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
On Monday afternoon, the buzz amongst my colleagues in New York was the Super Bowl from the night before. In particular the advertising and one advert by Coinbase sparked more discussions than others. The advert was divisive. Some people that there was something wrong with their smart TV which had triggered a dodgy screensaver. One person even first thought that the QRcode would take them through to a site that might explain whatever ransomware had hijacked their TV.
They scanned the QRcode but it didn’t work properly. The reasons for it not working were twofold:
The contrast in the QRcode background and foreground wasn’t large enough for certain colours and so wouldn’t scan
The coinbase website fell over. This would be spun as unprecedented demand, but the reality was poor execution
A game console style ROM screen revealed at the end that it was Coinbase. The management would likely pass the whole car crash off as growth hacking.
Growth hacking
Growth hacking as a term was attributed to a blog post by Sean Ellis back in 2010. But as a concept it goes back much further. A classic example of growth hacking could be considered to be FMCG staple of ‘buy one, get one free’ or BOGOF. The master of the growth hack was David Wallerstein came up with the idea of supersizing popcorn servings in the 1960s. Wallerstein came up with a behavioural change experiment as business idea based on the insight of that people might want to buy and eat more popcorn, but were simply ashamed of buying two bags at the cinema. Wallerstein was successful in his experiment. Wallerstein was appointed by Ray Kroc to the board of McDonalds in 1968 and then rolled out larger servings in McDonalds restaurants, if you’ve ever been asked if you want a ‘large meal’ with your burger Wallerstein was responsible. This created a whole range of products in restaurants and supermarkets called expandables, from large meals to multi-packs of products.
A more recent example would be the signature on hotmail.com emails that encouraged whoever received them to get their own email address at hotmail.com. This was effective back when most people had a work or college email address and wanted a home account for personal communications like finding a new job. Gmail took a slightly different approach with an invite scheme that saw early adopters clamouring like they were trying to get in the door of Studio 54 on a Saturday night.
The original idea of growth hacking is to try a small marketing tactic and refine it based on the feedback that you get. In reality that gets translated into poor thought out showy tactics focused on the short term. The reason for this is that test and learn is done over a short time period and doesn’t incorporate marketing science. The Coinbase advert was a classic example of this.
Buzz marketing
Growth hacking is influenced by a number of things. One of which was the concept of ‘scrappiness’ in start-up marketing.
Startup scrappiness
During the original dot com boom new online businesses wasted a fantastic amount of money on ineffective advertising. The most iconic example of this would be the pets.com sock pocket advert that featured in the 2000 version of the Super Bowl.
Courtesy of Yahoo! Inc. Co founder David Filo is hanging from the rear of the car.
You saw some businesses like Yahoo! try to do brand building advertising in a more cost effective way. This was known internally at Yahoo! as buzz marketing and in the US, it had its own team.
Examples of buzz marketing included wrapping employees cars that had been volunteered in the Yahoo! brand. This was listed in the employee handbook as a free ‘perk’ of working at Yahoo!. There were some conditions like you had to keep the wrap on for year and a good behaviour clause.
There were also some sponsorships like the ice machine at the San Jose Sharks stadium and some high traffic billboards. Yahoo! used to have a billboard alongside the 101 freeway going into San Francisco and another in Time Square, New York.
While the lesson of ‘go for business models that make financial sense’ seems to have been lost as we left the dot.com era further behind. The idea of ‘scrappiness’ stuck. It fitted with the wider concept of ‘struggle culture’ in entrepreneurship.
In technology, marketing = sales
On one level, the problem isn’t Coinbase but the technology sector. The truth is that for the most part technology companies don’t do good marketing. My hypotheses around the reasons for this are:
Technologists aren’t marketers. For the original technology firms, the products found their own market. Over time a salesforce was introduced and for complex products there might be pre-sales and post sales consultancy. They don’t really know much about marketing science. The sales funnel is the one ‘marketing model’ that managed to make it into Microsoft® PowerPoint® says a lot about the nature of this understanding.
To a technologist, every problem looks like a technology challenge. So the answer for great marketing is either in kludges aka hacks, like the Coinbase advert, or algorithmic in nature. And those algorithms are usually based on a poor understanding of marketing featured in the point above
Technologists think short term. Brands are transitory if you are looking to be bought out, or are built ‘organically’ in the hands of the victors (Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Tencent or Alibaba). So building a brand is an alien concept. Why build a brand in a world when you believe in disrupt, or be disrupted? Contrast that with the FMCG world where brands have considerably longer lives. The Nestlé Kit Kat chocolate bar is 86 years old at the time of writing. Procter & Gamble’s Bold washing powder (laundry detergent) is a spritely 57 years old. Baileys Irish Cream liqueur is 48 years old, as is the Mobil 1 range of synthetic engine oils, oil filters, chassis grease, transmission fluids, and gear lubricants. If we think of technology brands with that kind of longevity its likely to be the incumbent telecoms companies, Fujitsu, Hitach and IBM. At the younger end would be the likes of Verbatim, AMD, Intel, Oracle, Western Digital, Microsoft, Apple, Acer and Atari.
Disrupt or be disrupted creates delusion. If you believe in the disrupt or be disrupted manifest destiny of technology you probably believe that your ability to market is better than established brands that are actually marketing organisations
I would guess that Coinbase marketers would tick at least some of these hypotheses. It probably doesn’t help that organisations who should know better are starting to buy into this ‘disrupt or be disrupted’ model.
Cost of reach
So, if you’re a technology company like Coinbase, who believes in disruption and ‘knows’ how to market better than marketers? The simple answer is that while digital has managed to get marketers to use its platforms, it has failed to offer the most competitive cost per reach. To achieve the same goals Coinbase would have had to spend an order of magnitude more on YouTube than TV to reach an equivalent audience.
Brand building
Finally the reason why the advert contrasted so sharply with the other content that ran during the Super Bowl was because everyone else focused on brand building rather than on brand activation. The reason why they are going for brand building is that the work will keep paying dividends for years. This is something that digital transformation doesn’t reflect well through its algorithms. The Coinbase approach was the equivalent of a TV ad that said click here.
Warning: Stamps that say ‘1st’ or ‘2nd’ class are going to become unusable from 31 January 2023 – each stamp will have a proprietary QRcode type glyph. The stamp’s glyph will be linked to a digital twin. This isn’t to be used for tracking the letters and the packages that they are affixed to; but purely as a security measure on the stamps. How much effort is this going to take and is it really going to be cheaper than conventional printing technologies to limit stamp fraud? How much of a black economy is there in stamps anyway? While the Royal Mail promises innovative services enabled by the stamps, it isn’t clear what they will be at the moment. Looking at Amazon, the ‘barcode stamps’ as the Royal Mail call them don’t seem to be widely available yet. The Royal Mail has announced but not launched a scheme to swap out your existing stamps for the new design.
China
What is most interesting about Eileen Gu isn’t that she switched countries but the narrative of western decline that China is wrapping around this: Cold warrior: why Eileen Gu ditched Team USA to ski for China | The Economist and Winter Olympics: Eileen Gu and the Chimerican Dream – The Olympic freestyle skier has stirred controversy for representing China. She is the product of a vanishing shared space between the Chinese and American elite. As for Gu’s Mum’s background, it would be an ideal model if a screen writers was adapting The Americans as Chinese sleeper agents instead
Wang Huning’s career reveals much about political change in China | The Economist – As its chief of ideology and propaganda, he is in charge of crafting a very different message: that China practises true democracy, that America’s is a sham and that American power is fading. For a party locked in an escalating ideological war with America, this line is unsurprising. Mr Wang’s role in the struggle is more so. His early writing did not suggest narrow-minded nationalism. He saw weaknesses in America’s system, but did not exaggerate them. He saw problems, too, in China’s. Even more remarkably, he has been crafting the party’s message under three successive leaders.
What’s interesting about the future of the ideas that aren’t hinged in culture, is how similar they relate to 10 year predictions back in the late 1990s and early 2000s – Internet in 2035 | Pew Research Center
The Plausibly Deniable DataBase (PDDB) « bunnie’s blog – Most security schemes facilitatethe coercive processes of an attacker because they disclose metadata about the secret data, such as the name and size of encrypted files. This allows specific and enforceable demands to be made: “Give us the passwords for these three encrypted files with names A, B and C, or else…”. In other words, security often focuses on protecting the confidentiality of data, but lacks deniability.
A scheme with deniability would make even the existence of secret files difficult to prove. This makes it difficult for an attacker to formulate a coherent demand: “There’s no evidence of undisclosed data. Should we even bother to make threats?” A lack of evidence makes it more difficult to make specific and enforceable demands.
Thus, assuming the ultimate goal of security is to protect the safety of users as human beings, and not just their files, enhanced security should come hand-in-hand with enhanced plausible deniability (PD). PD armsusers with a set of tools they can use to navigate the social landscape of security, by making it difficult to enumerate all the secrets potentially contained within a device, even with deep forensic analysis
Korea Herald – After being called feminists, these women faced online harassment – One in 2 men in their 20s in South Korea tends to be anti-feminist, according to a 2018 study released by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, a government think tank. In the same survey, only 1 in 4 young men saw women as “weaker than men” or needing protection. But such strong antagonism against feminism has puzzled many looking from the outside at a country that has the highest gender wage gap among OECD countries. Women also feel less safe than men in the country, according to a 2021 report from the Gender Equality Ministry. Only 21.6 percent of women said they felt safe from crime, as opposed to 32.1 percent of men.
On Meta’s ‘regulatory headwinds’ and adtech’s privacy reckoning | TechCrunch – “The investigation shows that gambling platforms do not operate in a silo. Rather, gambling platforms operate in conjunction with a wider network of third parties. The investigation shows that even limited browsing of 37 visits to gambling websites led to 2,154 data transmissions to 83 domains controlled by 44 different companies that range from well-known platforms like Facebook and Google to lesser known surveillance technology companies like Signal and Iovation, enabling these actors to embed imperceptible monitoring software during a user’s browsing experience. The investigation further shows that a number of these third-party companies receive behavioural data from gambling platforms in realtime, including information on how often individuals gambled, how much they were spending, and their value to the company if they returned to gambling after lapsing.”
Professional specific support – Self-Care Catalyst – is aimed at stressed and burnt out nurse practitioners in the US. I heard about it from my US colleagues and imagine that we will see similar businesses soon
This week is biggest night in advertising around the Super Bowl. I understand that this the 56th match, for as the Americans like to call it Super Bowl LVI. While Super Bowl LVI is an important sports event attracting an audience across North America.
Some of the more interesting adverts from my perspective
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com has a brand anthem featuring Matthew McConaughey. What’s interesting about this is how Salesforce defines its elf in terms of being ‘anti-big tech’. It contains digs at Facebook, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – you don’t need to work very hard to join the dots.
https://youtu.be/tIp251KCz6k
Kia Motors
Kia’s ad is one with more longevity. It’s packed with emotion and a fluent device of a robot dog at the centre of it. If Kia were smart they would build on the dog further in future campaigns as I think that have something here.
https://youtu.be/HoNMz_OV_dI
Choose life
The final one that grabbed me was Expedia’s ad spot with Ewan McGregor which seemed to borrow heavily from his Renton persona in Trainspotting & T2.
Here’s Ewan for Expedia with the Today programme having a preview of it.
Here’s the original ‘Choose Life’ monologue from Trainspotting. Note that Mr McGregor even sports Renton’s crew cut.
Here’s the ‘Choose Life’ monologue revisited in T2. Outside of the creative classes I don’t think most people watching NBC’s coverage in the US will understand the linkage between Expedia, Trainspotting and T2.
As a bonus here’s how the NFL was formed and how the teams got their names.
And before you ask, I think that the Rams will beat the Bengals in Super Bowl LVI.
Shiba Inu
NHK Worldwide did an amazing documentary on the Shiba Inu. The Shiba Inu is one of only 16 ‘basal breeds’. That means a closer genetic link to the source of what makes a dog a dog than newer breeds. By comparison breeds like the labrador have evolved much further. This shows up in the Shiba Inu behaviour such as the lack of relative physical closeness to their owners, despite having a deep bond.
Audrey Tang, digital minister, government of Taiwan, Republic of China
Audrey Tang is a legendary technologist and has developed some the best work combatting misinformation anywhere in the world. It is a great interview to listen to during your lunch hour. The lessons of her work have never been so important. I also love what she says about the importance of the commons, living the open source spirit and broadband as a human right.
Recycling glass
I am fascinated by manufacturing processes and the nature of materials. This video on how glass is recycled into loft insulation by Owen Corning is fascinating. Its a bit of a long video but worthwhile watching.
Yemen
I never thought I would be writing about Yemen. This video on the Caspian Report discusses how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are using the cover the Yemeni civil war to build bases that would allow them to project force into major shipping routes.
Project Apollo
Amazing NASA film that outlined the ambition for the Apollo missions.
The Japan – Soul Train connection can consider to have started with The Three Degrees who seemed to do consistently more successfully in Japan than the US. The Three Degrees The Sound of Philadelphia is better known to people over 40 as the theme tune of the Soul Train TV programme. The popularity of The Three Degrees was such that there was some Japan only releases like Midnight Train.
The Afro Rake discotheque opened in 1974 and a visit to the club convinced TBS to broadcast episodes of Soul Train on a Sunday night, forging a true Japan – Soul Train connection.
In 1980, Yellow Magic Orchestra played Soul Train cementing the Japan – Soul Train connection with a cover version of disco song Tighten Up. YMO also told the viewers of the Japan – Soul Train connection and its large regular audience on TBS.
The Japan – Soul Train connection trickled down into 1970s Japanese club culture like the Afro Rake night club. The Japan – Soul Train connection was made through articles and photographs of the show. This and artists like The Three Degrees built the Japan – Soul Train connection. It was ironic that the Afro Rake made the Japan – Soul Train connection for TBS.
China sportswear: Fujian Tigers earn their stripes in Nike fight | Financial Times – what’s really interesting is the collapse in share of New Balance (down to poor execution over the past five years) and adidas in China. Li Ning have had a boom and a bust and risen again. Anta have acquired brands like Arc’teryx, Suunto, Salomon and Wilson. Salomon and Arc’teryx are particularly interesting because of their use by western special forces units
Consumer behaviour
The ‘Boomer remover’: Intergenerational discounting, the coronavirus and climate change – Rebecca Elliott, 2021 – the emergence of the ‘Boomer remover’ as coherent with a longer history of fascination with the Baby Boomers, a generation that has ‘been watched, commented upon, and invested with hope and despond in equal measure’ (Bristow, 2019, p. 92). This fascination has taken a more negative turn towards ‘Boomer blaming’ in the last 15 years. The Boomers have themselves become social problems, ‘folklore demons’ who, for their sheer number, are feared for the unprecedented burdens they may place on welfare states: a ‘Boomergeddon’ created by a ‘tidal wave of retirements’, combined with longer lifespans (Bristow, 2019, p. 92; Bristow, 2016; Somers, 2017; Walker, 1990, 1996). Fears about the impacts of an ageing population have then been moralized, turned into a critique of the attitudes and behaviours of this particular generation, namely, their perceived individualism run amok and selfish, hedonistic, reckless actions that have ‘robbed’ their children of a prosperous future (Bristow, 2016; White, 2013). The Boomers are maligned for the kind of people they are believed to be, today serving as the ‘archetypal ‘villain’ in the narrative of generational conflict’ (Bristow, 2021, p. 768). Younger generations are then made out to be the true adults in the room, who have to take responsibility for the messes their elders have made (expressed also by some on Twitter, like the user above who suggested young people might ‘show ’em how it’s done’). In this case, broadly available tropes about the Boomers’ perceived sins and deficiencies get attached to ‘older generations’ generally, in a context in which the cohort most at risk of dying from the virus actually seems to be those over the age of 80 – the so-called ‘silent generation’ rather than the Boomers
Biden’s trade policy is crafted with political rewards in mind | Financial Times – “worker centred” is like the “hard-working families” long invoked in both US and UK politics: you cannot oppose a trade policy supporting workers any more than you can be biased towards feckless loners. But helping all workers equally is not what it means in practice. Nearly 10 months in to the administration, this worker-centred policy shows a disturbing focus on old-style manufacturing-centred protectionism — and not even all manufacturing, just the politically rewarding parts. Although it is also proposing to extend trade-distorting support to new sectors like electric vehicles, the Biden administration has continued the historic US obsession with steel
U.S. Housing as a Global Safe Asset: Evidence from China Shocks by William Barcelona, Nathan Converse, Anna Wong :: SSRN – This paper demonstrates that the measured stock of China’s holding of U.S. assets could be much higher than indicated by the U.S. net international investment position data due to unrecorded historical Chinese inflows into an increasingly popular global safe haven asset: U.S. residential real estate. We first use aggregate capital flows data to show that the increase in unrecorded capital inflows in the U.S. balance of payment accounts over the past decade is mainly linked to inflows from China into U.S. housing markets. Then, using a unique web traffic dataset that provides a direct measure of Chinese demand for U.S. housing at the zip code level, we estimate via a difference-in-difference matching framework that house prices in major U.S. cities that are highly exposed to demand from China have on average grown 7 percentage points faster than similar neighborhoods with low exposure over the period 2010-2016. These average excess price growth gaps co-move closely with macro-level measures of U.S. capital inflows from China, and tend to widen following periods of economic stress in China, suggesting that Chinese households view U.S. housing as a safe haven asset. – capital flight
Will Germany Depart from the Merkel Model on China? Beijing Will Have a Say. – The Diplomat – the appointment of Greens co-leader and former chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock as foreign minister has made such a break a real possibility. As an outspoken critic of China’s human rights practices and overseas economic coercion, Baerbock will advocate for a comprehensive China strategy that is more European, normative, and “rigor[ous].” She will be reinforced by FDP leader Christian Lindner, who joins the coalition government as finance minister, seen as the most powerful office next to chancellor. Lindner found himself on Beijing’s bad list in 2019 when he visited democratic opposition representatives in Hong Kong en route to the mainland
Xi fails to signal support for a second term for Hong Kong’s Carrie Lam | Financial Times – interesting earlier in the year the political insiders I knew of thought that Lam was going to run for a second time, when I thought that it might the be the security chap who had recently been moved to be her deputy. After this visit, CY Leung might throw his hat in the ring
Ideas
Maersk is no longer just a shipping company — Quartz – Maersk owns more container ships than anyone on earth, but it would be a mistake to think of the company as just a cargo shipping line. It’s also an airline, a trucking company, a port terminal operator, and a freight forwarder. Maersk has gobbled up a piece of virtually every stage of the global supply chain as part of its ambition to become a one-stop shop for logistics.
Yesterday (Dec. 16), Maersk struck a deal that offers a glimpse at the future of its business—and the future of global shipping. Starting next year, Maersk will effectively run the logistics operations of Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Maersk announced in a press release that it “will be providing operational management of international ocean and air transport” for Unilever from 2022 to 2026.
Normally, Unilever uses its own in-house software, dubbed the “International Control Tower Solution,” to manage its own supply chains. But as of 2022, Unilever will hand off the run of its supply chain software to Maersk. “It’s a strong indicator that Maersk’s expertise extends well beyond sailing ships,” said Eytan Buchman, CMO at the cargo booking platform Freightos, who has written about Maersks’ acquisitions and expansion. “Combined with their other assets and what they’ve been building towards, it’s not a stretch to assume that this is another rung in the ladder towards full end-to-end global supply chain ownership.”
How many people in Japan have actually worn a couple’s outfit? | SoraNews24 -Japan News – less than 20 percent of married couples have tried going on a date in a couple’s outfit. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t want to try it! The survey, which was conducted between November 18 and November 26 of this year, asked 800 married people–400 women and 400 men—about their experiences with couple’s outfits. When asked whether they’d ever gone on a date with their spouse in matching outfits, only 18.1 percent said yes. – I thought it was more of a drama trope rather than a trend
Risks to China’s Growth in Luxury Retail | Luxury Daily – China accounts for 35 percent of all luxury sales across the globe. By 2025, those sales could shoot up to 50 percent of all luxury retail revenue, according to Bain Analytics. Luxury sector concerned by China’s GDPR type laws, regulations on biometrics and common propserity
Zegna shares surge in New York after SPAC deal | Vogue Business – The company has struggled during the pandemic, with core revenue falling 23 per cent last year. This year, sales are expected to stay behind pre-pandemic levels at €1.2 billion – positioned very much as a COVID issue but also seems to be down to the wider move of luxury and streetwear going closer
China’s Big New Idea – The Atlantic – “common prosperity,” has been adopted by journalists, scholars, and corporate executives in China with a fervor only a dictator can ignite. State newspapers are routinely plastered with commentary on the topic. On November 11, a shopping holiday known as “Singles Day,” the usual conspicuous excess took a back seat to the common-prosperity spirit. The e-commerce company Alibaba, the holiday’s primary purveyor, focused its marketing on eco-friendly initiatives and charitable programs instead of sales figures. Its management, eager to get into Xi’s good graces, had already pledged billions of dollars in charitable donations to support the leader’s cause, rather than its own shareholders.Until now, common prosperity has mostly been a concept for domestic consumption in China, but it might soon be heading overseas. The idea could become a central node in the ever-expanding lexicon of language Xi is trying to use to increase Beijing’s influence in international affairs and reshape the world order to favor China’s authoritarian interests – I think its more memetic in nature than an ‘idea’ per se, something that could mean whatever people want it to mean in their head
Guidance for preventing, detecting, and hunting for CVE-2021-44228 Log4j 2 exploitation – Microsoft Security Blog – observed the CVE-2021-44228 vulnerability being used by multiple tracked nation-state activity groups originating from China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkey. This activity ranges from experimentation during development, integration of the vulnerability to in-the-wild payload deployment, and exploitation against targets to achieve the actor’s objectives. For example, MSTIC has observed PHOSPHORUS, an Iranian actor that has been deploying ransomware, acquiring and making modifications of the Log4j exploit. We assess that PHOSPHORUS has operationalized these modifications. In addition, HAFNIUM, a threat actor group operating out of China, has been observed utilizing the vulnerability to attack virtualization infrastructure to extend their typical targeting. In these attacks, HAFNIUM-associated systems were observed using a DNS service typically associated with testing activity to fingerprint systems
Huawei documents show Chinese tech giant’s involvement in surveillance programs – The Washington Post – These marketing presentations, posted to a public-facing Huawei website before the company removed them late last year, show Huawei pitching how its technologies can help government authorities identify individuals by voice, monitor political individuals of interest, manage ideological reeducation and labor schedules for prisoners, and help retailers track shoppers using facial recognition. “Huawei has no knowledge of the projects mentioned in the Washington Post report,” the company said in a statement, after The Post shared some of the slides with Huawei representatives to seek comment. “Like all other major service providers, Huawei provides cloud platform services that comply with common industry standards.” The divergence between Huawei’s public disavowals that it doesn’t know how its technology is used by customers, and the detailed accounts of surveillance operations on slides carrying the company’s watermark, taps into long-standing concerns about lack of transparency at the world’s largest vendor of telecommunications gear – I can’t say I am surprised
Chinese Spies Accused of Using Huawei in Secret Australian Telecom Hack – Bloomberg – a key piece of evidence underpinning the U.S. efforts — a previously unreported breach that occurred halfway around the world nearly a decade ago. In 2012, Australian intelligence officials informed their U.S. counterparts that they had detected a sophisticated intrusion into the country’s telecommunications systems. It began, they said, with a software update from Huawei that was loaded with malicious code. The breach and subsequent intelligence sharing was confirmed by nearly two dozen former national security officials who received briefings about the matter from Australian and U.S. agencies from 2012 to 2019. The incident substantiated suspicions in both countries that China used Huawei equipment as a conduit for espionage, and it has remained a core part of a case they’ve built against the Chinese company, even as the breach’s existence has never been made public – so I was working on Huawei when Australia banned them from their national broadband initiative in 2013. My boss who was an ex-government guy had gone back to Australia to lobby for Huawei and three days later the guillotine dropped. This disclosure explains the why. China views Australia as its own personal colony. Am I surprised that the Chinese have a tailored access programme? No, but it shouldn’t be made any easier for them
Merck to invest NT$17 billion in Taiwan over next 5-7 years | DigiTimes – to set up production capacity for semiconductor and display materials and enhance R&D capability in Taiwan over the next 5-7 years, according to Merck Group Taiwan managing director John Lee. The investment is the largest as compared with the investment projects Merck has historically undertaken in Taiwan, Lee said. The investment is part of Level Up, Merck’s global investment plan with a total budget of over EUR3 billion (US$3.4 billion) and investment projects varying among different countries, Lee noted.
Taiwan opposition clings on for political relevance as voters shun Beijing | Financial Times – an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese reject unification with China, and over the past decade, the KMT’s support has gone into a tailspin. According to the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University, the proportion of voters identifying with the KMT has dropped to 18.7 per cent, compared with 31.4 per cent for the ruling Democratic Progressive party. – Not entirely surprising given the example that Beijing has provided with Hong Kong
A celebrity divorce spotlights declining China-Taiwan relations — Quartz – The controversies around the former couple, whose ups and downs are often compared in China to the US reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, paint a picture of the increasingly confrontational attitude in China towards Taiwan. For decades, citizens from both sides of the straits have sidestepped the tricky political relations of the Communist-ruled People’s Republic of China, and the democratically governed Republic of China (as Taiwan is formally called), to forge personal and professional ties. Taiwanese businesses have been integral to China’s economic advance, and music stars and actors from Taiwan have long found audiences in the mainland. That coexistence often relied on people on both sides dancing around what it means to be Taiwanese. “But as Chinese ultra-nationalism boils over under Xi [Jinping], there is no longer space for ambiguity between nationality and cultural identity,” said Joshua Yang, a doctoral student who tweets about Taiwanese identity and relations with the PRC. As opportunities for Taiwanese and Chinese residents to connect directly through study, work, or jobs shrink, it could harden attitudes in the mainland even further
Do the costs of the cloud outweigh the benefits? | The Economist – few aspects of modern life have made geeks drool more than the cloud, the cumulus of data centres dominated by three American tech giants, Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as Alibaba in China. In America some liken their position of impregnability to that of Detroit’s three big carmakers, Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, a century ago. During the covid-19 pandemic they have helped transform people’s lives, supporting online medical appointments, Zoom meetings and Netflix binges. They attract the brightest engineering talent. Amazon Web Services (aws), the biggest, is now part of business folklore. So it is bordering on heresy to argue, as executives at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm, have done recently, that the cloud threatens to become a weight around the necks of big companies.
Spanx commits to all-female board after Blackstone investment — Quartz – More than a quarter of board seats in the Russell 3000 Index belonged to women during the last quarter, compared to 15.1% just five years ago, according the corporate leadership research firm Equilar. Still, just 84 of these boards had achieved gender parity, meaning that they were represented by 50% women. And companies still struggle to achieve adequate racial and LGBTQ representation on their boards as well. Justine Smyth, chair of the New Zealand telecommunications company Spark, has suggested that while the first “diverse” appointees on company boards may feel like tokenism, those members can help advocate for change once they are given decision-making power – Spanx is an American underwear company that does foundation garments to make the wearer appear thinner. Spanx innovated around testing with real people, having multiple sizes and packaging colours that increased brand salience. The back story of Spanx is similar to the ‘founder in a garage’ story that was the starting point of many Silicon Valley firms. Spanx is a private company. It is interesting that Spanx are taking private equity money from Blackstone rather than going public. Will we get to a situation in the future where all-women boards like Spanx come under the kind of pressure that all-men boards come under now? If we got to that stage, then we’d have equality. I think that will be a while.
Microsoft Executives Told Bill Gates to Stop Emailing a Female Staffer Years Ago – WSJ – interesting that we haven’t seen this kind of expose about Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs. Secondly, there is the timing with Mr Gates’ divorce. Finally, all of the money and hard work to reinvent Mr Gates as a philanthropist looks as if its becoming undone. While Mr Gates
The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy
Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong – I suspect that this is designed to do a few things over time.
Allows Chinese citizens on the mainland access to more ways to do investments, whilst still being in full view of the Chinese government.
It allows the Chinese government to expand ‘capture’ of western financial institutions
It will allow China to put pressure on VIEs ran out of the likes of the British Virgin Island and similar territories out of scrutiny
How Hong Kong’s Elite Turned on Democracy – The Atlantic – there is something performative about the face and patriotism on display that I suspect may be driven less by a drive to get on and more by the fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones if they didn’t
Apple’s privacy changes create windfall for its own advertising business | Financial Times – “Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.” Apple said its privacy features were designed to protect users. “The technologies are part of one comprehensive system designed to help developers implement safe advertising practices and protect users — not to advantage Apple.” – this has my spidey sense tingling right now
What blockbuster? China spurns Hollywood’s advances | Financial Times – “If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators,” said Aynne Kokas, the author of Hollywood Made in China and a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that’s possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective.”
Alibaba Faces New Threat: an Evolving Chinese Shopper – WSJ – consumers have started to embrace new ways of shopping that favor browsing and interaction over targeted product searches. That trend has left Alibaba playing catch-up in some areas, and competitors have used the shift to gain a foothold in the world’s largest online retail market. Alibaba remains the leading platform in online shopping, but its share of China’s retail e-commerce market has fallen to a projected 51% in 2021 from 78% in 2015, according to research firm eMarketer. Interesting that WeChat, BilliBilli, Pinduoduo and Douyin are claiming part of the e-commerce pie. What this article doesn’t cover is the relative importance by comparison of O2O (offline to online) (paywall)
