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.

  • Orchestrated media

    I decided to revisit the idea of orchestrated media recently. I had been working on the SEO of a post from 2011. This post linked out to an article by BBC research and development on orchestrated media.

    Picture of a test card from CCTV in Beijing
    Test card from Chinese public broadcaster CCTV.

    The BBC where aware that media consumption had become more complicated. Attention whilst watching the TV at one time competed with the occasional trip to the kettle; or flicking through a newspaper that was to hand but otherwise undivided. What became the TV changed with the advent of content distributed over internet connections to the web and mobile devices. But it wasn’t only about the proliferations of screens, but also how it interplayed with other media.

    It doesn’t necessarily imply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms. Nor does it imply the consumed content is related across the screens (e.g. an audience member may be using Facebook or Twitter for a completely unrelated purpose, while paying less attention to the TV show).


    Thinking in those terms is perhaps unnecessarily limiting in scope and misses the broader picture around the opportunities of social media, creating more seamless media experiences, and how these flow from home environment to beyond.

    Jerry Kramskoy on the BBC R&D blog on ‘orchestrated media‘

    This gives marketers a number of interesting things to think about. When is TV not TV. Think about live event programmes like The Apprentice or Britain’s Got Talent where social acts a ‘giant sofa’ as viewers share their opinions on what they see on screen. Twitter has tried to tap into this link between TV and discussion in its marketing efforts.

    As broadcasters, the BBC started to think of the potential in a two-way conversation that was far more democratic than SMS polling, email or letter bags and phone-ins.

    Orchestrated Media (OM)to refer to this experience of interaction, synchronisation, and collaboration of programme and companion content across devices. OM creates a new form of audience engagement with the broadcaster. Let’s start with some high level goals

    • Enable interactivity around the content (voting, games) and synchronisation thereof, based on time and/or events (such as a producer-console triggered “button push”)
    • Enable richer exploration of programme
    • Enable social network interactions through sync-related information and content identifiers for replay purposes
    • Migrate content between the TV and mobile devices (such as a load-and-go service that runs overnight to load the mobile with video corresponding to the unwatched portion of a program, or a resume-for-home service that picks up viewing on the TV from where it left off on mobile)

    Some of the necessary components in reaching these goals include
    • Visual feedback of shared interactions on TV screen
    • Private interactions on mobile screens
    • Support for not only live experience but also time-shifted and on-demand and pay-per-view ones
    • A back-channel to broadcaster for interactions, behaviour etc
    • Audio for different languages, directors commentary, clean audio etc, selectable per individual, synchronised to the programme
    • Accessibility for all above
    • Application life-cycle and runtime management

    Orchestrated Media – beyond second and third screen (II)

    This seems to be aimed to provide a seamless anytime, everywhere experience. Think of the way services work in the background as part of Apple’s ‘Continuity’ service layer. As marketers, if we’re thinking about an orchestrated media landscape, how do we hand off between channels and provide prospective customers a similar kind of seamless experience. How do we manage long term and short term attribution and feed these insights into proportion of media spend?

  • Full spectrum information ops + more

    Internet Observatory – New White Paper on China’s Full Spectrum Information Operations – China’s influence strategy on COVID-19 has involved a full spectrum of overt and covert tactics, which has included domestic censorship, English-language state media messaging bolstered by Facebook ads, and the use of fake accounts to influence conversations on Western social media platforms. English-language state media Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts, as well as Chinese diplomats and embassies, took part in an overt messaging effort to amplify the CCP’s preferred narratives on COVID-19. Covert state-sponsored activity leveraging fake Twitter accounts paralleled these efforts, praising the CCP’s pandemic response and criticizing the responses of other actors, such as the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. See also: Special Report: Australia faces down China in high-stakes strategy – Reuters 

    Huawei’s consumer chief says Harmony operating system will be rolled out on its smartphones in 2021 | South China Morning Post – security is an issue, and it doesn’t bode well that its all under a proprietary licence. Developers are an issue not only because of the installed base but the average revenue per user (ARPU). Points that are missing in this article

    Row over withdrawal treaty triggered law chief’s resignation | Financial Times – “Number 10 are doing this deliberately to pick a fight with the judiciary. They want to put the judges and Supreme Court on [the] wrong side of popular opinion. It’s a mistake to assume this is all about Brexit.” – reminds me of how Hong Kong is now being criticised for a defacto lack of separation in legislative and judicial powers brought in by China. It also affects the UK’s ‘gold standard’ contract law benefits

    FSI | Cyber | Internet Observatory – A US PR Firm Steps Into Contested Elections – interesting that they name the firm: CLS Strategies

    China Launches Initiative to Set Global Data-Security Rules – WSJ – playing to the global south. More on data privacy here.

    Australian correspondents Bill Birtles and Mike Smith pulled out of China after five-day diplomatic standoff over national security case – ABC News – no Australian journalists now in China

    Mediatel: Mediatel News: An age-old issue – Finally, note the profusion of industry 30 Under 30 awards (just Google it). Even actuaries have one. But don’t kill them. They’re vital. No, let’s have the 50 Over 50 awards, and 60 Over 60 (assuming you can find that many), or OAP Heroes of WPP

  • Dual circulation strategy + more

    China’s inward-facing ‘dual circulation’ strategy leaves many wondering where domestic demand will come from | South China Morning Post – dual circulation faces an uphill struggle. some structural issues. Finances in China are designed to benefit the state and the uber rich. China’s Gini co-efficient shows an astonishing gap between rich and poor. COVID-19 has meant that Chinese consumers have even less money to spend. This means that the domestic demand aspect of the dual circulation strategy won’t work as desired. More on China here.

    Forget TikTok. China’s Powerhouse App Is WeChat. – The New York Times – It has even extended Beijing’s reach beyond its borders. When secret police issue threats abroad, they often do so on WeChat. When military researchers working undercover in the United States needed to talk to China’s embassies, they used WeChat, according to court documents. The party coordinates via WeChat with members studying overseas – I loved the descriptor of WeChat as a super filter bubble. I am continually surprised by how nationalistic Chinese friends have become over my nine years using WeChat

    Jaron Lanier Thinks Things May Have Gotten Better, or Facebook ‘Might Have Won Already’ – Slashdot – interesting takeouts from an interview with GQ. This wouldn’t have made GQ five years ago, which goes to show how online privacy has become more important to the general public

    The True Story of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore | Palladium Magazine 

    The User Always Loses | Hacker News – fascinating Silicon Valley discussion on user-hostile companies

    How Did the Internet Get So Bad? | The Nation – “Search strings used to be phrased like ingredients: ‘revolution AND french OR russian NOT american,’” McNeil writes. But in the past two decades, the language and tone of our search queries have become more baroque and confessional. “When I search for information now, I feel like I should add ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to every request. There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.” This feels anecdotally true; I’ve certainly gotten into the habit of phrasing my searches, as McNeil notes, along the lines of “‘how do i download a printer driver for mac’ rather than ‘download printer driver mac.’” – one of my biggest frustrations is the lack of depth that ‘human language’ search allows versus the previous use of boolean terms

    ‘Is PR structurally ageist? Sadly, I think it is’ – PR leaders respond to Mark Read’s comments on age | PR Week – when the realisation you’re old hits you in PR, you have six options. You can set up your own shop (if you haven’t already). You can go in-house for breadth. You can run an agency (or help someone run theirs). You can become a functional ‘guru’ (a strategist, for example). You can fully embrace freelance consulting. Or you can go full side hustle and open a gin still

    Apple Watch Podcasts App Found to Falsely Inflate Listener Numbers – MacRumors – interesting, I wonder if this will change as we go ‘post-smartphone’?

    TikTok ads have pushed scams about apps, diet pills, other products, report says – CNET – to be fair most of Facebook and Instagram ads sourced from Chinese merchants and drop-shippers are just as bad. Given the continued export focus of China’s dual circulation strategy I can’t see TikTok changing this at all

    SoftBank unmasked as ‘Nasdaq whale’ that stoked tech rally | Financial Times – this almost sounds like a desperate gambler

    The Big Tesla Hack: A hacker gained control over the entire fleet, but fortunately he’s a good guy – Electrek – but what happens if its the GRU, the MSS or North Korea who find the next hack?

    ‘The Man in the White Suit’: What Will We Do When We’ve Nothing to Make? — Jim Carroll’s Blog – Should science pursue innovation that improves people’s lives regardless of the impact it may have on industry and employment? How do we deal with the concentration of capital that results from such disruptive change? How do we accommodate the workers who have lost their jobs? What will we do when we’ve nothing to make?

    WePresent | Mong Tong are an ambient psychedelic group from Taipei – Taiwanese krautrock?

    Harrods’s bold new bet: Suburbia | Vogue Business – in Essex and Milton Keynes. Surprised at this, I would have thought branches in Singapore and Berlin would make more sense?

    Dive action hero: meet the new Rolex Submariner | Financial Times – still the cleanest design of dive watch. The 70-hour power reserve is impressive

    Hong Kong cardinal warns priests to ‘watch your language’ in homilies – Catholic Herald – The priest, who asked not to be named because of concerns he could be prosecuted under the National Security Law, told CNA on Tuesday that many local Catholics were dismayed by Cardinal Tong’s actions. “The youth of the Church is for democracy, they simply are,” he told CNA. “They are looking for leadership, and I doubt you would find any Catholic under 35 here who is not angry and does not see the chancery as siding with the people tear-gassing them in the streets.”

    A TALE OF TWO NIKE ADS: MARKETING’S UNHEALTHY OBSESSION WITH “INSPIRATION” – BBH Labs – Generally speaking, ordinary folks are just much more chilled out than marketers. They are far less preoccupied with their careers, their personal fitness, keeping up with technology and looking at social media. They look for good deals and use coupons and loyalty programs but they are less likely to consult “expert opinion” before a purchase. They are much more interested in books and literature than they are in business. They are unashamed about their love of television. In fact they just love to be entertained.

    ‘We May Be Losing The Race’ For AI With China: Bob Work – US defence establishment think that they may be losing the race for AI with China.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Burger King King of Stream campaign conducted in conjunction with Ogilvy agency DAVID based in Madrid, Spain. The King of Stream makes sense when you look only at the data. Target young people who do gaming. Presumably there is some group cohesion data or insight that shows a propensity to eat fast food with gaming.

    However what would have been an interesting half-formed idea in a brainstorm seems to have had a negative impact in real life. Often what makes sense on Excel isn’t that smart when it meets the real world.

    It reminded me of the introduction to Robert X. Cringely’s insiders story of the PC industry, Accidental Empires written in the 1991:

    … PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.

    Robert X. Cringely – Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

    Spreadsheets and the data models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction. And King of Stream seems to be the advertising equivalent.

    The use of bot powered donations to Twitch with the donation sizes related to Burger King special deals had an adverse effect on the gaming community on Twitch for a few reasons.

    • Burger King is a big brand, yet isn’t engaging with the community in a respectful way. It was culturally tone deaf.
    • This was the bit that surprised me the most given Ogilvy’s reputation around its use of behavioural economics or behavioural science in campaigns. The ‘donations’ are miserly. There is a lot of psychology around the value of donations or gifts. If it really want to engage with the gamers, why not sponsor them?
    • The execution was intrusive and felt like spam

    More on this can be found on the King of Stream by reading this thread here. More on other Burger King campaigns here.

    https://youtu.be/236KSswX7v4

    Celebrating Hong Kong style milk tea. According to the descriptor on this video is made by the Cui Brothers in Hong Kong; though I suspect it might be carefully edited from other films. It features classic Hong Kong dishes including French toast and pineapple bun with butter.

    Indigo Gaming have put together this guide to cyberpunk culture. It is called part one, was done months ago and there doesn’t seem to be a part two yet. Part one of this guide to cyberpunk culture is worthwhile watching on its own.

    The best of dance music over the past 30 years or so in a Soundcloud account – The Classic Mix CD Series | Free Listening on SoundCloud – mix CDs were time capsules of what was hot in different clubs at the time. They owe their origins to the mix (cassette) tape packs that club promoters used to sell of their nights. Mixmag took that concept and came up with the first properly licensed recordings.

    The original ones were done as one track per DJ mix. At the time CD players would in a space between each track recorded on a CD. Even early versions of iTunes used to do the same thing with both mix CDs and recordings ripped of mix CDs.

    At their height, they were an amazing money maker for record labels. They received steady royalty payments from licensing their tracks to appear on these mix CDs. For example Gat Decor, who had a break out single called Passion – appeared on 191 compilations and mix CDs.

  • 1999 eclipse

    The 1999 eclipse, also called millennium eclipse as it would be the last total solar eclipse of the 2oth century popped up recently on the BBC.

    Solar eclipse

    For me it was a big online event. Eclipses don’t happen often. The last one in the UK had been some 72 years earlier. I was working in an agency in Covent Garden. It was the middle of the dot com boom. I had a mix of telecoms clients, the usual dot com projects and Palm PDAs as my clients.

    I had managed to hand off most techie client; custom chipmaker LSI Logic on to other colleagues.

    Delivering results wasn’t a problem for LSI Logic at the time. They were on the cutting edge of games console technology, computer storage and embedded electronics. Digital television was about to take off and LSI Logic had a chipset back then that even supported 8K transmissions. The corresponding displays to support 8K wouldn’t be along for another decade and a half. Its CoreWare library of chip functions based on a MIPS processor was the ARM of its day. But LSI Logic could fabricate the chips as well. The CEO was old school Silicon Valley, having been at Motorola Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor.

    The problem was the European operation communications team were very process-orientated, rather than outcome-orientated.

    With a few of my clients (RSL COM and Bell Atlantic’s international wireless business); I was allowed to run with remarkable leeway. I got on well with my clients. For the most part, I managed to avoid screwing things up.

    Life was hectic, I was constantly tired from a lack of sleep. But overall it was good. I had gained a promotion and was saving for the deposit on my first house. I was sat on the end of a (massive for the time 1Mbit/sec T1 internet connection). Ok, I shared it with other colleagues. But it mean’t pretty reasonable for the time internet connectivity. The IT department allowed me to use FTP overnight and during the weekends to download vintage house mixes. At the time the legendary deephousepage.com site was run by a technician on a university web server, allowing downloads of mixes encoded using Real Media audio format. This was just before MP3 went mainstream.

    The 1999 eclipse came along and was to be the first ‘internet’ event that I would experience.

    The BBC along with Sky News and ITV devoted their entire morning’s broadcasting to it. As an agency; we didn’t have a TV that I could remember. There was a problem with getting access to an aerial socket given we were on the ground floor of a tower block. Also the landlord wasn’t accommodating as they wanted a higher paying tenant in the office.

    Dot com businesses were driving up office rents in a similar way to Chinese hot money driving up central London residential property prices a decade later.

    The day of the 1999 eclipse, London was overcast. Just before lunch, colleagues dipped out to watch whatever they could see. I jumped on my work computer and fired up the BBC website to watch the eclipse experience live. It didn’t work that well; I presume every design agency with an ISDN line had a similar idea that morning.

    I typed in the website address for Sky News and went there instead. It was slightly better. I then used the backwards and forwards buttons to switch between the BBC and Sky News. (It would be another few years before mainstream browsers like Mozilla and Opera had tabs). Both pages carried what was supposed to be live video of the 1999 eclipse.

    Just six months previously, our agency had done Victoria’s Secret annual fashion show as a web stream for the first time. Back in 1999, this was a major technical feat and for the most part it turned out alright. The picture was so small you couldn’t really make it out. I couldn’t tell you if it was Tyra Banks on the cat walk. But that didn’t matter, it captured the imagination. It was done as much for the buzz it would create, as for how many people would view it.

    I had high hopes for the eclipse. It was happening before the US came online. Back in 1999, as soon as the US woke up, our office internet speed would grind to a halt.

    The reality of the 1999 eclipse was more prosiac. The video was displayed on screen about the size of a large rectangular postage stamp. Like a special edition one that you might get for Christmas. The image changed in a very jerky manner, like a bad slide show rather than full motion. And there was no sound.

    But at least I got to see a full eclipse, which was more than my colleagues could say. The overcast day and only a partial eclipse over London wasn’t that thrilling. It would be at least another ten years before the internet was ready for mass live events.

    Two years later, the dot com bubble had turned into a bust. I was working at another agency, that thankfully had TVs and I remember leaning against a filing cabinet watching a plane hit the world trade centre in New York. It didn’t occur to me to go online. I knew that the web wouldn’t work that well.

    Four years after that, I was working at Yahoo! Europe, when our web pages ground to a halt as the UK scrambled to get the latest news on the July 7th – London bombings. This was the first social media event as the engineers saw a flood of pictures into flickr. This gave the team a 15 minute head start to strip the Yahoo! UK home page of adverts and scripts. Instead they rebuilt the home page manually (in Dreamweaver) and republished updates as they happened through the day and into the evening.

    Now, most events would be produced and streamed via a smartphone on to a service like Twitch, YouTube or Instagram with video good enough for broadcast news.