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.

  • Traffic experiments + more things

    Fascinating Traffic Experiments by Publishers (by @baekdal) #analysis  – Presence is often a very big part of the effect that you can have, in that, if you can be present in people’s minds, you often experience a kind of spillover effect on your business as a whole. This is not just true for content, but also everything else … like advertising. We know that creating an ad campaign where you show up in front of people continually over time is far more effective than just having one good ad. – a great delve into online with these traffic experiments. The practice of digital advertising tries to move away from ‘traditional’ advertising thinking a la branded recall. But it ends up validating it. The comment particularly resonates the findings of people like Byron Sharp. More related posts here.

    Great video essay on the Yamaha DX-7 synthesiser. After you listen to the bits on percussion you’ll never listen to your iPhone ringtones in quite the same way again.

    Systems Confrontation and System Destruction Warfare: How the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Seeks to Wage Modern Warfare | RAND – interesting to read. The concept of system destruction warfare [体系破击战] is also a good analogy for the way Amazon in particular has acted the in the commercial sphere (PDF)

    Android Wear is getting killed, and it’s all Qualcomm’s fault | Ars Technica – this assumes that the problem with Android Wear is a supply side issue with silicon, it doesn’t ask if Qualcomm sees it as a demand side issue and has moved on?

    The Shift: His 2020 Campaign Message: The Robots Are Coming | NYTimes.com – interesting how the debate about automation has been internalised and weaponised by politicians (paywall)

    Useful video, well worth a watch about applying Bayes Theorem to everyday life

    Key takeouts:

    • Remember your priors – what do you know about the context in advance of making an assumption
    • Imagine that your hypothesis is wrong? Would the world look different? – it forces you to check your presumptive assumptions
    • Update incrementally – all yourself to gradually change your mind based on updated information (flexible stance rather than dogmatic belief, as body of proof builds over time)

  • The forces of 5G + more things

    The next generation of wireless technology is ready for take-off – The forces of 5G – the forces of 5G will be felt more in the industrial space than cellular networks (paywall) More related content here.

    The top trends to watch in OOH | Marketing Interactive – digitalisation – dynamic contextual content, programmatic like placement

    Inside North Korea’s Hacker Army – Businessweek – Bloomberg – really interesting insights. It makes you wonder about freelancing sites

    Silicon Valley Has Developed a $300 Million Foot Fetish – Bloomberg – Bloomberg’s take on how startups are tapping into the streetwear luxury nexus. Jordans are starting to look pretty played out

    Books with Full-Text Online | MetPublications | The Metropolitan Museum of Art – amazing resource via our Matt

    Episode 337: The Secret Document that Transformed China : Planet Money : NPR – a great lunch time listen. The farmers who came up with the first commercial contract during the communist era of China that led the way for the Deng era of opening up

    Trivago Surpasses Billion-Euro Mark as Tech Investment and Advertising Pay Off – Finance.co.uk  – The company also stated that increased expenditures in advertising had helped to improve revenues. Schroemgens informed reported that advertising has been a help for the company learn more about their customers. “We do a lot of quite extreme tests because the more extreme we do it, the more information we get,” said Schroemgens, in reference to the near wall-to-wall advertising campaign of Trivago on the London underground that features “the Trivago girl”, actress Gabrielle Miller. – In a digital world mass media still works. Trivago is particularly interesting when you think about the amount of established online travel players

    Tom Scott talks about the ethics and perils of doctored videos due to face swapping. Porntube and Twitter have already outlawed it, but I think that we’re only at the beginning of the ethical morass that’s about to unfold

    Bloomberg: China May Legalize Gambling on Hainan Island | Jing Daily – problematic for Macau and more likely to attract luxury retail to Hainan island alongside the high rollers

    Why Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Need to Be Disrupted – basically a summary by Scott Galloway of the argument in his book The Four

    Scandal-hit casino mogul Steve Wynn’s luck may be running out in Macau as well | South China Morning Post – according to a gaming industry source, that Wynn may have failed to meet expectations the Macau government had that he could be a key driver of a culture shift which would see the city “transformed” from a purely gaming destination into a family oriented centre for mass market tourists

    Why mobile operators want your second SIM card slot | HKEJ Insight – Hong Kong is hyper-saturated. Apple missed out by not having a dual-SIM offering. The problem with a lot of non-Hong Kong carriers is they would be struggling to innovate on the service that they offer due to generous data packages

    Toyota’s China Crisis Is Misfire in Biggest Auto Market – Bloomberg – interesting debate around Toyota’s product range

  • Super Bowl LII & other things

    Super Bowl LII adverts

    It was the Super Bowl LII in the US which means a festival of TV advertising

    If Super Bowl LII had a star it would be Tide’s ad as  the most interesting because of the way it let the audience ‘in’ on the advert playing off against the cliches used in US advertising:

    • The car ad
    • The pharma ad with its disclaimers
    • The beer ad
    • Perfume ad
    • The rustic setting based ad (for conservative folks)
    • The car insurance ad
    • The luxury ad

    Brittle Chinese sensitivities

    Less about enjoyment and more about interest in social campaigns. Chinese netizen outrage at perceived slights is now affecting channels blocked in China.

    mercedes benz

    Mercedes-Benz put up a filler motivational post on Instagram quoting the Dalai Lama. Instagram isn’t available in China, but that didn’t stop the Chinese web getting angry. Ok when I said the Chinese web, I meant a particular faction of it young people with extreme nationalist tendencies called 愤青 fenqing (said fen-ching). They are a diverse group in terms of beliefs, but a simple view would be to think of the nationalism of Britain First supporters, but with Chinese sensibilities.

    Expect the threat of a Chinese government inquiry. Mercedes for their part apologised on Weibo:

    ..extremely wrong information

    Which caused further outrage as netizens wanted an apology on Instagram. So Mercedes apologised again. Mercedes is stuck between a rock and a hard place, an apology like that on Instagram would blow back on them outside China.

    What you are likely to see is a greater degree of self censorship by brands.

    Lunar new year

    Talking of China we’re starting to run into the lunar new year advertising season and my favourite so far has been this one by Nokia. It also ties quite nicely into a campaign that they ran online over Christmas.

    nokia

    The focus on family moments shows a maturity in Nokia’s advertising versus many competitors who talk about features.

    Taiko

    Taiko versus a vintage big band sound

    Mark Moore

    I have been exploring mixes by London clubland legend Mark Moore.

  • Fake porn videos + more things

    Pornhub Is Banning AI-Generated Fake Porn Videos, Says They’re Nonconsensual – Motherboard – a whole new world of ethics and intellectual property violations on image rights has opened up. Adult entertainers work often lives on way after they’ve left the life. Deep fake porn videos would allow for stars careers to never end (and they not get paid for it). Celebrity porn indistinguishable from reality, rathe than the pornalikes seen in spoof adult films like Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? Or porn made from digital humans, which would allow for new levels of extreme content

    Why Paper Jams Persist | The New Yorker – constant industrial design evolution

    Goodstuph creates ‘Jason’, a same-day idea delivery services for clients | The Drum – PR meets ad agency in approach for agile creative ideation. This would be particularly use for social creative, which relies much more on memes and catching the zeitgeist

    Spotify Launches ‘Spotlight,’ A New Multimedia Format – Reminds me that visuals over DAB that didn’t take off, success will depend on how it affects podcasts current pattern of usage, but will have interest from brands. Spotify is background content rather than active listening, so the visual aspect of this will be less important

    Meet Fashion’s First Computer-Generated Influencer | Intelligence | BoF – boom digital disrupts Instagram and YouTube wannabes. Digital humans don’t need a good behaviour clause, or disintegrate under the pressure of fame. You can prototype products and have them show case it to get an understand of demand and likely customer concerns.

    Optimizely’s decision to ditch its free plan suggests A/B website testing is dead | VentureBeat – testing isn’t dead but won’t improve conversion instantly

    A Kingdom from Dust — The California Sunday Magazine – big agriculture in California. So many aspects mixed into this including immigration, the environment and ethics.

    Rokid Home  – Interesting voice interface company who have an AR prototype as well. The mix of voice and AR could be very interesting as a concept

  • The art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye

    Untitled

    Sonny Liew’s The art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is the autobiography of a fictional comic book creator. It is also an illuminating history of Singapore and a clever exercise in multilayered storytelling.

    Charlie’s story takes you through his family’s history, growing up in a shop house run by his parents and his own life that largely stands still as an unknown comic writer.  It covers his disappointments in comic publishing and the decline in ‘pavement libraries’ as TV became an important form of information and entertainment. One of Chan’s comic book superheroes is a ‘night soil man’ who gets bitten by a cockroach and develops super strength and abilities. Until the necessary infrastructure was built out Singaporeans used to dispose of their toilet contents manually. They would be collected by a night soil man and driven for disposal in a lorry.

    Various life events of Chan are outlined; his parents selling the shop to pay for his father’s unsuccessful medical treatment in Singapore. The love of his life marrying a business man and an unsuccessful visit to ComicCon. All of this tangentially addresses changes in Singaporean society in terms of public housing, medical care and economic improvements. Chan’s failure reflects on what they author felt Singapore lost by not having this kind of critique.

    Through Chan’s comic stories we see a post-war Singapore lose respect for the British following their defeat by Japan and the path toward a post colonial future. The book takes an oblique but cutting tilt at the legacy of the People’s Action Party and Lee Kuan Yew and asks at the end what if things had turned out differently.

    Beyond the storytelling and the historic analysis of Singapore, the book is a homage to the greats of the comic book world:

    • Osamu Tezuka
    • Walt Disney
    • Will Eisner
    • Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

    Despite being relatively oblique in its critique of Singaporean history, the Singapore National Arts Council withdrew a grant $8,000 for the book. Citing “sensitive content” and its potential to “undermine the authority and legitimacy” of the government. Just a few decades earlier Liew could have received a stronger reaction to his work from the state.

    It leaves some interesting questions, Singapore has been a success growing from a post-war where much of the infrastructure was destroyed to an economic power house unlike any other country in South East Asia. Admittedly, it did much of this prior to the opening up of China; but it also didn’t enjoy the natural resources of its neighbours either.  Had Singapore missed out in this dash to economic success?

    The post-war change of sentiment towards fallible British rulers raises questions about whether a post-Brexit freebooting global Britain open for trade will be successful in the face of 7 decades of diminished responsibility and respect around the world?