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.
Catching up with fellow former Yahoos. Employees of Yahoo! were known as Yahoos. All three of us worked on the European marketing team in London at the time when web 2.0 was kicking off. It was great to see my fellow former Yahoos. We kicked around the move away from quality in online media, historic ‘pirated television reception’ in Ireland, the worrying state of brand marketing and new ventures. If you are looking for high-quality male grooming products Charles has been working on Scrubd.
Andrew Tuck tells the Monocle story on the Mediamasters podcast. Really interesting origin story – what’s interesting is the contrarian thinking of Tyler Brûlé. Monocle is notable for building a print magazine in the face of a digital onslaught of media. More media related content here.
Great interview with Roger Smith about the wonders of mechanical watch.
Smith worked with Dr. George Daniels who invented the co-axial movement which has been a major step forward in mechanical watch making – changing the way power is delivered that is more efficient and can improve accuracy.
Smith is exceptionally articulate about the technical differences of the different watches from high accuracy quartz watches to classic Rolex and Omega movements.
Antonio Da Silva’s Hell’s Night where famous film characters interact in one night club stunned me when I saw it a few years ago. In the meantime he did a sequel and has had time to work on the colour grading of the video to make it even more mesmerising.
Hell’s Club
Hell’s Club Two
Finally I am surprised that this was something I hadn’t heard already – what if the late great Terry Wogan had listened to Skibadee or MC GQ vintage mixtapes and Rinse FM? Peter Serafiniwicz channels The TWOG$.
Alternatives to Big Tech, and a t-shirt | Creative Good – as someone who has used RSS for a long time I am intimately aware of the needs for alternatives to big tech. Google Reader obliterated RSS readers and then obliterated RSS readership by abruptly withdrawing the product. I’d argue that you could use Apple’s default iCloud account and MacOS apps. Mark Hurst recommends Safari or FireFox but ignores Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts.app. I have been using these three apps since I started using OS X in 2001.
Nice little Nesta egg: Former lottery quango took £7m from Google • The Register – details of Google’s influence in European academic life are detailed in a report by the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), an initiative part-funded by Google’s competitors. Google turned out to be the only corporate sponsor of think tank Readie, the Research Alliance for a Digital Europe, hosted at Nesta.
VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock – probably the best argument that I’ve read for super capacitor and hydrogen fuel cell technology due to the shortage of cobalt. Lithium prices have also inflated massively over the past few years
Amazon: The Making of a Giant | WSJ – Today, the AI assistant has more than 30,000 skills available on its store and can be used to control more than 4,000 smart-home devices from 1,200 different brands. (paywall)
The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.
The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.
Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.
Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.
What Siri creator Norman Winarsky thinks of Apple’s Siri now — Quartz – not terribly surprising. Norman Winarsky is now a partner at a number of Silicon Valley venture firms. Whilst he is better known in business space now as a lecturer on business, entrepreneur and VC, he is an academic at heart.
Norman Winarsky via the TechCrunch account on Flickr
Norman Winarsky studied and eventually ended up with a doctorate in mathematics. He started his private sector career at RCA Research (RCA’s answer to Xerox PARC or IBM Research), he had a career there for a number of decade as that moved through various owners. Eventually it became the east coast campus of SRI. Norman Winarsky went on to help found the SRI process for spinning off businesses and technology licensing. He was a co-founder of one of those businesses: Siri – that was bought by Apple. It will be interesting to see if Norman Winarsky has another high impact idea in him moving forwards. More related content here.
That’s the key finding from an analysis of regional and global agency deals by global marketing management consultancy Trinity P3 and Mark Ritson
Alibaba rival JD.com posts first annual profit as a public company | TechCrunch – The company’s fiscal profit was helped by a surprise $35 million profit in Q1 and a lucrative Q3 quarter in which it posted a RMB 1 billion ($151 million) profit thanks to its own efforts on Single’s Day, China’s online shopping bonanza. The company posted a RMB 909.2 million (US$139.7 million) loss for Q4, but that marked a 28 percent decrease year-on-year.
While Alibaba has a higher profile — with enormously profitable quarters — JD.com has quietly built out its e-commerce by expanding into financial services, offline retail and more
Consumer behaviour
This Chinese billionaire felt lost in US without WeChat, mobile payments | South China Morning Post – The chairman of Legend Holdings, the controlling shareholder of Lenovo, said China was now comparable to Japan and ahead of the US in terms of mobile internet technology, digital content and innovative business models.“If you haven’t stayed abroad for a long time, you might not understand [the difference],” said Liu, citing his recent experience in the US. His insights give credence to how Chinese technology companies have cultivated a hi-tech universe so large that it exists almost exclusively on its own – sustained by the country’s 1.4 billion people – but cut off from the rest of the world by Beijing’s Great Firewall, which blocks content not approved by the government. – the problem is that Chinese systems are ‘Galapagos’ technologies
BlackBerry suing Facebook for patent infringement | CNBC – “Blackberry’s suit sadly reflects the current state of its messaging business. Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, Blackberry is now looking to tax the innovation of others. We intend to fight,” Facebook general counsel Paul Grewal said – you see Facebook has sucked the blood out of other businesses for too long. I have little sympathy with them in this suit. It will be interesting to see how robust BlackBerry’s patents are and whether it would be cheaper for Facebook to pay them off or buy the business outright. The question is who is next after Facebook in Blackberry’s legal sights?
Luxury
Balenciaga is Putting its Money Where its Logo-Covered Hoodie Is for F/W 2018 | The Fashion Law – garments on the brand’s runway bore a phone number, +33156528799, which turns out to be Balenciaga’s “new hotline.” Call the number and you can answer a 20-question survey, inquiring about your age, primary language, height, and shoe size, as well as your favorite form of transportation, type of music, season, taste (your options are: Bitter, Salty, Sour, Sweet, or Umami), and so on.
A way for Balenciaga to better understand its customers? Maybe. Considering that the message is ends with the following note: “Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. All data will be erased now,” I, for one, am guessing this is more interactive experience than fact gathering mission. If we have learned anything over the past several years, it is that “experiences” are everything to the modern-day consumer – I can imagine a choir of marketers howling in a symphony of pain about this
Meet the billionaire millennial pouring money into British fashion… and she’s only 27 | Telegraph Online – ‘My generation has completely different shopping habits,’ says Yu. ‘People born in the 1960s and ’70s buy into established brands such as Dior and Chanel. For them, it’s about showing status and where they fit into society. But my generation isn’t into logos – it’s not cool, it’s too obvious. [And] we prefer to shop online. We’ve become very interested and hungry for young, emerging designers.’
P&G’s Marc Pritchard calls for ‘fewer project managers’ at agencies as he vows to destroy ‘maze of complexity’ – “For media, data and analytics is enabling us to bring more media planning in-house, replacing multiple layers,” said Pritchard. “When it comes to buying, our purchasing people can negotiate with the best of them, so we’re doing more private marketplace deals in-house. And if entrepreneurs can buy digital media, why can’t the brand team on Tide, Dawn and Crest be entrepreneurs and do the same? They can, and they will.”
He explained that P&G wants and needs brilliant creatives, and will invest in such talent. But “creatives represent less than half of agency resources, because they’re surrounded by excess management, buildings and overhead.”
Media
Time for news to fight back | The Australian – Mark Ritson arguing that that agencies may be pushing clients into digital media because it can result in greater commissions for the agencies — in some cases almost 3 times greater than for traditional media (paywall)
Retailing
Smartphone users are spending more money each time they visit a website – Recode – The amount of money people spent per visit to online retailers has increased 27 percent since the beginning of 2015, according to new data from Adobe Analytics. Meanwhile, the length of smartphone website visits has actually declined 10 percent
Silicon Valley Is Over, Says Silicon Valley – The New York Times – In recent months, a growing number of tech leaders have been flirting with the idea of leaving Silicon Valley. Some cite the exorbitant cost of living in San Francisco and its suburbs, where even a million-dollar salary can feel middle class. Others complain about local criticism of the tech industry and a left-wing echo chamber that stifles opposing views. And yet others feel that better innovation is happening elsewhere – like Shenzhen? I think a lot of the problem with Silicon Valley is that it doesn’t build hardware any more. Bright people are mobile for the right pay, what you can’t easily do is the kind of commercialisation and manufacturing speed as a feedback loop like you see in Southern China
Techmeme Ride Home by Techmeme on Apple Podcasts – nice summary of the biggest stories in the tech sector on a 15 minute podcast. Techmeme started as a tech focused news aggregator, but this Techmeme ride home podcast is really handy to listen to on my commute.
FK Twigs x Spike Jonze
HomePod — Welcome Home by Spike Jonze — Apple – FKA Twigs dances along in a mind bending video that’s part LSD trip and part old time Hollywood musical. Just a shame that its advertising the Apple HomePod. More related content here.
Stephen Hawking Voice Generator (play/download) ― LingoJam – kind of like the Speak n Spell you had when you were a kid but more adaptable. Hawking came to view his voice generator as part of his personality. When it was glitching out at the end of its natural life, a tremendous effort was put into replicating its sound for Hawking. The story in itself says a lot about how we relate to technology.
Let’s Go Twitter – I haven’t watched a film at the cinema in a while so am probably way late to this creative. I ended up being really confused by this advert. Visually, its a feast for the eyes, but still confusing. I love Twitter but good lord do they honestly think that advertising will solve what they seem to have diagnosed as a UX issue in on boarding for a new account?
Supermarket chain REWE empowered shoppers to choose the sugar content of its own-brand chocolate pudding. During the campaign, REWE distributed puddings that had 20%, 30%, and 40% less sugar alongside its original formula; the favorite formula (30% won!) will be permanently available for sale at the supermarket. Of course, one could say that there is a bias in the survey design, but this idea of co-creation and a transparent discussion about sugar is a welcome change. via Trendwatching.
