Ged Carroll

Category: korea | 韓國 | 한국 | 韓国

Annyeonghaseyo – welcome to the Korean category of this blog. This is where I share anything that relates to the Republic of Korea, business issues relating to Korea, the Korean people, Korean culture and the Korean language.

At the time of writing this category descriptor its been about 10 years since I have last been able to visit Korea. In that time the country has risen on the world stage.

There have been continual disputes with Japan and more recently continual bitter disputes with China. The Japanese disputes are related to history and territory. Korea had been occupied as part of the Imperial Japanese empire. Independence came with the end of the second world war.

The Chinese disputes are more complex. Chinese investors are buying up Korean property particularly in Seoul, Busan and Jeju island, while many Koreans can no longer get on the property ladder. Chinese tourists blitz Korean shops in a similar way to what they’ve previously done in Hong Kong.

Chinese nationalism has seen claims made on Korean cultural assets from the national dress to kimchi. Finally China has interfered in Korea’s efforts to defend itself from the threat in the north.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Samsung launched a new smartphone that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in wireless as well as Korea. If there is Korean subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Dawns Mine Crystal – Yunchul Kim

    Dawns Mine Crystal is an exhibition on at the Korean Cultural Centre between now and November 3, 2018. I was invited to a preview of it. The title Dawns Mine Crystals a reference to the material world and its intersection with symbols and metaphors.

    Thanks to Korean Cultural Centre @kccuk in London for invite to preview Dawns Mine Crystal exhibition by Yunchul Kim #contemporaryart #londonart

    Dawns mine crystal reminds me of science fiction from the mid-20th century, vacuum tube based electronics and the Russian film Solaris. The chromed ray gun type appearance reminded me of everything from vintage Flash Gordon, art deco object d’art, Americana and 1950s science fiction like The Day The Earth Stood Still. I also thought about my Dad who used to visit electronics junk shops when I was a small kid that would be full of everything from valve driven circuits to wartime radar components.

    The form and function of devices had a beauty to them like vintage fighter planes or the silver cathedral like structures of the chemical and petrochemical industries. I thought about Solaris when I stared into the swirling liquid surfaces of some of the installations, like storm clouds rippling across an alien planet.

    It is well worth going to see, Mr Kim merges the world of art and science together in a way that is mesmerising and entertaining. It is unsurprising, given the works link to Arts at CERN, that the art pieces have a very scientific bent to them. The works will be part of a bigger exhibition that will tour venues in France during 2019 and 2020.

    Be sure to catch it at the Korean Cultural Centre before it finishes. The Korean Cultural Centre does a really good job of curating exhibitions by Korean artists and promotes the works of Korean film makers with regular screenings at the centre.

    Mr Kim is a Seoul-based artist, composer and founder of Studio Locus Solus in Seoul. He’s exhibited in German, Spain, China and the United States. More related content here.

  • China male beauty market + more

    The booming male beauty market in China – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China – finding the latest Asian male beauty market trend – Korean idol flower boy image difficult to square with mainstream male beauty products. I guess this male beauty market trend must be analogous to the new romantics of the early 1980s. In that case the new romantics had a high degree of cultural impact that dwarfed the actual size of the movement.

    Hayden Cox On Becoming An IWC Ambassador, And The Watches We Should Be Wearing – GQ – interesting choice of ambassador aiming at millennials. Hayden Cox shapes surfboards. He started Haydenshapes when he was in high school. In this respects his career mirrors the old school shapers like Shawn Stüssy in 1970s. Cox’s business is still laser focused on shaping boards as a business person.

    It is interesting that IWC focused on an entrepreneur, rather than an athlete, celebrity or adventurer. There is a certain commonality that can be drawn between the craft of shaping and the expertise of the veteran watch maker.

    Leading taxi-hailing app providers in Japan and South Korea to collaborate | The Japan Times – interesting move by Kakao. It shows the rise in Korea – Japan tourism. This goes against the wider policy dynamics prevalent in Korea – Japan government relations. Both vendors need to partner to deal with the South East Asian, Chinese competitors and Uber. In technology spheres, scale matters; innovation doesn’t.

    Doing One Thing, Well: The UNIX Philosophy | Hackaday – great essay on the design philosophy on Unix. The design philosophy was based around simplicity. Specific pieces of software were built to do one thing well. (That approach was mirrored decades later in web 2.0 design ethos as well). These applications were designed to work effortlessly together. This all made computing simpler and more accessible. It is the foundations that the web from network core, to smartphone clients run on. This post is written using Unix powered laptop and hosted on an instance of Linux (an operating system that apes Unix).

    Baidu in Hot Water After Hospital Mix-Up – Caixin Global – not the first time for Baidu

  • Three and Superdrug + more

    Three and Superdrug launch new UK MVNO | total telecom – the MVNO deal with Three and Superdrug is a natural deal. Three and Superdrug are both owned by CK Hutchinson Holdings. The interesting bit is the cross business CRM where Three and Superdrug have got together to Superdrug drive loyalty card adoption. More retail related content here.

    THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT needs THE WRONG AND THE SHIT OF IT – BBH – interesting essay. The challenge is where do you get ‘crap’ campaign data from and how well will it be documented?

    Meet Kakao: How Korea’s Largest Mobile Giant Is Embracing Blockchain – CoinDesk – some smart critical thinking

    The Canard About Falling Incomes – WSJ – not an argument that I agree with, but Kessler argues that increasing digital features (like ABS on cars) compensate for the hollowing out of the middle classes (paywall)

    Tesla Model 3 Gets CR Recommendation After Braking Update – Consumer Reports – Teslas inspire a ‘true believer’ type following. I am leery of their ‘always in beta’ car software approach because its a car. So I am more concerned rather than delighted the that company managed to bring its braking distance closer to standard using an other-the-air software update

    Right Media, Creators of the First Ad Exchange | NYMag.com – the rise and fall of Right Media

    Chinese firms pile in to sponsor World Cup 2018 amid Fifa fallout-Sino-US – “Chinese companies get two things from sponsoring the World Cup. The first is access to western audiences that they will sooner or later be trying to win over, as their companies expand. The other is a cosmopolitan veneer to their brands, which they hope will resonate with their sizeable domestic markets.” – interesting that BBK’s youth brand Vivo rather than Huawei is the smartphone sponsor

    Grace Dent: ‘The processed food debate is MSG-sprinkled class war’ | Life and style | The Guardian – I would align it more with a Neo Victorian patrician attitude towards the working class

    Cross border insights finder – handy Facebook ad tool

    ‘I make £45k a month buying clothes for other people’ – The FT catches up with diagou 15 years after everyone else. China’s changes in luxury tax, increased travel of consumers, restrictions on capital flight, clampdown on corruption and e-tailing has had its toll on diagou

    Smart bulbs turn dumb: Lights out for Philips as Hue API goes dark • The Register – I get the benefits of technology but why does heating, lighting or other smart home controls have to be mediated through the cloud?

    Holiday Rentals, Homes, Experiences & Places – Airbnb – AirBnB launches stories which seems to be a continuation of its magazines

    What is a smartphone? | ASSA – really nice essay on smartphones and consumer behaviour

    Shenzhen’s tech innovation hothouse overheats – it’s been going on for the decade or so that I have travelled there. The unaffordability, maker spaces which are a real estate ruse to suck government grants and a grinding life pace. Financial services and design have already moved in. Your in less need of maker spaces when workshops can build working prototypes for you

  • Martin Sorrell & other things this week

    Martin Sorrell

    The Martin Sorrell departure from WPP was like an earthquake in the marketing and advertising industry. Sorrell started at Saatchi & Saatchi before building WPP as a marketing services conglomerate with global reach. I decided not to write a post on his retirement because there were more questions than answers. A couple of things saddened me:

    • The Martin Sorrell departure was assumed by some outsiders to be part of the #metoo movement. This seems to be a default setting for many now
    • Headlines like the Globe & Mail that talked about Sorrell’s departure as the end of the Mad Man era. You have journalists and the sub-editors that they work with having no understanding of the industry that they cover. Martin Sorrell was a major factor in the end of the Mad Man era; moving advertising from being the closest thing in business to art, to something numeric in nature. One could argue that technology has moved the bar too far in terms of removing the craftsmanship all together, but that’s a discussion for another day about Google and Facebook rather than about WPP

    More information on the Martin Sorrell 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 leaves social

    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. More related content here.

    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.

    Music

    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.

    Shinsegae Food

    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.

  • App constellations 2018 research

    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.

    App constellations survey methodology

    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.

    App constellation definition

    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.

    Changes in the environment

    Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:

    • Apple had a purge of apps that didn’t support 64 bit processing
    • They moved away from supporting the app store within iTunes application and on the web; to within the app store on the device

    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:

    • The app was serving a purpose for a fixed time
    • It is an application that has fallen so far out of favour that it is no longer worth maintaining
    • The code base no longer meets Apple’s or Google’s minimum standards
    Data analysis

    I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations:  Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.

    Number of apps

    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.

    compound annual growth in app number

    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:

    • In mature markets consumers are not really downloading new apps
    • They are sticking with a few in terms of regular usage. Many of the apps on their phones don’t get used
    Notes on a few of the companies in terms of their app constellations
    • Daum Kakao – notable for being the only company who I looked at who had a decline in the number of applications versus 2016. A lot of this seems to be in service consolidation of both Daum and Kakao to remove duplications or non-core services. It is the Daum brand that has taken the biggest impact. This is understandable, since Daum struggled on the move to smartphones and Kakao is a mobile-first brand.
    • Dropbox – the growth in apps has been down to the larger business acquisition strategy at Dropbox. I don’t expect further growth like what we have seen with  Facebook’s pivot to mobile
    • Facebook – Facebook’s pivot to mobile was one of the reason why I decided to look at compound annual growth rate as well as the size of app constellation in terms of app numbers. In terms of raw app ‘SKUs’ Facebook is dwarfed by most of the other companies that I have looked at. It is only by looking at the growth in apps developed where one can really see their move to mobile
    • Netease – was interesting for its focus in a couple of areas. Like other Asian internet companies, education was a big target area, but Netease went into it with major commitment. Both NetEase and Tencent were big in magazine and book apps as well. I think this is down to the fact that ‘traditional’ web surfing is harder to do with (at the moment) when URLs are written in western script and numbers.
    • Tencent – the raw app numbers beggars belief. There are a number of reasons for this. Like NetEase, Tencent has a lot of apps solely optimised for the iPad and a separate iPhone app. There are free and paid-for product variants. Lastly Tencent will have four or five apps competing in a given category like streaming music which seems insane. Only time will tell if Tencent is spreading itself too thin; like when Yahoo! was described Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto
    More information

    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