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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Cristiano Ronaldo & things from last week

    Football star Cristiano Ronaldo is sponsored by a Japanese company to promote a facial fitness device resulting in a cringeworthy advertisement and some of the most uncomfortable event footage I have seen in a while. It is worthwhile watching just for the cringe factor. There is no word on how well the Cristiano Ronaldo promotion has been doing for manufacturer MTG.

    The deal looks like a triumph of money over fit with the Cristiano Ronaldo’s profile. It is a freakish spectacle. More related content here.

    Amazing video of how the FBI used to handle fingerprints prior to digitisation of records. The filing cabinets are impressive and the process is laborious. The sheer scale of the filing cabinet room is mind boggling. It is more like a factory than an office space.

    Finally a great presentation from New Zealand conference Webstock on the benefits of quitting, which seemed appropriate content to round this post off on

  • Pirate friendly platforms + more

    Govt waves stick at pirate friendly Google search • The Register – regulators upset at pirate friendly sites surfaced by the likes of Google. The problem is the momentum it starts towards mass censorship. Which begs the question, rather than just removing pirate friendly sites, why don’t they just go all the way and ask for Chinese style ‘harmonisation’ of the web and be done with it? Why not have one-party rule as well? It’s not about what they’re asking for, it’s the precedent for what might come down the line.

    Interview: Inside Google Brain Founder Andrew Ng’s Plans To Transform Baidu | Forbes – really interesting article on how Baidu is using AI or deep learning. And how Google has lost key talent to go and build these services in China instead.

    Anonymous Analytics: Tianhe Chemicals – interesting Chinese business report, the problem is one of trust and transparency make reports like these seem more credible. Audits of Chinese companies are too opaque, state secrets cover anything that China wants it to cover. It almost looks like a gangster state. More China related posts here.

    Nixon pardons Nu Skin | Bronte Capital – interesting article about network marketing beauty and wellness product company Nu Skin. Disclosure – I had consulted on Nu Skin business problems in China and Hong Kong when I worked out there.

    How China’s Mobile Ecosystem Is Different from the West | TheNextWeb – interesting how WeChat is driving app behaviours in Chinese consumers. The big impact will be felt in terms of operating system differentiation. A mid market phone becomes good enough eroding the premium phone sector.

    A billionaire’s son designs an app to keep nosy parents at bay | Quartz – interesting positioning away from WeChat and LINE, Hike has been around for a good 18 months and is only now getting publicity

  • Dual class listings + more things

    Don’t change listing rules until lawyers have to change theirs | South China Morning Post – interesting take on dual class listings. Not viable unless there are other protection measures in place like class-action lawsuits and contingency fees – which makes sense when one thinks about how Facebook, Google and Alibaba have gamed the dual class listing system in the US against shareholders. I am surprised that dual class listings hadn’t come into Hong Kong earlier to support control of local businesses by their oligarch family founders. I can understand why dual class listings would be attractive to the kind of mainland companies now looking to list in Hong Kong (paywall)

    ‘Closest thing China has to a presidential debate’: face-off between two geeks over a mobile phone | South China Morning Post – not too sure how much good this did either brand, but it did seem to provide good entertainment. I would love to see Richard Yu of Huawei do one :-)

    Wakie.com — Social Alarm Clock – I really like the idea of this, plays to the dynamics of sleeping through an alarm whilst becoming wide awake from a call

    Lessons to be learned from Yahoo’s native ads | VentureBeat – interesting op-ed by an OutBrain executive

    Fujifilm just one of several struggling manufacturers jumping into medicine | Japanese Times – it used to be that Japanese companies were pointed in the direction of markets by a government ministry, it is interesting that they are all now flocking towards healthcare

    Charting the rise of Generation Yawn: 20 is the new 40 – Telegraph – I heard a similar thing about gen-x, particularly around apparent apathy for causes. Don’t believe it, generations aren’t amorphous: for every hippy there was a young conservative in the boomer generation

    Fast-moving consumer goods market saturated in China | WantChinaTimes – bad news for Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive in the FMCG space. It is in these kind of circumstances where local brands will break out

    Technohyperbole | The Economist – takes on Gartner’s hype curve

    Apple To Developers: No Selling HealthKit Data To Advertisers – does this mean that marketers can’t use the data for other things? For instance, pre-screening for insurance premiums or weight loss classes?

    Beijing Scientists Replace A Boy’s Vertebra With A 3D-Printed Bone — The First Surgery Of Its Kind – titanium used, so I suspect sintered metal powder rather than a printing process