ (counter)culture ^ media ^ tech ^ design ^ marketing ^ ephemera
The Korean screenings of Infinity War (part one) went horribly wrong. The film did really well in the Korean box office, partly due to a huge amount of pre-sold tickets. But the subtitles were so poorly done that criticism has outshadowed other aspects of the film within the country.
Asian Boss did a good straw poll of Korean citizens on it.
Things that made my week:
Sir Martin Sorrell’s departure from WPP. I decided not to write a post on his retirement because there were more questions than answers. A couple of things saddened me:
More information on Sir Martin’s departure from WPP
Why WPP’s Cryptic Handling of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation Is the Wrong Move | AdWeek
WPP Claims It First Learned of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation From His Own Internal Memo on Saturday Night | AdWeek
With Martin Sorrell’s resignation at WPP, the Mad Men era truly seems over | Globe & Mail – (paywall)
Wetherspoons walking away from social media. Again the whys and wherefores of this seems to have as many questions as it does answers. As an outsider, their digital strategy and execution on social channels was patchy at best. It wasn’t something that Tim Martin was that committed to anyway. It probably won’t make that much difference to their business.
Whilst as a marketer I can point to high street brands to who do social really well (Paddy Power, Poundland or Tesco Mobile a number of years ago); there are a lot of mediocre brand accounts. I can see the argument for going all-in, or not at all.
This week I have been listening to:
Tim Westwood recording of De La Soul freestyle throwback – never heard before! – YouTube – this was apparently done for the Westwood Rap Show sometime in the early 1990s.
This Sould Out tune seems to bridge the gap between disco and the late 1980s / early 1990s Italian house sound popular in the North of England.
Lastly, here’s one of them ads that never got approved by the client. Shinsegae Food is the food manufacturing arm of Samsung in Korea. Samsung is completely vertically integrated with these food products often sold in Samsung owned restaurants and Shinsegae department stores which can be paid for with a Samsung credit card. Mamee is a Malaysian manufacturer of instant noodles. The video is a satirical take on a usual Korean drama trope.
I initially looked at app constellations back in 2014, when Fred Wilson put a name to the the phenomena. And every two years or so I have gone back and looked at a number of major internet companies to see how many different types of apps that they had in play.
I originally selected the companies back in 2014 because I felt that they represented the largest and best of their ilk. It skews Asian because the west can be viewed as one eco-system represented by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
China is an enclosed eco-system; though Microsoft is actively engaged in the app eco-system there. I chose Tencent and NetEase as being my Chinese bellwethers. DaumKakao and Naver were representative of the Korean eco-system which blends highly-used domestic services with western platforms. Finally LINE of Japan (a subsidiary of Korean company Naver) provided a similar bellwether of the hybrid Japanese eco-system which mirrors Korea.
For the sake of convenience I have compared the contents of Apple’s mobile app store for each of the companies. While most of the internet companies have some Android-only or iOS-only apps; the iOS app store is still a good indicator of their app activity.
I stayed true to the definition of app constellations in terms of deciding what kind of app should go in.
I manually assessed each app, rather than relying on the category that the app had been submitted into. Tencent and Netease, had a number of mobile utilities that aided discussion and kept players updated on their favourite game. These didn’t fit within the definition.
Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:
2018 marks over a decade of mobile apps in the Apple store. Many of the major players have delisted almost as many Android and iOS apps as they currently have in the store. This happens for a number of reasons:
I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations: Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.
Both Microsoft and Google’s growth has been driven by ‘experimental’ apps that they have put out in the public for their own reasons and enterprise focused apps.
But it was quickly apparent to me that the number of apps developed were only part of the story. What about the rate of change in numbers of apps developed? This would be indicative of the rate of change in moving to mobile. Here both Facebook and Microsoft’s pivot became immediately apparent. The Asian companies looked less impressive as they had been able to keep steady in their focus on mobile.
All of this growth in the number of apps developed by major internet companies is all the more remarkable when you consider the following:
Jargon watch: app constellation – back in 2014 when I wrote this post, it still took me the best part of a week to research and describe each of the apps in the main eco-systems. It would take me much longer today due to the growth in apps
Peanut Buttergate – analysis of Garlinghouse’s original memo about Yahoo! from back in 2006
Wow. Facebook eroding much faster than anyone expected. Pivotal’s analysis of Nielsen data shows core app dropped 11% in time spent per person in November. Without Instagram/WhatsApp, a complete cliff dive in share of time. pic.twitter.com/tEd5UclZ3p
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) February 20, 2018
After Anbang Takeover, China’s Deal Money, Already Ebbing, Could Slow Further – The New York Times
Hello, mobile operators? This is your age of disruption calling | McKinsey & Company – lots of buzz words, diagnosis but not a glimpse of a way forward
Edelman Revenue Up 2.1% In 2018 To $894m | Holmes Report – given that all the global PR groups have had exceptionally low growth or even declines
How Douyin became China’s top short-video App in 500 days – WalktheChat
Nokia on 5G at MWC, what struck me is the sales pitch was more like an enterprise software company like IBM or Oracle than a telecoms vendor. There is lots of tech in the networks but there isn’t a recognisable killer app. His warnings about 5G upgradeable products ring true though.
Asian Boss do some really nice street interviews in different Asian cities and this one about Apple iPhones in Korea is particularly instructive. Samsung is seen as the default as they assemble phones (mostly for Asian markets) in Korea. Whereas in Europe all of the are made in China.
The iPhone seems to have won out on product design amongst younger people.
Siri vs Siri: What Apple’s AI can and can’t do on every Apple device | Macworld – it implies context based on device, but they need to raise the game in particular on the Mac
How Russia’s ‘red tourism’ is luring wealthy Chinese visitors bored with Paris and Milan | South China Morning Post – Russian department stores TSUM and GUM become important for foreign Chinese luxury sales
May braced for Unilever decision on headquarters | FT – Unilever: ‘stichting’ up a move to the Netherlands, which would make sense. 100VE is a leased building, its overcrowded and a number of the people there were contractors like me. The team that I worked in had already upped sticks to the Netherlands with the roles moving but not many of the people were redeployed, let go or didn’t have their contracts renewed
Millennial insecurity is reshaping the UK economy – interesting impact – not moving out of region to take a job like I did when I had a degree affecting productivity and entrepreneurship. One could see how Brexit will exasperate things further. It doesn’t imply that there will be a corresponding youthquake to overturn it at a later date
The Case Against Google – The New York Times – the problem with Found’em and the way the story was started is that it came off a bit cray cray a decade ago when it first popped up. They weren’t cut from the same cloth as Silicon Valley wunderkinder. That and they looked like Microsoft finger puppets. You had the SCO vs. Novell court case over the future of Linux at the time and there was evidence of Microsoft’s finger prints all over it (via Wikipedia): “On March 4, 2004, a leaked SCO internal e-mail detailed how Microsoft had raised up to $106 million via the BayStar referral and other means. Blake Stowell of SCO confirmed the memo was real. BayStar claimed the deal was suggested by Microsoft, but that no money for it came directly from them. In addition to the Baystar involvement, Microsoft paid SCO $6M (USD) in May 2003 for a license to “Unix and Unix-related patents”, despite the lack of Unix-related patents owned by SCO. This deal was widely seen in the press as a boost to SCO’s finances which would help SCO with its lawsuit against IBM” – And at the time if it had the taint of Microsoft involvement that overwrote any Google wrong. People seem to have forgotten the Judge Jackson trial and what an evil sack of shite Microsoft was shown to be. It would have been really hard sell to the media
NASA Is Bringing Back Cold War-Era Atomic Rockets to Get to Mars – Bloomberg
Amazon is merging Prime Now and AmazonFresh – Business Insider – it should add clarity from a brand point of view as well. Now they just need to get the Prime Now app to work properly
Apple in Talks to Buy Cobalt Directly From Miners – Bloomberg – sounds like a smart use of their capital pile given the rising cost of cobalt due to electric vehicle batteries
Dr. Penelope Boston: “Seeking the Tricorder: The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life” | Talks at Google – YouTube – interesting challenges in terms of identification, methodology and analysis
APAC Millennials Lead for Sharing Branded Social Content – GlobalWebIndex Blog
George Soros may invest more in fighting Big Tech – Axios – the noose is slowly tightening around big technology
You can call me Al (but you really shouldn’t) – The overclaims of Artificial Intelligence « Comms Planning « Planning Above and Beyond – many technologies take a number of runs to get it right; machine language translation or VoIP being the classic case study. AI takes much more to get it right; this is a timely reminder that we are in an ‘AI summer’ at the moment and may hit an AI winter
“Just an Ass-Backward Tech Company”: How Twitter Lost the Internet War | Vanity Fair – to be fair this is probably a similar situation with Facebook as well