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.

  • #theinternetisdying

    Perhaps due to the febrile nature of the times we live in, the tech-savvy community seems to have become aware of various trends, leading them to conclude that #theinternetisdying. This term itself is imprecise. The internet is a series of abstractions, ranging from physical infrastructure to software and functions upon which communication, messaging, video streaming, app data, transactions, and web pages operate.

    Bovine metaverse

    So technically, #theinternetisdying is actually #thewebisdying.

    So why now?

    I believe the most intriguing question regarding #theinternetisdying is this: why now? What has occurred is more about internet users awakening from their ‘comfort zone’ and abruptly realising how rapidly things have evolved? I believe that a number of inciting incidents are the cause of this sudden wakefulness:

    • Google as regressive ‘tax’ rather than marketing channel exposed.
    • Continued deterioration of Google web search.
    • Link rot.
    • Online media businesses look to make money by selling proprietary and user-generated content to LLMs as a revenue stream.
    • Realisation that a lot of web content is adapted or created using LLMs. The non-English web has been expanded by machine translation of English language content. Secondly, LLMs have been used to create a lot of good enough content in English for publications like Sports Illustrated.

    The reality

    In reality, what’s happened to the web as netizens knew it has happened over time. To use a vintage web phenomenon as an analogy. It’s like the vintage Joe Cartoon interactive Adobe Flash animation Frog in a Blender from the late 1990s.

    A cartoon frog sits in a blender and admonishes the viewer, claiming that they wouldn’t dare to to blend him. The blender has settings from 1 to 10. 1 is mildly agitated water, 10 is instant blended frog. Silicon Valley has slowly upped the power of the blender and netizens realise that things have got weird.

    Google tax bias

    Google search has been on the shit list of websites as engineering documents from inside Google were leaked. They revealed some aspects about how search actually worked that Google had been denying for decades. A few of the key findings were:

    • Google search learns from ‘external devices’, so things like Chromecast dongles. Data from the Chrome browser is used in a similar manner, despite Google repeatedly claiming that it wasn’t in the past.
    • Google values quality, relevant sites, BUT, that value is caveated by restrictions it puts on small quality sites and the benefits it provides to large platforms detailed below.
    • Popular sites receive higher search levels through the ‘Navboost’ system. This reinforces platforms and established sites. Smaller sites would need to spend proportionately more on Google advertising to match their larger competitors traffic funnel. This designed imbalance is the digital equivalent of John Pierpoint Morgan’s nefarious involvement in railroad transportation, or the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller agreement on oil transport in the 19th century, which drove much of the subsequent anti-trust regulation in the US – this is the Google tax. It’s a regressive tax that is levied on smaller businesses and the ‘free web’.
    • It is deliberately set up to hold back small sites, many of whom have seen their traffic drop by up to 91 percent. This adversely affects sights that might have deep domain knowledge, specialist retailers and netizens who host personal sites and blogs like this one.

    Google has even lied in court and in parliaments to hide these facts. Disclosure of these details have rippled through the search engine marketing industry and strongly discouraged numerous web businesses once the truth came out – for a lot of businesses #theinternetisdying.

    For Google the timing couldn’t be worse:

    • It is seen to have dropped the ball on LLMs, despite having developed most of the key technology powering the likes of OpenAI and Anthrophic.
    • Google’s local business advertising for the likes of coffee shops or nail clinics have suffered due to the cost-of-living crisis post-COVID and consumer behaviour changes in various countries.
    • Traditional Google search advertisements for e-commerce are being rapidly eroded by retail media. That is ‘search style’ adverts on the likes of Amazon, Tesco and eBay.

    Google is perceived as having set itself up as the ‘start page’ to the open web, while all the time sticking the proverbial knife in all of which adds an inevitability of the feeling of #theinternetisdying.

    Decline of Google search

    Back in June 2022, The Atlantic complained about the declining utility of Google. This echoed similar themes on discussions that had happened earlier in the year on Hacker News and Reddit. The consensus was that they searched Reddit, StackOverflow, Hacker News or StackExchange as it provided a richer, more relevant base of search results.

    I have been using social bookmarking service Pinboard and photo service flickr for search for similar reasons for the past few decades.

    Pinboard allows me to search 65,000+ web pages that I have found over that time for something that might be useful. My act of saving the page link in pinboard allowed me to categorise the page saved and implied a certain ‘good enough’ quality to it. I also get to search the public links of other netizens that do a similar thing. Pinboard is insufficiently popular to reward spammers, so the quality quotient is relatively high. Reddit offers a more expansive corpus of links and information, without the same level of quality control.

    The reason why Google’s web search has degraded has its roots in Google’s pivot to mobile two decades ago. Google abandoned key areas of interest to web users:

    • Boolean search terms, which would have been harder to do on early mobile devices.
    • Blog search because it was non-mobile content.
    • Google News and RSS, in favour of nascent mobile social platforms that it lost out to.

    And the list goes on, I am less sure why it has suddenly surfaced into the public consciousness now?

    Link rot

    A month or so go my friend Matt in his newsletter recommended a website that allowed you to search Google to find out the oldest mention of a term. So I put my own name in, and nothing came up prior to 2004.

    DECAY

    That meant all records of my early agency work had been expunged from the web. Work that included big brands:

    • BHP-Billiton
    • Ericsson
    • MTV Networks
    • Palm
    • Sony
    • Verizon

    Alongside startup brands that fizzled out almost as quickly as they had started. Maybe there is still some traces locked somewhere in behind LexisNexis or Haymarket Media paywalled databases.

    Author and veteran member of the digerati Cory Doctorow wrote about link rot this year, partly prompted by research from the Pew Research Center. Pew found that 38 percent of content surveyed disappeared over a ten-year period.

    Link Rot google trends

    But link rot isn’t a new concern. Interest in link rot seems to have peaked 20 years ago.

    google books ngram

    Link rot is a subset of a wider concern called bit rot, where digital media degrades over time, or can no longer be read due to issues with software file compatibility. Bit rot as an issue was explored in a series of short stories by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in a book of the same name back in 2016.

    Web of data to walled gardens

    Of all #internetisdying factors, this one surprised me as much as link rot. Closing of Twitter API access was considered to be a defining moment for #theinternetisdying. However it fails to acknowledge that the high point of the web of data was web 2.0 and the comparatively free access to APIs. Facebook with its closed wall by design set the standard for subsequent services like TikTok and Instagram. Like link rot, the awareness timeline feels a decade too late. The closure of Google Reader is an equally big impact back in 2013, stopping mainstream adoption of RSS in its tracks.

    LLMs

    Journalist Steven Levy has been chronicling Silicon Valley for decades. He wrote a few of my favourite non-fiction books including Insanely Great, Crypto and Hackers. In the summer of 2023, he wrote an article for Wired magazine: What OpenAI wants. This became a cover story for the September 2023 issue of the magazine under the header ‘Dear AI Overlords, Don’t Fuck This Up’. Less than a year later, the consensus from netizens seems to be that they already have.

    Dear AI overlords don’t mess it up

    Several things have happened, here are three of them:

    • Imitation became mainstreamed. OpenAI used a female voice that was apparently a copy of Scarlett Johansson’s voice due to Sam Altman’s infatuation with the premise of the Spike Jonze film Her. A Ukrainian YouTuber found her likeness being used as an avatar to sell Russian goods to Chinese consumers.
    • Misinformation had everything from the Pope wearing a designer down jacket and fake black supporters for presidential candidate Donald Trump.
    • Scott Galloway talked about ‘corporate ozempic’ where AI being good enough to reduce human tasks allowing for corporate headcounts to disappear. The CEO of Klarna freely admitted that they used AI to replace 700 employees in customer service roles. AdVon was used to write articles for SportsIllustrated driving anger and anxiety in readers and journalists.

    Automation has eaten blue collar roles for decades, but it has taken the automation of white collar roles to create the panic and sense that #theinternetisdying and AI is killing it.

    The Sky Is Falling In

    Chief Vitalstatistix

    As a child I fell in love the Asterix The Gaul books. In them was the Gaulish village chief Vitalstatistix – who is portrayed as mostly reasonable, well-informed, fearless, (comparatively) even-tempered and unambitious. Vitalstatistix was known for his irrational fear that the sky may fall on his head tomorrow. I was thinking about Vitalstatistix as I wrote this post on #theinternetisdying.

    Back in the late 2000s, Dr Ira Wolfe wrote a book that discussed how online behaviour and Google services were creating irreparable damage in the workplace and beyond. His book was merely the latest in a series of panics about societal destruction:

    Back in March 1997, Wired magazine had their own version of the #theinternetisdying, they believed that web browsing (or web surfing as it was termed back then) was about to be killed off by ‘push technology‘. This episode of The Computer Chronicles gives a good overview of push technology at the time.

    You may already be using push technology without realising it, such as receiving mobile notifications for breaking news or localised weather alerts.

    In conclusion, #theinternetisdying? really?

    Previous technological shifts introduced new challenges, but we adapted and progressed. There’s no reason to think the current ‘#theinternetisdying’ phase is any different from those before. Perhaps in 15 years, I’ll be writing about how people feel the ‘metaverse’ has become closed or some other futuristic concern.

    Posts on related content can be found here.

    More information

    The Internet as You Know It Is Dying | Fabricated Knowledge

    Rot-Com bubble | Ed Zitron

    Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024)

    5 Reveals From Google’s Leaked Search Docs | AdWeek

    When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research Center

    The Internet: Now you see it, now you don’t | Daniel Tynan

    The Open Secret of Google Search | The Atlantic

    Is Google Dying? | Hacker News

    Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization: How to Manage the Unprecedented Convergence of the Wired, the Tired, and Technology in the Workplace by Dr Ira S Wolfe

    The Trick To Understanding New Media: Nobody’s In Charge | Yahoo! Finance

    Dead tools | renaissance chambara

    Media Companies Are Making a Huge Mistake With AI – The Atlantic

    Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry

    The Japanese knotweed of generative AI is strangling Facebook | Social Warming

    Google messed up Gemini launch, Sergey Brin says | CNBC

    Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month | Klarna

    AI makes photos of fake Black Donald Trump supporters | Quartz

    Ukrainian YouTuber found her AI clone selling Russian goods on Chinese internet | Wenhao’s News Blog

    Google Mired in Controversy Over Gemini AI Chatbot Push – WSJ

    Corporate Ozempic | No mercy / no malice

  • Collapsing the funnel

    I was prompted to write about collapsing the funnel as a trope that marketers and adtech salespeople tell each other after listening to Jon Evans Uncensored CMO podcast. Jon was interviewing Josh Feldman.

    NBC Universal TV set (3D)

    Josh Feldman

    Feldman is CMO at NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships business. He has been a long-time NBCUniversal marketer. Prior NBCUniversal, Feldman started at Turner Broadcasting, where he took on various roles including national and regional advertising sales roles. He managed client relationships for a range of TV channels including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT and TruTV. Feldman’s sales orientation partly explains his collapsing the funnel perspective.

    NBCUniversal

    Mr Feldman is no longer just selling 30 second TV spots at NBCUniversal. NBCUniversal is a plethora of media properties:

    • Live events such as BravoCon
    • Five theme parks
    • 1 billion reach across more than 150 countries
    • 200 networks
    • 350 digital properties

    Here’s the way the podcast broke down:

    1. 00:35 – Josh’s Career Story
    2. 02:50 – How does being creative help with sales
    3. 04:17 – B2B strategies that make NBCU successful
    4. 09:41 – NBCU’s iconic programming
    5. 11:05 – The secret to building strong client relationships
    6. 14:21 – Funnel marketing and the importance of end of funnel <—–
    7. 16:34 – The popularity of Bravo
    8. 17:46 – BravoCon
    9. 21:00 – The best brand activations at BravoCon
    10. 22:51 – How brands can work with talent
    11. 24:49 – Being a media partner for the Olympics
    12. 27:59 – Josh’s advice on creativity and landing your message
    13. 31:39 – Helping smaller brands

    Two aspects to collapsing the funnel

    Josh’s comment about collapsing the funnel was emblematic of two separate trends going on that he encapsulated in this one segment of the show.

    • The first is that performance marketers are waking up to the fact that brand matters.
    • The second trend is the fusion of sales and marketing functions in the business-to-business through account-based marketing or what used to be a sales support function now being lionised as a ‘strategic approach’.

    Brand matters

    A classic example of what happens if one focuses exclusively on performance marketing is the plateauing of growth that occurred in ASOS. The ASOS story is now often cited by marketing media mix experts as an example of what happens when brand building isn’t used to support performance marketing.

    In the noughties and 2010s ASOS was a purveyor of trendy clothing for young people. It started as a copycat brand over time became a competitor to Urban Outfitters and an Etsy-type platform for small vintage clothing and design boutiques.

    ASOS review

    ASOS took a performance marketing approach to growing its business. Over time it expanded to eventually ship to 197 countries, but 40 percent of its customer base was still in the UK.

    ASOS customers and orders over time

    Performance marketing drove the customer base, but didn’t drive a significant increase in the number of orders per customer over time.

    ASOS basket size

    When we look at the inflation adjusted average basket value, we see a steady decline each year, with a sharper drop from 2021 onwards.

    Performance marketing failed to increase basket size, and each customer added was less valuable than the last. Especially when one factors in the complexity of global logistics required for customer deliveries.

    This next bit is speculative, but the geographic expansion drove growth as performance marketing based growth in its established markets plateaued.

    The business went into reverse after 2020. The reasons for this reversal are likely to be multi-variant including:

    • Performance marketing plateau.
    • The bifurcation of the market. At the bottom end, Shein, Temu and TikTok commerce. At the top end luxury brand websites and secondary market platforms like StockX.
    • Culture. Like other online properties including Buzzfeed and Vice News, ASOS had a millennial user base that has been somewhat aged out.
    • The cost of living crisis due to post-COVID inflation.

    Let’s next think about advertising, in particular Les Binet’s explanation of how advertising really works. In this explanation summarises the conclusions of decades of Ehrensberg-Bass Institute research, alongside marketing science work by the likes of the IPA into a six line explanation.

    Advertising increases / maintains sales and / or margins

    By

    Slightly increasing the chance that people will choose your brand

    By

    Making the brand easy to think of and easy-to-buy

    And

    Creating positive feelings and associations

    Via

    Broad reaching ads that people find interesting and enjoyable

    And

    Targeted activations that they find relevant and useful

    Les Binet – How advertising REALLY works | YouTube

    ASOS failed to maintain sales and margins because they focused on targeted activations – that consumers found useful. But the utility seems to have changed over time.

    This happened despite ASOS using data science to optimise their marketing with a particular focus on geo-experimentation in performance marketing rather like trialing TV ads in different TV company regions, which marketers have done for the past 70+ years.

    This isn’t because Lilia and Clara are bad data scientists, indeed I think they are good marketers using data to inform their decisions. The problem was that the focus was nearly exclusively on performance marketing.

    ASOS are an example that has started to persuade performance marketers that brand advertising helps performance too.

    ABM

    Account based marketing is a strategic approach to business sales. It depends on account intelligence and analysis. This insight is used when an organisation considers and communicates with each prospect or customer account as markets of one.

    Target selection becomes important and the criteria is usually focused on the most profitable business.

    In existing accounts it is focused on upselling or cross-selling products and services to the customer. The main focus is alignment of marketing tactics with sales management. This moves the focus from individuals as targets to groups of people within an organisation.

    ABM isn’t about collapsing the funnel per se but about melding it and reshaping it in the service of the salesforce rather than short term and long term brand with sales.

    More marketing-related content here.

    More information

    The Josh Feldman podcast episode.

    ASOS Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)

    ASOS-related coverage on Financial Times

  • Mobilizing for monuments & more

    Mobilizing for monuments

    Mobilizing for Monuments is an interesting brand collaboration. Flickr was a natural partner for the the environmental charities due to it being the destination community for serious photographers. Rivian also makes sense, given that they make electric all-wheel drive vehicles – which presumably have a lower carbon footprint.

    The Mobilizing for Monuments road trip film that highlights the benefits of the brands involved as well as the conservation messaging. Rivian gets to showcase its vehicles at a time when Tesla’s Cybertruck has a reputation that’s gone from a must-have vehicle to a dog’s dinner. The thing that I am most curious about Mobilizing for Monuments is where Flickr takes it next? Test

    Ray Kurzweil expands on his idea of The Singularity

    Ray talks about his ideas articulated in The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and popularised in The Singularity. He speculates that The Singularity will be in 2045 in terms of what’s technically possible, but not the market forces that are likely to be green light it. I presume that this talk is to coincide with the launch of his book featuring his updated thinking: The Singularity is Nearer.

    Writing with large language models

    This MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy talk is very pertinent given the current debates that copywriters seem to be having around automation and LLMs. Mina Lee takes a social science approach to her investigation to LLMs including an evaluation model.

    Reinvent the model

    Swedish fashion retailer Lindex has looked at diversifying its models across its advertising and marketing materials. It is also re-examining beauty standards and the related pressures that its customers face. This a long term process that they have described as ‘Reinvent the Model‘.

    More related posts can be found here.

    Spotify showcases inspirational ads

    Spotify (at least in the UK) have done a great job supporting strategists and planners with case studies and research reports over the years. This time they have collected a selection of UK-specific campaigns on their platform demonstrating its strengths.

    • Channel 4 Streamland—an in-app experience, which personalised show recommendations for Spotify users based on their listening habits.
    • Hyundai did a video takeover for their campaign to get consumers to pronounce their name authentically.

  • Shutting down

    Shutting down is a conscious choice. You might see it described as digital detox or a digital break. I, like a number of people that I know have a ‘dumb’ phone to complement my smartphone. This is different from the pre-broadband era of the internet where going online was an active decision punctuated by the sound of the modem.

    At that time, keeping in touch was an active decision rather than the tyranny of the pings from messaging applications. We cocooned ourselves from each other with a personal audio soundtrack via an iPod or a Discman. This cocooning effect was viewed to have a positive effect on personal autonomy was called the Walkman effect by sociologists.

    Once you used a device be it the modem-connected PC, TV or music player you went through the act of shutting down devices. My parents still go room-to-room at night shutting down devices.

    Pimp my N95
    My Nokia N95

    Over the past two decades we have stopped shutting down. A number of things happened:

    • Phone as Swiss Army knife. Cellphones quickly became our alarm clock. Working on the Nokia N93 launch with Flickr (then part of Yahoo!) felt like a watershed moment allowing photos to be taken and shared instantly online. During the July 7th London bombing, I got home by navigating with the ring bound A-Z atlas of London, which lived in the bottom of my backpack. Now I have four apps that would use depending what I wanted to do.
    • Device as social currency, your smartphone says as much about your economic health as your car. It’s a hygiene level of status, just like branded training shoes (sneakers) were when I was at school.
    • Synchronous social media. The now long-forgotten iNQ SkypePhone, BlackBerry and Danger Sidekick heralded no-shutting down engagement.
    • Dark patterns / design techniques used to encourage app or service use as a compulsion. It is no coincidence that a number of senior design and engineering teams at Tinder and Instagram sat in BJ Fogg’s persuasive computing design (captology) modules, yet the products used techniques that Fogg described as unethical.

    Parent and policy voices.

    The key points that activists and concerned parents talk about revolve around the following talking points:

    • Screens now dominate our lives, and their presence is only getting stronger and more powerful. For instance, I can no longer phone up my local surgery to get a repeat prescription or book an appointment, it’s all mediated by the surgery website and the NHS app.
    • (Some) adults can control to a certain extent how often and when they use screens. Shutting down is proving hard for many adult consumers to do. But there is a commonplace screen addiction. Empirical evidence suggests that it would be damaging for children. I could make countervailing points, here is a better place to see them outlined.
    • Smartphone addiction and drug addiction share some similarities including a neglected personal life, a pre-occupation with the subject of the addiction, social media as a mood modifier or for escapism. The implication is that smartphones are an unwilling appendage which add capabilities (some of which are of a questionable value) and can’t be put down. All of which reminded me of my childhood (and adult relationship with music).

    The push seems to be on regulating the services that run on top of smartphone platforms.

    There doesn’t seem to be a corresponding focus on encouraging shutting down as a desirable behaviour; presumably because the efficiencies promised by digital government services are too alluring.

    Under-supply.

    While there might be a desire for dumb phone, there are remarkably few options as second generation mobile networks have been turned off around the world.

    HMD (what was Nokia’s terminal business) is the leading player in this sector. They are starting to do clever things that tap into the idea of shutting down and being present in the meatspace at key moments.

    HMD x Heineken x Bodega collab dumb phone

    Heineken collaborated with HMD and streetwear atelier Bodega to collaborate on a ‘dumb’ phone in a transparent case, similar to electronic devices issued in prisons.

    HMD x Heineken x Bodega collab dumb phone

    Heineken seem to doing this for a number of reasons:

    • People are less likely to be themselves when there is a broadcast studio in your pocket full of distractions to pull you away from the now.
    • Shutting down allows you to be more present for your friends.
    • Losing a £1,000+ device down the pub full of work information and access to your bank account isn’t a particularly attractive option. So providing a cheaper option is a bit like the ‘festival phone’ tough but basic Nokia that I bring to gigs and festivals.

    Punkt.

    A less well known competitor is Punkt. Punkt is a boutique Swiss consumer electronics company who have made a number of cellphones, home phones and a Braun-like alarm clock. Punkt want to promote the idea of intentional technology use, rather than as a wrapper around our everyday lives. Their MP02 phone acts as a wi-fi hotspot and a dumb cellphone, as they view a two device strategy of laptop and phone leans in better to their intentional technology use vision. Punkt make shutting down easier, by adding friction to switching on.

    More related posts can be found here.

    More information

    Battle lines drawn as US states take on big tech with online child safety bills | Guardian Online

    UK children and adults to be safer online as world-leading bill becomes law | GOV.uk

    Zuckerberg among tech bosses to testify on child safety | BBC Online

  • Very Ralph and other things

    Very Ralph

    Very Ralph is a documentary that celebrates the career of Ralph Lauren. What’s interesting is Lauren’s lack of expertise in fashion and design. Instead Very Ralph captures Lauren’s childhood ability as a stylist and art director to eventually create a Ralph Lauren world. Very Ralph became a descriptor of a style and a lifestyle. It’s a very unique way of brand building that you usually see from the likes of Muji rather than many luxury brands.

    Polo Ralph Lauren

    If Apple could have a ‘Very Ralph‘ moment their role in luxury tech would be cemented beyond the Mac and the iPhone. Charlie Rose’s seminal interview with Ralph Lauren is also worth watching.

    Living wake

    A generation before me in Ireland, living wakes were a thing. Usually it was when a member of the family was migrating to the United States, Canada or Australia. Michelle ‘Mike’ Ng’s living wake was because she had state four cancer. The film is an emotional rollercoaster.

    Miss Goddess of Beauty

    A lot of what keeps Hong Kong (and Singapore for that matter), is the hundreds of thousands of domestic helpers who run middle class households. They cook, care for the elderly, clean the homes, do the shopping and bring up the children. While being cheery and sociable people they largely remain unseen and unheard; except for Sundays when they congregate in public spaces.

    Despite the western view of beauty pageants as objectifying women by MEN, Miss Goddess of Beauty is different. It allows these women to to be seen and creatively express themselves. The entire event is organised by the community of domestic helpers. Although the ladies are predominantly Filipinas, there is at least one Indonesian participant in the pageant – a solidarity built on a shared experience in Hong Kong.

    Quentin Tarantino on going to see The Matrix

    Tarantino recalls how the TV spots, rather than reviews or word-of-mouth drove the viewership of The Matrix. The power of advertising to build a world that excited the heck out of the audience before they saw the movie.