Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • QQ themed KFC + more news

    First QQ themed KFC opens in Shenzhen | Marketing Interactive – interesting brand collaboration. KFC has always made a point of being more local and closer to the Chinese consumer than rivals. This has paid off over time. It is no surprise that there is a QQ themed KFC, but what’s next in terms of media-dining experiences? What could be the content tie-ins that would bring a QQ themed KFC concept to life? Is it the China market answer to Chuck E. Cheese?

    Here’s How Snapchat Might Be Beating Facebook | TIME – relative engagement rates and popularity with millennials desirable for marketers. But it has easily copied features and might end up being the beta tester for Instagram’s new features.

    Pentax K-1 Hands-on First Impressions – Bokeh by DigitalRev – I really like the look of it. Pentax has had a rough ride with change in owners but they are still a great DSLR camera platform. One of the key reasons for this is the cheap but good quality lens available for it.

    Google takes aim at Microsoft and IBM’s enterprise clients (GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, IBM) | BusinessInsider – probably not what IBM needs at the moment. I think that Microsoft would have much less worried simply because it has better client relationships. IBM Global Services have had issues for years documented by Robert X. Cringely in The Decline And Fall Of IBM

    Is Apple starting to rot in China? Top level thoughts – SocialBrandWatch – It is less about ‘what the phone projects externally’, and more about “does the phone allow me connect digitally, if so, I am open to what fits me best” – interesting cross platform commoditisation as app layer becomes OS. WeChat is doing what Netscape thought that they could do with the browser and the web in the late 1990s. Also smartphones in trough part of innovation. The big gains between models are no more.

    How Facebook’s Stock Split Lets Mark Zuckerberg Keep Control | Fast Company – getting out ahead of things to prevent a future Yahoo! situation with activist investors and slowing growth ending up in tortious tech death

    Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network | Digiday – ok, but where’s the revenue and user growth? Twitter has a lot of things going for it except the ability to effectively

    Google just pissed off the entire TV industry | TheNextWeb – hahahahahaha really, lets see reach curve data across different consumer groups and CPMs. Technology companies don’t get marketing and branding. They do get sales, but they’re lame on brand and really understanding the consumer. More posts on advertising here.

    The Guardian bets big on VR: ‘We’ve jumped in the deep end of the pool’ | Digiday – feels more like an experiment or a PR stunt rather than a meaningful media exercise. I guess it could be an interesting way to explore storytelling in VR. Film doesn’t work as well as an analogue as it has in video gaming. VR seems to be more about experiences and emoting

    Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek – My own take is Mayer had a nearly impossible job as a turnaround, but a manageable job as an optimise and shred. The products launched just weren’t up to standard and those that were aren’t monetised well. How on earth could Tumblr be worthless. We’re talking not just about underachieving a la Twitter, but literally having no value. When Yahoo! bought Flickr it was breaking even and they managed to ruin that as well

    This is one big example of the market conditions that are holding Apple down (AAPL) – lengthening upgrade cycles. You’ll see an emphasis on services. It also means that the first Apple device is a pre-owned Apple device

    Kaiser Kuo on Baidu, Foreign Reportage, and the ‘Paradoxes’ of China | Asia Society – great interview. Kaiser is one of the best ‘translators’ of China out there.

    The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium – interesting vision thing on the IoT by Tom Coates.

    Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds | Reuters – The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period. 

    Penney’s results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools. – I am not terribly surprised as an Irish child growing up in the UK during the Troubles I saw the community around me self-censor so they couldn’t be accused of anything.

    Apple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster | NYTimes.com – “None of the brands do really great,” he said. “But while I might sell one or two Huawei phones in 10 days, I may not even sell one iPhone 6s.” (paywall)

    The rise of China’s millionaire research scientists | South China Morning Post – A total 1.4 trillion yuan was spent on the sector last year, according to the government, more than the entire GDP of New Zealand

  • Yahoo’s downfall

    I’ve seen a lot written about Yahoo’s downfall.

    Most of it lacks insight. And at the most basic level lacks precision. Yahoo is an employee who works at Yahoo! or Y! (the Y-bang). It was the best culture I ever worked in; and the most dysfunctional company that I ever worked for. I got to work with amazing people at a company that managed to fumble the ball on opportunity after opportunity. Most analysis you see comes from outsiders who lack insight.

    So when I came across this question on Quora and decided to post my answer. I’ve shared my answer on this blog with additional data points and information on ‘Yahoo’s downfall’.
    Yahoo! star
    This is a big question. In the answers that it will receive you are likely to see:

    • Difference of opinions about the reasons of the decline
    • Differences of opinion  about when the decline actually set in. Which begs the question was the downfall that drastic?

    Before we get into the why, lets think about the nature of businesses.

    Public listed companies generally don’t last forever

    The AEI said that 88 per cent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1954 are gone. Yahoo! is between 21 and 22 years old depending which way you count its age.

    Yahoo! has outlasted many of its peers:

    • Excite – merged with @Home Network in 1999. It went bankrupt in October 2001. It was sold in December 2001. By 2007, the business was broken up by territory.
    • Lycos – was sold three times, each time for a fraction of the purchase price
    • Hotbot – bought by Lycos
    • AltaVista – minority stake sold to CMGI in 1999. Bought by Overture in February 2003. Yahoo! acquired Overture in July 2003

    Only MSN remains of the original brands that it competed against. If MSN wasn’t a Microsoft business, its survival would be questionable. Microsoft’s online services lost money from 2006 through 2010. By comparison, Yahoo! has kept making a profit – despite its issues.

    Macro-effects

    The technology sector has become a hunting ground for active investors. Back in the 1980s, American publicly listed brands were attacked by investors:

    • RJ Nabisco – leveraged buyout by KKR
    • Gulf Oil & Unocal – T. Boone Pickens had failed bids for both oil companies but made a large profit on his holdings
    •  TWA – leveraged buyout by Carl Icahn. Icahn’s business practices were responsible for its bankruptcy in 1992 and 1995
    • Revlon – acquired in a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman, much of the business was broken up to pay for the deal

    In the 1990s, factors changed:

    • Credit lines for deals dried up as some leveraged buyouts proved to be bad for investors
    • Businesses developed more effective defences including poison pills, golden parachutes and greater debt
    • Overall value of the stock market increased. This reduced the amount of opportunities to get companies on the cheap

    Moving forward 20 years, the technology sector became in a similar place

    Historic technology businesses have moved from being high growth to value businesses. This changed the nature of investors interest in them.

    • Microsoft gave a seat on its board to an activist shareholder ValueAct Capital
    • Apple started paying dividends and raising the debt on its balance sheet to fend off Carl Icahn

    Google’s unique two-tier shareholding structure has proved to be an effective defence so far.

    A business like Yahoo! looks like a classic corporate raid target as its value is less than the sum of its parts. It has a regular cashflow that could service a lot more debt at current interest rates. It has assets that can be quickly sold.

    Capital has become much cheaper. This is partly a result of low interest rates set to keep the economy out of trouble in 2008. But there is also a lot of foreign capital and pension fund money looking for a home.

    Missed opportunities

    Given that we have the perfect vision of hindsight, Yahoo! missed key opportunities. Here are some of them.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Google

    Yes, Yahoo! did fail to buy Google. And their competitors failed to buy Google as well. Excite rejected the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000 in a deal arranged by Vinod Khosla. By comparison Terry Semel, then CEO of Yahoo! failed to buy Google for $5 billion. At the time Yahoo!’s entire market value was roughly $5 billion.

    Yahoo! failed to buy DoubleClick

    While Yahoo! was playing catch-up with Google on search. Google outbid the online industry to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. DoubleClick provided advertisers with more opportunities to place banner ads than Yahoo! did.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Facebook

    Terry Semel offered $1 billion for Facebook in 2006. Semel wouldn’t go to $1.1 billion Facebook’s board wanted.

    Yahoo! failed to sell to Microsoft

    I don’t think that the Microsoft deal was a serious offer. There are  reasons to be suspicious:

    • Microsoft couldn’t make its own online business profitable at the time. The deal was unpopular with shareholders
    • Yahoo!’s contribution to the open source community would have been an antitrust issue
    • It would have to get through approval by Japanese competition authorities
    • It would likely have to get through Chinese antitrust authorities

    Yahoo! didn’t communicate these risk factors to shareholders. Which then left the door open for the Microsoft-funded Carl Icahn coup later on.

    Yahoo!’s board has failed the company

    I think that there is a stronger argument for this when you look at their selection of CEOs over the years

    • Tim Koogle – led Yahoo! on the upcycle of the dot.com boom. He resigned and replaced by Terry Semel during the bust that followed.
    • Terry Semel – was a senior media industry executive who bought the business out of the bust. He never got the product and never used email. He never managed to build a media company despite his Hollywood heritage.
    • Jerry Yang – history will look with more favour on Jerry Yang in the future. He did the Yahoo! Japan  and Alibaba deals which are the most interesting parts of Yahoo! today. As a CEO, his time was consumed by  Microsoft’s hostile bid
    • Carol Bartz – Bartz was a Microsoft approved appointee. Her deal on Facebook Connect saw the social network build its business on the back of Yahoo!’s user database. Bartz does the Microsoft search deal badly. She also launched mobile apps that were bad. The one thing she needs respect for is her approach to marketing. Bartz realised that she needed to promote the entire Yahoo! brand. Although there was a buzz marketing team in the US, most marketing was based around products. Unfortunately the execution of the brand campaign was poor. This was partly because it was led from the US with little engagement of regional and national marketing teams.
    • Scott Thompson – stayed for five months. Allegations were made about his education, better due diligence on his recruitment required.
    • Ross Levinsohn – Ross served as interim CEO after Thompson left. It is hard to know what CEO he would have made. But his successor seems to have borrowed his strategy.
    • Marissa Mayer – Despite the goodwill Mayer had going into the job she hasn’t managed to change Yahoo!’s current business. That the company’s strategy is being driven by activist shareholders says a lot.

    Problems in execution

    Yahoo! had its fortune hitched to brand display advertising. Growth has dropped in this for the past ten years. Yahoo!’s declining advertisng revenues started in Q2 of 2006. Part of the problem was that Yahoo! had been too successful to begin with. Yahoo! sold its display advertising for way more than it was worth.

    Yahoo! failed to monetise search as well as Google. And then handed its search business over to Microsoft, who failed to do as good as job as Yahoo! managed on its own.

    Yahoo! failed to execute in mobile, despite some smart early efforts. Photo community Flickr was the default photo app on Nokia’s N73 blockbuster smartphone. The N73 launched at the end of April 2006. It was was one of the last things I worked on before leaving. Given that headstart Flickr could have been Instagram. Instead its a more specialist community of ‘proper’ photography enthusiasts. Yahoo! Messenger and Mail both worked on Nokia handsets from the mid-2000s. Yahoo! Go was an app which provided access to services including:

    • Flickr
    • Address book
    • Calendar
    • Email
    • Maps
    • Search
    • Content: news, weather, finance, sports, entertainment

    It could have provided the same function that Android provides for Google, but Yahoo! considered as ‘beta software’ right up to it’s demise in January 2010. Yahoo! has been providing Apple with weather information and stock data for the iPhone. Yet it hasn’t managed to build a successful iPhone app.

    One way of illustrating the decline of Yahoo! in mobile is to look at the user numbers of Yahoo! mail, which seems to have peaked around September 2011.
    Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail users over time
    Hotmail shows a linear increase over time, likely due to organisation changes as it has moved to the cloud and Gmail takes off, presumably on the back of Android – though iOS users also have Gmail accounts.

    Yahoo!’s acquisition process was broken. Ever since Yahoo! wasted 1 billion dollars buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com the business slowed down. Broadcast.com was a scare on the collective memory. Capital decisions took longer, acqusitions took longer. The cheque book was harder to open. Under Marissa Mayer, it was finally let loose, but the purchases seem to have made little difference.

    Yahoo! failed to become a media company. Back when I was at Yahoo! we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone – a sort of proto Vice News in 2005. Despite Semel’s Hollywood background, he and following CEOs never made it work. Despite the fact Yahoo! had joint ventures with TV networks in Australia and Canada. When Marissa Mayer finally managed to get talent in the door, audiences had moved to other sites:

    • Gawker Media
    • Buzzfeed
    • Daily Beast
    • Aol’s blog network
    • Huffington Post

    Yahoo’s downfall in social is spectacular. Yahoo! owned pioneer social brands, any of which could have been the Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp:

    • Yahoo! Chat – chatrooms were the Facebook Groups of yesteryear. Yahoo! was doing social before it was a thing
    • Delicious – neglect, internal politics and corporate interference meant that Yahoo! never capitalised on Delicious. Despite its tribulations there are some people who still use it, though I am not sure why
    • Flickr – corporate interference and neglect destroyed the potential growth of photo sharing site Flickr. The site is kept going as a photographic enthusiasts community. It could have been Instagram. Thankfully, Yahoo! only spent $30 million on it
    • Yahoo! Messenger – Yahoo!’s Messenger had a poor mobile client, but could have been WhatsApp. Facebook dominates the sector along with Tencents WeChat, NHN’s LINE and Daum Kakao’s KakaoTalk
    • Tumblr – Yahoo! was forced to writedown the value of Tumblr to nothing. The company failed to monetise the popular blogging and curation platform. Tumblr is one of Yahoo!’s few products that attracts a millennial audience

    Yahoo! products had a poor experience. I launched over 14 products at Yahoo! in just over a year. I only ever used 2 of them on a regular ongoing basis – Delicious and Flickr. Other products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! MyWeb 2 – fell into three categories:

    • Dogs to use – particularly in the set-up part of the process
    • Not particularly useful – Yahoo! Answers, great idea in prinicple but poor cultural fit. That poor fit meant that it filled up with noise, Yahoo! Answers isn’t as useful as Quora
    • Strangled soon after birth – so it became frustrating to commit your time to them as a user

    Politics paid a part in this process. The Communications group (responsible for Messenger and Mail) had a lot of duplicate products. Yahoo! Photos was a bad version of Flickr. For storing your bookmarks there was:

    • Yahoo! Bookmarks
    • Yahoo! MyWeb
    • Yahoo! MyWeb 2
    • Delicious

    This all bogs management down and sucks away resources. There were also so many projects that never saw the light, due to constant changes in priority. More Yahoo!-related posts here. What do you think brought about Yahoo’s downfall?

    More information
    Fortune 500 firms in 1955 vs. 2014; 88% are gone, and we’re all better off because of that dynamic ‘creative destruction’ | AEI Ideas
    Microsoft’s Bing/MSN Results Truly Horrifying — Loss Rate Balloons To ~$3 Billion A Year | Business Insider
    Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price | Minyanville 
    A Microsoft First: Activist ValueAct Gets a Board Seat – WSJ
    How Yahoo! Blew It | Wired
    Yahoo! Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today’s Valuation | Business Insider
    Sorry Microsoft, Yahoo — Google Just Got Bigger | Ad Age

  • Thin film electronics + more things

    Coal redefined for thin film electronics | Electronics EETimes – sounds like a graphene connection. Thin film electronics is going to be key for wearables

    Web Summit 2016 | Approach to marketing – it does beg the question why should a marketer support this and go to their conference?

    The VR idea maze — Benedict Evans – worthwhile read. I think the point made on content is particularly pertinent. We may have the hardware but it could take decades for the craft of content creation to come to full fruition

    China’s government sounds out international PR agencies about how to polish nation’s image overseas, sources say | South China Morning Post – A spokesman for WPP, which owns Hill+Knowlton declined to comment. Ketchum also declined to comment. Fleishman Hillard Inc, Ogilvy Public Relations and Edelman did not respond to messages requesting comment – Weber Shandwick attracted negative attention working for China during the run up to the 2008 Olympics and Ketchum had a similar experience working for Russia

    Microsoft’s Silver Lining Is Shrinking — The Information – not surprisingly moving a cloud model disrupts Microsoft’s margins in comparison to package software (paywall)

    Off the grid – Official site of Stephen Fry – interesting essay on the perils of social media

    China Unicom bets on turnaround as net profit plunges 85pc | SCMP – 4G network capital costs and increased marketing costs

    “Overpaid and underperforming”: An anonymous investors’ letter lashes out at Nikesh Arora — Quartz – there are other shoes to drop on this. Looking that the shareholders hold ADRs rather than SoftBank shares – this is a US led charge. It is also interesting that this happening right before the Yahoo! shoe drops. SoftBank,  and its Yahoo! Japan joint venture are a key part of Yahoo! Inc’s value

    Korean TV Dramas Are the Best Export Since ‘Gangnam Style’ | Digital – AdAge

    Pirate Bay Founder: Streaming Model Could Ignite New Piracy War – TorrentFreak – really interesting essay. I had a similar experience with Apple’s iBooks. I bought James Michener’s Mexico for a long flight and trip, tried to download it a week later and it was no longer available. I now buy mostly paper books

    Brands rip up media plan in the face of disruption – it decided last September, in consultation with MediaCom, to take more radical action. Tesco slashed its media budget for newspapers to practically zero and shifted most of the money into online and social media. TV and other traditional media have also been heavily cut (reg wall)

    Can audio go viral on Facebook? Here’s what happened when NPR ran an experiment for a month » Nieman Journalism Lab – Sharing audio on social media is hard to do. Stan Alcorn documented many of the struggles two years ago in a widely cited Digg story

    Elisabeth Murdoch’s Vertical Networks creating ‘Brother’ Snapchat Discover channel – Business Insider

    IRIN | Spies Sans Frontières? – the ethical conundrums around this are particularly interesting. More security related posts here.

    Is Programmatic Expertise Moving In-House? – EContent Magazine

  • Integrated agency wins

    I started thinking about integrated agency wins when I read that Asda appointed Publicis after a short pitch process this week.
    ASDA
    What was notable about the win was that it covered both creative and media briefs. Notable enough to become a conversation topic when I met up with industry friends for coffee. Integrated wins are not that common.

    WPP has managed to win global single agency accounts:

    • Ford Motor Company
    • HSBC
    • Colgate-Palmolive
    • News International
    • Bank of America
    • Miller Coors
    • Ford Motor Company
    • Mazda
    • Huawei

    Then there was Enfatico for Dell.  Enfatico struggled with personnel changes at the client and client culture.

    The Publicis deal is is more modest in one respect, it only affects Walmart’s UK business, but is still £95m.

    On the face of it, integrated appointments have a lot to offer, so why aren’t they more common?

    Let’s first look at the pros of an arrangement:

    • Better chance of not getting silo-ed thinking from the agency. Both creative and media can be part of the ideation process. One of the big parts of WPP’s early success was a focus on media investment management. This broke the symbiotic creative relationship between media and creative. It worked well for a number of years, but with integrated agency wins, the pendulum seems to be swinging back the other way
    • New ways of audience targeting as part of the creative process. The concern is the combined profitability of the account. Rather than a focus on media profitability

    Barriers to adoption:

    • Current contractual timings don’t allow for pitching media and creative business together. It seems so obvious, but there may not be a convenient break clause in place
    • Pitches are often driven by procurement teams; who look at better value in continuity, rather than a more holistic approach

    Weakness of a combined media and creative agency arrangement:

    • The marketing group may not have strength in all areas. I worked for a large marketing group which held the global account of an FMCG company. Despite being part of a global marketing group, we couldn’t execute in two markets for the client. This affected the social media marketing work we did for them and they weren’t happy
    • Dependent on the marketing team, they may not want to work with a media agency that:
      • Operates an arbitrage model. Having bought the ad space from the media, they then sell it on to clients with targeting data
      • Operates a model that isn’t media neutral to meet wider internal goals
    • Clients often think of the arrangement only as a way of cost reduction

    There are also weaknesses with the single client agency model as WPP has done it:

    • Set-up costs are usually shared across clients, but where there is dedicated infrastructure. This cost will have to be borne by the client, upfront or salted in the fees
    • From a client perspective there is moral pressure to maintain the agency relationship. This complicates the client’s ability to ensure cost-competitive rates
    • Less opportunities to cross-pollinate ideas across categories. This is because the agency is focused on one client only

    While Asda have taken an interesting first step, hiring an integrated offering. The hard work is only now starting:

    • Putting in place the right working practices client and agency-side
    • Changing the creative process to take advantage of integration
    • Have a proven positive effect on Asda’s sales figures in the face of competition from Lidl and Aldi

    More posts on WPP here, and Publicis here.

    More information
    Asda hands £95m media and creative to Publicis Groupe in double coup | Marketing Magazine
    WPP Folds Ill-Fated Dell Agency Enfatico Into Y&R Brands | Advertising Age

  • With a VHS… + more things

    ‘I feel like my granddad with a VHS’: UK agency Gen Xers on Snapchat – Digiday – great headline, though I think that they would struggle just as hard with a VHS reciorder. Discover is showing interesting content

    Apple Watch sales: 2016 projection shows it’s gaining no traction | BGR – really interesting survey. I wonder if you would have got similar data 1 year after the launch of the Apple Watch II? I sold my Apple Watch II as the notifications weren’t nuanced enough and I didn’t find a killer app yet

    China’s New Conglomerates | The Financialist – nice summary of Alibaba and Tencent

    不带钱包在中国怎么度过24小时？结果让外国人惊呆了…… – CNN on WeChat

    Anticipating change – really nice strategic model

    Facebook Livemap – where Facebook streams are happening in real time

    Facebook Wants You to Post More About Yourself – Bloomberg – Facebook employees working on the problem have a term for this decline in intimacy: “context collapse.”

    From VW to HSBC, there’s a simple reason why so many CEOs fail to spot rogue behaviour | South China Morning Post – Responsibility is being dodged because those at the top insist they are suffering from information overload

    Cruz Campaign Abandons Cutting-Edge “Behavioral” Voter Targeting Tech, Say Sources | Fast Company | Business + Innovation – interesting that they moved away from pyschometric targeting

    Facebook Struggles to Stop Decline in ‘Original’ Sharing — The Information – 15 per cent drop in original sharing apparently

    Why All Printers Suck (Even the Best Ones) | The Wirecutter – so true. I use a basic laser printer

    Xiaomi now even have their own transformer! – Gizchina.com – smart tie in Xiaomi and Hasbro bonds with the consumer at an emotional level

    Moleskine ® – Smart Writing Set – interesting device, feels evolutionary from a technology point of view, not that it is a bad thing

    Huawei Struggles to Be Cool – Digits – WSJ – nice summary of Huawei’s fashion collabs. More Huawei related stuff here

    The 2016 State of Link Building Survey – Results & Analysis – Moz

    Panama Papers: Email Hackable via WordPress, Docs Hackable via Drupal – Wordfence

    Welcome to Thington – interesting translation layer and UI thrown over the smart home

    Saint Laurent deletes its entire Instagram feed | Dazed – how do you say cat fight?

    StarCom MediaVest and MYJAR online endorsements case – GOV.UK – clear labelling of promoted content online

    People are reportedly sharing fewer personal updates on Facebook | The Verge – not terribly surprising, changing norms around privacy, OTT messaging platforms and reduced utility which seems to be an inverse network effect