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2020 media diary

I was inspired to write a 2020 media diary after re-reading a post that I had contributed to Stephen Waddington’s blog back in 2015 that looked at my online and offline media consumption. Prior to COVID; it wouldn’t have changed that much from the 2015 variant. In fact in 2020, a lot is still the same through COVID. A number of the changes had happened had been driven prior to COVID.

But lets start off the 2020 media diary with the COVID effects.

Zoom fatigue

When I started off working in agency life. Being able to work from home wasn’t possible for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have my own space that I could work at. Even if I could, I would need to find a block of work where I would need to write and concentrate rather than bounce ideas of colleagues.

I idealised working from home as a bit like the early bits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Working in my pyjamas, with a kick ass hi-fi. The future is more banal. I own a nice Sony pre and power amp combo rather than a Carver Audio system based around the M-500t power amplifier.

But what its actually meant was an extension of the working day and a blurring of the line between work and personal time. I empathised with those people I saw using the edge of the bed as an office chair and their dressing table as a desk on Zoom calls.

Zoom fatigue set in. Zoom was tiring for a few reasons. Calls were often stacked up one after the other. Secondly you couldn’t carve out blocks of time for it like email. Instead its a constant low level presence; rather like Stack or WhatsApp groups. When you did a group video call, there is a lot happening on screen and its much more of a cognitive load than your average meeting. Finally there is the extension of the working day.

And no, I haven’t managed to work in my dressing gown.

Return of the desktop

If I had written my 2020 media diary before March, I would have referenced discussions around ‘post-PC age’; even if it wasn’t mirrored in my own behaviour. I primarily used my Mac for content creation because I spent a lot of my time outside the home. Not being so mobile has meant that my iPhone has been used less and my Mac has been used much more.

Continuity provided integration across my iPhone, iPad and Mac. All my messenger apps have a desktop client, which I can toggle between on the Mac. A lot of the apps in my personal use made no sense as I have been by my home entertainment set up all the time. Ocado stopped supporting their mobile app as they become overwhelmed with orders; which meant that my shopping was completed on my Mac. My iPhone was then only really useful as a phone.

Messenger for keeping in touch and on track

I have been using messenger clients for almost as long as I have been online. I used to have them all together in an app called Adium X on the Mac. Unfortunately that isn’t possible any longer. Instead I am using a hodge podge of clients

WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype, Apple Messages, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Over the past 12 months Signal has become very popular and I am using WeChat with contacts inside and outside China much less. Signal took off because of concerns about privacy amongst my network at home and abroad.

Secondly, I have been using my Mac as my primary messaging device which was definitely an effect that COVID had on my 2020 media diary.

From always on to keeping it off

When I started to use internet based services, you made an active decision to get online. You dialled up or logged on. For the best part of the past few decades we moved towards an always-on world. People often complained about the amount of email received at work; the way the email client was a constant draw, when they could be getting things done instead. First my Mac at home was constantly connected to the internet and mobile phones allowed us to be called directly on the go. Then we had mobile email and a nascent web experience. From there it was apps. My 2020 media diary has seen this accelerate even further. Immediacy has been accelerated even further and has been making people burn out and feel sick.

Turning off and keeping the internet off has now become an active decision. All be it, one that has become much harder to make.

Flickr is an archive

Flickr is still my visual archive and an essential part of my 2020 media diary; but since I have been out and about much less. Its less of a source of anxiety for me since Smugmug purchased it from Yahoo!

Facebook is private groups

I continue to use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I go directly into the groups, I don’t bother looking at the home page news feed.

Twitter: paring back

Back in 2019, I started to cut back what I posted on Twitter and how long I wanted it to be on there. Generally posts won’t last more than a week on my profile.

My Instagram has been paired back and just shares a record from my collection now and again. Just enough activity for people to know that I am still alive, but that’s it.

Media content

2020 saw me bulk up my vinyl collection. I bought digital music and vinyl records on Bandcamp. I also bought CDs and vinyl from the Discogs marketplace.

The major change has been the way I listen to my music. When I was out and about I use a late model iPod Classic upgraded with 256GB flash memory storage. My listening has now moved to my Mac. I invested in a high quality pair of headphones (Beyerdynamic x Massdrop.com DT177X Go for home listening, they are 32 ohms which makes them very easy to drive). I don’t have to worry about driving them with a big amplifier. I also don’t need noise cancelling to deal with the the clutter of my office surroundings. My Bose headphones are charged but unused for the past eight months.

I have been using my Mac’s native Podcasts app and have pretty much given up watching news from the major UK news channels. The whole Brexit debacle and a failure to hold politicians of all parties accountable meant that I instead listen to content from the likes of RTÉ, CNBC, NPR, NHK and KBS instead. I get this content via their podcasts.

I still have an Apple TV box that I use for Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance (which is surprisingly good), Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and iTunes store content.

News is print, the web and RSS.

Given everything that has been going on, I decided to invest in a print and digital Financial Times subscription. Why print? I like to scan my news quickly on the newspaper with my morning coffee. I can then dive into stories that catch my eye in more depth online. Placement on print provides a layer of context that digital doesn’t really have.

My RSS reader of choice is still Newsblur.com. That is now supplemented through email updates from Sinocism, the China Research Group and a whole pile of marketing and advertising newsletters.

I still read magazines. I am currently subscribed to Monocle and the US edition of Wired magazine. I have print and digital access to both.

Search promiscuity

I still bookmark with pinboard.in and now have almost 55,000 bookmarks at the time of writing. This represents a ‘trusted universe’ of web pages that I often search in first before going to DuckDuckGo and then Google. I use DuckDuckGo as my first option of search engine. It isn’t because it the best, but for many searches its good enough. Going there first means that I am giving Google less of my data, which has incremental benefits from a privacy point of view. I would like to see DuckDuckGo improve the quality of its organic search results, but that is likely to be a slow process since it is based on Bing search technology.

Brands that cut through

I first wrote the headline brands that cut through in my 2015 post. And I started to question as I wrote my 2020 media diary, what does cut through mean in a COVID world? I don’t need the kind of purpose advertising that Dettol came up with in the UK.

For many of the brands that I like, the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental.

COVID tested service brands. Ocado came close to losing me as a customer.

Hermes reinforced my impression of their service being dreadful.

The Royal Mail and Parcelforce delivery people continued to shine. Though I have qualms about Amazon’s business practices, they did what I wanted them to. Prior to lockdown I had upgraded my parents to a newer model Apple iPad and have Facetimed them every day. Each day the quality has been consistently good.

If one brand stood out in terms of its marketing, it was Carhartt US stood out for me this year in the way that it tried to be useful in a low key way to the essential workers and first responders in its customer base.

Authority in crisis

Five years ago, if you had told me that I wouldn’t be listening to the BBC any longer and that the prime minister would be so bad at handling a crisis. I wouldn’t have believed you. It sounds like some fantastical dystopian vision. Some institutions have managed to burn through a lot of latent goodwill, moral and intellectual authority. But it’s not just the UK. The Hong Kong government has issues that go beyond the 2019 protests; with a diffusion of power and responsibility. In the US, the Trump administration was surreal. The one bright light being Mike Pompeo, who was at least consistent with regards China.

Examples of the kind of good leadership that we should expect, stood out for their abnormality; when in reality it should be the other way around. Democracy should give us great leaders in moments of crisis, shouldn’t it?

Veering towards the jackpot

In William Gibson’s last two books The Peripheral and Agency, there is the concept of a slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. It isn’t one thing that does the human race in like a meteor, a rogue AI or a nuclear holocaust. Instead its a slow drumbeat of events over decades: changes in weather, mass pandemics, flood, drought and populism.

I’ve previously enjoyed William Gibson’s visions of the near and far future. It taught me a lot about technology and where the rubber hit the road between tech and people. 2020 has felt like we’ve veered towards the jackpot. Now having lived in Hong Kong post-SARS, I realise that feeling is overly dramatic. We have historically lucked out in the west. COVID-19 posed a unique challenge, because you spread the virus before you exhibit symptoms, which is remarkably different to SARS and other conditions. I hope I am here in five years time to review this 2020 media diary and write a more upbeat 2025 media diary.

December 17, 2020
Creatives outputs + more things

Different times | Campaign magazine – It’s tempting to look at the best of today’s creatives and compare them with the greats: David Abbott, John Webster, Helmut Krone, George Lois, Ed McCabe, Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, Paul Arden, Sir John Hegarty. And to think there’s no-one around who could hold a candle to any of them. But is it a fair comparison? They were working with account men like Frank Lowe, Tim Bell and Nigel Bogle, they were working with media guys like Mike Yershon, directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, and planning hadn’t even been invented then. Of course it was easier to do great work, everyone wanted great work. There weren’t hundreds of TV channels and big data and micro-targeting, and ad tech, and dozens of different platforms, and five campaigns shown at creative pitches. What was wanted was quality not quantity, one fantastic ad not a dozen space-fillers. It was, in fact, much easier in those days to do great work. Sure the competition was tougher, but everyone was agreed on what they wanted, ads that made the public sit up and take notice. I know the people working today may not have stood up against the greats. But I’m not sure that if any of the greats had been working today, they would have been able to produce great work either. – Dave Trott on the futility of comparisons that relate to now, versus then and changing ad environment for creatives (and everyone else for that matter). The contrast in creatives and their output is very striking. One cannot ignore the nature of the medium in the creative process. The move to social seems to have kneecapped creatives and creativity. By comparison earlier media revolutions like television enhanced creativity. Creatives were constantly learning new ways of creativity within the medium. The copywriters seems to have reduced their standing in creatives even more than visual designers. How can platforms provide creatives with a similar range that legacy media did? What can creatives do to recover their own mojo as a profession? More marketing related content here.

Pop Mart/Asian IPOs: go figure | Financial Times – Pop Mart, which sells $8 boxes of figurines, has taken advantage of its newfound popularity to join the listing boom in Hong Kong. Shares nearly doubled in value on the first day of trading on Friday. As with other recent Asian listings, a redirection of money previously set aside for the postponed Ant Group listing appears to have fuelled the frenzy. Demand has also been boosted by the approaching holiday shopping season.

Coca-Cola Launches Global Creative and Media Agency Reviews –Coca-Cola is launching a full global review of its media buying and planning services. The creative portion of the review encompasses creative, experiential marketing, production management and shopper marketing. “We are on a journey to fundamentally transform and dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing investments,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told Adweek. “By improving our processes, eliminating duplication and optimizing spend, we will generate significant savings to fuel reinvestment in our brands. “Media and creative agency services require significant investment from our brands. They are also a crucial component of our ongoing digital transformation journey to drive our business. With that in mind, we have decided to undergo a complete redesign of our media and creative agency models in an effort to align the strategic, operational, and commercial needs of our new, networked organization,” the spokesperson added. “This will necessitate a full review of our media and creative planning and buying practices, as well as our media and creative agency appointments and commercial relationships around the world. We expect this process will be completed by the end of 2021.”

Pompeo shames MIT, calls Chinese authorities ‘jackbooted thugs’ in remarks about academic freedom | South China Morning Post – “A Fulbright student coming in from some country ought not be returned to their home country and to suffer from the jackbooted thugs that now want to take the information that they got, send them back into the United States only to have them just take a little bit more information that they’re going to hand off to the Chinese [Ministry of State Security] … or the People’s Liberation Army”, he said. “MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks,” Pompeo said in his opening address. The school’s president, L. Rafael Reif, he added, “implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors”. – interesting, if true, that US universities are no platforming politicians to avoid offending Beijing

The Hottest Campaign Ads on Twitter Didn’t Really Work: Study – The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for. The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested. – I think that there a lot of lessons for creatives and strategists in this piece of research in terms of eliciting behaviour change, beyond politics

China shadows the rise of Hong Kong’s next tycoons – Nikkei Asia – Avoid politics, build trust: One dynasty heir speaks on a generation’s dilemma

How The 1985 Downturn Set The Silicon Wafer Industry On A Path To Consolidation That Continues Today – Semiconductor Digest – a great read

A transatlantic effort to take on Big Tech | Financial Times – Companies are counting on the incoming Biden administration, which will include a number of tech-friendly officials from Barack Obama’s time in the White House, to help them stand up to Europe. It shouldn’t. One of the huge risks for the new administration is that it will be seen as too cosy with concentrated corporate power. Witness the cries already coming from the left about some of Mr Biden’s appointees who have backgrounds in private equity. Individual appointees should be judged on their own merits. If we didn’t let anyone from either the finance or the technology industries into the new administration, we would be the poorer for it. Take Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who is now Mr Biden’s chief markets adviser. He cleaned up derivatives trading while at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years – grab the popcorn

About Google’s approach to research publication – Google Docs – A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date

Pioneer DJ reports 82 per cent rise in the sale of entry-level DJ controllers during lockdown – Tech – Mixmag

Hong Kong’s Civil Servants Under Siege – The Diplomat – I think the oath taking is a big deal. If you don’t sign it, they will immediately assume you will be against the government one day. Most of us don’t agree with this practice. Those who are almost retired and are older think it’s quite normal. They stress that Hong Kong is a part of China, and civil servants have the responsibility to uphold the policies issued by the government and support it no matter what we think. But most of the newer recruits, what we care about is that freedom of speech is protected. The Basic Law guarantees our freedom of speech. No matter what career we have, we should enjoy this right.

RTOS port to RISC-V core for high reliability designs | EE News Europe – opportunities that previously would have gone to ARM

Wikipedia Matters by Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer and Slivko – we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’ choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia in- creases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities. The impact is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on Wikipedia (PDF)

December 15, 2020
Technics SL-1200 & things that caught my eye this week
Discogs wrote a really good article about the cultural impact of the Technics SL-1200 series of turntables. Technics have relaunched the turntable with a renewed emphasis on high-fidelity sound. The Cultural Impact of the Technics SL-1200 Turntable, Then and Now

Inside a Technics SL-1200 turntable with DJ Fix founder Jon Hildenstein

ZAK Agency did some qualitative interviews amongst young people for their opinion on diary products.

Opinions on dairy products

And if you’re tired of dairy farming, what about cows as a method of carbon capture? Courtesy of Rabobank. The theory is that by carefully managing grassland grazing, farmers can feed their livestock and maximise carbon capture. Part of this process is helped by the use of virtual fencing on the open range. I am sure that it makes sense from a mathematical point of view, but what about growing natural forests?

Opinion | When Can I Get a Coronavirus Vaccine in America? – The New York Times – I know, I know. You’d much prefer to hear about the minutae of my fingernails than another coronavirus post. I am not trying o do anything but point out to you the great interactive infographic in the article. You put in some basic detail and gives you an idea of where you would be likely to sit in the queue.

It bases your placement on the following information:
- Age
- American county where you live
- High priority profession status (medical worker, teacher, first responder etc)
- COVID related health risks
Its all rather clever.

Taiwan’s flag carrier EVA Air have released a waterproof packable jacket that caught my eye. As airline merchandise goes its subtly branded on the hood. The print design, cut and fabric give it a look that would be at home on screen in either Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077.

https://youtu.be/C4qO9xMgq80

More design related posts here.
December 14, 2020
Luxe streetwear
I started thinking about the latest developments in luxe streetwear after leafing through the FT to see the following advert marking the proposed purchase of Stone Island by Moncler. (Stone Island had already sold its parent brand CP Company and intellectual property back in 2015 to Hong Kong manufacturer Tristate Holdings Limited).

R+R SpA – published in the Financial Times – a luxe streetwear merger

It follows hot on the heels of Supreme being purchased by VF Corporation.

Luxury disruption

From the luxury market point of view their customer base over the past 30 years has done three things:
- The customers have become younger. Luxury shopping is no longer dominated by dowager heiresses in Europe and the New World. Now the man purchasers of luxury are much younger and are second generation money. They’ve had money in their families for somewhere between 20 and 50 years. They are the scions of political leaders or business leaders. Money has allowed them access to the world’s best education institutions. They might have had etiquette classes, but they’re no more than two generations away from having known deprivation.
- The customers are in a different place. Globalisation massively changed their customer base. First it was the Japanese middle classes who picked up a taste for luxury brands whilst travelling abroad. As the Asian tigers took off, you started to see luxury purchases being made in Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and China. When the Soviet Union fell luxury consumption also sprang up in the East as some people had money to burn. Much of the luxury retail in traditional shopping areas like London and Paris are derived from tourists rather than local purchasers. A change in the luxury tax regime in China has seen more domestic luxury consumption. China is now looking to build Hainan into a domestic luxury shopping and holiday resort.
- Luxury serves a different purpose. Luxury has traditionally reflected status. Goods of a superior nature that the ‘wrong sort’ of people would never be able to afford. Luxury then became a symbol that you’d made it. In Asian markets, particularly China, luxury became a tool. People gifted luxury products to make relationships work better. It also signified that you are the kind of successful business person that partners could trust. You started to see factory managers with Gucci man bags and premium golfwear to signal their success. Then when the scions of these business people and figures in authority were adults, luxury has become about premium self expression. It has been mixed up with streetwear in a manner reminiscent of the Buffalo Collective.
So from the perspective of the luxury industry, they are feeling a massive amount of disruption going on. And that’s even before you get into digital transformation.

It is this transformation of customer segments, geographies and use cases which is forcing the luxury industry to ‘go casual’ fit in a luxe streetwear space.

Streetwear evolution

The perspective from the streetwear side of the table is more exemplified by my favourite Thai English phrase: same-same, but different. Their market hasn’t been disrupted in the same way as luxury. It has got a lot bigger.

Growth in streetwear

The internet has meant that streetwear culture has become global and trends catch on much faster. It has become more popular around the world and there are thriving secondary markets like StockX and GOAT.

Streetwear has pushed into luxury pricing models led by Japanese brands; who brought a higher attention to detail to the market. It has continued the trend of innovation that companies like Stone Island started. This is best exemplified now by the likes of German label ACRONYM.

From a design perspective right back to the origins of what we know as streetwear by the likes Shawn Stüssy or Harlem’s Dapper Dan co-opted luxury product language. In Dapper Dan’s case using fake fabrics and labels to make clothing. His customer base of African Americans from poor neighbourhoods whether early hip hop stars or criminals didn’t see the items that they wanted in boutiques. And even if they did, many of them didn’t feel welcome in the uptown boutiques.

From Stüssy’s point of view it was the pop art ethos and DIY fanzine culture that infused his work. The reversed double S in a circle is an obvious reference to Chanel’s design language.

Over the space of a decade Supreme went from being sued for aping Louis Vuitton’s design language to collaborating with them. Dapper Dan has recently been collaborating with Gucci.

Does luxe streetwear lack ambition?

Highsnobriety asked the question five years ago and concluded that no streetwear company had shown the serious ambition to become an umbrella brand the size of LVMH or Kering. Skiwear, skate wear and snow sports equipment are sectors that are a tenth of the size of streetwear. Yet they have seen consolidation into larger holding groups. These groups provided the financial cushion for these companies through the 2008 financial crisis.

The closest that luxe streetwear has got to the holding group is likely to be New Guards Group. New Guards Group describes itself as a contemporary luxury fashion holding group. It owns Off-White, Opening Ceremony and Palm Angels. This in turn was bought out by luxury e-tailer Farfetch. Farfetch in turn has Richemont and Alibaba as minority shareholders.

Surfwear is also described as having a generational strain. Dads keep wearing the gear. Kids no longer want to wear it. Given the commonality with the streetwear lifestyle. You could see similar things happening at even the largest of streetwear brands eventually. Some of the people wearing Supreme in the mid 1990s are still wearing it. The original international Stüssy Tribe are still going strong, repping streetwear in their 50s and 60s.

Luxe streetwear brand A Bathing Ape has definitely seen better days, by the time Nigo sold the business to Hong Kong I.T. Group. The transitory nature of streetwear brands is littered with names that were formerly prominent like XLarge (that came back) or 90s icon Massimo.

Stone Island and luxe streetwear

Moncler get a technically proficient firm in Stone Island. It was built on a foundation of experimenting with materials. It is the only company able to garment dye polyester fabric for lightweight applications like summer jackets.

The brand is widely respected and has collaborated with other innovators like Nike. It has been worn by Drake regularly that opened the brand up to hip hop fans. This has helped the brand widen its association beyond football hooligans and scally culture.

More luxury related content here.

More information

Moncler to buy Stone Island in deal that values rival at €1.15bn | Financial Times

VF snaps up streetwear line Supreme in $2bn deal | Financial Times

Luxury brands set sights on Chinese tourists in Hainan as extended duty-free quotas and pandemic-free shopping attract travellers | South China Morning Post

Dapper Dan’s collaboration with Gucci – focused on ‘hip hop style ready to wear and accessories featuring the GG logo

Everything we know about the Supreme x Louis Vuitton collection | High Snobriety

The umbrella brand: is streetwear ready for corporate takeover? | Highsnobriety

Billabong’s demise is emblematic of a wider crisis in the surfwear industry | Guardian

Silk or Synthetic | Financial Times
December 12, 2020
New Balance factory closure + more

New Balance Boston factory closure

New Balance to Layoff Dozens of Workers as It Closes Boston Factory – Footwear News – this is huge for New Balance. It is a major knock to the perceived wisdom around the New Balance brand and its differentation versus other footwear vendors like Nike or Adidas. New Balance his made US manufacturing a big part of its corporate story. Being private owned, it can take a longer view than competitors. But that doesn’t seem to have helped New Balance during the pandemic. It will be interesting to see how New Balance handles this moving forwards.

Business

The inadequate trials of Philip Green | Financial Times – There is something else at work too — distaste for the wheeler-dealer made good. His parties and celebrity schmoozing were considered vulgar. He was accused by MPs of being a “spiv”. Three commenters under one FT article this week described him as a “barrow boy”. A campaign was launched to strip him of his knighthood, as if that is what mattered. – interesting op-ed that makes a valuable point about the discussion around Philip Green

Consumer behaviour

Streetwear in China: hip-hop influence and form of expression for the Chinese youth – Daxue Consulting – Market Research China

Economics

Hong Kong chief has ‘piles of cash’ at home after US sanctions – A government survey taken between June and September registered for the first time in 11 years a reduction in the number of foreign businesses operating in Hong Kong. The survey found 9,025 companies had offices in Hong Kong compared with 9,040 the previous year. Only 15 per cent of the companies said they had plans to expand in the city in 2020, whereas last year 23 per cent expected an expansion. – I thought that this quote was interesting in the FT article. What becomes apparent is that the Chinese government thinks that internal circulation is more important than Hong Kong as a gateway to foreign direct investment (Paywall)

Media

NSFW TikTok Porn: Bree Louise OnlyFans Is the Future of Adult Content – According to Alex Hawkins, Vice President of xHamster, Gen Z and young millennials are “disproportionately” willing to pay for adult content compared to previous generations, especially if the star of the video is also the one creating it. “We see the shift from studios to performer-producers dramatically changing the industry,” he says. Aesthetically, this translates to “a surge in realistic situations and more natural bodies.” In other words, more of what you might find on TikTok, albeit with fewer clothes. “We believe that consumers are much more likely to pay for performer-created content than they are traditional porn,” says Hawkins. “It feels more intimate.” – Mirrors the record labels have been historically looked at from at least the 1980s.

Francis Fukuyama: How to Save Democracy From Technology | Foreign Affairs – everyone hates big tech. Fukuyama is famous for his Warsaw Pact break-up era book The End of History and The Last Man. Here’s his opinion on social paltforms: But few recognize that the political harms posed by the platforms are more serious than the economic ones. Fewer still have considered a practical way forward: taking away the platforms’ role as gatekeepers of content. This approach would entail inviting a new group of competitive “middleware” companies to enable users to choose how information is presented to them

How Biden’s Rebels Blew Up Trump’s Death Star | AdExchanger – on combating disinformation: “Instead of chasing down and knocking down every ANTIFA rumor, we knew that the best defense was convincing people that the Joe Biden they did like, whose values they shared, would be the author of his own presidency,” said BPI partner Danny Franklin. “And when we reminded them of those values … and validated that through trusted endorsers, we could win the argument and defeat the attack.”

Technology

Warning lights are flashing for Big Tech as they did for banks | Financial Times – The pandemic has emphasised our reliance on technology. It’s not just the interminable video calls or the technology that underpins deliveries to our locked-down doors. It is the mountains of data that dictate the ads we see as we scroll through coverage of the latest coronavirus briefing. Digital transformation is sweeping through my industry, too. Consumers have squeezed years-worth of adoption of apps and online banking into just a few months. Yet the risks go much deeper than the risk of hastily managed change. The algorithms that determine how much work delivery drivers get and what we see when we go online are no better understood than the structured credit products that brought the banking system to its knees in the financial crisis. – Interesting and provocative analogy to the financial system

Teaching in the Pandemic: ‘This Is Not Sustainable’ – The New York Times – vehement debates have raged over whether to reopen schools for in-person instruction, teachers have been at the center — often vilified for challenging it, sometimes warmly praised for trying to make it work. But the debate has often missed just how thoroughly the coronavirus has upended learning in the country’s 130,000 schools, and glossed over how emotionally and physically draining pandemic teaching has become for the educators themselves. In more than a dozen interviews, educators described the immense challenges, and exhaustion, they have faced trying to provide normal schooling for students in pandemic conditions that are anything but normal. Some recounted whiplash experiences of having their schools abruptly open and close, sometimes more than once, because of virus risks or quarantine-driven staff shortages, requiring them to repeatedly switch back and forth between in-person and online teaching. Others described the stress of having to lead back-to-back group video lessons for remote learners, even as they continued to teach students in person in their classrooms – I imagine that it is probably pretty similar levels of burnout in knowledge workers as well. (Paywall)

Do serious games help you learn? – Hello Future Orange – Serious games are more effective than traditional teaching but they do not produce better results than more active forms of knowledge transmission and are often more costly to implement.

Thailand

Pornhub, along with several other adult entertainment sites have been banned in Thailand. This has been part of a wider political debate within the country on government performance and what role the royal family should play. Asian Boss asked Bangkok residents on their opinions. What pleasantly surprised me about this video was thoughtful opinions on both sides of the argument

More Thai-related posts here.

December 8, 2020