Ged Carroll

Category: london | 倫敦 | 런던 | ロンドン

Why London?

First of all I live in London, I put down my roots here because of work. Commuting from the outside towns into the city takes a long time. People only tend to do that when they don’t have to come in every day or getting their kids into a good school is important for them.

Secondly it is an area distinct from the rest of the UK, this is partly down to history and the current economic reality. It is distinct in terms of population make-up and economic opportunity. London has a culture that is distinct from the rest of the UK, partly due to its population make-up. Over 30 percent of the city’s inhabitants were born in another country. From music to fashion, its like a different country:

  • As one women’s clothing retailer once said on a news interview ‘The further north you go; the more skin you see’.
  • The weekend is a huge thing outside the city. By comparison, it isn’t the big deal in London. The reason was that there were things you could enjoy every night of the week.
  • You can get a good cup of coffee
  • The city was using cashless payments way before it became universal elsewhere in the country
  • The line has extended into politics. London opposed Brexit. London, like other major cities it is one of the last holdouts of Labour party support in the 2019 UK general election

London posts often appear in other categories, as it fulfils multiple categories.

If there are London 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.

  • Slugger O’Toole – social & print

    The people at Taylor Bennett and Unicorn Jobs invited me along to an event which discussed social media and how it relates to the mainstream media. The panelists were Drew Benvie, Simon Nixon of Breakingviews and Mick Fealty of Slugger O’Toole and the Brassneck blog at the Daily Telegraph.

    Here is the notes that I made from the event (but I’ve cleaned up the spelling):

    Simon provided an introduction to Breakingviews which drew some parallels between internet mainstream media and social media (though social media elements like the dialogue with readership like letters to the editors and opinion pieces work just as well in print). Simon acted as a chair for the discussion.

    Mick started blogging whilst working as a researcher. He found that it was a handy way of tracking research on the net. Over six years later and, Slugger O’Toole was said to set the political agenda in Northern Ireland by the editor of the Irish News. The compelling reason for blogging is its capacity to get news issues out to the readership 12 -13 hours faster than print media.

    Slugger now run by five contributors with much less day-to-day input from Mick.

    Drew started using technology to help with his job agency-side in PR, the blog started by posting coverage so that he could read it when he got home. Over time, he gradually became aware of the community of readers that went to his blog.

    Everyone on the panel is a blogger, but are they are a journalist?

    Drew said straightaway that he is not a journalist.

    Mick said being a journalist is not whether you right for a mainstream media title, instead its about how they use the technology, does the writer have a good nose for a story? Mick is a member of UK advertising network MessageSpace, whilst there are bloggers taking a professional approach, there aren’t the revenues there yet for the majority of its members.

    How do the panelists go about agenda setting?

    Drew started off by looking at news feeds, looking at other bloggers and mainstream media, now he also tracks keywords including client names and industry topics. Drew reads some 200-plus blogs about public relations. PR has moved past press releases and is now about infiltrating the feeds of key journalist. Bloggers offer an ideal opportunity to do this.

    Mick said that all the stories in Brassneck and Slugger O’Toole are peer-to-peer stories. In terms of advice for PROs, they need to know who it is that they are reaching out to and to do it in a conversational style and keep it brief. Group emails don’t work, instead even a url to story thats interesting is fine.

    Are blogs replacing old media?

    Drew: He has received double the amount of requests from clients to get in blogs compared to even six months ago. Blogs may not be killing mainstream media but is certainly strangling it.

    Simon described blogs as being live and rough around the edges. Mainstream media is absorbing the ways and methods of online media and bloggers in order to survive. As the media has brought blog content into the papers as columns. The web has become a cheap way to run a fast-failure development process for new content.

    Mick: Things are going to change, the primary driver is disaggregation, where the consumer has become the new editor. A major challenge for mainstream media is that it is not in constant touch with audience

    Are journalists more professional than bloggers?

    Drew: Admitted that he is careful about what he writes as he doesn’t want to get sacked for anything that he says online. However he would still like to see snarky content like The World’s Leading… when it was running.

    Blogging sped up the response. Bloggers can post instantly

    Mick: bloggers and commenters can deliver a rapid response, but they need to play it straight. A recent survey by IPSOS MORI found that bloggers are more trusted than journalists by consumers. Pew Internet found that 57 percent of journalists stories had been sourced from the net.

    The editorial time-space is putting mainstream media at a disadvantage, they end up with online one chance at getting a story right. Whereas a community of bloggers can digest and discuss a story to get every element out of it.

    The power of the mainstream media brand covers journalist sins, whereas bloggers personal brands run the risk of being damaged if they write a dodgy story.

    Is blogging and social media open to misuse?

    Drew: Abuse will always happen, PROs need to be careful in their guardianship of their clients reputation, track where they can be done, media law still applies

    Mick: The nature of the bloggers peer-to-peer relationship with their audience, also puts an onus on the audience and the blogger to not be passive. A good blog is like a pub and a good blogger is like the landlord who will kick out trouble-makers before it gets to be of a serious nature. From a readers point of view they need to be aware that lower orders of knowledge are being manufactured.

    Mick: The real value in public relations is in audience insight, social networks are an ideal tool to gain audience insight. Currently one of the key mistakes that PROs have been firefighting too hard.

    Audience member Sam Bottrell of WestLB asked Simon Nixon about how practical blogging and social media really was for financial institutions. Simon pointed out that social media presents a high level of risk for financial institutions, I pointed out that the research team at Piper Jaffray provide a list of links to interesting articles each day via Google Reader.

    Justin Hayward pointed out how search had grown beyond finding information or discovery to become a reputation engine.

    Post-event I caught up with Steve Waddington, had a quick chat with Drew Benvie, Ben Matthews, Jaz Cummins and Justin Hayward. More on related content here.

  • MobileYouth trend workout

    MobileYouth trend workout introduction

    Nokia E90

    Here is the notes that I made mostly from the morning sessions of the mobileYouth trend workout. There will be presentations and videos of the event available from their site next week. I was speaking on a panel later in the afternoon so was able to pay attention to the earlier panels.

    Graham Brown – mobileYouth, the organisers of MobileYouth trend workout

    Event introduction

    • Young people spend about 1.3 trillion USD per year, 130 billion of which is spent on mobile services (or roughly ten per cent of their total income). This impacted the sales of chocolate, music (in the form of CDs) and cigarettes
    • Young people spend an average of 20 – 25 GBP per month
    • Mobile services of young people grow at about 4.5 – 5.0 per cent year-on-year. This growth comes at the expense of, and in competition with television, entertainment and clothing

    Brown asked the audience of mobile operators to think beyond ARPU and instead think about lifetime spend. By the time that consumers are 33, they have already completed half their lifetime spend. Yet this is the age group that is currently most attractive to carriers looking at the ARPU model. It was an interesting counterpoint to marketers viewing the grey market as the next big opportunity.

    Mobile marketers run the particular risk of ending up with an aging or aged brands due to the virtue of a misplaced focus. Brown delivered a case study on Harley Davidson to prove his point. In the 1960s circa Easy Rider, Harley Davidson was a youth brand, now their average customer age is 51 years old.

    If things carry on this way, in a little over twenty years, their customer base will be 70, possibly only ready to ride a zimmer frame. According to Brown the consumer lifecycle begins at 10 years old.

    Geoff Goodwin and Marc Goodchild – BBC

    Children still view as much children’s television as ever, however their consumption of television overall has declined as expected

    The BBC is now looking for integrated media properties and partnerships. No one organisation has it right, hence the need for partnerships. Young audiences churn at an incredible rate so the BBC is constantly having to rework itself to remain relevant, rather than having the brand advantage that most people thought they had.

    Important mobile technologies for young people are FM radio, SMS and Bluetooth. This low-level tech is because most young people get by with found technologies: hand-me-down mobile phones, an old TV from the living room or a discount model picked up at ASDA or Tesco and vintage computers from work or the living room.

    Roundtable: Johan Winbladh mobile channel editor – Danish Broadcasting, James Davis head of mobile – News International, Michiel de Gooijer business development manager – Endemol, Giovanni Maruca director interactive and mobile EMEA – Paramount and Tim Hussain head of mobile monetisation – AOL UK

    Mr Winbladh was the hawk in the discussion: mobile devices weren’t ready to put to the kind of mobile experience that users wanted and the industry thought was appropriate, whereas the other audience members felt that the latest generation of mobile handsets and all you can eat tariffs are readdressing the issue.

    Maruca was excited about the way that advertising could be delivered in a context aware manner. By adding value to the advertising it can become unobtrusive and essentially no longer be advertising, but information.

    Roundtable: Richard Miller general manager for consumer convergence – BT and Derrick Heng director segment marketing and communications – Singapore Telecommunications Limited

    BT’s vision of Wi-Fi as a mobile technology is at odds with the GSM/W-CDMA orthodoxy of the mobile industry.

    SingTel in contrast has complete fixed and mobile integration and pay TV. SingTel segments its customer base and actively manages the customer relationship with a long-term view. They provide email to mobiles on an ad-funded revenue model. In Singapore the killer apps for mobile usage by young people were email and SMS. By comparison audience member Jonathan MacDonald sales director of Blyk pointed out that for UK mobile users the three killer apps are voice, SMS and the phone’s alarm clock.

    The audience debate then raged, the killer application for young people is doing the basic things well, providing decent customer service, having a decent relationship with the clients and not charging them excessively for that relationship. More related content here.

     

  • V and A

    On Saturday, I continued my sporadic tour of London’s cultural highpoints: Fabric, Smith of Smithfields, The End, Flying Records, Phonica, The Science Museum and now the Victoria & Albert Museum known informally as the V and A.

    The museum is very disorientating despite the map that they provide you with on the way in. In fact the map was an offence against design to my co-explorer Steve, a design agency owner who came along. The exhibits on Japan were very interesting and made Europe look like a bunch of savages. The Victorian silverware looked crass and tasteless, the plunder of robber barons from an empire that spanned a third of the world (sort of like Kenneth Noye on a grand scale).

    There were lots of activity areas and it should get a high rating for being child friendly. It was way cool and both Steve and myself took some time out for learning activities. The café wasn’t as swish as I had thought that it would be, however it is still very good. My expectations of the V and A had been distorted by the ‘V&A café with museum attached’ descriptions of it in the media. (Their 1 1/2 cup pot of coffee is actually good for two cups).

    In addition, they had The Other Flower Show art exhibition and Tracy Emin’s work in particular had a very dark sense of humour in it with a ouija board and knife in the centre of a children’s wendy house.

    One of the things I found out was that it was Architecture Week, judging by their materials and handouts both RIBA and the Arts Council had invested heavily in it. However beyond mentions in the design press about activity in Clerkenwell to celebrate the event we had not seen any press coverage. If you were involved in Architecture Week and want to get more publicity give me a call :-))

    The V&A area suffered from a dearth of fast food suppliers so Steve and myself had to decamp by foot to Leicester Square in order to support a heinous global corporation that tears down the rainforest and provides gainful employment to sociology graduates in the fast-food industry. More posts about getting out and about here.

  • Dance Music Industry

     Many dance music labels have closed down, particularly those owned by the majors like Strictly Rhythm and Credence. Cream runs festivals and restaurants rather than clubs and looks to Latin America and Eastern Europe for growth, Home is looking to be let out as retail space and the giant screen on the side of the building sits there in darkness

    – Young people are listening to rock now, yes they are but they also have varied taste – which is why dance music festivals are doing well

    – People want live music, the amount of live music venues in the UK dropped way below what it should have done and it is good to see it come back

    – People want R&B, R&B has always been popular

    – The dance music scene has stagnated, much of it has and UK record labels have been guilty of churning out more rubbish than most. The mash-up is a classic sign of creative bankruptcy in the industry and Hoxton’s tastes do not play well thoughout the rest of the UK. I cannot remember the last record I bought from a UK label, I suspect it was probably this time last year. I have however, kept buying imported records from the US and Europe

    – US labels like Nervous, Guidance or even going back to Trax Records and DJ International, survived in a hostile home market by selling abroad, why can’t the UK labels

    -US labels on the west coast are surviving an onslaught on to their scene by police using draconian crack house laws to shut the parties down and send organisers to jail for ten years, they are still making good music and selling records worldwide successfully

    – Young people are drinking and not doing drugs: that’s why cocaine seizures are up, MDMA is plentiful and cheap

    There are labels that are thriving: Defected is licensing American content from the likes of Miguel Migs. While there is much of the input like Junior Jack that is not my cup of tea you have to hand it Simon Dunmore that he is managing to walk the line between quality and commercial success for his label

    AATW – all around the world. A label based in Blackburn, Lancs that realised what Pete Waterman discovered twenty years ago. You can run a record label on single sales. Like Pete Waterman the records are well produced tat that know their target market really well. They are down market and the listeners are disparaged as ‘Northern Pill Monkeys‘ by London based record executives, and their acts are criticised as ‘a plumber with a tired lap dancer’ but they are getting out there and buying the singles.

    I personally don’t believe that you have to provide customers with a ‘crap’ product, that a well crafted one will sell, but you have to know your marketplace. Many of the tastemakers within the industry have lost sight of that and need to move on.

    One person that seems to have it right (all be it on a small scale) is my friend Nick Lawrence’s label Altered Vibes that has gone from strength to strength by not compromising on quality and developing its artists. Something that is hard to do when the majors like EMI are dropping 30 per cent of their rostered artists in one fell swoop and putting less and less each year into development. More media industry related posts here.

  • Science Museum with my Dad

    Mission to the science museum

    My parents came down for the weekend. While my Mam was content to chill out and do some knitting whilst listening to Daniel O’Donnell slaughtering country and western standards, my Dad and I were at a loss for something to do. Having been told by my friend Kirsty who has a little boy that the Science Museum has free admission, I had a brain wave.

    Steam power

    My Dad is a mechanical fitter by trade and we spent about two hours in the Science museum finding out about the development of the steam engine and the rise of the internal combustion engine. We found out that James Watt did not invent the steam engine (our school teachers lied to us) but improved on existing designs. We took a brief break and then pushed into the space section and then on into the modern world with everything from a Mills & Boon novel to an transgenic sheep proteins (derived from their milk). So far so good, the digital section did not impress, despite its architectural scale, but the aviation gallery got a big thumps up from Pops.

    When he comes down to pick my Mam up next week, we hope to go back to explore more of the Science Museum. By that time the Science Museum guidebook will have arrived and help us make more out of the visit, when we manage to get another visit in.

    Thameslink

    The journey home to Luton however was a bit of a trauma with Thameslink trains shutting down their service completely. I am thankful that my commute usually isn’t that traumatic. We had to get home via Milton Keynes (a soul less bit of urban planning) and it took us four hours. Once you get off the rail network the public transport outside London is poor. More related posts here.