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
MLM or multi-level marketing is where people who need to make money buy product from a company like Avon, Amway, Herbalife, Nu-Skin or Tupperware. Usually the franchisee doesn’t buy directly but through a contact. They may be a long way down in a chain of sellers, which means you end up with a pyramid scheme. Some have described the onboarding and seller communications as a cult. (Disclosure, I did a bit of agency work on Nu-Skin when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to see products, but not how they were sold).
Financial freedom
The real product of MLM seems to be hope. Discussing the downside of MLM at this time is important. Financial freedom is going to sound particularly appealing to struggling middle class households wrestling with the cost of living crisis and rising mortgage interest rates.
These videos by Sean Munger give a really good insight into Amway.
Ponzinomics
Robert Fitzpatrick’s self-published Ponzinomics seems to be the most cited book talking about the underbelly of MLM. Here’s an interview with him.
Soviet space programme
Enough time has gone buy for us to know how innovative the Soviet space programme was. Some of the innovations were dictated to them by limitations in production campacity. I came across these films about it.
And how Russian closed cycle rocket engines surprised NASA after the cold war.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves period drama novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God were remade in 1976 as a 13 part TV series. (The first two episodes are called 1a and 1b, presumably to avoid an episode 13, given that theatre as a whole is superstitious). In 1965, the BBC had done a documentary about the unfinished 1937 film version and had found bringing their version to television difficult due to production rights still tied into the 1937 production.
I, Claudius was considered to be a high water mark from point of view of audience viewership of more high brow material and latterly critics consider it to be one of the best TV programmes ever on British TV.
Hello Hong Kong
I received post from friends in Hong Kong and the package had a large sticker highlighting the Hello Hong Kong campaign which the government has been using to paper over the cracks left by its authoritarian pivot.
Hello Hong Kong mandatory sticker.
One part of me thought that ambient media such as the sticker might be a good side hustle for mail services everywhere. As I dug into it, I found out that the staff ‘had to’ put these stickers on the packaging and at least some of them were doing so reluctantly. At least some customers were reluctant for their packages to be ‘propaganda banners’ for the Beijing backed regime. Meanwhile 7/21 alleged government backed triad actions are still fresh in the mind of locals.
YKK
You don’t think about how YKK clothes zips work effortlessly, but this Asianometry documentary gives you insight into the Japanese zip manufacturer.
Starbucks Rewards as massive bank
I used to use the Starbucks pre-payment system back when I could use it in both the UK and Hong Kong, but a rupture came in when Starbucks removed its rewards scheme from stored value cards to an app. So I found this video by ColdFusion reframing the Rewards scheme as a large bank like pool of money more akin to PayPal’s float than Avios loyalty points.
Apollo project astronauts off the record
On everything from the context of Project Apollo through to their views on climate change.
Restaurant of mistaken orders
A Japanese pop-up retail project with restaurant servers who are suffering from dementia. I was sent the link by a friend of mine from Japan – the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders really brings the impact home.
The two stand out films of the summer are Barbie and Oppenheimer . Oppenheimer is a biopic of scientist and Manhattan Project lead J. Robert Oppenheimer, based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer went on to lead the projects Los Alamos lab. Los Alamos National Laboratory has gone on to do scientific research on defence projects as well as health related projects. Casting of Cillian Murphy provides a good physical resemblance of Robert Oppenheimer.
J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic
Oppenheimer is a complex film with the story told in the form of flashbacks. It also tries to reinterpret Oppenheimer for the present day, with a sense of guilt that Oppenheimer never personally expressed. But Oppenheimer had been concerned about the nuclear arms race and weapons proliferation. He opposed the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. These positions along with his friendships with communist party members in the US, led to him losing his security clearance in 1954.
J. Robert Oppenheimer via the US Department of Energy
Barbie
Barbie looks to bring to life Mattel’s toy characters Barbie and Ken. Barbie was introduced in 1959 as a copy of a German fashion doll line. The fashion doll line came out of a cartoon strip in the Bild tabloid newspaper. Mattel went on to buy the German originator and shut it down. But by this time the German doll moulds were bought or copied by manufacturers in Hong Kong and Spain.
1990s vintage Barbie
The Barbie movie addresses head on the cultural and design legacy of Barbie alongside present-day culture wars
Barbie starts off in a matriarchal fantasy world; Ken is represented as a boy toy
Eventually Barbie and Ken end up in the real world. Barbie meet her owner who accuses her of setting unrealistic beauty standards
Ken learns about the male patriarchy, which means a battle of the sexes ensues when they both return to toyland
Barbeheimer
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were released in the cinema at the same time going head-to-head with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. This led to cinema goers taking advantage and buying a ticket to see each film one after the other. The practice of watching Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double-bill became so common it was given its own name Barbenheimer, when then became a thing in the news, on podcasts and social media. It has been credited with listing the business performance of cinemas, while sit on the edge of a recession. In fact in the UK, for some of the weekend, both Picturehouse cinemas and Vue cinemas websites were having trouble handling customer traffic.
Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles – The New York Times – One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.
I was taken back to to memories of Skeleton Records in Birkenhead during the early 1990s due to a Taylor Swift album mispress. As a young record buyer I used frequent secondhand record shops to pick up promo copies of records. A rock orientated shop would often not realise what they had, this was before widespread internet access.
The gaunt middle-aged shop assistant was sat behind the counter looking at a picture disc of Fish – State of Mind on picture disc. Fish had recently left then popular rock band Marillion and State of Mind was a single from his first solo album Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Apparently one of his customers worked as an assistant shop manager, realised what they had and ‘lost’ the record before the distributor came to collect all the copies of the mispress. The reason why the distributor would want to collect the records? Because they played Madonna’s Cherish instead. The shop assistant said to no one in particular, that will be worth something one day. He wasn’t wrong, I have seen prices quoted as high as 650 dollars paid – if the right Madonna or Marillion completist collector actually finds a copy for sale.
Taylor Swift Speak Now Concert at Heinz Field by Ronald Woan
A similar thing happened to Taylor Swift fans this week, who ordered her latest album and ended up with Taylor Swift artwork, but songs from the early 1990s electronica compilation Happy Lands volume 1 playing instead.
This mispress became know as the ‘cursed version’ presumably because of its dark electronic sounds featuring Cabaret Voltaire and others. They might be able to take heart when they realise the such mispresses have become collectors items in the past with an appreciating value.
Back when I was a child, the oil refinery was a cathedral to industry rather than a climate crime scene and working in the oil industry was a cut above working in other industries.
3D printing industry gripped by intrigue, litigation and churn | Financial Times – 3D printing or additive manufacturing is currently used for small batch manufacturing by the likes of GE, Rheinmetall, Airbus and Lockheed Martin. You had a similar set up with CNC milling (including multi-axis machines) and multitasking machines which were confined to manufacturing ‘cells’ until Apple went out and bought thousands of them and had them running in parallel on Foxconn lines manufacturing iPhone chassis’. Additive manufacturing needs its ‘iPhone moment’ to cross the chasm to mainstream use. That is reliant on an innovative client rather than supplier innovation and the current players like Stratasys aren’t in a position to drive this next stage of innovation, but their customers might be.
Letter Statement March2023 | DAIR – Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.
A number of things have happened that made me think about the idea of the British discount. A fund manager came out and said that UK equities were cheap compared to their counterparts listed on other stock markets and would likely remain so for a long time.
Genuine sale bargains?
There are a number of reasons why these companies may trade at a British discount:
The London Stock Exchanges doesn’t have a reputation for high growth businesses in the same way that the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ does. Instead it has a preponderance of mining companies and similar firms
UK pension funds are discouraged from purchasing stocks
The UK doesn’t foster the kind of businesses that growth investors would want to invest in
British banks don’t particularly want to invest in British businesses beyond property portfolios
Management demonstrate short-termism in their investment approach, as does the banking system
There isn’t a culture of retail share ownership
The UK economy has numerous structural challenges, some of them self inflicted
The British discount goes beyond the stock market, but instead the very nature of the UK itself.
Indebted government
Government debt is ballooning and will continue to do so, yet productivity is stubbornly low meaning the bonds will be ever harder to pay off. Finally as the Liz Truss debacle showed even leadership shows the British discount.
The state Britain has been in
The ideas and concepts the British discount aren’t even new – most of them came from ideas in Will Hutton’s The State We’re In originally published in 1995.
The fund manager can be confident in the British discount to be long-lasting as he knows that neither the Labour Party or their Conservative Party counterparts had managed to address existing structural economic issues. Instead they managed to create new ones.
The Trajectory of China’s Industrial Policies – IGCC – Barry Naughton, Siwen Xiao, and Yaosheng Xu argue that most of the changes in Chinese industrial policy since the mid-2000s can be thought of as being part of a trajectory that seeks to build a policy/planning mechanism, and that shifts the ultimate objective of technology and industry policies from economics to security.
Saudi Arabia’s Barn’s Coffee plans 25 outlets in Malaysia – Malaysia’s Premier Fine Foods plans to establish 25 outlets in Kuala Lumpur as its hub and expand operations to other Southeast Asian countries, including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, in its aim to have 300 outlets in the next 10 years – interesting franchise coming out of Saudi Arabia
Street Style in Tokyo: “Harajuku Is Like a Fashion Gallery With a Free Entrance” | Vogue – “In present-day Harajuku, there are probably more foreigners walking around than there are Japanese people. They used to be watchers of Harajuku fashion, but now they are players; it’s a new movement in the neighborhood. In this story, there are many Chinese and Korean individuals who seem to enjoy and carry forward the Harajuku fashion of the 1990s and 2000s, rather than simply copying it
Full article: ChatGPT, AI Advertising, and Advertising Research and Education – leading scholars and industry thinkers in our field and neighboring disciplines are actively examining and engaging in debates on AI technologies and their applications to advertising practices and effects. However, we have not imagined such powerful AI technologies as ChatGPT emerging and spreading in the general public so quickly. According to industry estimates, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly users in the first two months after launch, which makes it the fastest-growing technology application in history, but web traffic has since peaked. ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies in this new phase of AI advancement are expected to completely transform the advertising business and research. More research is urgently needed to gain an understanding of the short- and long-term impacts of this new generation of transformative AI technologies on advertising across the micro, meso, and macro levels
Influence 100: In-House PR Budgets Slashed | Provoke Media – This year, our Influence 100 cohort control a combined spend of $3.7 billion, a drop of more than $1bn on last year’s figure of $4.8 billion and far below 2020’s dip to $4.2 billion, after being at $4.8 billion in 2019. The drop is largely down to a significant dip in the number of our Influence 100 managing top-end budgets. Last year the number who managed budgets of more than $100m was 25% (compared to 27% in 2021), while this year it is down to 17%. The number of CMOs and CCOs managing between $75 and $100m also dropped, from 12.5% last year to 10% (although this is on a par with 11% in 2021), and the next budget bracket, $50-$75m, also saw a drop from 17.5% to 13%, one percentage point lower than 2021. The proportion of communications leaders managing budgets of between $25m and $50m remained the same as last year, at 10%, and the only budget bracket that saw an increase was at the lower end, $10m-$25m, which shot up from 12.5% to 30% – unsurprising given the dip in advertising spend
Materials
Machine learning based design optimisation was used to create additive manufactured brackets for NASA instruments. They feel organic in nature, presumably because they the result of millions of virtual trials, rather like generations of biological evolution.
A story caught my eye in Hong Kong’s English language establishment paper related to Chinese bank risk. Goldman Sachs issued a report on (maybe) five Chinese banks, changing their ratings to neutral and sell. Eastmoney.com is a subsidiary of government newspaper People’s Daily, came out to stoutly defend the banks against concern about Chinese bank risk.
Ping An Bank and China Merchants Bank have the largest exposure to real estate, accounting for 8% and 6% of total assets which the report authors are flagging as a canary in the coal mine for Chinese bank risk
CMB real estate loans accounted for 5.61% of about of total loans and advances
Ping An Bank real estate-related business bearing credit risk totalled 322.093 billion yuan, also down from the end of the previous year, and if this is taken as the numerator and divided by its total assets of 5.456 trillion yuan, it yields a share of about 5.9% – interesting choice of wording
Overall, the non-performing rate of the mainland real estate industry is still in a period of accelerated exposure in 2022, and the overall non-performing rate of listed banks for public real estate continues to rise to over 4.3%
There was a reference to “Industrial Bank” that has “deteriorating assets and liabilities” – I think that this is Industrial and Commerce Bank of China better known as ICBC. ICBC is recognised as a systemically important bank
Systemically important bank means that Chinese bank risk becomes global economic risk. While it is state-owned (being one four original institutions that spun out of the Bank of China in 1979), it still exposes retail shareholders and bond holders around the world. Word on the grapevine is that a number of Goldman Sachs partners had long term holdings in ICBC for well over a decade, which explains the banks irrational exuberance for China AND means it would have been extremely hard for the analysts to name check ICBC in this kind of report. During the 2006 IPO, Goldman Sachs purchased a 5.75% stake for US$2.6 billion, this apparently was the largest sum Goldman Sachs has ever invested at the time.
ICBC. Foggy night. – QuantFoto released under a CC licence
Of course issuing this kind of report in China means that they can’t talk about associated Chinese bank risk. For instance:
Local governments depend on property development for their main source of revenue and have issued a lot of debt which they may now find harder to pay off resulting in further Chinese bank risk. Given that this is more directly linked to government, it may get less scrutiny
Finally China’s industrial and services economic growth seems to be an issue with youth unemployment running very high at 20%
Trying to get reliable economic data on China as the government data tends to ‘harmonised’. Part of the problem is the information that local governments provide the central government and part of it is central government choosing to ‘tell the best China story’.
Expect China to increase solar panel dumping due to massive over-capacity. In addition these panels seem to be of low quality with a lower than expected panel life. Given the challenges that the Chinese are experiencing recycling the materials, they represent an environmental problem with a substantial risk of pollution.
Beyond belt-tightening: How marketing can drive resiliency during uncertain times | McKinsey – interesting read that’s about 50 percent right, probably too much of a bottom funnel focus and a more critical consideration of the marketing technology stack McKinsey are about 50 percent right. One thing that they haven’t done is leverage the marketing science research supported by the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising on relative marketing spend and relative impact on market share. Also in-house agencies have serious problems due to cultural issues in clients.
The Eagles Announce ‘Final’ Tour Dates – Variety – following the lifecycle of their customer base. The Eagles attitude to covers, remixes and sampling always sat badly with me which is why I never bought any of their music new. I am sure this tour will keep them wealthy for the rest of their lives however
Interesting YouTube clip about how open source software is being used to extend the lives of Nissan Leaf electric cars. It raises interesting points for consideration about the right to repair debates that have been happening in areas like agricultural machinery through to Apple smartphones.
The devil is in the details of the claims and the research with regards ChatGPT driven trading. TL;DR ChatGPT didn’t trade any better and ChatGPT 4 did worse than earlier versions, implying random chance rather than ability
