Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • Facebook most shared

    I managed to get hold of some data about the top 10 of Facebook most shared sites and it made some interesting graphs. From a media perspective Facebook has become less social.

    What does Facebook most shared content tell us?

    For the past year or so there has been a steady sustained decline in the amount of content shared. This even has a name internally at Facebook – context collapse.
    Facebook top ten content domains shared (june 2015 - april 2016)
    This is even more striking when I compared it with 12 months of data from January 2014 to January 2015. One can see that the trend of the graph has gone from a positive to a negative slope. Secondly, different media organisations have sailed in and out of this chart showing that even now after years of experience they don’t a consistent formula for success.

    The media landscape also started to change to more reactionary content with the rise of titles like the Conservative Tribune and Breitbart.

    What these graphs don’t explain that well is why the drop in sharing happened. Did our media consumption become much more fragmented?
    domains shared (January 2014 - January 2015)
    These trend lines partly explain media’s push into other channels like SnapChat, especially given that Twitter has hit a natural ceiling in its subscriber base.

    Perilous pivot to video

    Secondly there has been a big push into video content, particularly live video content. Video is more expensive to produce, yet monetisation is difficult. Viewability of video ads is lower than display ads. One has to wonder about the sustainability of all this video production? Especially since many of these media organisations don’t seem to have managed long term success at the top of Facebook’s eco-system.
    Viewability

    Ad fraud or ‘invalid traffic’ is higher on video advertising inventory solid via programmatic platforms – which are the hot new thing. Both of which are issues of concern to marketers and publishers alike.
    programmatic

    More on Facebook related topics here.

  • Crush Google Plus + more

    How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War to Crush Google Plus | Vanity Fair – Zuckerberg et al were helped by Google Plus having a poor product experience and dumb rollout approach. This has been evident across Google’s products from Google Wave to GTalk and the Google Cloud service. Facebook didn’t need to crush Google Plus, it just needed to do a better job on a consistent basis. More on Facebook here.

    Huawei Draws From Apple Playbook, Narrows IPhone Market Lead | Digital – AdAge – Guo Ping talks a good game, but why would someone develop specifically for Huawei rather than Android?

    Smart TVs are a dumb idea | TechEye – really nails it in terms of the value created and consumer behaviour

    The foibles of freemium – …turn the commercial model upside down by no longer relying just on journalists to report the news but also articles from a raft of other contributors – including corporate brand and advertising PR people. City AM goes all Forbes and Huffington Post blurring the line in editorial and advertorial content

    Samsung’s subtle nudge to get potential customers to upgrade – interesting acknowledgement that the competition is existing devices in mature markets like Europe and North America

    Huge: Microsoft opens up its Windows Holographic platform to third parties – In what could be a defining moment in the nascent augment reality and virtual reality spaces, Microsoft Corp. has opened up its Windows Holographic platform – trying to become the OS for immersion in the same way that AltSpace is the social platform for VR interactions

    SMARTPHONES: Microsoft Puts Smartphone Bets on Xiaomi Bottom line: Microsoft probably took a 10-20 percent stake in Xiaomi as part of the pair’s deal. At least Xiaomi doesn’t have a carrier relationship to burn by bundling Skype on a handset – let’s hope the do a lot better than Nortel, Nokia, Motorola, Palm, Sendo or LG. All of whom had been in bed with Microsoft at one time or another

    Mobile location data is accurate up to 30 meters: report – Location data accuracy fluctuates which isn’t terribly surprising

  • 2016 Mary Meeker presentation

    2016 Mary Meeker’s annual presentation on internet trends is a tradition within the technology sector that goes back more than two decades. Meeker used to be a sell side analyst during the dot com boom and was known as a cheerleader for the sector. Unlike Harry Blodget she didn’t come unstuck with the subsequent bust.

    More recently Meeker moved to Silicon Valley and took a job with a VC firm. Hence the reason why the 2016 Mary Meeker presentation is done in conjunction with KPCB (Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers).

    The key themes explored in the presentation this year include:

    • Mobile – a favourite for a number of years, but with over half of all internet sessions being done on a smartphone or similar it was inevitable that it would take up a substantial amount of the presentation. Mobile is maturing which is shown in the decline in growth rate of the sector this year. Android is picking up market share due to its cheaper handsets but still lagging behind in share of profit
    • Declining global economic growth. Global debt has risen higher and faster than global GDP. Population growth is also slowing and ageing. Meeker thought that India may be the bright spot due to its demographics, but this assumes that it can get over its structural issues and take advantage of its young population. That is probably overly-optimistic because of rising hindu nationalism
    • Online advertising – efficacy still a serious issue to be dealt with. Consumers hate it hence ad blocking.
    • Social: Meeker saw the big factors being video, images and messaging
    • Voice: the rise of voice driven assistants in the home and on mobile devices. The decoupling of China versus the rest of the world is apparent in this new category.

    Here is the latest iteration for 2016

    More on Mary Meeker here.

  • Weiying + more news

    China’s Tencent and Weiying Take $85 Million Stake in Korea’s YG Entertainment | Variety – China is the market for a lot of Korean TV. Gaining soft power through culture is part of the government’s aspirations – this deal makes both political and business sense. Korean production companies have found that their shows are often blocked by Chinese regulators. Instead the best way around this has been licensing the formats for a remake locally, which offers modest payments. Whether it is good for Korea in the longer term is another matter.

    China has a number of problems on its hands before it can replicate Korea’s success. China has a warped production model that works on patronage and ever bigger budgets and returns. Great for doing a large scale fight scene, not so good for romantic dramas. China hasn’t managed to build up a bench of likeable stars with international appeal in the same way that Korean has managed in a consistent manner. The desire of the government propaganda department blunts the appeal of dramas. Weiying will struggle to give China the kind of soft power that Korea and Japan enjoy respectively abroad. More on Korea related topics here.

    Discover Vietnam’s most chosen brands | Kantar Worldwide – well done Unilever. Unilever is especially interesting because of its success with both Vietnamese urban and rural consumers. However Nestle is a high-performing number 4. Unilever’s competition isn’t P&G, but local brands Musan and Vinamilk.

    How Akira sent shockwaves through pop culture and changed it | Dazed Digital – still an amazing film. I remember seeing it at the 051 cinema in Liverpool, some time before 1994 and it blew me away. It wasn’t just an engaging story but a well thought out future. Architecture wasn’t just new and shiny like Star Trek, but there were new and old side-by-side like London or Hong Kong. It was the future cyberpunk Japan that author William Gibson mirrored in his own early books. The impact of Akira encouraged me to watch more anime, when then led to my love of Ghost In The Shell.

    Tumblr is now blocked in China | Techinasia – surprised it hadn’t happened already given its meme and porn driven nature

  • Mobile searches + more

    Saying a third of mobile searches are local, Google brings “Promoted Pins” to Maps – but still no development platform for third party integration. Google Maps is still behind Baidu Maps in this respect. But the pivot towards local mobile searches offers opportunities for many small and medium sized businesses. More on where 2.0 related topics here.

    Samsung will no longer make Android Wear devices, all in with Tizen OS [Update] | 9to5Google – as Benedict Evans said: Samsung is (probably) giving up on making Android Wear watches. The Apple Watch is only a partial success so far, but Android watches don’t seem to have worked at all

    I, Cringely Apple and Didi is about foreign cash and the future of motoring – I, Cringely – as ever thought-provoking, Bob Cringely’s take on Apple’s Didi investment

    EXCLUSIVE: The Dirty Advertising Practices of the Industry’s Biggest Brands, Bloggers — The Fashion Law – the legal challenges for influencers of becoming native advertising formats

    Anti-EU Campaign Offers A £50 Million Prize For Whoever Can Predict Euro 2016 – BuzzFeed News – smart data capture. Likely to skew male

    Spotify Now Lets Brands Sponsor Its Popular Playlists | IPG Lab – history repeating as consumer brands used to sponsor radio programmes like P&G’s recession era ‘soap opera’. It will be interesting to see how much traction this it gets

    BNP Paribas in partnership with Luc Besson’s next movie, Valerian and the City of a thousand planets – really interesting execution from a French bank BNP Paribas. Valerian is a classic French comic space opera based on comics by Pierre Christin and artist Jean-Claude Mézières

    Secrets of WeChat and Weibo Feed Stream — China Internet Watch  – (paywall)

    Hoffman Fabrics | Stussy – great background on the Hawaiian shirt, my favourite picture has Tom Selleck as Magnum in the background

    PDF Decrypter Pro (Windows & Mac OS X) – Remove PDF owner password and restrictions – Download FREE – handy app to have on tap. the native macOS Preview app, or trying to hack the file on ColorSync will only get you so far

    PayPal is shutting down its Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Amazon apps | The Verge – its an Android and iOS world. This isn’t a good environment for carriers