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.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Share of search

    Les Binet talks about how share of search (organic search queries) volumes is a good indicator of likely interest in a brand. Somewhere between salience and brand consideration. As an idea it isn’t necessarily new, but Binet has put validated it through research. Its a new spin on the idea of people telling what they’d like to be true on social and what’s actually true on search. You can watch Les tell you more over at Vimeo. Given the popularity of Binet and Fields The Long and the Short of it, I expect to hear share of search cited much more in client – agency discussions.

    Pepsi & Notorious B.I.G.

    Notorious B.I.G. has had one of his in-studio freestyles (think the equivalent of a doodle) that was never released, converted into a Pepsi ad. He probably didn’t release it for a reason, it didn’t really go anywhere apart from him flexing is quick thinking. It didn’t add to his image. But that didn’t stop Pepsi from swooping in. I like it, it has brand salience.

    Hip hop seems to be a bit of blind spot for progressive voices at the moment. Wallace was a self-proclaimed former drug pusher, was arrested for selling crack cocaine and weapons charges. Apparently is was Sean Combs who eventually stopped him selling drugs. Whilst Wallace had collaborated with Pepsi-sponsored Michael Jackson; he’d also wrote about violence towards women on his album Ready to Die.

    I get that it would be cool for gen-X marketers; who also listen to the Wu-Tang Clan, De La Soul, Common, Mos Def, Gangstarr and the Beastie Boys.

    But what happens if the tide suddenly changes as it has with other artists? Pepsi could be left high-and-dry. My attitude might be seen as overly cautious; but I am sure that Kendall Jenner ad seemed like an ‘now’ version of Coca-Cola’s ‘hilltop’ advert to the clients at the time.

    DataPlay

    Even though I am interested in gadgets and technology, I had never come across DataPlay. Mat Taylor goes through the history of the DataPlay format. The format looks like something straight from the pages of Akira or Ghost in the Shell.

    I had a number of takeaways from the video:

    • DataPlay lacked what Robert Cringely called the ’10x’ factor in his book Accidental Empires.
    • DataPlay ignored the progress promised by Moore’s Law, which at the time was still going strong through the early mainstream web era
    • DataPlay ignored the lesson that Sony learned the hard way with the Betamax format. If you don’t have content for your format; it will fail. Other Sony formats like MemoryStick, SACD, DAT to name but a few have shown that formats can fail even if you have content. But not having content leaves you with little chance for success.
    • Finally, DataPlay was relying purely on third parties to make the format successful. It had relatively little skin in the game.

    More here.

  • North Face + more things

    From Supreme to Gucci: How North Face uses big-name collaborations to drive ‘brand heat’ – Glossy – Tim Hamilton, North Face’s head of global creative, said it typically does two collaborations per year, at most. In addition to its upcoming collab with Gucci, North Face has an ongoing collab with Supreme that started in 2015. And it released collabs with athletic brand Brain Dead and MM6, the sportswear line of Maison Margiela, in August.  Hamilton said the brand’s collaborations typically require a lead time of 1-2 years and are almost always manufactured and produced by North Face. The MM6 collab, for example, began with discussions between Hamilton and the Margiela design team in 2019. – This lead-up time probably explains the balance in their collabs between hype and steadier brands. Hence no Virgil Abioh or Yeezy deal with North Face. Abioh has flirted with Canadian technical brand Arcteryx; which is owned by Chinese sports and outdoor clothing conglomerate Anta – who have a lot of cash. It is interesting that nothing has come from Abioh’s visual love letter so far.

    Op-Ed | New Balance Collabs Are Second to None This Year – New Balance places an emphasis on “aligning with brands that are authentic in their space and have substance behind their message.” New Balance’s roster of collaborators represent a wide range of aesthetics, communities, and subcultures, meaning the brand can speak to a variety of consumers based on what product has been matched with which collaborator. In a sense, putting together a New Balance sneaker collaboration is like a game of exquisite corpse. “We’re able to keep product executions and stories fresh while creating different followings for each type of partnership,” – you could argue that adidas and Nike’s deals with Yeezy and Off-White relegate adidas and Nike to little more than original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). But New Balance also doesn’t have the deep pockets to go up against adidas and Nike head-on. That lack of deep pockets also affects North Face as well. I am surprised that the North Face and New Balance haven’t collaborated, though part of the issue maybe New Balance’s Danner Boots business. This competes somewhat with North Face’s boots business, but they have a very different aesthetic appealing to a different audience. North Face is owned by VF Corporation with sister brands Dickies, Timberland and JanSport. This means that brand collabs for North Face are probably complex politically.

    A millennials love affair: China’s second-hand luxury goods market booms | Reuters – yes Chinese like new things like new apartments. Yes but: Chinese luxury consumers have become more sophisticated. Chinese consumers have travelled and seen the pre-owned market like Milan Station and BRAND OFF in Hong Kong and Japan respectively. In absolute terms middle class wages are lower in China still than the US; yet this isn’t reflected in luxury product pricing

    Alibaba Takes Over China’s Top Hypermart Chain for $3.6 Billion – Bloomberg – interesting that Alibaba is working on an offline retail strategy

    Robert Lighthizer Blew Up 60 Years of Trade Policy. Nobody Knows What Happens Next. — ProPublica – I am not normally interested in publishing about politics, but this article on US trade policy is an interesting starting point to think about the current debacle

    Revisiting Lyn Collins’ “Think About It” – Micro-Chop – great essay. Its also good to see how the edits of Ultimate Breaks and Beats played a role in popularising the ‘think’ break

    Hong Kong walks: discovering traditional, trendy Tai Hang | Financial Times – it makes me ‘home sick’ as Hong Kong island was my home for a while

    Baaaa for business: Princess Diana’s iconic sheep sweater is back | Financial Times – its interesting that luxury brands are now raiding not just archives but childhood memories for cues. Also the convoluted customer journey outlined in the article for the original purchase via a bridesmaid’s mother

    Debate over vegan ‘sausages’ and ‘burgers’ heats up ahead of EU vote | Financial Times – unsurprising given the size of the beef and pork industries in the European Union

    WPP back on hunt for deals, says chief | Financial Times – Read’s challenge is to win back investors who think agency holding groups are struggling with multiple structural tests: cost-cutting and clients taking business in-house, competition from consultancies such as Accenture, and waning clout as middlemen in digital ad markets dominated by Google and Facebook. WPP’s share price is 65 per cent lower than its 2017 peak, and has fallen more than a third since the pandemic battered the economy. The three-year decline is a more severe than at rivals such as Omnicom and Publicis. Meanwhile, investors have flocked to the simpler growth story of adtech providers such as The Trade Desk, which this year has soared to almost three times WPP’s market value on a tiny fraction of its revenues. The £2bn market capitalisation of Sir Martin’s S4 Capital, a digital-only advertising group, is almost a quarter of WPP’s value even though it generated less than three per cent of its £12.4bn sales in the year to June 30.  – a number of things from this interview. The Trade Desk has a lot of heat around it, WPP attempted to do this with Xaxis but has got little credit. Read tried to spin that Accenture and WPP have sweet spots at different points in the economic cycle. Hence the comment about Accenture being good at cutting marketing costs.

    Mr Read’s pitch is that WPP has combined its traditional creative strength with the tech expertise to build ecommerce platforms for clients such as Sainsbury’s, and become the single biggest integrator of Adobe’s software. “Our goal is to be to revenue growth what Accenture is to cost reduction,”

    Chinese-Americans campaign for Trump on WeChat | Financial Times – it is becoming increasingly difficult to organise on WeChat, not only because of the looming US ban but also because of Chinese censorship. Simple WeChat filters for sensitive terms such as “democracy” can detect articles about US politics. Sometimes when Mr Ming sends articles to his groups, those with Chinese-registered phone numbers on their WeChat accounts cannot receive the links, no matter where they are in the world. Ms Wen, who used WeChat in 2016 to organise a door-knocking campaign for Mr Trump, was glad to shift away from the platform this year. “I know it is completely surveilled. Nowadays I mostly use Telegram,” she said, referring to the encrypted messaging app. – interesting move to Telegram, mirrors what I saw in my Hong Kong friend network after the Hong Kong National Security law was passed

    Google’s new ‘hum to search’ feature can figure out the song that’s stuck in your head – The Verge – now this is clever

    The future of fashion week? Look to Shanghai | Vogue Business – Shanghai Fashion Week, which pioneered digital pivots like live streaming, returns today as a largely physical event, featuring around 90 brands across a number of venues, including its main stage in fashionable shopping district Xintiandi and emerging designer platform Labelhood

    How to steer clear of discounts this holiday season | Vogue Business – “Markdowns have almost single-handedly ruined our industry,” says Hewitt. “They train the consumer not to buy in-season because they can come back in three months and get a discount. It’s a vicious cycle.” – during the 2008 recession Rolex reputedly bought back watches in its retail and wholesale channels. And then recycled them

    Kibbles & Bytes #1122: Apple Releases Four iPhone 12 Models and the HomePod mini – Don Mayer nails the assessment of 5G in the latest edition of his newsletter.

    Why a new generation of challenger brands need to rethink how to challenge | A Little West of Centre – Blands. That’s what Ben Schott, writing for Bloomberg, coined them. And what a coining it is. The new generation of humble, conscious, in-it-to-sell, underdog companies, sporting D2C models, consumer champion narratives, minimalist aesthetics, affordable luxury positionings and post-choice selling techniques (this is THE mattress, that is THE toothbrush).

    Sony Launches SR Display: You Can See 3D Pictures Without Wearing 3D Glasses – Gizchina.com – really interesting technology

    Indonesia’s central bank hints burglary in e-wallet player – consumers should look at the track record of providers before using them to save large amounts of money. Indonesia’s total e-wallet transaction value size is expected to reach US$15 billion by 2020, according to a recent report by The Asian Banker

    Problem Solved #13: A lesson in tackling bloody taboos from Bodyform | The Drum – the result was to present the viewer with flame-engulfed apartment of a perimenopausal women; a monster ripping at an endometriosis sufferer’s uterus; a ‘flood gate’ moment following an unexpected sneeze; a woman who has chosen not to have children; and the often-turbulent journey of trying to conceive

    Diane von Furstenberg: Interview | Vanity Fair – The iconic wrap dress, designed in 1974 and sold more than 15 million times since, made von Furstenberg an overnight sensation and began a dialogue with women that she has maintained ever since, in a large part through admirable philanthropic efforts, including the annual DVF awards. Now she’s taking that dialogue to the podcast, a medium she champions for its value in shifting the focus away from appearance.

    British Airways Avoids Huge £180 Million Data Breach Fine for Hack That Compromised the Personal Details of Over 400,000 Customers – good for BA given airlines are haemorrhaging cash at the momen. I am worry about the message that this sends to large corporates and customer data

    Shenzhen — Justin McGuirk – pretty much nails how I found Shenzhen over the decade that I visited regularly. More on Shenzhen related posts here.

    Facial recognition data leaks are rampant in China as Covid-19 pushes wider use of the technology | South China Morning Post – interesting that this is being collected by non-state actors such as property management companies and schools as well as the state bodies

    iPhone 12 launching without earbuds or wall chargers is compared to eating without chopsticks in China | South China Morning Post – I was expecting this as Chinese consumers are value orientated, brands focus on ‘client delight’ and there is a culture of free gifts with products. So taking items out of the box and the green explanation won’t wash

    Beijing 1986: portraits of a forgotten China | Financial Times – amazing photos from 1986.

    Shenzhen/Huawei: the other Bay Area | Financial Times – The impression of military manoeuvres by alternative means was reinforced by Tencent, another Shenzhen resident. It was among big Chinese social and video platforms including iQiyi and Weibo, that simultaneously cancelled the livecast of Apple’s iPhone 12 launch – a small example of the nexus between the Chinese government, corporate decision-making influenced by the government and an undercurrent of Han nationalism

  • Amazon returns + more things

    Hidden cameras and secret trackers reveal where Amazon returns end up | CBC News – interesting aspect of Amazon’s business model. It does make me wonder how much of a drag is returns on Amazon’s business? Retail returns are usually running at 10 percent of products bought. With e-tailing; this rate is thought to be as high as 40 percent according to the programme. That sounds like an extremely high rate of returns. Back when I was in college 25 percent was quoted as a returns rate for catalogue businesses.

    Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Unicorn – “Where you get into trouble is when the software gets so complicated that you have to send people in to manage it,” said one former CIA official who is complimentary of Palantir. “The moment you introduce an expensive IT engineer into the process, you’ve cut your profits.” Palantir, it turns out, has run headlong into the problem plaguing many tech firms engaged in the quest for total information awareness: Real-world data is often too messy and complex for computers to translate without lots of help from humans – to be fair enterprise software companies have always sold a good deal of smoke and mirrors in terms of over-exaggerated claims – sounds a lot like IBM’s Watson in this respect

    Apple’s New 5G IPhones May Be Left on the Shelf | Yahoo! Finance – 5G lacks a killer app for consumers

    Exposure to TV ads up 15% during height of lockdown – Even children were watching more broadcast TV and exposed to a greater volume of advertising in the weeks following the lockdown in March.

    Alibaba Group – investors day presentations – some interesting insight into Chinese e-tailing, retailing and internationalisation of these models

    Blockbuster Chinese games said to boycott Huawei and Xiaomi app stores over revenue tax | South China Morning Post – two Chinese gaming startups, Lilith Games and miHoYo, said they won’t sell their would-be autumn hits via app stores pre-installed on smartphones made by Huawei and Xiaomi. Instead, they’ve opted for stores charging smaller fees or none at all—including Apple’s App Store, which levies the same 30% charge in China as it does everywhere else. While the duo didn’t say outright they were unhappy about the 50% rule set by the Chinese Android stores, many gamers and developers see them as the good guys stepping up against tech’s behemoths

    How to Monitor Facebook Pages – Meltwater Help Center – now allows users to monitor Facebook pages that they’re in charge of. The limit is 50 specific Facebook pages. It pulls out the Facebook analytics data into a Meltwater interface

    European Semiconductor Sales Drop, Global Sales Rise – EE Times Europe – not surprising given the disruptions to manufacturing

    Google Chrome remains China’s most popular web browser, even with Google search and other apps blocked | South China Morning Post – consumer backlash against some domestic browsers can be attributed to their aggressive user acquisition tactics, such as being deliberately difficult to uninstall. But he said that a shift in consumer tastes might also play a role. When Chinese internet companies first started designing websites and applications in the late 90s, the minimalist aesthetic was unpopular, he said a friend told him at the time. “Chinese consumers wanted stores where all the merchandise was crammed onto the shelves at maximum capacity, with narrow aisles where people were just bumping into one another,” he said. “It felt like plenitude.” “Those early design preferences endured for a surprisingly long time online, and I think there’s still a much higher tolerance for it than we’d see in the US or other Western countries,” he added. “I think as consumers get more sophisticated, though, they’re looking for a retail experience that doesn’t feel like a fire sale all the time.”

    Opinion: How Can Luxury Brands Successfully Price In The Post-COVID World? – In these challenging times of lockdowns and demand contraction, luxury brands have increased – even more than usual – the prices of their bestselling products to offset part of the compression of margins due to the pandemic. Take for instance, Chanel which earlier this year confirmed it had brought the prices up of its iconic handbags (11.12, 2.55, Boy, Gabrielle) ranging between 5 and 17 percent in euros and Louis Vuitton which also raised the prices of some of its products in March and May. It is not a surprise that brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Dior, whose handbags are products that are considered iconic and perceived by consumers as investment pieces, can be more bold in increasing prices to protect their margin. But not all companies have such strong brand positioning and therefore cannot raise their prices so easily.

    Bulgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin: “Millennials Don’t Want Formal Luxury.” | Luxury Society – I suspect that this is across age cohorts but the blend of streetwear and luxury is a key sign of it

    Is online advertising subprime? Contagious – interesting thought experiment

    South Korean Activists Accuse China of Using Huawei to Hack Their Election | Daily Beast – of course Samsung is looking to pick up 5G smartphone and infrastructure sales from Huawei….

    New info about Facebook-Instagram deal delays antitrust report: source | CNBC – it will be interesting to see what comes out

    Axios China – Top German official hushed up report on China’s influence – not terribly surprising when you read books like Hidden Hand. More China related posts here.

    The end of the American internet — Benedict Evans – more precisely. The end of Americans being the dominant users and culture on the internet

    Brussels drafts rules to force Big Tech to share data | Financial Times – grab the popcorn

    State of AI Report 2020 – interesting report on the hype

    The great uncoupling: one supply chain for China, one for everywhere else | Financial Times – Untangling supply chains that have built up over a generation is a complex and difficult task and the multinational companies which sell into the Chinese market will stay and even expand. But if companies that once used the mainland to make goods for export do decide to depart in significant numbers, it will represent a major reversal of five decades of economic integration between the US and China

  • Antitrust investigation into Google + more

    Exclusive: China preparing an antitrust investigation into Google – sources | Reuters – it would be interesting to see how a Chinese antitrust investigation into Google would play out. I could understand an antitrust investigation being put on the table of the politburo, I am less sure how it would work. Chinese companies need Google advertising, whereas Google is shut out of the Chinese market already. Google could turn around and tell them to do one; it would lose one R&D centre. A bigger issue might be the forced rejigging of its Google Home | Nest product supply chain. I suspect an antitrust investigation into Google is more likely to happen in the US than China

    Behind China’s Decade of European Deals, State Investors Evade Notice – WSJ – the EU needs to wise up

    Are Luxury Brands Losing The Battle Against Alibaba’s Counterfeiters? | Jing Daily – of course Alibaba can’t be trusted (and neither can Amazon)

    The perils of life in Beijing’s backyard | Financial Times – while it is all too easy to stereotype China and its companies as pantomime villains, Hiebert is skilled at teasing out the nuances and ambiguities, including local elites who have welcomed Chinese money, sometimes under corrupt circumstances. For south-east Asian countries, Beijing has proved a more predictable partner than the US, continuing business as usual with Myanmar when it faced isolation under its former military dictatorship, then more recently when it faced international condemnation for the military crackdown on the Rohingya. Beijing continued military sales to Thailand after the most recent coup in 2014

    American Engagement Advocates Sold a Dream of Changing China – efforts to downplay the missionary impulse of engagement with China amount to historical gaslighting, an attempt to retcon the record to conceal the extent of failure. During the Cold War, American leaders justified engagement with China as reining in China’s revolutionary foreign policy, establishing a stable bilateral relationship, and countering the Soviet threat—all reasonable goals. But for the first 20 years of the post-Cold War era, American leaders, backed by their advisors and strategists, unambiguously sold engagement with China on the basis of fostering a democratic and responsible government in Beijing

    Daring Fireball: Apple Is Removing Feed Readers From Chinese App Store – this doesn’t surprise me in the least. I used to use an RSS reader app when I would go to China. It’s interesting that RSS is now undergoing that much of a focus in China though as the audience will be distinctly niche. More on my RSS adventures in China here.

    When coffee makers are demanding a ransom, you know IoT is screwed | Ars Technica – Security problems with Smarter products first came to light in 2015, when researchers at London-based security firm Pen Test partners found that they could recover a Wi-Fi encryption key used in the first version of the Smarter iKettle. The same researchers found that version 2 of the iKettle and the then-current version of the Smarter coffee maker had additional problems, including no firmware signing and no trusted enclave inside the ESP8266, the chipset that formed the brains of the devices. The result: the researchers showed a hacker could probably replace the factory firmware with a malicious one. The researcher EvilSocket also performed a complete reverse engineering of the device protocol, allowing remote control of the device. Two years ago, Smarter released the iKettle version 3 and the Coffee Maker version 2, said Ken Munro, a researcher who worked for Pen Test Partners at the time. The updated products used a new chipset that fixed the problems. He said that Smarter never issued a CVE vulnerability designation, and it didn’t publicly warn customers not to use the old one. Data from the Wigle network search engine shows the older coffee makers are still in use – the bit I don’t understand is why you would need these appliances connected to the internet in the first place

    Apple vs Epic may go to jury; Google finally speaks on Fortnite ban – While Judge Rogers merely upheld her previous position, and didn’t dismiss Epic’s case outright, she was very obviously skeptical of their claims. Actually, that might be an understatement — she outright said that Epic lied, and, regarding the separate payment apparatus Epic insists on calling a “hotfix,” she said, “Lots of people use hotfixes. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you were told, and you knew explicitly because of your contractual relations, that you could not have that, and you did. It’s really pretty simple.” She was also rather unimpressed with Epic’s repeated claims that they were being denied access to large market of gamers who play Fortnite only on iOS, saying there are many other avenues through which those players can access the game.”

    Ai Weiwei: ‘Too late’ to curb China’s global influence – BBC News – “The West should really have worried about China decades ago. Now it’s already a bit too late, because the West has built its strong system in China and to simply cut it off, it will hurt deeply. That’s why China is very arrogant.”

    China’s Leaders Can’t Be Trusted by Chris Patten – Project Syndicate – interesting read. It gives you a sense of the uphill battle China now faces with political elites

    China under Xi Jinping feels increasingly like North Korea – The Washington Post – across China, it has become extremely difficult to have conversations with ordinary folk. People are afraid to speak at all, critically or otherwise. Students and professors, supermarket workers and taxi drivers, parents and motorists have all waved me away this year

    Wong Kar-wai is back making films: here are some of his best | Dazed – great summary of Wong Kar-wai’s work

    Fashion brands design ‘waist-up’ clothing for video calls – BBC News – this makes a lot of sense

  • Rival device makers on Amazon + more

    Amazon Restricts How Rival Device Makers Buy Ads on Its Site – WSJ – interesting that his is confirmed by both according to Amazon employees and executives at rival companies and advertising firms. Would rival device makers have an antitrust case? It would be harder for Amazon to argue that it doesn’t have a monopoly position in retail. More on Amazon here.

    China’s Sina Agrees to Go Private in Deal Valued at $2.6 Billion – Bloomberg – will probably list on a home stock market like Shanghai, Shenzhen or Hong Kong

    Oxford moves to protect students from China’s Hong Kong security law | The Guardian – one can see this is a direct reaction to Hong Kong’s national security law and also as a reaction to Chinese influence operations on campuses across the western world

    Will The Chinese-Owned French Luxury Brand Baccarat Survive? | Jing Daily – combination of bad management and circumstances. It is interesting that the owner Coco Chu has disappeared

    Mark Riston: It’s time for ‘share of search’ to replace ‘share of voice’ – Peckham’s Formula posits that when you launch a brand you should set its advertising budget based on your desired share of market. Specifically, your initial share of voice should be 1.5 times the desired market share you want to achieve by the end of the brand’s second year.

    Older People Have Become Younger – Neuroscience News – in terms of their mental faculties

    Netflix called out for “Three-Body” author Liu Cixin’s Xinjiang remark — Quartz – Mulan seems to have become a verb in US media in a similar way to ‘it’s all gone Pete Tong’ in late 1980s vernacular English. Although originally ‘gone Pete Tong’ meant that something had gone commercial and mainstream – in effect a sellout, which was a bad thing in the 1990s, when credibility was everything. Netflix might be able to see dramas into China a la the BBC and Sherlock; but I can’t see it being allowed to be a platform. China already has QQVideo iQiyi and PPTV