Like many people who have bought a new Apple laptop recently. The move to USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 has been extremely disruptive. I spent a fortune on new accessories. One thing I wasn’t prepared to do was throw away my Belkin hubs and Apple Cinema monitors. I tried Apple’s own Thunderbolt 2 – Thunderbolt 3 adapter; and it worked inconsistently. One day I would switch on my computer and the monitor or hub wouldn’t work. For apparent no reason, on a seemingly random basis.
StarTech are a Canadian company who have been involved in unsexy, but necessary parts of the technology and video industry. Their focus is purely on interconnectivity of different video display standards. Whilst they aren’t a well known brand like Logitech or Belkin, there are probably some of their products used by your office sys.admin. They used to make a well respected Thunderbolt 2 hub, that didn’t seem to ship to the UK. So in desperation I decided to give their adaptors a chance.
Let’s get the negative aspects about them out of the way first. They are bulky, with the electronics coming in a case about the size of a stack of playing cards, rather than a small pack of chewing gum like Apple’s own convertors. They’re in a shade of dark grey only a sys.admin could love.
But once you get over these cosmetic issues you get a product that just works. It is ironic that I had to go to a non-Apple supplier to get this most Apple of attributes. I can wholeheartedly recommend these convertors.
More on my trials and tribulations with USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 here.
Juul Sales Halted in China, Days After Launch – WSJ – this could be as much about IP as anything else that caused the Juul sales halted in China. The e-cigarette was invented by a Chinese engineer looking for a healthier option to cigarettes. Secondly tobacco is a monopoly in China run by a state owned enterprise that is a valuable source of government revenue. There are even tobacco sponsored universities. I am only mildly surprised that Juul sales halted hadn’t happened in the US, given that Juul is so popular with teens
Trend-bucking Maccas turns back to tradition | The Australian – the most interesting implication of McDonald’s selection of W+K is what it says about client conflict. W+K already has the North American account for KFC and has been producing spectacular work for the brand. McDonald’s made no request of W+K to drop KFC in order to work for it, with its North American chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, noting the potential client issue “doesn’t concern us”. “We wanted to make the decision around getting the best work that this business deserves,” she said. – it wouldn’t have been that long ago that a major client would tolerate that degree of client conflict
Frankfurt Motor Show: Winter Is Coming | EE Times – the moon shot of autonomous driving may one day lead to falling accident rates, but that the development costs — and liabilities of public testing — may destroy them on the way. Almost everyone has stepped back from the brink of a ludicrous business model. This begs the question about autonomous driving as a killer app for 5G
Standing out is the key brand challenge, so great brands play with their codes | Marketing Week – purpose-wank aside, removing every single letter from your packaging is actually a very smart and very effective move. Because when companies play with well-established codes like this and remove or alter their appearance, the impact on salience and brand image is significantly improved – great article by Mark Ritson, but requires decades of brand consistency to work well
Facebook warns about Apple iOS 13 privacy improvement – the blog post appears to be a way to get out in front of software changes made by Apple and Google that could unsettle Facebook users given the company’s poor reputation for privacy.
The new Microsoft To Do is here – pity the poor product manager who is trying to transfer Wunderlist which built up an amazingly loyal following
Apple’s September 10 event ‘By innovation only’ marked the autumn season of premium smartphone launches. It is also a bellwether of what we can expect from the technology sector.
Mark Twain’s ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes’ fits especially well in the smartphone business. From a consumer perspective Apple’s 2019/20 iPhone range is basically the same phones but with more camera features. Other vendors are going to come out with handsets with more camera and 5G modems.
All of them are going to be trapped in the same pictures-under-glass metaphor. The smartphone industry as a whole (with the iPhone as bellwether) is trapped in its own version of groundhog day.
5G? Not so fast
Whilst 5G sounds good on new handsets, there’s five points to consider:
Early generation handsets for a new wireless standards tend to have poor battery lives
5G phones are only as good as 5G networks
There aren’t applications to make use of 5G networks
A lot of mobile usage happens on home or other wi-fi networks. 5G is competing with your home broadband connection rather than your patchy cellular connection
5G isn’t really about smartphones
When you see all launches (like this picture from the Huawei Mate 30 launch); just remember the five points above and process the slick technology spin through this lens.
In Huawei’s case they’re basically launching very pretty €1,000+ 5G Mi-Fi hotspots with point-and-shoot camera functionality, since they’re an Android phone without access to Google services. The Porsche Design variants come out at closer to €2,500 – ideal for bored, but patriotic 土豪.
Price inelasticity
Apple’s iPhone X and XS models tested the the price elasticity of premium smartphones. The market spoke. This year’s prices have stayed the same rather than increasing. You could argue that the value proposition has increased through a year’s worth of bundled services. Of course, its only worth anything if you use the services.
Differentiation through services
Seven years ago I was sat in a hotel restaurant in Seoul and overheard Flipboard going through a pitch they wanted to deliver to Samsung. Samsung eventually tried out Flipboard and free content subscriptions to help sell the Galaxy S3.
Apple decided to build their own free subscription model based around streaming video. This is to:
Differentiate its new devices from competitors
Provide a recurring revenue stream from iPhone users with older devices
Utilise the massive data centres that Apple has been building for the past decade
Built to last
The use of superior materials has resulted in iPhones lasting longer. Add this to pricing and for many people, their first iPhone is a pre-owned iPhone. They are handed down in families or to older relatives. This has built Apple a large user base. The big question is whether they can turn this footprint into services.
There is a tension between new phone sales in a saturated marketplace, versus a growing base of service users.
China Set Traps To Capture Dangerous NSA Cyberattack Weapons: New Report – the implications of China set traps for attacks and repurposing the NSA’s expensive code has seriously difficult optics. Leaked NSA tools have already been used by cybercriminals, it is likely the China set traps may faciliate it. More security related content here.
The 10,000-hour rule has been disproven. Now what? — Quartz – what another Malcolm Gladwell ‘truth’ disproved? His books are entertaining but the amount of people who take them as gospel is astounding. His works are the QAnon of middle class dinner party discussions
China’s Sinopec launches coffee brand with 27,000 locations | News | Campaign Asia – I like the way they’ve named the coffee after RON (octane) values of petrol. It harks back to the cup of joe which would have been filter coffee in a roadside diner or doughnut shop. You can take your flat whites and hipster shite and shove it up your (well you get the idea). But I do wonder if it fits in with the Chinese consumption pattern of coffee being essentially middle class in nature?
The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites | Jeffrey Epstein | The Guardian – whilst people like famous computer science professor Dave Farber believes this article is ‘way off base’ – it’s an accurate reflection of policy makers views on big tech and I am surprised that the Republicans haven’t managed to rally around the idea of skewering academics, metropolitan elites and big tech.
(Account) Planning is a role focused on bringing the consumer into creative thinking. This then impacts channel choice as well. It started in advertising agencies in the mid 1960s. At the time account managers were using information provided by researchers. The problem was the poor and untimely use of the information.
The solution was to put the researcher and account manager on an equal footing. UK ad agency Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP) ‘invented planning. It was J Walter Thompson (JWT) that gave account planning its name later that year.
As is true with the story with many innovations, a similar process happened in Australia at the same time. Both were completely unconnected to each other.
The rise of planning as a discipline gave rise to a corresponding golden age in ad creative. BMP came up with the Cadbury’s Smash robots and the PG Tips chimps.
Jay Chiat of TBWA\Chiat\Day took note of the British experience and shipped it over to the US in 1982.
A couple of definitions
“The account planner is that member of the agency’s team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used – not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client’s advertising problems.”
Stanley Pollitt
“Planners are involved and integrated in the creation of marketing strategy and ads. Their responsibility is to bring the consumer to the forefront of the process and to inspire the team to work with the consumer in mind. The planner has a point of view about the consumer and is not shy about expressing it.”
Fortini-Campbell
I think Pollitt has it closest to right from my personal perception of plannng as a practitioner.
Now it’s unthinkable that an agency of a certain size doesn’t use planners to help the creative process.
For smaller agencies, often the creative director tries to synthesise the planning function. Often there is reverse engineering of ‘planning’ to justify creative.
Communications agencies have tried adopting some of the practices of ad agencies. They have integrated planning functions into their businesses with varying degrees of success.
The tensions between account planning and public relations as a discipline
Whilst public relations has done a good job in terms of professional bodies. It has failed to come up with a solid definition of PR:
Managing Public Relations defined public relations as ‘the practice of managing the flow of information between an organization and its publics’.
Grunig, James E. and Hunt, Todd.
The UK’s PR practitioners professional body defined it as:
Public relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.
Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR)
These definitions are broad and deep. Broader and deeper than what companies ask agencies to do in most cases. The discipline has a conflicted identity at its core.
That has meant that the PR industry missed out on opportunities in search and social marketing. It also means that bringing planning to PR is like building on foundations of sand.
Secondly, there are agency practices. Real-world agency practices don’t look like the theory taught by PR academics. Often the strategy and planning process is not billed to clients, so you look to do ‘minimum viable planning’. This is done by generalists. These generalists learn by doing. Clients pay for activation only. It is a progressive client that spends resources on measuring campaigns. Optimisation is often hit-and-miss, because of the role of a planner and approach to data.
But it’s not all bad
That doesn’t mean that it can’t be done. Fishburn Hedges (now Fleishman-Hillard Fishburn) had a number of planners. Camilla Jenssen at Brands2Life is building an interesting team over there. I fell into the planning role at Ruder Finn because its what we needed. The agency didn’t really realise it at the time and currently do a similar role now at 90Ten.
In the decade or so that I’ve been planning we’ve seen PR agencies move to become communications agencies. I got to do cinema adverts, OOH and public transport campaigns. I got to do TV commercials that ran in in Latin America, the US and Southeast Asia.
In my current role we do paid media campaigns alongside earned media. The key difference is that we’re looking at behavioural change rather than selling a product or service – because we work in healthcare. Edelman spent a lot of money to build out a planning function. They have done amazing work in association with CAA (Creative Artists Agency).
So what does this mean for the agency?
PR agencies have repositioned themselves in the communications space. The PR name was too limiting from a commercial point-of-view. Programmes have become too ambitious to bodge the planning process. Agency management are being forced to resource planning properly. The task urgency culture of PR doesn’t die though.
I freelanced on a TV advertisng campaign to run in Southeast Asia. By the time I picked the campaign up, it had been worked on for six months in the Shanghai office. There had been three attempts coming up with a creative brief. Three sets of ad concepts were created, tested and rejected. So the challenge was thrown over to the London office. My job was to take another run at the creative brief to build a fourth set of ad concepts that would then go into testing. It went into a month of testing and then another six weeks for shoot.
This level of pre-launch focus and testing wouldn’t happen in a PR setting. The reason is because the creative is small compared to the media spend put behind the advert. But the opportunity cost in not having the creative right is large.
In the past with PR, you could create a catastrophe. A classic example would be Gerald Ratner’s after dinner speech at the IoD annual convention. Media coverage of this speech destroyed the Ratner brand he ended up pushed out of his own firm.
But the majority of the time, poor campaigns go nowhere. Press releases sat on newswires that no one ever sees and social media posts that no one engages with.
All this means that planning gets compressed timelines in communications agencies.
Data collection, analysis and synthesis has its challenges in communications agencies. You won’t have access to some of the sources you’d expect at a large ad agency. Sources like WARC, Contagious or Global Web Index. You can read more on data for comms agencies here.
The success of planning in communications is about melding two very disparate cultures. William Gibson’s ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy of books offer a vision of a possible way forward. In the book Gibson outlines the role of PR as having its finger in the zeitgeist. This has a clear analogue to the planning process.
