Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Holiday season e-tailing + more things

    Holiday season e-tailing links –

    Exclusive: Huawei in talks to sell parts of its Honor smartphone business – sources | Reuters – interesting move that move Honor out of the US sanctions. Less convinced that Huawei can focus on high-end phones as there was a supply chain and design synergy with Honor. More on Huawei here.

    Amazon launches an AR app that works with new QR codes on its boxes | TechCrunch 

    Why the Serverless Revolution Has Stalled | Infoq – Serverless computing refers to an architecture in which applications (or parts of applications) run on-demand within execution environments that are typically hosted remotely. That said, it’s also possible to host serverless systems in-house.

    China’s Games Streaming Giants Huya and DouYu to Merge – Variety – Twitch analogues

    EFFECTOR® -ROCK ON THE EYEWEAR- – amazing Japanese eyewear. More style related content here.

    Samsung pulls BTS-branded products from online Chinese platforms | Financial Times – this just makes Chinese netizens look ridiculous. It shows a fragile nature in Chinese nationalism. The kind of fragility that could drive China to conflict as the party tries to stay ahead of nationalist sentiment

    The ‘Fake Rich’ of Shanghai: Peeking Inside a Wannabe Socialite WeChat Group | What’s on Weibo – this shows the lengths people will go to be ‘living their best lives’. There have been examples of western and Russian netizens doing similar things for Instagram

    Caterpillar bets on self-driving machines impervious to pandemics | Reuters – Fred Rio, worldwide product manager at Caterpillar’s construction digital & technology division, told Reuters that a remote-control technology, which allows users to operate machines from several miles away, would be available for construction sites in January. – They’re not self driving as the headline says, but controlled remotely: think drones not robots. John Deere had done work on pre-plotted courses guided by GPS for ploughing and spraying in large fields. However in agriculture, this is also tied into a bigger issue around the ‘right to repair’ making automation to date non-viable for many farmers

    Taiwan academics told to identify as Chinese in journal | News | The Times – Springer Nature claimed that under its editorial policy, authors alone could choose their affiliations, but said that it was “unable to enforce” the same standard on journals it did not own. It considered Eye and Vision, owned by the Wenzhou Medical University in China, as a “co-publisher” that operated under separate editorial guidelines. “The stipulations of this and other Chinese-owned journals with respect to Taiwanese affiliations are beyond our control,” it said. Its position has prompted outrage from leading academics in Britain, who have demanded that Springer Nature stop partnering with journals that operate under rules set by authoritarian regimes

    #MyLevisMyVibe Hashtag Videos on TikTok – Earlier this year, Levi’s tested the TikTok ‘Shop Now’ button, which allowed them to provide their fans with a more integrated shopping experience within the app. We are truly moving towards the type of social commerce that has already been going on in China for several years. Now Levis has come back for another big TikTok campaign. This #MyLevisMyVibe is a simple, fun way for people to play around dressing up with Levi’s apparel. What better way for retail brands to connect with their fans than by highlighting them trying on actual clothes? It reminds me a bit of the Asos #AySauceChallenge we covered a few weeks ago. We’re starting to see so many brands now use TikTok that the total set of case studies to draw from is getting larger. I also noted that the language used by Levi’s in the hashtag challenge says “Show us your authentic self,” emphasising the trend of authenticity we are seeing across all modern advertising. I must say that by seeing random people creating their own videos to voluntarily participate in a challenge, it really does feel authentic. – the take from Good TikTok creative

    Orders from the Top: The EU’s Timetable for Dismantling End-to-End Encryption | Electronic Frontier Foundation – interesting that this appeared, alongside Five Eyes governments, India, and Japan make new call for encryption backdoors | ZDNet 

  • iPhone 12 range launch

    Apple announced a four phone iPhone 12 range:

    • iPhone 12 Mini
    • iPhone 12
    • iPhone 12 Pro
    • iPhone 12 Pro Max

    I looked at the event using a social listening tool and the thing that really struck me was where the people commenting on it where commenting from.

    iPhone 12 event languages used in 1000s of mentions
    Languages versus 1,000s of mentions

    Thinking about key Apple markets; at least some of the buzz seems geographically misplaced. There was a distinct lack of discussions happening in Japan and mainland Europe for example. I watched it with a couple of friends based in Hong Kong; but I realise the launch itself would be at an inconvenient time in Japan.

    Where was the Japanese pre-event buzz though? Why didn’t Apple do more to build buzz in Japan? Apple has a sizeable market share in Japan and this 5G range of handsets are strategically important to retain that market share.

    As for mainland Europe, if social discussions are a proxy for a lack of interest; Apple has a serious problem on its hands. The silence hints a wider question around brand and product relevance. Yes 5G rollout is less advanced than in Asia, but there is also the improved camera and improved 4G reception that the handsets provide. Apple has arguably the best 4G antennas currently available on a handset which would benefit real world performance.

    At this time, Apple should be on the up, given that Huawei is no longer a serious contender in the market. Instead there is the silence of one hand clapping.

    Here’s what the social discussions looked like during the live event.

    iPhone 12 event social mentions over time
    Social mentions over time.

    As a brand marketer I would be concerned. The fan boys didn’t show, neither did the critics. Yes this launch is happening in a pandemic, but that should help due to the lack of distractions and the break from doom scrolling on social to do something else.

    More Apple related posts here and rewatch the iPhone 12 launch online.

  • Persuasive Technology by B.J. Fogg

    Persuasive Technology was published in 2003. It is still the bible for captology ( from Computers as Persuasive Techologies). Back when I was working inhouse at Yahoo!; copies of the book could be found on the desks of some product managers and designers. It has since gained a certain amount of notoriety. Questions are asked around the addictive behaviour of social network and gaming app users. Some consumers even find it hard to stop swiping dating apps.

    Persuasive Technology
    Persuasive Technology – Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg

    Fogg realised that computers offered new challenges and opportunities. Persuasive Technology was written almost 20 years ago. How well does it now hold up?

    Relevant content

    Right from the start when Fogg starts going into the advantages of persuasive technology you can see the evergreen nature of the content.

    Some of the content is quite prescient with a section on surveillance technology creating persuasion through observation. The comments on simulation are equally applicable to modern VR environments, which has been proven in the treatment of PTSD amongst combat veterans. The application ‘In My Steps’ (page 76) designed to facilitate empathy among doctors for cancer patients echoes through the patient centric work that pharma companies are currently funding.

    Chapter 5 on computers as persuasive social actors is playbook for the way modern apps from freemium games to Tinder work effectively. If you don’t read anything else read this chapter.

    Tired?

    A cursory skim of the book would yield examples that are Windows Vista-era screenshots of crude applications. You have to remember that the book was written before mainstream social networks or the New York Times paywall. Back then, it was right at the end of the banner ad golden age in online advertising; surviving on ads was still considered an option for news media.

    Whilst the context has changed around the web and the way that we use it; the examples are still illustrative. They’re worthwhile sticking with when reading though the book.

    Misinformation

    The modern issue of misinformation gets a relatively small mention. Fogg realised the impact that misinformation could have on future computer credibility. He felt that as computers lost their ‘aura, their mystique, their presumed credibility’. He thought that computing ubiquity would make computing credibility more complex due to purpose and form-factor.

    He also worried about bad actors; though this largely seems due to hacker Adrian Lamo hacked the Yahoo! News content management system from his browser and was able to alter the quotes in stories. At the time subtly altering mainstream news stories was seen as the greatest risk

    …Peter Sommer, an expert in computer crime at the London School of Economics, says that carefully changing information posted to a major web site could be far more serious. 

    “If it is done in a subtle way then this could spread misinformation,” Sommer told New Scientist. “It’s unfortunate that Yahoo! is the largest and most important portal in the world.”

    Yahoo! is one of the most popular destinations on the internet. In June 2001 the site had more than 200 million visitors. Yahoo! takes news feeds from a wide range of news agencies and web sites. 

    Lamo says he was disturbed to have had access to the system during recent terrorist attacks on America, when internet news sites were in great demand. 

    “At that point I had more potential readership than the Washington Post,” Lamo told Security Focus. “It could have caused a lot of people who were interested in the day’s events a lot of unwarranted grief if false and misleading information had been put up.”

    Hacker re-writes Yahoo! news stories – New Scientist (September 20, 2001)

    In some ways Fogg’s vision came true. The Macedonian fake news publishing during the 2016 US election wasn’t driven by bad actors; but ad revenue hungry teens. The effect was the same as Lamo’s Yahoo! News hack a decade and a half earlier.

    Ethics

    The thinking in Persuasive Technology was weaponised in various products and services. Yet, the book, was ethically driven by design. Fogg had a good understanding of how his work could be used by bad actors. He devoted a whole chapter to the ethics of captology and pointed out times when an act would be unethical throughout the book. Fogg starts off with ethics in the preface on page XXVI right before the acknowledgements section.

    Chapter 9 goes into the various ethical pitfalls that may await the designer and the user. It’s interesting that many of the case studies focus on getting personal information out of children. Protecting children online has consistently been an issue since the start of the commercial web.

    It is also interesting in this chapter that he emphasises the role of education in protecting future users from the unscrupulous.

    Conclusion

    Yes rereading Persuasive Technology was like taking a time machine back to the post dot com bust web. But the lessons to be learned are still the same. We might have more stylish web design and responsive pages; but we still have the same problems. Whether you work in digital transformation, user experience or content strategy, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf

    More book reviews can be found here.

  • Amazon returns + more things

    Hidden cameras and secret trackers reveal where Amazon returns end up | CBC News – interesting aspect of Amazon’s business model. It does make me wonder how much of a drag is returns on Amazon’s business? Retail returns are usually running at 10 percent of products bought. With e-tailing; this rate is thought to be as high as 40 percent according to the programme. That sounds like an extremely high rate of returns. Back when I was in college 25 percent was quoted as a returns rate for catalogue businesses.

    Inside Palantir, Silicon Valley’s Most Secretive Unicorn – “Where you get into trouble is when the software gets so complicated that you have to send people in to manage it,” said one former CIA official who is complimentary of Palantir. “The moment you introduce an expensive IT engineer into the process, you’ve cut your profits.” Palantir, it turns out, has run headlong into the problem plaguing many tech firms engaged in the quest for total information awareness: Real-world data is often too messy and complex for computers to translate without lots of help from humans – to be fair enterprise software companies have always sold a good deal of smoke and mirrors in terms of over-exaggerated claims – sounds a lot like IBM’s Watson in this respect

    Apple’s New 5G IPhones May Be Left on the Shelf | Yahoo! Finance – 5G lacks a killer app for consumers

    Exposure to TV ads up 15% during height of lockdown – Even children were watching more broadcast TV and exposed to a greater volume of advertising in the weeks following the lockdown in March.

    Alibaba Group – investors day presentations – some interesting insight into Chinese e-tailing, retailing and internationalisation of these models

    Blockbuster Chinese games said to boycott Huawei and Xiaomi app stores over revenue tax | South China Morning Post – two Chinese gaming startups, Lilith Games and miHoYo, said they won’t sell their would-be autumn hits via app stores pre-installed on smartphones made by Huawei and Xiaomi. Instead, they’ve opted for stores charging smaller fees or none at all—including Apple’s App Store, which levies the same 30% charge in China as it does everywhere else. While the duo didn’t say outright they were unhappy about the 50% rule set by the Chinese Android stores, many gamers and developers see them as the good guys stepping up against tech’s behemoths

    How to Monitor Facebook Pages – Meltwater Help Center – now allows users to monitor Facebook pages that they’re in charge of. The limit is 50 specific Facebook pages. It pulls out the Facebook analytics data into a Meltwater interface

    European Semiconductor Sales Drop, Global Sales Rise – EE Times Europe – not surprising given the disruptions to manufacturing

    Google Chrome remains China’s most popular web browser, even with Google search and other apps blocked | South China Morning Post – consumer backlash against some domestic browsers can be attributed to their aggressive user acquisition tactics, such as being deliberately difficult to uninstall. But he said that a shift in consumer tastes might also play a role. When Chinese internet companies first started designing websites and applications in the late 90s, the minimalist aesthetic was unpopular, he said a friend told him at the time. “Chinese consumers wanted stores where all the merchandise was crammed onto the shelves at maximum capacity, with narrow aisles where people were just bumping into one another,” he said. “It felt like plenitude.” “Those early design preferences endured for a surprisingly long time online, and I think there’s still a much higher tolerance for it than we’d see in the US or other Western countries,” he added. “I think as consumers get more sophisticated, though, they’re looking for a retail experience that doesn’t feel like a fire sale all the time.”

    Opinion: How Can Luxury Brands Successfully Price In The Post-COVID World? – In these challenging times of lockdowns and demand contraction, luxury brands have increased – even more than usual – the prices of their bestselling products to offset part of the compression of margins due to the pandemic. Take for instance, Chanel which earlier this year confirmed it had brought the prices up of its iconic handbags (11.12, 2.55, Boy, Gabrielle) ranging between 5 and 17 percent in euros and Louis Vuitton which also raised the prices of some of its products in March and May. It is not a surprise that brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Dior, whose handbags are products that are considered iconic and perceived by consumers as investment pieces, can be more bold in increasing prices to protect their margin. But not all companies have such strong brand positioning and therefore cannot raise their prices so easily.

    Bulgari CEO Jean-Christophe Babin: “Millennials Don’t Want Formal Luxury.” | Luxury Society – I suspect that this is across age cohorts but the blend of streetwear and luxury is a key sign of it

    Is online advertising subprime? Contagious – interesting thought experiment

    South Korean Activists Accuse China of Using Huawei to Hack Their Election | Daily Beast – of course Samsung is looking to pick up 5G smartphone and infrastructure sales from Huawei….

    New info about Facebook-Instagram deal delays antitrust report: source | CNBC – it will be interesting to see what comes out

    Axios China – Top German official hushed up report on China’s influence – not terribly surprising when you read books like Hidden Hand. More China related posts here.

    The end of the American internet — Benedict Evans – more precisely. The end of Americans being the dominant users and culture on the internet

    Brussels drafts rules to force Big Tech to share data | Financial Times – grab the popcorn

    State of AI Report 2020 – interesting report on the hype

    The great uncoupling: one supply chain for China, one for everywhere else | Financial Times – Untangling supply chains that have built up over a generation is a complex and difficult task and the multinational companies which sell into the Chinese market will stay and even expand. But if companies that once used the mainland to make goods for export do decide to depart in significant numbers, it will represent a major reversal of five decades of economic integration between the US and China

  • Troll communicators

    Troll communicators

    When I started my agency life; PR people tried not to be the story. The idea was to let the client be the story, whether you were inhouse or agency side. An exception to this would be agency leaders trying to raise the brand profile of their agency and senior political advisers.

    Troll communicators
    Andy Stone’s oddly passive aggressive post on the conclusion of ICO investigation into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

    The modern era of troll communicators finds its roots in social.

    Product blogs

    After the dot com boom blogging started to flourish in Silicon Valley. Companies like Google and Microsoft to develop product blogs over the next few years. These would often take the place of a press release to announce the launch of a new product or feature. Part of the reason for this was the speed of product launches versus approvals.

    A product blog post had to comply with the social media guidelines, but didn’t go through the legal overview like a press release would. It was essentially a ‘hack’ of the existing marketing infrastructure for a lot of businesses.

    On social

    Some communicators like Wadds and Frank X Shaw embraced the new format for professional reasons. Frank had started his blog around the same time as he moved from agency-side to work for client Microsoft in an inhouse role. Previously it had been a blog on the website of the agency where he worked.

    Over time, Shaw used his Glasshouse blog and Twitter to articulate his own opinions. He bleeds Microsoft so his views aren’t too far from the corporate line. While he might put together a forceful argument; I’ve always found him to be unfailingly polite. So far away from the troll communicators of today.

    Going around the media

    At some point, conventional media relations at the corporate headquarters of many firms became less important. Announcements just came out on the blog posts unmediated by the media.

    Thought leadership activities also changed. Rather than doing interviews or op-eds*; corporate leaders would do essays on their blogs. Speaking to senior technology leaders; you often hear Marc Andreessen’s essay Why Software Is Eating The World cited as an example of what they want. (They often forget that it actually appeared first in the Wall Street Journal and was republished on the Andreessen Horowitz blog the same day.)

    Media are awkward, they hold you to account and ask questions that you’re not that interesting in answering. It doesn’t fit in with their self image being an Adrian Veidt / Ozymandias type character.

    Where the media writes something about the company that they haven’t cooperated with and don’t agree with – owned media channels provide the platform for response. And the last word.

    It’s from this that you get the strangely passive-aggressive troll communicators. More PR related posts here.

    Op-ed is a shortened version of the American term opinion editorial or opinion piece in European English*