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

  • Facebook most shared

    I managed to get hold of some data about the top 10 of Facebook most shared sites and it made some interesting graphs. From a media perspective Facebook has become less social.

    What does Facebook most shared content tell us?

    For the past year or so there has been a steady sustained decline in the amount of content shared. This even has a name internally at Facebook – context collapse.
    Facebook top ten content domains shared (june 2015 - april 2016)
    This is even more striking when I compared it with 12 months of data from January 2014 to January 2015. One can see that the trend of the graph has gone from a positive to a negative slope. Secondly, different media organisations have sailed in and out of this chart showing that even now after years of experience they don’t a consistent formula for success.

    The media landscape also started to change to more reactionary content with the rise of titles like the Conservative Tribune and Breitbart.

    What these graphs don’t explain that well is why the drop in sharing happened. Did our media consumption become much more fragmented?
    domains shared (January 2014 - January 2015)
    These trend lines partly explain media’s push into other channels like SnapChat, especially given that Twitter has hit a natural ceiling in its subscriber base.

    Perilous pivot to video

    Secondly there has been a big push into video content, particularly live video content. Video is more expensive to produce, yet monetisation is difficult. Viewability of video ads is lower than display ads. One has to wonder about the sustainability of all this video production? Especially since many of these media organisations don’t seem to have managed long term success at the top of Facebook’s eco-system.
    Viewability

    Ad fraud or ‘invalid traffic’ is higher on video advertising inventory solid via programmatic platforms – which are the hot new thing. Both of which are issues of concern to marketers and publishers alike.
    programmatic

    More on Facebook related topics here.

  • 2016 Mary Meeker presentation

    2016 Mary Meeker’s annual presentation on internet trends is a tradition within the technology sector that goes back more than two decades. Meeker used to be a sell side analyst during the dot com boom and was known as a cheerleader for the sector. Unlike Harry Blodget she didn’t come unstuck with the subsequent bust.

    More recently Meeker moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with a VC firm. Hence the reason why the 2016 Mary Meeker presentation is done in conjunction with KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers).

    The key themes explored in the presentation this year include:

    • Mobile – a favourite for a number of years, but with over half of all internet sessions being done on a smartphone or similar it was inevitable that it would take up a substantial amount of the presentation. Mobile is maturing which is shown in the decline in growth rate of the sector this year. Android is picking up market share due to its cheaper handsets but still lagging behind in share of profit
    • Declining global economic growth. Global debt has risen higher and faster than global GDP. Population growth is also slowing and ageing. Meeker thought that India may be the bright spot due to its demographics, but this assumes that it can get over its structural issues and take advantage of its young population. That is probably overly-optimistic because of rising hindu nationalism
    • Online advertising – efficacy still a serious issue to be dealt with. Consumers hate it hence ad blocking.
    • Social: Meeker saw the big factors being video, images and messaging
    • Voice: the rise of voice driven assistants in the home and on mobile devices. The decoupling of China versus the rest of the world is apparent in this new category.

    Here is the latest iteration for 2016

    More on Mary Meeker here.

  • June 2016 research slides

    Here is a copy of the slides that I pull together (when I have the time) of publicly available data that would be of use. This is the June 2016 research slides.

    Google search volumes

    This month I have some new data around search which came from disclosures at Google I/O in terms of search volumes. We talk about social as if search has gone out of style but its growth is still staggering. This is now driven by mobile device penetration and adoption as computing devices on the go. It also speaks to the wider number of questions that search now answers. It used to be that search answered with ‘facts’ found online. It then became more contextual with shortcuts that gave you the weather forecast or a foreign exchange rate. Mobile moved this on further to items like local recommendations.

    Partly through the search box, but also by more meta detail about the device doing the searching and its location to within a few metres due to GPS and cell tower triangulation. Voice interaction has also started to impact search volume. Image driven search still seems to be an area that could drive much more potential search volume, that would be valuable for commerce.
    Google global search volume
    Looking at global search revenue over time, Google’s monopoly position becomes immediately apparent. It is amazing how Bing and Yahoo! haven’t managed to grow market share but just transfer value from one to the other. In the Chinese market, Sohu has been obliterated with Baidu search. But one does have to wonder about the value of web search, when so much internet usage now happens in the WeChat eco-system.
    Global Search Revenues
    More details about me here.
    Slide20

    Full presentation

    Full presentation available for download as a PDF on Slideshare and you can find more research related posts here.

  • 100 soundscapes + more things

    The 100 Soundscapes of Japan: A list of Japan’s greatest natural, cultural, and industrial sounds – this is the kind of project that the web was made of. It’s an inspired piece of work. Not to over-egg it but these 100 soundscapes are amazing. More Japan-related posts here.

    Burberry explores Mr. Burberry’s narrative via GQ films | Luxury Daily – its a smart time for Burberry to use this to work out a new brand positioning in the light of changing luxury market dynamics and its brand consolidation for Burberry Britain etc.

    I am a sucker for 1990s style CGI animation which seemed trippier and full of promise for an immersive cyber world that we would be able to one day jack into. This feels like it could be straight out of something like Lawn Runner Man or a vintage SIGGRAPH demo reel.

    This pre-film trailer for Regal Cinemas in the US is a classic example  of this. Play it on a big enough screen and it swallows you up without the need for 3D glasses. I remember watching Independence Day at a cinema and coming out with aching from having continually bracing myself from the action on screen. This video has a similar effect. This immersive perspective has changed as mobile devices have become more important.

    WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts—The First All Girl Radio Station in the Nation—Part 1 by The Kitchen Sisters on PRX – really interesting documentary on the US’s first all-women radio station. Some of the interviews are shockingly sexist in a way that couldn’t happen today. Even the title 100 Beautiful Watts – why is this necessary given its discussing audio? It’s irrelevant to the medium of radio? Despite these comments don’t let me put you off enjoying it

    We know acne, we don’t know teens. – YouTube – nice bit of honest marketing by Clearasil. We were all teens but every generations experience is a bit difference. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes as Mark Twain reputedly claimed.

  • Consumer Packaged Goods innovation

    Consumer packaged goods innovation – CB Insights put together an interesting presentation on the changing landscape of the consumer packaged goods sector.

    The key takeouts for me were:

    • The similarity to the technology sector in terms of startups developing a brand and selling out to a bigger firm
    • A key part of what they are buying is brand building – an activity that the likes of P&G and Unilever have excelled at in the past. Historically new product launches in CPG has a low success rate. Many brands have been going for decades. The startup acquisitions allow the Unilevers of the world to buy successes and change their portfolios faster
    • Start-ups and partnerships focused on process improvements across all business functions from supply chain management to the final interface between customer and product prior to purchase. Success and institutional heritage have baked processes and infrastructure in existing businesses that might hold them back looking at new channels. When I worked on an assignment at Unilever there were best practice guides for everything. These guides were smart and well written with lots of good heuristics in them. But you also had to complete an eight page form to get a search run on a social listening platform
    • Premium is defined around consumer values towards the environment rather than ‘luxury’. In this respect the CPG market kind of feels like the early 1990s in laundry products. Ecover started to get prominent place in UK supermarkets. You saw a good deal of product innovation from P&G and Unilever. You had liquid laundry dispensers that went in the tub and were supposed to reduce the amount of water used in the wash. However, pragmatism overran environmental concerns during the recession and supermarket’s own washing powder started to take off. Major brands were accused of brand washing