Ged Carroll

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  • Carry nothing + more things

    Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing – The Cut – Medium – women clean up because fashion allows it. She pointed to the size of women’s bags, which allow us — like sherpas or packhorses — to lug around the tool kits of servitude. A woman is expected to be prepared for every eventuality, and culture has formalized that expectation. Online, lists of necessities proliferate: 12, 14, 17, 19, 30 things a woman should keep in her purse. Almost all include tissues, breath mints, hand sanitizer, and tampons — but also “a condom, because this is her responsibility, too.” (A woman’s responsibility for everyone else’s spills extends to the most primal level.) – I don’t think that this ‘carry nothing’ mentality of men is true any more. One only has to look at the backpacks carried around. Or the whole EDC culture of over-engineered products to optimise the carry experience, making a lie of carry nothing as a concept. For a lot of men, the car is the handbag, but that’s a whole other discussion around the idea of carry nothing. More consumer behaviour related content here

    Gender ad bans set ‘concerning’ precedent, say advertisers | FT – the publishing ban only applies to direct marketing: members of the public, media outlets and sites like YouTube can continue to share banned materials.

    Amazon offered vendors ‘Amazon’s Choice’ labels in return for ad spending and lower prices – Digiday – shit meet fan….

    REON POCKET | First Flight – personal cooling device using Peltier effect to cool behind the neck

    Silicon Valley’s China Paradox | East West Center – the period from 2014 to 2017 as a time of “segmentation and synergy,” two words that on their face are opposites of each other. Their juxtaposition forms the core of what Sheehan labels “Silicon Valley’s China paradox.” While at a corporate level US and Chinese companies were entirely separate, the flow of money, people, and ideas reached an all-time high during this period. “This is when you saw a lot of investors from China showing up in Silicon Valley, some prominent US researchers and engineers joining Chinese companies in positions of leadership, and ideas flowing in two directions,” said Sheehan. He noted that the concept of shared bicycles, now popular in US cities, started in China, and both Chinese and US companies have been active in the development of autonomous vehicles. Even while the relationship between the two national governments was in many ways going sour, “the relationship at the grassroots level, the technology relationship, was still very free-flowing,” he noted. Sheehan suggested that the relationship has now entered a new and uncharted phase, which he termed the new “technology cold war,” with the US government asserting national policies in what was previously considered a private arena. This new phase has three dimensions, he said. The first is an effort to disentangle the interconnected technology com- munities that bind the two countries together. In 2018, the US Congress passed the Foreign Investment Risk Review and Modernization Act (FIRRMA). This new legislation increases US government oversight and supervision of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley, Sheehan pointed out. The US State Department also began restricting visas for Chinese graduate students working in sensitive fields of science and technology. The second dimension is height- ened competition between US and Chinese companies in other countries. In general, “American companies know they can’t win in China, and Chinese companies know they can’t make a dent in the US market,” according to Sheehan. So US and Chinese companies are competing in markets such as India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia. (PDF)

    Why Consumers Aren’t Buying Electric Cars | naked capitalism – no great surprise

    US smart speaker update – (PDF)

    Fake news and cyberwarfare from China in Hong Kong protests | Slate – really good analysis of some of the online events happening in Hong Kong

    The big scoop: what a day with an ice-cream man taught me about modern Britain | Food | The Guardian – “Since Brexit, people have less money, and less confidence in spending money. They haven’t got the money in their pockets they had a few years ago.”

    Apple and Samsung phone sales are down, and $1,000+ prices are one reason why – BGR – less convinced by this explanation – BlackBerry could have fitted into this format as well in its decline

    In-house marketing ‘costing firms lost productivity and creativity’ | Netimperative – but is the pay-off worth it should be the question

    US and China investors battle over Indian digital payments boom | Financial Times – so I think that Payments in India will turn out to be a White Elephant but the FT thinks that its a growth market

    Revealed: Johnson ally’s firm secretly ran Facebook propaganda network | Lynton Crosby | The Guardian – a lot positive advocacy campaigns can learn from this

    Are Companies About to Have a Gen X Retention Problem? HBR – or why are gen-y self entitled snowflakes part 43

    Taiwan primaries highlight fears over China’s political influence | Financial Times – Want Want China Times and Cti TV deny they take instructions from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office like good little United Front puppets. Who would you trust them or the FT?

    TikTok creator ByteDance to enter smartphone market, following deal with Smartisan | SCMP – not convinced by this move

    Boris Johnson to unveil biggest ad campaign since Second World War to prepare for ‘no deal’  – 100 million that realistically would need to be spent in 9 or so weeks. That’s a lot of gaslighting….

    Filling hospitals with art reduces patient stress, anxiety and pain – imagine seeing those tiles whilst well medicated

    Websites are (probably) making less money because of GDPR – MIT Technology Review – the caveats read so wide its hard to conclude anything from this really

  • Quentin Tarantino & things that made last week

    Quentin Tarantino couldn’t happen today. There is no need for an encyclopaedic knowledge of film trivia or the role of video store assistant as algorithm. He was familiar with a particularly wide library compared your average Blockbuster. Tarantino was a product of a childhood watching films on TV, dingy cinemas and a great independent video rental shop. TV film selection exposed him to films that algorithms wouldn’t have picked for him. Publishers like Eureka, Artificial Eye, Tartan and The Criterion Collection in the US have tried to carry the torch through careful curation.

    Most video shops had students or grumpy middle aged men as assistants who might grunt at you if you were lucky. But occasionally you would get someone who was a film fan who would love to share their knowledge like Quentin Tarantino did. Record shops and comic book shops were a similar experience, but for the fact that working in a record shop was considered a cooler job.

    This video is a great guide to Quentin Tarantino’s sources.

    The story of Yoshie Akiba, owner of Yoshi’s nightclub which specialises in jazz. The video below is just amazing to watch. More Japanese related content here.

    Vidal Sassoon took an interesting approach to this ad in China, more here – Do as you’re told? No thanks | The Work | Campaign Asia. The idea of not obeying authority is a subversive one in a collective society. Let alone a collective society in a totalitarian state. Brands are recognising that women can have a full independent life, this is at odds with government that wants a more traditional wife and mother role. China needs to raise its birth rate and needs married couples to increase social stability.  

  • Illegal spy camera + more things

    Illegal spy cameras are still easy to find in Shenzhen’s gadget paradise | Abacus – this will make you very paranoid. The size of the devices now mean that you can have illegal spy cameras everywhere. Smartphone adoption has driven the quality of small cameras up and their size down.

    Jollibee acquires US-based Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf | Marketing | Campaign Asia – this is huge. Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is a credible Starbucks competitor with a substantial footprint and great tasting coffee. It has a substantial presence in the US and Asia, with a particularly big footprint in Korea. Korea is one of the major coffee consuming nations in Asia.

    Inside Amazon’s pitch for new audio ads in music on Alexa devices | AdAge – Amazon sells 15 and 30 second radio type adverts. It looks like a modern version of Rediffusion style radio that piped content directly into consumer homes in the post war period. Cable radio used to be a thing in the United Kingdom Barbados, Malaysia, Malta, Singapore and Hong Kong….

    Forever 21 Sent Some Customers Atkins Diet Bars And People Are Very Angry | Buzzfeed News – I wonder what persuaded Atkins to come to Forever 21 with this tie-up. Is there something in their customer base demographic profile that isn’t obvious to me? I could see why at first glance Forever 21 could have seen the product drop as a ‘delight’ for customers. But in retrospect the sensitivity is understandable. It is also interesting how Forever 21 took the brunt of consumer displeasure on what was a co-promotion with Atkins.

    Extinction Rebellion breaks into fashion in Stella McCartney sustainability campaign | The Drum – Extinction Rebellion gets co-opted by fashion brands. The FT have an interesting interview with Greta Thunberg about how XR and he wider climate change protest movement spiralled out of control

  • Celine + more things

    Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.

    I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.

    Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:

    CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.

    2019 Dentsu Aegis Network CMO survey (sample size 1,000 CMOs)

    If you take into account the relatively short tenure of CMOs, it looks like a toxic brew for businesses in the medium to long term.

    It’s like as if this opinion piece was written with marketing in mind…. Watermelons vs. Sesame Seeds | World Bank.

    Interesting academic research paper that reflected on the triad actions against Hong Kong’s civil society and democracy movement in 2014, which seems sensible to revisit. Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong – Federico Varese, Rebecca WY Wong, 2018  

  • Secure empty trash + more news

    How to replace El Capitan’s missing Secure Empty Trash | Macworld – SSD as security risks. This is because sold state drives can only be read and written to a limited amount of times which poses problems when you want to do three or more overwrites on a regular basis as part of the secure empty trash process. The irony being that hard disks despite their many faults are more secure. More on SSDs here.

    Fake Everything 2019 Update – 50 odd examples of how the online advertising marketplace is thoroughly corrupted. This is well worth a good read if you have anything to do with digital marketing. This should bring up questions around efficiency and effectiveness. Unfortunately this seems to have been supplanted by the cult of disruption above everything else.

    Internet advertising to grow at slowest rate since 2001 dotcom bust | Media | The Guardian – deceptive visuals, but interesting analysis. We’re now in the tyranny of high numbers. The sheer size of numbers required to drive percentage increases mean that growth had to slow. You also have concerns about the data supporting online advertising media planning and measurement due to ad fraud (see the Fake Everything 2019 update above this as a good primer). In addition, there is now data available that underlines concerns about having a more balanced media mix in play. More on online advertising here.

    AR/VR early stage valuations soften, leading to investment and acquisition opportunities | VentureBeat – China investing more in VR and AR than the US. These investments seem to be focused exclusively on domestic market requirements.

    Hackers breach FSB contractor, expose Tor deanonymization project and more | ZDNet – interesting that Tor networks have been breached. Tor was developed by US defence department grants to provide secure internet communications for people living under repressive regimes.