Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Chinas booming streetwear scene + more

    Inside Chinas booming streetwear scene – Inkstone – great video on Chinas booming streetwear scene that’s morphing into someithing very different

    Tesco Is Said to Work With Israel’s Trigo on Cashierless Stores – Bloomberg – if Chinese cashier less stores experience is anything to go by, this might not be a good idea

    ‘Adapt or die’ – Martin Sorrell’s message to ‘Pavlovian’ ad industry holding companies – Mumbrella Asia – S4 Capital’s low overheads and a cheaper wage bill due to the average employee age being 25 at Mightyhive – the programmatic firm – and 33 at MediaMonks, the production house, meant it could deliver greater bang for the buck than the networks – so its not a smart marketing play but a manpower cost play? We’re better run because we employ cheaper staff? Sorrell gets made to look like a chump in this article; I’d also suggest that he does his homework looking at effectiveness and creativity more closely

    Opinion | A Major Police Body Cam Company Just Banned Facial Recognition – The New York Times – interesting move by Axon. The US seems to be doing to facial recognition what the EU did to online data with GDPR

    FCB parts with Nivea amid rising tensions, including allegations of homophobic remark | AdAge – client reported said ‘we don’t do gay’ on agency call. That’s being leaked from FCB staff or freelancers

    Crazy/Genius: Are Influencers Frauds or the Future? – The Atlantic – the dystopian age of whuffie capitalism

    Nike Withdraws Products After Brand Partner Vexed China for Supporting HK | Jing Daily – Nike and the bullshit of brand purpose, especially when you contrast this to the Colin Kapernick campaign. When sales are lacklustre principles go to shit

    Huawei Personnel Worked With China Military on Research Projects – Bloomberg – looks like a mix of internal security work (analysing emotions in online video content, and external security on collecting and analysing satellite images and where 2.0 data. One also has to remember that Qualcomm has got a heavy national security background in the US. Given the current situation this news couldn’t have landed at a worse time for Huawei.

    Naomi Wu has an interesting discussion on professionalism versus engagement to maximise pay off on video. You need to have 2 million+ viewers to make the transition from 1080P to 4K worthwhile

    Carrefour sells 80% of China grocery business — Quartz – surprised they didn’t use China to jump start experience on e-commerce so they could take Amazon on in the home market. Talk about a missed opportunity

    China’s millennials are mourning the end of an era in online hook-up culture | Quartz – really interesting, given how early marketers like China Merchants Bank used drift bottle for its CSR programme. Its also unsurprising given China’s tightening grip on media distribution

  • BMW NEXTGen & things that made the week

    BMW NEXTGen event included a concept car the BMW Vision M Next. What I found most interesting about this is how BMW whilst looking forward with the i8 and the M Next; is still stuck with designs resembling the Giorgetto Giugiaro designed M1(E26) of the late 1970s. Don’t get me wrong, when I was a pre-teen my ideal car would have looked like the BASF sponsored M1 track car with the spiral paint work. It would have been nextgen for my pre-teen self, in the same way that the future also looked like a Star Trek communicator. Though our current smartphones would look nextgen to the original Star Trek set and prop designers.

    BMW M1 écurie BASF série PROCAR 1980

    Here’s what the M Next looks like (© Copyright BMW AG, München, Deutschland.)

    BMW M Next courtesy of BMW

    Which raise an interesting question. From a branding perspective does iconic legacy design make it harder to draw a line under one technology as you transition to another? We have various bias’ in our expectations, some of which BMW have tried to challenge with the sonic experience in their cars. I’d argue that they need to think about this outside the vehicles as well. From a safety perspective and because part of driving a BMW is being ‘seen’ to drive the marque.

    I think that there’s still work to be done by BMW and other manufacturers on getting their arms about the future of performance from a brand perspective, for a post-ICE (internal combustion engine) age.

    Abacus (a tech media publication from the South China Morning Post) has channeled the Pixel Boys to come up with a way of trying to make the Chinese tech sector make sense to foreigners. China Tech City | Abacus is well worth checking out.

    In an era when there is a chance that Jeremy Corbin could be a prime minster in waiting should a general election come along, And I speak with people who profess to be MacBook totting communists. I am surprised that Marxman haven’t seen a resurgence in popularity. I randomly came across this great interview of them by a French TV programme around about the time their first album broke.

    Hong Kong’s leaderless movement against the Chinese extradition law (or their CIA paymasters if you believe the Chinese government) have been doing some really nice creative to rally internal and international audiences to their cause. There were print ads that ran in the newspapers of many G20 countries and video content. Taking the politics to one side for a moment, just look at the craft in this video. At the time I have written this has been dubbed into:

    • Taiwanese variant of Chinese
    • Dutch
    • English
    • French
    • German
    • Bahasa Indonesia
    • Italian
    • Japanese
    • Nepali
    • Norwegian
    • Spanish
    • Swedish
    • Tagalog

    It makes Led By Donkeys look a poor effort in comparison.

    Bubble tea shops are opening around London outside of the usual China town locations. It’s success is in a sharp contrast to the likes of Jamies and Patisserie Valerie chains recent closures. Bubble tea actually came out of Taiwan in the late 1980s and London has been way behind in adopting the drink. Asian Boss tracked down the Taiwanese inventor of bubble tea Lin Hsiu Hui (of Chun Shui Tang) and the interview is great.

  • Flickr best social network experience + more

    Flickr best social network experience going / Boing Boing – I believe that flickr best social network experience at present, but I am not blind to the communities flaws

    An Oral History of Oakleys, the Most Badass Sunglasses of the 1990s | MEL Magazine – or how Luxottica made a great brand merely good. More related content here.

    The Ad Contrarian: The Stupidity Of Ignoring Older People | Ad Contrarian – interesting, it used to be that half the lifetime spend was done before the age of 35. Given that most marketing is short term programmes marketing to older people as well makes sense

    China Counterfeiters’ Hot Product in 2019? Peppa Pig Couture | Jing Daily – interesting China’s fake clothing people have been cranking out snide Peppa Pig wear; including dreaming up Burberry, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Off-White and Givenchy collaborations that haven’t happened! It’s wonderful and subversive at the same time

    They welcomed a robot into their family, now they’re mourning its death – The Verge – Williams understands that companies have bottom lines and that gadgets come and go, but Jibo was also designed to appeal to children, and those kids are now learning what it means to own a robot and have no control over its fate – pretty dark stuff. It sounds like the product succeeded with customers but was too pricey for what was required – A couple of things here; it wasn’t that long ago that we thought Japanese people were odd for having Shinto funeral ceremonies for their dead Aibos. Now we see similar behaviour playing out for Jibo. Secondly, unlike the first Aibo, Jibo is essentially a cloud personality, which begs the question when’s the move towards device based AI etc coming back as seeing your kids cry is too much?

    Dolce & Gabbana’s Expanded Sizing “Proves They’re Really about Selling Clothing,” Not Just Leveraging it — The Fashion Law – Dolce & Gabbana has announced that it will increase its sizing to include garments that will range up to size 54 in Italy, the approximate equivalent of a stateside size 18? You bet it is. The move by the Milan-based brand to extend its sizing – which went into force with its currently available pre-fall collection – “makes it one of the most inclusive designer brands for women,” according to The Independent’s Olivia Petter, a far cry from most high fashion brands, which Fashionista’s deputy editor Tyler McCall says “stop much closer to a size 10 [or] below that even.” – I think its a smart move given their problems in China

    The crisis in creative effectiveness | WARC – There has been a serious declining trend in the effectiveness of creatively awarded campaigns over the last ten years. The most recent IPA/WARC Rankings data, explored in the new Crisis of Creative Effectiveness report, confirms this continuing decline; creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than they have ever been in the entire 24-year run of data and are now no more effective than non-awarded campaigns. We have arrived in an era where award-winning creativity typically brings little or no effectiveness advantage.

    Top 1000 Brands | Intelligence | Campaign Asia – for China

    Study Shows Big Rise in Teen Vaping This Year – The New York Times and Juul faces House investigation over teen e-cigarette use – this is going to get regulated sooner rather than later and the whole Philip Morris International ‘dialogue’ campaign is going to leave some creative agencies holding the reputation equivalent of a live hand grenade

  • Mercedes 300D & things that made last week

    This video on the 1970s and 1980s Mercedes 300D is instructive in terms of the amount of work that was put into industrial design. What would now be called user experience in a more digital world. The Mercedes 300D was a workhorse of European taxi fleets during the 1970s and 1980s. They became a popular car in the developing world because they were so robust and there are still vintage car owners now who love them because of their design and engineering. When I close my eyes and think of Mercedes, this is the era that encapsulated the essence of Mercedes for me.

    Japan had a culture of non-fiction informational manga as well as the stuff that we’re used to seeing in the west. I’d not seen it done in anime before but ti works really well. Here is a short film made by the people that brought you Sailor Moon in the mid 1970s. It explains some of the incidents that form the base of UFO sightings and subsequent UFO conspiracy theories popular during the cold war.

    https://youtu.be/5k0Yz-iVxdY

    The social side of online computer games. Gaming like chat rooms and social before it brings together like-minded people. My cousin moved to Canada but keeps up with friends from college and home in Ireland over online gaming quests. But these people aren’t merely maintaining existing connections, but building new ones. What also becomes apparent is how detached many people are from their communities. Not just in major cities like London, but also small towns in Wales. More consumer behaviour related content here.

    Amazon is bringing Garth Ennis’ The Boys to the small screen. Karl Urban is a lean but less imposing Butcher and Wee Hughie ISN’T played by Simon Pegg….

    South China Morning Post’s Abacus channels The Pixel Boys to try and bring China’s tech giants to life for westerners: China Tech City | Abacus 

  • Web services I use

    Web services I use everyday has evolved over time. I thought I’d explore what I use now, compared to my essential services nine years ago.

    Bloglines –  I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll

    Delicious – is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather

    Google – as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here

    Teoma – one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go

    Email – my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange

    iDisk – I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out

    Flickr – if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook

    Twitter – is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content

    Skype – whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places

    LinkedIn – I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

    Ten Web Services I Can’t Do Without | renaissance chambara

    Lets have a look this in terms of numbers. In the space of nine years:

    • 3/10 services no longer exist in a meaningful way
    • 4/10 services I no longer use
    • 3/10 services I still use, but are just not important to me anymore

    The key lessons to take away from these are:

    • The importance of data portability. Which is one of the reasons why I am minimally invested in Facebook
    • Always be looking out for new services that serve as a plan B
    • Steady but niche beats aspirational mass services every time. Ok so services like del.icio.us had a mass expectation pushed on them by large corporates post acquisition
    • It’s easier to make a service less useful than more useful – Skype definitely had a tipping point into the second tier for me following a user experience redesign around about the time of the Microsoft acquisition

    What does my list look like now?

    • Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice. Bloglines was shut down by IAC, so I had a choice of moving to Google Reader or FastLadder. FastLadder was an English language version of their iconic Japanese RSS reader. Livedoor got wrapped up in a financial scandal. The English language service was a distraction and eventually got shut down. Thankfully, RSS readers have a standard format to export your list of sites that you want to read called OPML files. The downside is that it has become fashionable for web designers to turn off RSS feeds on websites
    • Pinboard is my social bookmark platform of choice. Yahoo! started stripping the delicious team of its developers and they eventually transitioned their personal accounts to Pinboard. That was enough of a recommendation for me
    • Duck.com is now my first string search engine. Google is bumped to second tier. The key reason for Duck.com is privacy. It’s search quality is good enough, the search engine results page has a clean design rather like Google used to. Google still has handy vertical search options like Google Scholar and Google Translate are still top class.
    • Email – my use of email hasn’t changed at all. It has been a constant in a sea of change.
    • WeTransfer – Apple’s move from iDisk as a file system on the web to more of a tight integration with the company’s productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)
    • Flickr is still my visual memory. It’s just an awful lot more web friendly than Instagram or Pinterest. It’s longevity is remarkable given all its been through with Yahoo!
    • Messaging got a lot more fragmented. I work with friends in China so WeChat is needed, as is KakaoTalk, Messages, WhatsApp and Slack. None of which offer a perfect fit
    • Skype has been replaced by a bridging conference call number and some people that I work with use Zoom. Skype still has some uses but my use has declined
    • LinkedIn is still an important business tool. Despite constant fiddling with the format, the spam on the platform and declining candidate functionality

    Listing these web services out it makes depressing reading. Declining functionality, good products (almost) sunk by large corporate shenanigans and corporate investors. In many respects things have stood still rather than moved forward with web services. More related content here.