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

  • El Capitan + more things

    Things that made my day this week. I have been quiet on here as El Capitan has a real problem with memory leakage with regards to mail.app, this necessitated a complete rebuild of the computer (which didn’t solve anything) and an eventual pruning of the library. This is a real software quality problem for Apple. Be careful with El Capitan, otherwise you might have the same kind of pain that I endured. 

    Piers Sanderson, who I first met a few years ago has put out a new film called the Art of The DJ which uses the story of Steve Lawler to tell the wider story of the rise of the superstar DJ. When I met Piers he was struggling to get sponsorship to pay for the licensing rights to the music in his acid house film High on Hope. This time around, he has Lawler’s record label backing him and the documentary has been realised as a paid for stream through Lawler’s Facebook page. If you want to watch it it costs 3.50GBP.

    Taco Bell managed to make a brand event out of their rescue of the original Taco Bell store, which is being moved to Taco Bell headquarters for posterity. More from the old school web cam footage here.

    Jakob was just your average IP infringing online oversharer until the Business Software Alliance (basically Microsoft) legaled him in his native Czech Republic. He was offered a deal to appear in an anti-piracy film and had to gain 200,000 viewers. It looked like a win for the software owners, in reality Jakob has become a figure that netizens seem to have rallied around if you look at the comments on his video.

    I read Liar’s Poker in college and enjoyed his book The Big Short that is ostensively about investors who realised first that the mortgage market was unsustainable, but acted as a insiders guide to mortgage cons in a similar way to his insiders view of derivatives in Liars Poker over 25 years earlier. Hollywood is hoping to cash in on Lewis’ book in the same way that it did with Money Ball and the trailer looks awesome (hat tip  for the trailer to Whatleydude).

    More stories related to Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short here.

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • The limits of digital

    A few articles that I read over the past few days highlighted the limits of digital. The FT published an analysis on the modern problems that digital has wrought on the advertising industry.

    Jeff Goodby, chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – a successful longtime American advertising agency said:

    In the past, he said, the only true measure of success was whether the public knew and cared about your work. “You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two, whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.” Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”

    In essence advertising campaigns had lost talkability, positive brand associations and long term memorability – the kind of things that you would think of being important in terms of marketing’s role in brand building. Digital has worked in performance marketing, brand building shows up the limits od digital

    Brands, particularly emerging brands like designers have it as bad as advertising agencies, here’s fashion site Man Repeller on the challenges of building a brand:

    When I first started working in fashion retail, coming from a fine arts background, I thought it would be completely different. Working with the clothes but also seeing the way it had to recycle every six months got me thinking about the branding that gets pushed upon designers. I think it happens in all creative fields because of social media. I see it with a lot of my peers. We see the same obsession with youth — young painters — in the art world that you have in fashion with young designers, the same pressure for a cohesive vision. At 25? Nobody knows what they’re doing at 25. And that’s totally fine. You’re still finding yourself. And there has to be more room to find yourself when you’re young as opposed to this pressure to emerge as a fully formed Greek myth coming out with her uncracked egg, or whatever.

    Which impacts the kind of businesses likely to grow in the future. They are likely to be ‘culturally stunted’.

    The noisy environment of social has meant that brands are also distorting themselves to get cut through, Vice magazine covered what can only be described as sociopathic brand personalities of independent coffee shop chains in London.

    Or Instagram baiting street side billboards like a pub landlord who misquotes Enoch Powell and thinks that the National Front aren’t serious on race issues

    More digital related posts here.

    More information
    How the Mad Men lost the plot | FT
    MR Round Table: The Burnout Generation – Man Repeller
    London Is Tearing Itself Apart Because of Coffee Shop Sidewalk Signs | VICE

  • Green labels + more news

    Green labels

    There are more than 450 meanings behind “green” labels – Eco-conscious shoppers have probably noticed hordes of new “green-approved,” “100% natural” eco-friendly goods—claiming to be “certified” by some organization or other—popping up on store shelves. Green labels have many problems. One of them is that environmentalists can’t agree on what’s green so green labels are challenged. Let’s take take hybrids versus old cars on carbon footprint – since most carbon release is in manufacture, yet the hybrid cars would sell on green labels. Or electric cars overall, we don’t understand the energy requirement to recycle them yet they will get green labels. Ands thats before you look at how electricity is generated where they are being sold. Chinese electric cars may get green labels, but the majority of China’s electricity generation comes from coal-fired power stations.

    Business

    I, Cringely Amazon’s cloud monopoly – I, Cringely – Bob Cringely provides some interesting insights into the market position of Amazon regarding cloud services. It also highlights the challenges that Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in addressing Amazon’s cloud monopoly

    Yahoo, NHL Ban Employees from Paid Fantasy-Sports Sites | WSJ – ethics (paywall)

    Consumer behaviour

    68% of Chinese men are smokers—and millions will die because of it | Quartz – most of the cigarette brands are owned by state owned firms and China has a surplus of males to females. More China related posts here.

    Innovation

    Weekend edition—The lure of Mars, citizen Schmidt, lobster mysteries  – Hot on the heels of the release of the action movie The Martian—and the discovery that the red planet still has liquid water—NASA has unveiled a bold three-stage plan for getting humans to Mars – interesting lessons in messaging and storytelling from this

    Marketing

    adam&eveDDB, Temptations Dress Up Cats for the Holidays – Ad Week – blatant link bait

    Has Essena O’Neill signalled the end of influencer marketing? | Econsultancy – probably not, influencer marketing is too much ‘on trend’ but it does beg the question are the fees worth it?

    Online

    WeChat reading rates are dropping. How much, and why? – In mid-2015, the number of views of WeChat subscription accounts started to decline. Some popular accounts saw a decline of more than 50% in readership. More on WeChat here.

    product insights from wechat — Medium – interesting WeChat insights

    Technology

    Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain? – NYTimes.com – so your cryogenics is probably wasted

    Web of no web

    Watch How to Eat a Virtual Cookie | MUNCHIES – how is a virtual cookie possible? By altering the taste of food with different visual cues using virtual reality techniques – literally creating a virtual cookie.

    Wireless

    iPhone Vs Samsung: Apple is still the marketshare leader | BGR – Apple still commands more than 90% of all the profits in the smartphone market

  • The Boardroom + more stuff

    What The Boardroom Thinks About Data Breach Liability | Dark Reading – cybersecurity risk vs cost of insurance premiums is the sums that the boardroom will be making. Expect the insurers to force innovation and better practices on large corporates rather then doing it off their own bat, a case in point being Sony Entertainment breach and TalkTalk. There was surprisingly little impact on the boardroom given the seriousness of the cases

    Tablet users indifferent to upgrades | TechEye – because they work well on their current consumption media use cases

    Huawei who? We probe the sleeping storage dragon’s brains • The Register – nice summary of where Huawei is from in terms of history and culture

    Vulnerable Coffee Machine Demonstrates Brewing Security Challenges Of IoT | Dark Reading – not terribly surprising that the internet of things has such poor security. There is no incentives for vendors to harden the tech at all. The problem is that in categories like TVs, you no longer an purchase a ‘dumb’ option. More on IoT here

    Microsoft says that collecting user data is ‘not an issue of personal privacy’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – oh really???

    Facebook Prods Users to Share a Bit More – WSJ – interesting data point

    Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind – to save articles or get newsletters, alerts or recommendations

    Young shopper: south korean’s young shopper – What they expect from retailers | GfK – great insights on Korean consumers

    Microsoft Surface Book teardown reveals almost impossible-to-repair design | ExtremeTech – 1/10, just waiting for Greenpeace to realise that there is campaign mileage in low teardown scores

    Samsung Sells More Phones — but for Less Money – WSJ – the brutal commoditised business of Android handsets (paywall)

    Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws – Telegraph – you have no right to privacy but really bad people do

    ‘Candy Crush’ owner King sold to Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn – FT.com – (Paywall)