Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Nostalgia + more things

    If Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be, Why Are We Living in the Past? | Newsweek – Our past keeps growing, and as it does, it continues to crowd out our present, shortening the already narrow nostalgia gap. If Tom Vanderbilt thought treating last month’s music as classic was silly, think about various #TBT (“Throwback Thursday”) posts online, which celebrate historical events that happened a mere seven days ago. 

    We could shrink this gap even further. Like many kids her age, my 20-year-old sister is obsessed with the 1990s. When Netflix announced that it was remaking the ABC television show Full House , she and her friends took to Facebook to share their delight that a show from “their childhood” was coming back. 

    This reaction struck me as odd because my sister was born in 1996: a year after the original series ended. She does the same thing with other ’90s phenomena, taking to social media to share images and songs and neon colors from a decade that she describes not as her favorite , but as her own.– more on consumer behaviour here.

    Why Zero-Emission Hydrogen Is the Best Way to Power the Cars of Future | Robb Report – great article by the Robb Report which highlights my skepticism around Tesla et al

    Why Estée Lauder are spending 75% of their marketing spend on influencer marketing | The Drum – what’s the job to be done that their spend is that skewed?

    Costco grand-opening hoopla gives way to disappointment in Shanghai | News | Campaign Asia – this didn’t look like it was going to end well

    As Hong Kong Churns, Beijing Bankrolls Shenzhen | EE Times – interesting that they are trying to ‘overcook’ Shenzhen

    Sources say China used iPhone hacks to target Uyghur Muslims | TechCrunch – the thing that puzzled me is why China would want to take off data from Chinese SNS that the government has a pipeline into anyway?

  • Jeremy Renner store + more stuff

    The Jeremy Renner store – this must be the 21st century equivalent of the celebrity infomercial on cable TV: @ Amazon.com. The Jeremy Renner store is interesting because it’s an odd choice of celebrity. More on Amazon here.

    Amazon UK 2

    Nike China with Weiden + Kennedy did these great basketball-themed adverts

    Laundry Musical. Procter & Gamble invented the soap opera back during the great depression as sponsored radio serials. They were instrumental in building P&G as a brand powerhouse. Riffing on the theme P&G Philippines launched the first ‘laundry musical’ with Broadway star Lea Salonga.

    It is hard to explain how musical Filipino culture is. Wherever Flipinos are as a community, there is music. In Hong Kong they do group singing and dance routines. Music has been a huge export for the Philippines. You go to bars around the world and there will be a Filipino band who can pivot from hard rock to soulful R&B standards.

    Filipinos make up most of the bands on cruise ships too, which isn’t surprising given the amount of recruitment for the shipping industry that goes in the Philippines from sailors to engineers.

    TBWA\Chiat\Day’s Lee Clow on the making of Apple’s Think Different campaign. Chiat\Day still have this campaign as their calling card a quarter of a century later. The opening statement that technology is not a substitute for an idea is something that feels more relevant now. It is also interesting seeing the creatives working on MacOS Classic.

    Apple used the creative process as a way to showcase the creative hardware and software used on the campaign

    • Microsoft Word
    • Quark Xpress
    • Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat
    • AVID non-linear professional video editing
    • Claris eMailer – which was an email client similar to mail.app on macOS now. I had never used it, as I was using Netscape Communicator at the time

    Irish department store Brown Thomas launches its first brand anthem film

  • Worrying debt + more things

    WSJ City | Young Chinese Spending Creates Worrying Debt – looks like a credit bubble waiting to happen. Worrying debt in terms of personal credit doesn’t create economic value in the same way that government debt on infrastructure does. Chinese corporates also have worrying debt also has shades of bubble era Japan about it. Since consumer spending is driving China’s 6 percent growth, what would happen if the credit bubble burst?

    Farewell to Those Days of Wrestling With Fate
    Busy Chinese city life

    A European Perspective on Boeing’s 737 MAX Debacle: An “Existential Crisis” for a National Champion | naked capitalism – Boeing’s Crashes Expose Systemic Failings – fascinating Spiegel article of which this pulls out the highlights

    BangBros Acquires, Shuts Down PornWikiLeaks Site | AVN – this is about trying to stem the flood of doxxing that has beset performers in the adult entertainment industry and their families

    Big Brands ‘Acting Like Startups’​ – A Potential Red Flag | LinkedIn – one for companies in FMCG space like Unilever to read. It points out the flaws in ‘disruption porn’ pedalled by McKinsey Digital and Accenture

    WSJ City | Trans-Pacific Tensions Threaten US Data Link to China – also likely to affect Hong Kong as a financial centre and base for cloud network hosting

    YouTube to adjust UK algorithm to cut false and extremist content | Technology | The Guardian – censorship. Interesting that there will be concern about China yet we’ve stepped on a slippery slope

    Big brands turn to big data to rekindle growth | Financial Times – this makes me worry about the internal future state of research in large consumer companies

    bellingcat – Amazon’s Online Bezos Brigade Unleashed On Twitter – If you’ve worked on Amazon social you might want to take it off your CV after reading this…

    Nicolas Roope: “A different design language is taking over” – The challenge is how brands can adapt their propositions. Architecture demonstrates the formality of this new direction: what is now a series of gestures and actions that may or may not be involved in the surface will be critical to the success of the project. How do these buildings respond to the urgent requirements of energy use reduction and waste reduction? How do they perform as stories in hyperconnected environments where reputations are established in social media? Think Instagrammable hotel rooms…

    The Economist | China’s thin-skinned nationalists want to be loved and feared – Zoe hit the jackpot. Over a million netizens responded to her poll, posted on Weibo, the country’s largest microblog platform, asking what followers think of foreign brands that “insult China”. Her timing was impeccable. Her survey surfed waves of patriotic indignation crashing over the Chinese internet, heightened by puffs of windy outrage in the state media. To give you an idea of how ridiculous it can sometimes be:

    Big Blue Open Sources Power Chip Instruction Set – a really interesting opportunity opens up for a fully open source rival to ARM

    Member Research: Away vs. Rimowa – 2PM – I’ve been a long time RIMOWA fan, but the pilot case I like has been discontinued

    Mediatel: Newsline: Millennials finally get to neg someone else – gen-z seen as workshy egotists by gen-y

    Beyond Techno-Orientalism: An Interview with Logic Magazine’s Xiaowei R Wang

  • Glade e-tailing + more stuff

    Glade fills packaging pillows with its scent in creative product sampling campaign with Walmart | Contagious – Glade fills packing pillows in Walmart e-commerce orders to provide scent samples and drives a double digit uptake in online sales (which is huge in CPG). It also provides Walmart with a uniquely pleasant e-commerce experience. More retail related content here.

    Canadian charity SickKids put together this amazing ad. The production is beautiful. The ad plays with idea of super powers. It focuses on the self esteem and resilience of the children.

    Guinness and Japanese women’s rugby. Not a combination that I would have normally thought of. But this ia lovely advert that pays tribute to Japan’s first women’s rugby team. Again its another ad that focuses on resilience and dignity. Guinness has had a long history with promotion round rugby as sport.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE_mVvJyWQY
    AMV BBDO & Grey London

    Luxury brands have done a good job of tapping into modern culture from streetwear to gaming and everything in between. Frieze and Gucci partner on a mini-documentary looking at the history and origins of techno. Part of Kim Jones’ success at Dior has been his ability to draw on culture like this. This is the reason why he draws from 90s street wear and even got Shawn Stüssy to collaborate with Dior.

    This history of techno is an attempt by Gucci to do a similar meld with culture. It pulls on Detroit’s manufacturing history, pre-dominantly based around the US automotive industry. Detroit always had a distinct culture. Black people in Detroit were known to spend more money on their outfits in the 1960s and 70s. It was a birthplace for the Motown sound.

    A six year old Korean YouTuber buys a house. Korean public reactions are interesting. The Korean influence sector is large. What is particularly interesting is how profitable mainstream content is. The UK influencer scene is much more skewed towards beauty, fashion and hospitality.

    Child influencers will hopefully have a happier ending than many child actors.

  • Dieter Rams

    I was watching the Dieter Rams documentary – Rams: Principles of Good Design by film maker Gary Hustwit and a small section jumped out at me.

    I immediately thought of how Spotify and other streaming services have dramatically changed our relationship with music. Music is as good a place to start as any, Dieter Rams first sprang to prominence due to a stereo dubbed Snow White’s coffin. Streamed music is not something that is actively listened to. The music disappears without leaving a trace.

    Digitisation diminishes our experience of things.

    Pictures appear and disappear one after the other without leaving a trace up here (pointing to his head).

    This goes insanely fast. 

    And maybe that’s why we can or want to, consume so much. 

    The world that can be perceived through the senses exudes an aura that I believe cannot be digitised. 

    We have to be careful now, that we rule over the digital world, and are not ruled by it. 

    Dieter Rams – Rams: Principles of Good Design

    Of course, consumerism took off at a rate of knots way before the cellphone became mainstream let alone the smartphone. But his comments about content being ephemeral in nature, lacking in memorability or substance rang through. Rams maybe right, we’re at a time where consumer interest in analogue media formats such as the vinyl record and the cassette tape is on the rise.

    There are even niche record labels that put out recordings on reel-to-reel tape for well-heeled and committed listener. As for the digital medium, the playlist is more important than the album or single, let alone the artist name. Even well established acts fail to make significant returns from streamed music. In some respects it goes back to era of the Rediffusion radio set that piped music into the consumers home, rather than ‘owned media’ from the LP to the iPod.

    Dieter Rams

    We’re seeing a move away from DAW (digital audio workstation) based instruments in music that Dieter Rams would likely approve of. And a move to hardware that would have been familiar to the 1970s version of Brian Eno. Despite the best efforts of Pearson Education and Amazon; consumers still love printed books.

    Continued love of Dieter Rams’ and his team’s own designs at Braun and Vistoe are an illustration of that championing of the real over virtual. More on design here.