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.

  • Yahoo Found + more news

    Yahoo Found 

    Advertising Age has a case study of the Yahoo Found campaign that ran in London.The Yahoo Found campaign was interesting because it used the environment as an interaction with the poster executions to give it an experiential feel.

    The Yahoo Found campaign reasonated for a long time with consumers and we took found arrows on to the streets long after the poster campaign had finished to hijack the Dukes of Hazzard UK fillm premiere, SES London (with the help of Vegas showgirl outfits) and a Harry Potter book launch.

    Running a brand building campaign like Yahoo Found on a sustained basis takes a lot of cojones, especially in a corporate environment. Its a pity that Yahoo Found wasn’t exploited to its full potential.The problem that marketers now face is that brand activating tactics Google Adwords provide a safer option with PowerPoint friendly data that can be dropped into pivot tables and used like a crutch to support their decision-making in the face of a hostile management.

    What this doesn’t capture is brand equity through salience and mental availability which provides more diffuse benefits of preference over time.

    Influential analyst houses

    Interesting survey over at Duncan Chapple’s blog over which analyst houses have the most influence.Whilst the split may may change depending on what tech sector your client is in, its an interesting piece of research; particularly when you see the dominance of US focused players.

    And the fact that a good third of the most influential analysts are in the other category indicating a large amount of fragmented trusted expertise.

    EU roaming charges

    Meanwhile the GSM Association have a handy site that allows you to compare roaming charges when you visit different countries in Europe.

    I tried it using Orange post paid as my settings to have a look at different carriers. What I found interesting was that in the countries that I sampled (Germany, Ireland, Spain, France) there was not price differential between the carriers. Of course this was an unscientific test isn’t at all indicative of price fixing is it?

  • Yahoo! Answers adoption

    Yahoo! Answers was one of the last projects that I worked on when I was inhouse, I will hold my hand up and admit that I was a hawk in the Yahoo! Answers team. The reasons for my Yahoo! Answers hawk status in terms of the product being a ‘killer application’ was mainly because it failed my own ‘test’ of how is this relevant to my online life. It also suffered from the Yahoo! services problem of an off-putting onboarding process. If you weren’t put off by the sign-up then would be greeted by a product that would be familiar to business online support services.  The prototypes that I saw internally reminded me of the self service customer solutions offered by the likes of RightNow Technologies and Transversal and the support forums provided by Apple for users.

    I thought that the opportunity may be in sponsored channels: Microsoft sponsoring an XBox channel, or Sainsbury’s sponsoring a recipe channel. But this was poo-pooed as an idea by my immediate director.

    In some ways I was wrong about Yahoo! Answers success (and I am happy to be wrong in this case).Windows Live QnA doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere, Lycos IQ: though superior in terms of design and features doesn’t seem to have got that much traction so far.

    According to Hitwise (via SearchEngineWatch), Yahoo! Answers is now the third most popular reference site online, however its 2.94 per cent market share is puny in comparision to the 16.76 per cent marketshare of Wikipedia which has a Googlesque sector dominance.

    Steve Rubel has talked about Yahoo! Answers on his MicroPersuasion blog Marketers will Answer to Yahoo! and sees the opportunity for sponsored sections, which kind of squares the circle in the way that I viewed the product.

    It offers yet another opportunity for direct interaction with consumers and a channel for cummunications, but not a full-on dialogue.

    Where it gets interesting is when you look at the Google Trends data on the service, most of the search enquiries for Yahoo! Answers seems to be coming out of India, rather than the US or Europe. This will alter the services attraction for advertisers in terms of the net worth of the consumer, whether they can capitalise on the clicks through presence in the marketplace and the quality of answers given for a global audience – quality control will be a critical ongoing issue.

    In addition, where similar services have been provided in the US before, they haven’t made much of an impact. More related posts here.

  • WSJ Online tenth anniversary

    10th anniversary of WSJ Online

    The Wall Street Journal Online or as it calls itself the WSJ Online has been celebrating its tenth birthday with some retrospectives and future gazing.

    WSJ Online dot com disasters

    A couple of the articles caught my eye.The Best of the Worst by Kathryn Meyer (May 3, 2006) celebrates the suckiest ideas of the first dot com boom.

    CyberRebate

    CyberRebate did what it said on the tin; they charged you an outrageous price for an item and then promised you a rebate, they hoped to make money on the redemption drop-out – they were overwhelmed and drowned in a sea of debt.

    Digital currency

    Digital currency ideas (Beenz and Flooz) withered on the vine as they weren’t as universal as Mastercard or cash. PayPal survived because it kicked Western Union’s ass and we could all be credit-card merchants.

    iSmell

    iSmell was a device designed to release smells appropriate to the pages you surf (don’t even think about it, get your mind out of the gutter this instant) like some kind of b-movie experience enhancement craze of the 1950s.

    CueCat

    CueCat plugged into your PC (Windows only if you please) and allowed you to scan bar codes of magazines into your computer to get further information or content. This idea seems to have caught on in Japan with mobile phones and specialised software, so maybe they were too visionary?

    3Com Audrey

    The 3Com Audrey internet appliance was a great well engineered device killed by the ever decreasing price of PCs. I still rate its QNX-based OS and I like the product design on it.

    PointCast

    PointCast the push technology service that was a richer more engaging experience than RSS is today, but then I was sat at the end of a fat pipe whereas most users were on dial-up. Also marketers knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing used the service to carpet-bomb users with unwanted ads.

    Tech trends

    Tim Hanrahan’s piece on Tech’s 10-year Creep (May 8, 2006) brings out some interesting trends that have occurred. I have paraphrased and commented on his trends below

    Anytime, Anywhere: Push email and wireless internet access mean that getting online whilst traveling or wire-free on your couch or at Starbucks — is possible for $60 a month or so. However it eats into the work life balance.

    Think Better! Google basically.

    Putting Yourself Out There: Originally people liked their privacy, caller ID on phones was pushing the envelope in terms of social disclosure. Over the past five years people have gotten used to sharing personal information online. Chat rooms, forums, online dating followed by social-networking sites; to blogs and MySpace came to dominate. Easy-to-use tools, cheap to free storage and online social interaction brought out the pioneer spirit ‘Go web young man‘.

    The Post-Stuff World: Music downloads, ebooks, ripped movies. (But if its that post-stuff why is Amazon so successful selling books, everyone’s iPod is full of music ripped from CDs and people love their laptops, mobile phones, PDAs, crackberries, Nintendo and Sony handhelds). This techno-minimalism bollox didn’t wash with me.

    Free Information, Free People: People are exercising their free speech and there is a maelstrom of content out there that Technorati struggles to handle. The social web has replaced the techno web – (though when Soledad O’Brien hosted a show on MSNBC that featured a young Max Headroom-type avatar sidekick named Dev ten years ago (good gosh, was it that long ago?) was it precient of Second Life?) CNN now covers blog content as if it was matter-of-fact, though blogs often don’t have the same rigorous process behind them as well-written journalism.

    Picture of Soledad O’Brien courtesy of CNN.com. More related posts here.

  • Veoh and misc. tech stuff

    Veoh Networks is a great company, though I haven’t worked out yet whether it is sailing too close to the wind or not. The company is funded by media conglomerate Time-Warner and Michael Eisner (the former ruler of planet Disney). The website looks like YouTube, but with some important differences:

    • Veoh lets you submit full-sized streaming videos
    • YouTube limits its users to 100 MB files.
    • Veoh can do 2 GB files distributed via a P2P-client available for Mac and that other platform

    I’ve been enjoying a selection of ‘so-bad-they’re-good’ 1970s martial arts movies off there. The Mac client is really easy to use. My main concern is how will the company make money in the longer term. I can see someone like TimeWarner using Veoh as a guinea pig to further is experiment with AOL and online TV. On second thoughts just enjoy it while you can! More media related posts here.


    I’m with Stupid    Apple has apparently moved away from using a PortalPlayer media processor in all its iPods and instead moved to Samsung for the next-generation of MP3 players. PortalPlayer is very exposed to the Apple business, with iPods counting for about 70 per cent of its sales according to a Reuters report that I’ve read. Its not healthy for PortalPlayer, hopefully the company will diversify its client base to become more independent.

    However Samsung as a supplier was also a dumb move for Apple. This is not a commodity product like flash memory where Apple can use multiplie suppliers and change at will, the media chip is central to the iPod functionality and experience.

    Does it sound like a smart move to work closely with (and educate in the art of engineering a killer MP3 player) a large ambitious, hyper-aggressive company that wants to eat Apple for lunch? It has been alleged that Samsung had meetings with creative agencies in London where the central theme was Kill iPod.

    You can chart the fall of the iPod empire from this moment on…

  • Day pass media model

    I first came across the day pass concept with Salon.com, its an interesting compromise between subscription content and ‘free content’. First of all, with the possible exception of consumer homepages there’s little free content on the web. Content that you don’t have to pay for has advertisements around the sides of the pages and in the text, these are often paid for on a ‘per click’ basis.

    Self described ‘premium’ publications like the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal go for a walled-garden approach where you have a paid for subscription and they vend the content out.

    I consider this to be going after short-term gains and sacrificing their future.

    The day pass says my content is valuable; however if you engage with my sponsor, they will pay for your access to my content over the next 24-hours. It means I have a moral contract with them to listen to their sponsor (and actually Aviva the insurance company did a smart bit of work by tailoring their content to deliver their message to an Economist reader whilst at the same time getting over their positioning as a progressive innovative company), I understand the ‘real value’ of the content that I get to look at AND the publisher remains relevant to a modern net audience rather than trapped in the dead forest business.

    As Oscar Wilde said it is better to be talked about than not be talked about; in the online world, getting talked about means that you have to be accessible. Bloggers will tend not to blog about sites were people cannot go and see the content in context, for instance I have reduced the number of links I have to New York Times stories because of their part-way subscription model.

    During my day pass tour of the Economist, I came across a series of trend articles and a number of interesting podcasts for download touching on some of the editorial teams hot topics for 2005: economic change

    More related content here.