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.
In Deep Geek through his Middle Earth playlist goes in depth into the world that JRR Tolkien built around The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. Christopher Tolkien added to the world through his work compiling and editing his father’s manuscripts. Keeping track of it all is a huge undertaking and Tolkien fans often disagree over nuances. Hence, the Middle Earth playlist acts as a sort of audio CliffsNotes analogue to all things Tolkien-related.
Ahascragh races
The Ahascragh of my memories is a one-road town with a petrol station slash local garage and tractor repair workshop, pub and one or two general stores. It was the local market town closest to the farm where my Dad grew up in Galway. By comparison it barely merits the name of town compared to the local urban centre Ballinasloe. This TV news section is from 1977. This seems to be encouraging child jockeys and raising money for the local GAA club.
Big Trouble In Little China
Big Trouble In Little China has a number of problematic aspects to it, but is saved by its efforts to honour the Chinese and Hong Kong cinema that went on before. It’s one of my guilty pleasures as I am a big John Carpenter fan.
Cadbury Lunch bars
Cadbury South Africa promoted their Lunch Bar using a character called Tumi who is the ultimate side hustler.
According to Dan Parmenter who was the creative director on the project
So, we created the story of Tumi, a streetwise hustler who has a couple of different vocations and even owns his own small business. His streetwise nature means that even though he’s managed to snag a part as an extra in a war film, he’s still not shy of a bit of his own shameless self-promotion.
Using StableDiffusion algorithm to create a video that explore our past, present and future. It has a charm to it that reminds me of old stop motion animation.
Alan Dulles
Alan Dulles talks about the role of intelligence and regime change in foreign states in this old film. It is interesting that the film starts off with a modern Soviet tank that the CIA managed to acquire through theft. Dulles was the head of the CIA during the early cold war. He was responsible for coups in Iran and Guatemala. His career finished with the Bay of Pigs.
I worked peripherally on And1 early on in my career, but it didn’t catch fire in Europe than it did in the US. I hadn’t known the full extent of the buzz marketing campaign that backed up the brand in the US. Here’s the early versions of their ‘mix tapes’, which did for street football what skate videos did for skateboarding in the 1980s. They blew up street basketball in the US, in a similar way to the X Games blowing up extreme sports. ESPN got on board with a sports related reality TV show with players competing for an And1 team contract.
But all the buzz marketing didn’t get the cut through that Wieden + Kennedy’s Freestyle TV advert did, effectively depositioning And1 from its street ball territory. Then there was a tie-up show on MTV2 that was similar to the And1 | ESPN show of the previous year. The lesson I took away from And1 was that product and reach both matter. Nike could buy reach and And1 didn’t have any product of note after the Tai Chi.
Opinion: Intel’s ‘smart capital’ is a warning from the past | eeNews Europe – the author considers the rise of private equity to fund new silicon fabs as a warning of peak semiconductors. Similar things happened in the 1980s and 1990s when large businesses like Coca-Cola helped fund manufacturing facilities. The key difference this time is how globalisation has been thrown into reverse by ‘Made in China 2025’ and hostile moves against Taiwan
Loss of Chinese tourists forces Europe’s luxury retailers to rethink | Financial Times – A recent surge in Middle Eastern tourists, as well as US visitors buoyed by the strong dollar, has helped fill stores. Eduardo Santander, CEO of the European Travel Commission, said the lack of Chinese tourists left the many luxury retailers that relied heavily on them with “a huge feeling of loss”, but had spurred “a huge effort to diversify”. Retailers have personalised their services. During Europe’s Covid lockdowns, shop assistants contacted customers via WhatsApp with tailor-made recommendations. Berg sees a “possible return to the old idea of service and store management from the 1990s, the little black book with all the customers’ addresses and preferences in it”. “You have to do much more to attract local customers,” Berg said. “They can come back, they have more time to spend, versus an international customer that was determined and straightforward.” – A few thoughts on this: The article asserts that Chinese tourists are straightforward and not picky. I think Chinese tourists are very picky by comparison, although the diagou’s supplying lower tier cities or buying to order might appear to be ‘luxury hoovers’. Secondly, luxury brands have treated non-Chinese customers abysmally (in particular the watch makers like Rolex and their retail partners like the Watches of Switzerland group) and they deserve all the problems that they get. Only focusing on the Chinese market has allowed the Chinese customers to blow up the secondary market. A straw poll of people that I know who have a Rolex from the past 10 years or so:
All of them had to buy their watch on the secondary market
About 80 percent of them had original warranty cards with Chinese family names, which is far higher than the 30 to 40 percent share that Chinese consumers make of the global luxury market
Finally, I don’t see the market coming back in the same way given Xi Jingping’s focus on common prosperity which will make luxury consumption increasingly problematic.
This New Study Reveals How Brand Loyalty is On the Decline / Digital Information World – I see this as more indicative of economic recession rather than any major change. Gallup showed that traits such as preference for green products decline in a recessionary environment, it would make sense if brand loyalty took a similar battering in favour of private label brands and substitute products
I have had my head in PowerPoint presentations and market research reports so haven’t paid much attention this week until I read in this weekend’s FT about the Korean drama trade.
The premise of the Korean drama trade is a paradox, that while Netflix as a business isn’t doing well with investors and has experienced a lot of short selling, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the companies who produce content for the platform.
In many western and developing world media markets, consumers have been used to international content. Media industries that more closely match their own values tend to do better. For instance, there has been a brisk Korean drama trade in Middle Eastern countries because there was less sex and violence on display than American media.
Cracking foreign language markets
In the English speaking western world, foreign language media has had a tougher time to gain mass market acceptance. Things opened up a bit with the popularity of Scandinavian media, in particular ‘Scandi-noir’ dramas. The ironic thing is that prior to 1964 the films available to broadcast in the UK were either old b-movies, pre-war pictures from smaller studios or foreign-language films. Hollywood saw television as competition, so there was an informal blockade. This ended in the UK when Samuel Goldwyn and MCA began selling films as packages to the BBC and ITV. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing however.
Netflix then became the world’s entertainment broadcaster*. This meant that over time Netflix had to build up a body of content for lots of different markets. And if you want to be successful in Korea, you need Korean dramas and movies.
Freedom through the Korean drama trade
One of the standout aspects of the Korean dram trade has been that it has allowed Korean writers and directors to push the limits of the genre. A classic example of this is Hellhound. Hellhound gets to explore interesting questions around religion, morality, hysteria and power.
Or you have the nihilism of Squid Game.
This meant that Korean dramas have got a bigger creative palate and become exposed to a far larger potential audience than previously possible on niche streaming platforms like Rakuten’s Viki or Kocowa. Warners must be kicking themselves, having bought and then shut down early K drama streaming service DramaFever in 2018. Bob Cringely talked about innovation in terms of surfing waves and the danger of wiping out by being too early was as big as missing the wave altogether.
Back to the Korean production companies that have made these films. June Yoon over at the FT noticed what is now a well trod short term investment play
See what K-drama performs well when launched on Netflix
Buy shares in the production company if it is listed on the Korean stock market
Hold shares and then sell before the price starts to decline to a more reasonable level (after four weeks or so)
According to Yoon, this is the Korean drama trade. You have seen a similar bounce in the entertainment agencies of K-pop bands with international success already. So this surfing of the wave in Korean stocks makes sense.
Zurich
The reason why I hadn’t been paying much attention is that I had a workshop in Zurich. The preparation was all-consuming. This all sounds very glamorous but it wasn’t. I flew in and went to the client office near the airport. Co-hosted a workshop and departed via Zurich airport after seeing next to nothing of the city. It was a long 19-hour day of work and travel. No Instagrammable moments or even shots grabbed by the departure gates. The few observations that I did have:
The pound now almost has parity with the Swiss Franc, which gives you an idea about how much Sterling’s depreciation since Brexit must be driving inflation
Mars had a really strong presence in the duty free shops. Which was really strange given the strong association of Switzerland with chocolate. It was a major win for the Mars brand that manages to associate its brands with the Swiss country brand in the minds of travellers
Switzerland still has a strong presence for tobacco advertising and promotion. The Marlboro chevron was on view in the duty-free store and there was a Winston smoking lounge for the nicotine addicted. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid at this 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. But it caused cognitive dissonance on this visit. (Disclaimer: I grew up around tobacco advertising, having had Uncles who ran cigarette machines in Ireland and were wholesalers to Irish bars, shops and petrol stations. I still have somewhere a few packs of Jordan B&H playing cards, a couple of Carroll’s Number 1 ash trays for keeping change in and a Reemtsma-branded Maglite torch.)
*With the exception of China, given that the media industry is one of many sectors that China views as being central to its state interests. This has meant that Taiwanese dramas and documentaries on the Hong Kong democracy movement have been given a platform on Netflix.
Warriors of the Future is a project of Hong Kong star Louis Koo. Koo has been almost single-handedly keeping the Hong Kong film industry in existence. A lot of Hong Kong‘s directors, cinematographers and stars go to work on ‘mainland co-productions’. Koo spent ten years getting Warriors of the Future off the ground. All the special effects that you see rendered in the film have been done by Hong Kong effects houses. The three years that the film spent in post-production seems to have been partly down to problems in accessing sufficiently large render farms for the CGI. The film cost just over 48 million pounds to make, but made only 39 million pounds in Chinese box office takings so far.
About those box office takings, on the face of it Warriors of the Future looks like just the kind of film that would do really well with Chinese cinema goers. They love Marvel, Transformers and the film adaption of Liu Cixin’s Wandering Earth. There are rumours going around that the box office takings for Warriors of the Future were spiked.
The usual scam goes something like this and has affected foreign films in the past. Cinema goer goes to the cinema. Wanders up to ticket office and asks for a ticket to Warriors of the Future, instead gets ‘Yet another remake of some made up chapter on the role that the Chinese communist party played during the great patriotic war against the Japanese’ – plot spoiler: the ‘heroes’ die. Cinema goer says ‘But I want to see Warriors of the Future‘. Ticket seller tells them to take that ticket to screen three where they can see Warriors of the Future.
Cinema goer gets to see Warriors of the Future, propaganda film gets the box office gross and cinema makes the quote of tickets that they have to sell in order to not get a visit from the security services. Given the high degree of support that the film enjoyed from stars like Daniel Wu who rented out screenings so that their fans could go and see the film for free; it seems like the Chinese government wants to stamp on the wind pipe of the barely alive Hong Kong film industry.
The film opens in Hong Kong cinemas on August 25th, and will hopefully make up for some of the lost revenue in the mainland alongside a sale of film related NFTs.
One Way
One Way is a documentary film that captures the ups and downs of Ah Man and Fiona who move with their two children to the UK from Hong Kong. Fiona is a teacher and Ah Man earns half of what she does. There is already a lot of stress in their marriage before they even plan to emigrate. There is naivety to them, which I also see mirrored in many of the other Hong Kongers I know who have been making the move recently. I am genuinely worried for how many of them will cope with the harshness of UK life.
In my experience, the British could learn a lot about civility and community from these new Hong Kong arrivals.
The bonesetter
Growing up in rural Ireland and an Irish household in England as a child I occasionally heard of a ‘bonesetter’. A bonesetter is part way between a chiropractor and a mystic. It was passed down through families and was considered to be a miraculous power. Doctors and medicines were expensive, so someone who could solve a slipped disc, trapped or a dislocated shoulder was highly valued.
You would hear around the dinner table tales of neighbours who were ‘crippled’ with pain, they were driven by a relative to a bone setter and were cured by the bonesetter. The bonesetter was said to have a ‘gift’ rather than medical training. It is generally thought of as a relic of Ireland past, like cocks of hay, cutting turf down the bog with sleán, tea made up in a recycled mineral bottle like a large Lucozade bottle, reading the Blondie comic strip the Sunday Press and getting covered with newsprint, The Old Moore’s Almanac and Ireland’s Own.
Jimmy Heffernan featured in the film, was a name I heard as a child. He was a farmer who gradually built up a reputation via word-of-mouth across the country and amongst the Irish diaspora in the UK, US and Australia. Heffernan is no longer with us, he died in 2003. Another member of the Heffernan family continues on the tradition to this day.
Industry Structure: Fabs are in Favor – LTAs are the Tell – Fabricated Knowledge had this interesting article on the role of NCNRs – which means non cancelable, non refundable orders. Chip foundries have to spend an enormous amount of money to be at the cutting edge of manufacturing. They also need to retain staff who understand the best way to use this capital and the machines that it buys. So they spread the risk, which is where NCNRs come in. NCNRs provide the chip foundry with guaranteed revenue and remove the foundries dependence on all the other aspects of the customers supply chain. Don’t long term agreements do the same thing? Long term agreements do guarantee revenue over a set number of years, but it might not be delivered in an even manner, for instance Apple might half orders in one quarter and push back up again in the next. But if you combine NCNRs within an LTA you end up with an entirely predictable revenue stream. NCNRs mean that you capital expenditure becomes more predictable and your operating expenses have money to meet them. The foundry has worked to derisk this business by moving it on to the customer.
NCNRs works for the largest cutting edge foundries and their clients. But it could be also used to keep legacy foundries alive for the likes of car manufacturers.
Economics
Economists must get more in touch with our feelings | Financial Times – Jon Clifton, the head of Gallup, which has been tracking wellbeing around the world for many years, notes a polarisation in people’s life-evaluations. Compared with 15 years ago (before the financial crisis, smartphones and Covid-19) twice as many people now say they have the best possible life they could imagine (10 out of 10); however, four times as many people now say they are living the worst life they can conceive (0 out of 10). About 7.5 per cent of people are now in psychological heaven, and about the same proportion are in psychological hell.
Xi’s Great Leap Backward | Foreign Policy – Amid China’s worsening economic crisis, nearly one-fifth of those between the ages of 16 and 24 are now unemployed, with millions more underemployed. One survey found that of the 11 million Chinese students who graduated from college this summer, fewer than 15 percent had secured job offers by mid-April. Even as many U.S. and European workers are seeing their salaries surge, this year’s Chinese graduates can expect to earn 12 percent less than the class of 2021. Many will make less than truck drivers—if they are lucky enough to find a job at all – so much in this to unpack
Why banning Huawei is proving easier said than done | Business | The Sunday Times – Huawei remains in the UK, with 1,000 or so staff working at offices including an HQ in Reading and a research and development centre in Cambridge, where it is investing £1 billion. It provides funding to universities and has a small stake in Oxford Sciences Innovation, which commercialises research from Oxford University. The BBC still shows Huawei adverts on its websites outside the UK, even though the company is alleged to have provided Chinese authorities with surveillance technology to target the Uighur population.
Chinese secret police warned exiled Hong Kong businessman over parliament plan — Radio Free Asia – China’s state security police threatened an overseas Hong Kong businessman who recently announced plans to set up a parliament-in-exile with repercussions for his family members who remain in the city, RFA has learned. Hong Kong’s national security police said last week they are investigating former pro-democracy lawmaker-elect Baggio Leung, overseas businessman Elmer Yuen and journalist Victor Ho for “subversion of state power” under a draconian national security law after they announced plans to set up the overseas parliament. “They warned me in advance [not to go ahead with the plan], but I ignored them,” Yuen told RFA in a recent interview, saying he had been contacted by state security police in Beijing, not the national security unit of Hong Kong’s police force. “They gave me a number of warnings, [including] saying I still have family members in Hong Kong,” he said, adding that there “no point” in worrying about it. Yuen’s comments came as his daughter-in-law Eunice Yeung, a New People’s Party member of the current Legislative Council (LegCo) whose members were all pre-approved by Beijing ahead of the last election, took out an advertisement in Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily News, publicly severing ties with her father-in-law – a couple of things. 1/ This will drive awareness and consideration of the parliament. 2/ It is very similar to the cutting ties done by Myanmar families of opposition members
Hong Kong’s shortened covid quarantine won’t revive its economy — Quartz – the Hong Kong government this week finally shortened mandatory hotel quarantines for inbound travellers from three days to seven. But the city remains as cut-off from the world as ever. Tourists and business travellers are deterred by Hong Kong’s stringent, costly, and often unpredictable quarantine measures. As a result, Hong Kong’s economy has taken a hit, sliding into a recession last month following two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The outlook is clouded with uncertainty, as zero-covid policies locally and on mainland China continue to weigh on consumer demand and trade.
Innovation
Interesting view on DARPA’s Gambit project. It builds on scram jet technology to build a more efficient energy.
MoFi sold high end vinyl pressings and claimed that they had a high-end analogue only chain from master tape to vinyl pressings. The reality is rather different. That doesn’t mean that the records are not great quality recordings, but they aren’t what they claim to be.
Millennial Internet Tics Have Gone From Cool to Cringey – The Atlantic – I’m still guilty of the “Millennial pause.” After hitting “Record,” I wait a split second before I start speaking, just to make sure that TikTok is actually recording. Last year, @nisipisa, a 28-year-old YouTuber and TikToker who lives in Boston, coined the term in a TikTok about how even Taylor Swift can’t avoid the cringey pause in her videos. “God! Will she ever stop being relatable,” @nisipisa, herself a Millennial, says. Gen Zers make up a larger portion of TikTok’s base, and have grown up filming themselves enough to trust that they’re recording correctly. Which is why, as short-form video comes to Instagram (Reels), YouTube (Shorts), and Snapchat (Spotlight), the Millennial pause is becoming easier to spot
China National Intelligence Law – article seven makes for particularly grim reading if you are engaged in the Chinese market, have Chinese employees or use Chinese products
Interesting dig into the US aid being sent to the Ukraine and what it implies about strategy.
