The online field has been one of the mainstays since I started writing online in 2003. My act of writing online was partly to understand online as a medium.
Online has changed in nature. It was first a destination and plane of travel. Early netizens saw it as virgin frontier territory, rather like the early American pioneers viewed the open vistas of the western United States. Or later travellers moving west into the newly developing cities and towns from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
America might now be fenced in and the land claimed, but there was a new boundless electronic frontier out there. As the frontier grew more people dialled up to log into it. Then there was the metaphor of web surfing. Surfing the internet as a phrase was popularised by computer programmer Mark McCahill. He saw it as a clear analogue to ‘channel surfing’ changing from station to station on a television set because nothing grabs your attention.
Web surfing tapped into the line of travel and 1990s cool. Surfing like all extreme sport at the time was cool. And the internet grabbed your attention.
Broadband access, wi-fi and mobile data changed the nature of things. It altered what was consumed and where it was consumed. The sitting room TV was connected to the internet to receive content from download and streaming services. Online radio, podcasts and playlists supplanted the transistor radio in the kitchen.
Multi-screening became a thing, tweeting along real time opinions to reality TV and live current affairs programmes. Online became a wrapper that at its worst envelopes us in a media miasma of shrill voices, vacuous content and disinformation.
Inside Facebook Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech – The New York Times – Moderators express frustration at rules they say don’t always make sense and sometimes require them to leave up posts they fear could lead to violence. “You feel like you killed someone by not acting,” one said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he had signed a nondisclosure agreement. – the Facebook secret rulebook for global free speech raises as much questions as it provides answers and gives Facebook dangerous extra governmental powers. More Facebook related content here.
Amazon Alexa crashes after Christmas Day overload | The Irish Times – The crash, at about 10am Irish time, prompted Amazon customers to complain about not being able to play festive songs, turn on their living room lights or get cooking instructions for Christmas dinner. – reminds me of working on the Cellnet / O2 Genie WAP portal that did a similar thing on Christmas day. And the technicians from Logica (now part of CGI) who supported it all having to roll back the Oracle database underpinning many of the systems including email.
Silence has been golden for Jardine Matheson | Financial Times – today’s Jardines is primarily Sir Henry’s creation. It is an intensely conservative institution that does not give a fig for modernity or the views of outside shareholders, and is overseen by an all-male, family infused board of directors. It is equally a daring merchant adventurer with plenty of grit. – Jardines were more averse to the risk that the 1997 handover of Hong Kong represented and have built up businesses in other countries unlike their peer Swire
Amazon Alexa Shopping Tripled as Bose, Nerf Topped Holiday Sales | Fortune – Amazon on Wednesday said that the number of voice-activated orders placed via its virtual personal assistant Alexa were three times greater during the 2018 holiday season than they were in the last year – is this proportionate to the increase in Alexa powered devices, this comparison is important in order to understand the ramifications of the growth pattern
Huawei Veterans Selling AI to Banks Shape China’s Newest Unicorn – Bloomberg – 4Paradigm looks as if it could get crushed by Huawei’s wolf culture. The only thing holding it back is the lack of trust in the associatedHuawei name abroad and concerns about letting Chinese software manage the most sensitive data
At a macro level, the world is in a pretty strange place at the moment. Populism is at the centre of uncertainty across many countries in terms of political direction, macro economics, technology and consumer uncertainty.
Populism and nationalism is on the march: Duterte in the Philippines. Trump in the US. The German right wing populism leaning political party AfD is shifting the Overton window in Germany. The yellow vests in France and the UK is channeling anger into political activism along fringe party lines providing an opportunity for populism. The UK has seen a rise in far right grassroots media mirroring the rise of The Canary and similar publications on the left both of which fuel different forms of populism. The Russians don’t need to do it as the populism and divisive politics is homegrown. The Queen’s speech called for unity in the country and the UK government’s Prevent anti-radicalisation programme has more far right cases than Islamic extremists. Even China has been gradually moving to a Han nationalism as part of its more forceful foreign policy. India and Pakistan have both seen a rise in sectarian politics. This has impacts in terms of foreign trade and economic growth. We are already seeing domestic brands rising in China and India; we may see a decline in brands and product SKUs in the likes of the UK – all of which will impact advertising budgets. At an agency office level; the chilling effect of nationalism is going to affect the movement of talent on both client and agency side. It’s hard to articulate the atmosphere of an agency that I was working in the day after the Brexit vote without using the word bereavement. I know people in my family and peers who are moving away. Over time this will impact culture and creativity. It is hard to remember but back in the 1970s the UK was much more parochial and less multi-cultural than it is now. Everyday things we take for granted like good food were much poorer experiences.
There are so many variables in play we don’t know where populism and divisive politics is going, but there are dark possibilities to the government ‘by the seat of their pants’ which seems to be prevalent.
Cryptocurrency and block chain: We’ve seen a wide range of crypto currencies decline in values this year. What are the factors might drive a recovery? Why would there be a spike in demand? I don’t know what that ‘X factor’ would be. I suspect that experiments in block chain such as verifying online media spend to prevent online fraud will start bumping up against the limitations of the technology. Blockchain has a relatively low transaction rate compared to legacy payment systems. Decentralisation still isn’t as good as an Oracle database or a mainframe a la the traditional banking system. Some applications just make no sense.
From Farm to Blockchain: Walmart Tracks Its Lettuce – The New York Times – is a classic example of technology for technology’s sake. How much lettuce would Walmart be selling day in, day out? That data has to be collected across a complex supply chain. Secondly, its a privatised centralised blockchain which negates the technical benefits of Blockchain and makes me wonder why IBM weren’t selling in Db2 or Oracle high transaction speed relational database on a z-series mainframe. It’s announcements like this that makes one wonder if blockchain has jumped the shark.
Virtual reality hasn’t seen the level of adoption that was predicted. The problem is no longer one of technology hardware (lets ignore battery life for a little while) but content. VR changes the way stories are told and experienced, it makes it hard to build brand experiences and compelling content. Microsoft has managed to build a community of early adopters in Altspace – a Second Life type environment. Augmented reality (AR) has been sporadically adopted and Apple has been putting a lot of work into building creator tools, but the decline of Blippar. Magic Leap’s demo film for its partnership with Cheddar doesn’t currently look like a compelling AR application to me. It does mirror, anecdotal evidence that suggests the most common use of VR is to replicate a big TV experience in a small space through the Netflix application.
https://youtu.be/xjYE-joYjQs
If 2017 and 2018 were the years when ad fraud became the bête noire of marketers, 2019 might see harder questions asked of influencer marketing practices. The move from influencers to micro-influencers was down to cost per reach and engagement. The move to nano-influencers implies a similar kind of shift again. Yet it seems to be largely taken on blind faith by marketers at the moment that influencers are good thing. I think many of the challenges that influence marketing faces when I wrote about them earlier are still valid. One question that I haven’t seen seriously considered by marketers is when you’re in a culture where ‘selling out’ has moved from being shameful to gen-x; to a badge of validation in the space of a decade that has to change the value proposition that influence brings? As a marketer the possible answer to that question worries me.
The focus on ad fraud might be partly responsible for a slight resurgence in the realisation brand advertising is valuable. Performance advertising is about the now, brand advertising is all about sowing acorns that are reaped for decades to come. As a concept it’s easy to grasp at an empirical and research driven level. But when marketers typically stay in a role for a short time, the now becomes of outsized importance. They have to make an impact and then plan their exit strategy in what’s typically a three year cycle. Brand is hard for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) brands to take on board as they see channel and shelf disruption from the likes of Amazon and Ocado. They have experimented with the direct sales model a la Birch Box and Dollar Shave Club, but that will only work with certain products. Consultants selling disruption are selling chaos; clients hedging against black swans often miss where change isn’t happening – consumer behaviour doesn’t change at the speed of PowerPoint. I’ll leave the last word on digital disruption to Mark Ritson.
It’s hard to get emotional or feel any of the romance of news media from a home page, but the paper edition carries with it the great cultural power of journalism. Print editions will become the ‘couture’ offering of the news brands – loss-making but important assets for building and retaining authority and influence over the market
Validation of traditional media can be seen all around us. Amazon printing catalogues, online brands having flagship stores. Underground and out of home adverts for e-commerce businesses surround me as I go about my daily life in London.
Stories with everything – I don’t know whether the recent trend of every social platform having a short form video function that disappears a la ‘stories’ is a wider socio-cultural trend or the constant carousel of changing formats as part of a ploy to keep users engagement rate up. For established platforms there is little to be lost by throwing new features agains the wall and seeing what sticks.
I’ve omitted talking about 5G as it will take more than a year to get up and running. It won’t be clear what its application is until we start to see how effective the network is in practice. Gadgets like fold out phones won’t fundamentally change the pictures under glass interface used in smartphones for the past decade or so. Their impact may be exaggerated due to their high cost that consumers will bear one way or another.
I realise that these are a series of random thoughts but would be interested to know what you think. Feel free to comment below.
Keyboardio Blog — December 2018: A startling discovery – one of the worst tales I’ve heard about manufacturing in Shenzhen; this is off-the-hook. Keyboardio have been extraordinarily unlucky. Keyboardio are famous for making custom mechanical keyboards
Defiant Xi Jinping Says No One Can Dictate Reforms to China – Bloomberg – depending how you read this statement “No one is in the position to dictate to the Chinese people what should and should not be done.” This could be defending legitimacy of CCP AND OR Chinese firms and people can do what they like abroad with impunity
Key takeouts from the Tencent Annual Staff Meeting:
They made a big issue of treating customers honestly, which made me think that might not be in the culture up to now. There was also a call to focus on users rather than competitors
More on user focus – WeChat is a tool, not a platform. Only tools are the most friendly and meaningful to users. WeChat has been trying to do one thing, to treat every user as a friend
They wanted mini games become a platform for ordinary people to show their creativity. If this goal is not achieved, then they were happy if the mini games on the platform died
A recognition of the cognitive dissonance on social platforms where people show their best lives on Douyin and the unhealthy nature of it
Tencent launched the most stringent youth anti-addiction system in history. This is a long-term initiative that is very beneficial to the entire industry and a responsibility we must assume as an industry leader
2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights – I wish that I’d this quality of data when I was cranking out press releases for Yahoo! Search. The review is as much about cultural change as it is about trends in smut. More on adult entertainment industry related content here.
Interesting video that’s as much an illustration of collective delusion that drives VC thinking in a very wasteful manner and where they are likely to be putting their focus moving forwards
New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.
Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”
