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

  • 2018 Brand Action Library & things from last week

    The 2018 Brand Action Library by Planning Dirty has been published. I contributed one of the sections. You can view it and download it here. The 2018 Brand Action Library is a collection of campaign case studies for inspiration sorted by vertical market. it was collaborative efforts with planners and strategists from around the world, coordinated by Australian strategist Julian Cole. 

    Here’s the things that made my day this week –

    The Nonetheless podcast is looking to inspire female students to take up careers in STEM subject areas; as way of broadening and deepening STEM skills throughout America. As part of this, they’ve created great posters to download.  Find out more about the podcast here. You can find out more about Cynthia Breazeal’s work on her personal MIT website.

    01 Cynthia Breazeal

    Salvador Dalí & Walt Disney’s Short Animated Film, Destino, Set to the Music of Pink Floyd | Open Culture – it is worthwhile reading Open Culture’s bit on the backstory of this animation. They’re right, this does fit really well with Time off Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon album

    I have been listening to a vintage concert by Hijack in Montreux. The Montreux Jazz Festival played host to the South London rap group. The film captures them at their height. While the Britcore scene faded away into history, it left an enormous influence on the next generation of turntablists. The britcore sound of which Hijack was an exemplar is rougher, faster and harder than US productions. The closest America had to offer was Public Enemy’s wall of sound, which still lacked the energy and pace of Hijack. It feed into the breakbeat culture of rave and drum and bass music scenes. Smooth, nice and groovy it isn’t. 

    Great brand film by Mercedes-Benz; presumably aimed at reframing the whole debate around women drivers. The film was made by R/GA, New York.

    Finally Miu Miu’s autumn winter collection film is really nicely done.

    More luxury related content here.

  • KAWS + more news

    KAWS’s Dark Take on Mickey Mouse | Anatomy of an Artwork | Sotheby’s – I have been a big fan of KAWS work – in particular the stuff by KAWS done under the OriginalFake name. KAWS OriginalFake was where art and streetwear met. KAWS did some great collaborations under the OriginalFake name. I wore my Porter Tokyo x OriginalFake wallet to death in the end. KAWS has abandoned the label and is now focusing on his art pieces. Great collection of stuff here going on auction in Hong Kong. More luxury related content here.

    “Become the leader in our industry” is not a strategy | Quartz – how many times have I seen this on briefs….

    New Balance is finding trendsetters with AI and giving them shoes | Fast Company – interesting seeding campaign

    The economy is booming, your salary is not: Blame the decline of unions | FastCompany – interesting that this appearing in Fast Company whereas in the past these ideas would have been considered the work of a left wing crank

    US airlines are struggling to make money from China’s travel boom-Sino-US – looks like an ideal opportunity for Trump’s trade war

    Don’t Pretend Facebook and Twitter’s CEOs Can’t Fix This Mess | WIRED – the interesting this is that this is written by Ellen Pao; who went through hell when she did this at Reddit. Good read. It could be a slippery slope however, what happens when whats fine in the US isn’t fine in Europe, or the middle east or Asia?

    Saudi Arabia banned from advertising reform agenda on British TV | World news | The Guardian – how would this affect other country ads. Could Mexican Tourism Board ads be seen to be masking the issue of narco-violence? This feels like a slippery slope in many respects

    If you have a Yahoo account your emails have probably been scanned to figure out what you buy — and they may have been read by employees of the company – so lots of viagra and other spam email products in the vast majority of seldom opened accounts

    Luxury’s Unofficial Poster Boys | The Daily | Gartner L2 – You don’t need a brand ambassador to reap the rewards of influencers. In China, TFBoys’ wholesome act has become a cultural and marketing juggernaut, though not always via official partnerships.

    The ugly truth about why I left BBDO China after just a year | Advertising | Campaign Asia – not terribly surprised, even in a tier one city like Beijing

    The convergence of AI and nanotechnology — Nano Magazine – machine learning work on image processing has improved microscopy. Machine learning is also being used in chemical modelling which is an important part of modern chemistry

    Facebook, Twitter and violence are linked | The Japan Times – correlation certainly, though less convinced about causality. Technology certainly facilitates, communication and organisation but there are other substitute real world comms platforms like BBM, email etc

    One yen camera: we bought an extremely cheap camera off Yahoo! Auctions and tested it out【Pics】 | SoraNews24 – really interesting article on his experiences, particularly how the smartphone camera metaphor threw him off on his first shots

    FACT CHECK: Did Vladimir Putin Rescue an Injured Donald Trump from the Viet Cong During the Vietnam War? – No. But its hilarious to think that this even got on to the internet

    Vietnamese website taunts Chinese drama fans with South China Sea quiz | Reuters – clever trolling, though it does remind me of the way Saudis were trying to undermine Qatari sports channels through rampant piracy

    The truth about ‘Snapchat dysmorphia’ | Dazed – is Snapchat really driving cosmetic surgery?

    Norte :: Itaú – Kidsbook Collection – great use of Canvas mobile content format

  • Brand actions library & things from last week

    I’ve spent a bit of time this week contributing to the next edition of Planning Dirty’s Brand Actions Library. This is a collection of inspirational case studies by vertical market for planners and strategists at marketing agencies. I’ll let you know when the brand actions library is available in the meantime you could do worse than going and subscribing to the Planning Dirty newsletter.  I’ll let you know when it comes out.

    Finally, let’s down to business and cover the things that have made my day this week:

    04-254
    Nick DeWolf was the co-founder of Teradyne; a provider of automatic test equipment for technology companies. He served as its CEO until 1971, when he travelled and continued his lifelong passion for photography. His son-in-law has built up an archive of his photography on Flickr. He’s got some amazing shots of Hong Kong in the early 1970s. There is enough distance between the time he was there and the 1967 riots to show the city on the rise. You can see the genesis of the modern Hong Kong, but also it still has touches of tradition including the floating villages in the typhoon shelters. Check them out.

    Interesting documentary on global capitalism by Deutsche Welle. It is interesting to see the way the editorial team framed the story. Germany has seen its news media break big stories on financial capitialism based stories. Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung has been a key driver in this.

    House music producer Kerri Chandler has given away 2GB of never digitised before tracks via WeTransfer, get them before they’re gone. You have less than five days to download them.

    Elsewhere electro legend Egyptian Lover picks his favourite Roland TR-808 songs

    Lastly Star Alliance highlight their connection service. It’s hard to get differentiation between OneWorld, SkyTeam etc. So I thought that this ad did a really nice job of it

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiU9A1S6cg0

  • Self doubt + more things

    Why social media and selfies are filling Hong Kong’s young women with self-doubt | South China Morning Post – 10 per cent of women in the 16 to 24 age group attributed their negative feelings to social media, while 31 per cent said it was due to friends and 28 per cent pointed to health. For older women, only 5 per cent cited social media, 18 per cent said friends and 40 per cent named health as an issue – survey of 1,010 respondents by think tank MWYO. Sample size is a little low. I suspect that self doubt and low self esteem due to social media is more than a Hong Kong phenomenon. There is a Dove brand marketing campaign in these insights. Filters and beautification camera apps probably drive this process even harder.  More on social media related topics here

    Ric Flair aka Nature Boy the veteran American wrestler from WWE appears in these ads. I love it for the nostalgia if nothing else. What’s amazing is the longevity in wrestling personality brands. World Wrestling Entertainment has an undervalued skill in building brands and sub-brand through storytelling that is timeless in nature. WWE is right up there with Disney in my book.

    Will China Let Google Back in? – MacroPolo – not likely, because China doesn’t need Alphabet.

    This is how Dutch police know you’re buying drugs online – interesting how transactions that don’t go through escrow can be compromised and how the police seem to be getting good intelligence on where the servers are located. This could be conventional police work, bad server set up or a compromise in the infrastruce of the dark web

    What does QAnon have to do with leftist Italian authors Wu Ming — Quartz – fascinating read. QAnon is definitely a pre-meditated construct, but beyond that we don’t know anything more about its creation.

  • The Conveni & things from last week

    The Conveni

    Its hard to understand The Conveni without understanding Japanese retail. In Japan, 24/7 convenience stores play a similar role to what supermarkets have in the west. They do groceries, allow utility and mobile payments and provide other services like faxing or photocopying. They offer free wi-fi and air conditioning in hot weather. There are an essential part of of Japanese life and there is a ‘combini-culture’ around them. Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Fragment Design has taken a good deal of influence from combini culture for ‘The Conveni’ retail concept. It includes processed food, bandanas in sandwich packs, towels packaged like onigiri rice balls and sweat shirts in snack packets.

    conveni

    If you can’t get to Tokyo, you can still look at their e-store.

    Michael Gove famously said that with regards to Brexit people were tired of experts. Obviously discussions between men in a pub is the antithesis of expert discussions. So here is a podcast with a couple of knowledgeable people in a pub

    https://youtu.be/Sx4AF-3Rd44

    https://youtu.be/sju9laLqeCo

    Lippincott were working on a Toys R Us rebrand that the company couldn’t implement. I don’t know if design could have saved Toys R Us, but the work is really nice.

    Aphex Twin launched a new EP; there were posters around the world and a fantastic video by Weirdcore. Warning the video will affect people with epilepsy

    Egyptian Lover picks his favourite Roland TR-808 songs – amazing listening. Some of this brought me back to my early teenage years.