My week was dominated by Social Media Week. I got to see Battenhall’s opening presentation and catch up former colleagues from past agency and in-house lives. A lot of Social Media Week is useless, its like as if the industry doesn’t move on from the late 2000s. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to see Ogilvy’s presentation on Twitter cards, which look extremely useful. So will have to make do with Slideshare:
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
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Yahoo stock + more things
Yahoo Stock Crashes As Alibaba IPOs – Business Insider – Yahoo stock represents an ideal target to do an LBO and asset strip to pay down the debt. The challenge for shareholders of Yahoo stock is how to minimise
Ashley Madison Steps Up Search For Asian PR Support | Holmes Report – they are banned in South Korea and Singapore. Thailand would likely be added to the list if Ashley Madison launched there
Logistics: The flow of things | The Economist – explains why e-railers are building their own logistics networks (paywall)
Dude, where are my socks? | the Anthill – great story about a small TaoBao reseller
Bits Blog: Net Neutrality Comments to F.C.C. Overwhelmingly One-Sided, Study Says | New York Times – paywall
Apple – Privacy – interesting that Apple didn’t do this sooner
Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better | MIT Technology Review – Peter Thiel often comes across as a bit of a dick but is right on the money with regards the lack of hard innovation and excess of soft innovation
Single Chinese company owns 60% of world market for tantalum | WantChinaTimes – which is really important for electronics manufacture
Move over Hong Kong, here comes…Chengdu? | SCMP – huge economic growth in Chengdu which is viewed as an important city due to its proximity to the western edges of China which are the current high growth areas
Smartphone stress in Coolpad cuts, China Mobile ‘naked’ strategy | SCMP – bottom end of market suffering with Coolpad laying off 1,000 employees
Why news extortion is so hard to uncover | China Media Project – not just a Chinese problem, look at the uncomfortable aspects of media power with NewsCorp / News Int’l
Clamshells Gets Smart | CSS Insight – could we see a return of clamshell devices?
Facebook Is Hiding Important Information – Business Insider – nothing new pointing out yet again that mobile app adverts count for a significant amount of their revenue sales
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Flightdecks & things from last week
Virgin Atlantic’s forthcoming Flightdecks on board a plane being managed by Cake rather reminded me of the KLM Fly2Miami campaign done some three years ago. Both were about turning the cabin into an inpromptu night club with live DJ sets.
Apparently Virgin will be live streaming their event. The line up includes Gorgon City and Rudimental. It just goes to show that an idea like Flightdecks can run and run.The World Economic Forum held another event in China this year and there was a rare opportunity to hear Chinese policy makers talk about the web. In short, the libertarian values of the web that we all know and love which came from the 1960s counterculture movement is likely to be reined in globally because the one thing governments can agree on is that more regulation and power is something they rather like.
It included Lu Wei the minister of cyberspace administration from the Chinese government. It is impressive that they take it so seriously when the internet was largely seen as a joke by UK politicians prior to Edward Snowden’s embarrassing disclosures. But then China spends three times as much on internal security as it does on defence. Internet companies like Alibaba have broadened the marketplace into rural ‘TaoBao villages’ as rural enterprises.
The only technology vendor / service provider represented was Qualcomm which felt unbalanced.
SmartInsights had a great set of examples of digital experiential marketing using VR headsets like the Oculus Rift.
iOS 8 rolled out the other day, my iPhone toting counterparts in the office are happy with it. I am giving it until after the weekend to ensure that any vagaries with carrier settings are ironed out before upgrading my phone. More iOS related content here.
Liam Neeson’s A Walk Among The Tombstones is actually based on a novel rather than a darker remake of the Taken series of films but the trailer looks epic.
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DJ equipment + more stuff
Pioneer To Sell DJ Equipment Business For More Than Half A Billion Dollars » Synthtopia – interesting move, particularly with the launch of the new turntable. Pioneer’s DJ equipment business gave them a fill up as hi-fi revenue dropped. Pioneer CDJs managed to replace Technics as the industry standard in DJ equipment for many clubs. What will happen with things like IP?
Fareed Zakaria Never Stopped Plagiarizing: How Dozens Of Episodes Of His CNN Show Ripped Others Off | Our Bad Media – looks like a potential new media storm-in-a-teacup. If he plagiarises, he has good taste with the material he takes
Daring Fireball: Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations – a key point missing here is that you don’t buy a watch when you pay for a luxury watch; you buy into the support network behind it which will keep it running at a price decades from now.
Foreign firms should not control so much of the Chinese economy | WantChinaTimes – explains antitrust crackdowns
This Chennai startup thinks the first click for an e-commerce purchase will soon be on a camera – reminds me of the virtual Homeplus (Tesco) stores in Korea
Daring Fireball: Promotional Images That Hide the iPhone 6 Camera Bulge – interesting that John Gruber has called it a mistake
Using app-specific passwords | Apple – Apple’s way around dealing with recent hacking scandals
Facebook partners with Google, Twitter, others to launch ‘TODO’ – Inside Facebook – interesting move and interesting omissions in the participants
The Apple Watch Won’t Kill the Swiss Watch Industry | The NextWeb – it makes sense that TAG Heuer would make a smart watch being the most feminine of the brands in LVMH’s roster of serious watch brands
Are Agencies Killing Their Programmatic Golden Goose? | WSJ – opaque practices and pricing models of some of these agency groups have recently led marketers to question how their money is being spent, and in some cases to shun the groups completely in favor of building their in-house alternatives. More related content here.
The single, buried statistic that explains China’s slowdown – Quartz – implication that construction is down
DisplayPort 1.3 announced w/ support for upcoming 5K displays, enhanced 4K performance | 9to5Mac – 5k displays already
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Digital PR report (in the UK)
The PRCA have put together a digital PR report for the UK market in association with YouGov and the Holmes Report. The report made for interesting reading and raised some questions in my own mind about the industry.
The main challenge raised by the panelists interviewed by the Holmes Report was one of agencies spreading themselves to wide in terms of a service offering. I think that this is about knowing when to partner and when to do it in agency. They flagged training as a secondary issue; I have done training in a number of agencies and found that the issue was having teams be able to implement their knowledge in a timely manner.
Back to the digital PR report:
Considering that the digital PR report was both agencyside and inhouse the sample size could be bigger. I suspect that the sample skewed towards business-to-business sectors looking at the answers later on. I suspect that the total digital marketing spend was bigger than the figures quoted simply because it probably happens outside the sphere of the communications department interviewed in these surveys.
A smaller majority of respondents struggled to measure the ROI of social, but majority of respondents also said that their goals for social were ‘general marketing’, brand awareness and reach. This would be harder to wrap SMART objectives around to measure the activity against. Perhaps it is a mistake that so many in-house teams were defining social strategies? For business-to-business clients that I work with marketing automation tools are being looked to, in order to provide the ‘last mile’ in attribution and ROI for tactics that would fall under digital PR.
I was surprised that 74% of respondents felt that the communications department was the first choice for digital tactical activity. I would have expected a stronger showing from marketers, this may be skewed by the sample. Part of the reason for my surprise is that many of the tactics used in digital PR would fall under search and digital marketing disciplines; we’ve hit a singularity in marketing and the roles and responsibilities could get messy. The numbers suggested a rise in the number of organisations with dedicated social teams; which was closer to my hypothesis.
Looking at in-house needs versus agency offerings I was very conscious of the fact that search seems to have largely passed the PR industry by; except when it comes to ‘online reputation management’ and ‘digital crisis management’. Whilst agencies think that digital is going to be a massive source of revenue, there seems to be be a reallignment of figures required as more inhouse teams get on with it without agency help.
In terms of branching out into future platforms I was surprised to see Instagram rank so highly for what feels like largely business-to-business respondents. I can only assume that Google+ was considered a future platform as this survey could have been conducted prior to Google recently moving away from attaching content authorship to Google+ profiles. In terms of training requirements, web design and build is probably something that should be provided by a professional rather than training PRs to have a go. Whilst intelligent, generally PR people aren’t that visual in their thinking (despite what they may say, the proof of the pudding is in the multitude of pitch decks that I have seen over the past 16 years or so).
More information
Study: Digital Skills Gap Poses Challenge For UK PR Firms | Holmes Report