Ged Carroll

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  • New Yorks information for Amazon + more

    New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.

    Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing – The New York Times – The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances – (paywall)

    ‘Agencies are shitting themselves’: SCA dean Marc Lewis on tutoring for today’s ad world | The Drum One of the biggest pitfalls in the industry is “worshipping at the altar of wanky new tech”

    Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”

    A bunch of millennials explained in a survey why they despise phone calls – BGR – basically poor social skills

    Researchers Found a Way to Shrink a Supercomputer to the Size of a Laptop | Futurism – interesting, though parallelism presents problems for software

    Honda, CalTech and NASA’s JPL might have a real alternative to Li-ion batteries – Roadshow – great opportunity in terms of energy density but copper and more particularly lanthanum are a materials supply chain bottle neck. One can see how China disrupted Japan’s access to rare metals years ago which affected the use of magnets in high-technology products

    The Chinese Social Network – Hacker Noon – the story of Pony Ma

    Jack Poulson, ex Google, says management obsessed with stopping leaks – Business Insider – indicating a crisis in culture and leadership. The way Google is dealing with it is by stopping people knowing about the issues

    More technology related content here.

  • Most popular blog posts of 2018

    It’s that time of year again when I reflect on the things that I’ve done and what I can learn from the year. I wanted to get this out there whilst I still have a bit of respite from the holiday cheer. 

    In reverse order

    Reuse, re-edit and remix – the quality and impact of creative is a key question that is being asked at the moment. Marketers have finally woken up to the power of brand building as well as performance media. Which then begs the question what’s the minimum viable creative tweaks to effective creative that can be used?

    Apple – special event (September 2018) – trying to cut through the formulaic delivery of the company’s new products to understand what where the key salient points. I was surprised that this generated far more interest than a similar keynote at Apple WWDC which was much more interesting. 

    Enron and the net in 2000 – pre-Facebook the net was a much more decentralised place. Enron failed in their vision of a real time market for broadband, so I decided to work out what happened to some of their ‘partners’ at the time.

    Ramblings on consumption – this started off as a collection of disjointed notes I made whilst travelling to see the family in Ireland 

    Recommendations for a marketers bookshelf – you can’t dismiss the power of a good listicle. 

    This wasn’t the internet we envisaged – looking at the media of the 1990s we were promised an immersive visually stimulating interactive experience. Unfortunately we ended up with Instagramers and Facebook

    Throwback gadget: Bose Wave system – I still use a Bose Wave stereo due to the big sound that you get from a compact size. Its modular nature meant that it has weathered the iPod, DAB broadcast radio and internet streaming extremely well

    Jargon watch: zhuang bi (装b) – an exploration into Chinese l33tspeak. 

    Oprah time: Operation Elop – Nokia accounted for 25% of the Finnish economy at one stage and then spectacularly fell from grace, with the iconic phone business being sold to Microsoft. Yet the definitive history of what happened has never been licensed and translated by business publishers. I got to read a crowdsourced translation instead. 

    Things I’d like to see in 2018 – included in this list was innovation in smartphone experience (which we don’t have at the moment), a leaner web and critical thinking around the hype of crypto currencies. 

    My web toolbox – some of the tools that I was using in early July this year. 

    How to use RSS – with so many people now getting algorithmically selected, part of the solution is by going back to RSS and Atom feeds from trusted sites. So I threw together a guide to getting started with Newsblur

    The advertising industry post prompted by WPP’s 2017 financial results – how much of WPP’s difficulties are due to changes in the client and media environment versus WPP’s business?

    Social networks 10 years ago – 2018 will be looked back on in internet history as when the elites finally woke up to the dominance (ex-China) of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Looking back at 2008, it is hard to believe how much the social network eco-system changed

    Mercedes Benz China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are still jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama. Dolce & Gabbana didn’t learn from the Mercedes experience. Mercedes and other brands saw the Chinese government get involved in what would be considered to be extra-territorial exceptionism. This mirrors and contrasts with the Chinese reaction to the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou. The Chinese foreign ministry accused the US and Canadian governments of overreach. 

    Oprah time: Directorate S by Steve Coll – book review of Directorate S which discusses the complex relationship between the US war on terror and Pakistan

    Personal online brand – the perennial debate of should you own your own site or build your reputation on someone else’s platform?

    Out and about: Sicario 2: Soldado – I was so looking to this film and felt so disappointed when I got to watch it and was presented with a grand vision at the start that quickly fizzles out to a mediocre homage of the original, with one eye on building a franchise. 

    Dawns Mine Crystal by Yunchul Kim at Korean Cultural Centre – amazing art installation that I was fortunate to see. It moulded art and science as part of the Art @CERN project. 

    The influencers post – a post on the irrational exuberance associated with influencer marketing. I suspect that we’re close to peak influence.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – I presume that its very Googleable – this post was inspired and featured a video on smartphones in China by Winston Sterzel earlier in the year. I then put accompanying background information to give it more context for marketers. China is changing a lot, one consequence of this is that Winston is looking to move to the US and visit China occasionally rather than live there, like he has been for the past decade.

    The long and the BBH of it – Binet’s The Long and the Short of it has been a strategists go to reference for a while. BBH pointed out the benefits of expanding the data set. However its easier to snipe from the sidelines rather than doing something meaningful about it.

    App constellations 2018 research – this built on research that I had done in 2014 and 2016. It was the most trafficked post for the first half of the year. It was also the post that took me the longest to research and I managed to lose my archive data file soon afterwards. I will revisit it, but will have to try and pull the data from these images for the basic numbers!

    Innovation: a few thoughts – this post came from the coalescence of many things that were kicking around in August and early September. My friend Nigel Scott had come up with some interesting research on venture capitalists; disabusing any illusion of science in their investment selection. You had ‘struggle porn’ being championed on LinkedIn; which made the wrong correlation between effort and innovation. Finally you have big technology companies with an inflated sense of their manifest destiny a la ‘software is eating the world’ and the hubris of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and Apple. I pulled ideas from across the board, borrowing a lot from Kevin Kelly’s concept of The Technium. 

    What if stories are brain code – storytelling is treated as a science within the creative  sector. The reality is that its based a pretty shaky base. Whilst the formulation of storytelling is suspect; psychological research indicates that stories are even more powerful than we previously realised. 

    Some data points

    30 percent of the top posts from the first half of the year made the cut through the whole of the year, which surprised me as I thought that they would benefit from additional ‘evergreen’ search traffic.  

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    Lessons learned

    • There is still an interest in long form content and research
    • There was less of an interest this year in purely social platform based subject matter materials
    • Evergreen content doesn’t seem to work as well as previously

  • Aston Martin classics + more things

    Aston Martin Will Make Old Cars Electric So They Don’t Get Banned From Cities – Slashdot – surprised more companies like Porsche aren’t doing this. This upgrade process reminded me of the service that Bristol Cars have provided for years. Like Aston Martin has planned, Bristol Cars has steadily upgraded cars with better brakes, handling, electronic fuel injection and more emissions friendly engines. Their purchase by Fraser Nash is now looking at an Aston Martin like electric upgrade service. More luxury related content here.

    Exclusive: Amazon’s Alexa begins crowdsourcing answers to common quest – reminds me of the original thinking behind Yahoo! Knowledge Search (what begat Yahoo! Answers) when I first heard Jeff Weiner articulate it

    Mark Ritson: The story of digital media disruption has run its course – Marketing Week – It’s hard to get emotional or feel any of the romance of news media from a home page, but the paper edition carries with it the great cultural power of journalism. Print editions will become the ‘couture’ offering of the news brands – loss-making but important assets for building and retaining authority and influence over the market

    WSJ City | Britain’s stock link to China falls flat – many larger foreign institutions can already access mainland-listed Chinese stocks via trading accounts in Hong Kong. – Not terribly surprising. The big problem is how much hope had been pinned on it from a Brexit point of view

    Unilever’s rules for influencer marketing | WARC – that its influencer efforts focus not just on a product, but on attempts to covey a brand’s purpose – as shown by Dove, the personal care line, focusing on “real beauty”. “We are using influencer marketing for Dove across the whole spectrum. In some cases, we use influencers to talk about the features and benefits of the products,” Di Como said. “But, more and more, we are using them to talk about the idea to buy into – to talk about the brand value, of why the brand exists, and the purpose of the brand.” “There is an obsession that the only KPIs out there are ‘reach’ or ‘number of followers’,” said Di Como. “We need to talk about what the real impact is on brand equity – the real impact on the values of the brand.” – which is interesting as I heard that there were efforts to move away from brand tracking surveys and instead interpolate the equivalent data from social listening

    Apple Offers New iPhone Promo Deals, Trade-Ins to Boost Sales – Bloomberg – I think the market in general for smartphones is over-baked

    Bose Global Press Room – Bose Announces Frames — A Revolutionary New Wearable – this looks interesting, if they get it to work and you have enough connectivity to the cloud

    46 insurgent brands shake up China’s FMCG market – Kantar – the redefinition of consumers, merchandise and stores known collectively as“New Retail.” China’s consumers have growing expectations for tailored and specific offerings, which creates many niche opportunities for insurgent brands to capture. The traditional scale advantages of incumbents, such as large sales forces and large retail shelf space, have in some ways turned into disadvantages by digital disruption. For example, the e-commerce channel can reach millions of consumers without a single sales rep, and online platform advertising can reach millions of consumers with much lower budgets than traditional brands typically spend

    Volvo & Ericsson – Scroogled? – Radio Free Mobile – interesting article looking at Google’s move into automotive systems

  • Meng Wenzhou & things from last week

    Meng Wanzhou and China

    I’ve made a conscious decision to ignore Sabrina Meng Wanzhou and her forthcoming extradition to the US. I had met Meng Wenzhou when she was called Cathy. I also decided to ignore Starwood’s database of really private data allegedly being pwnd by Chinese intelligence. Unsurprisingly Brexit – which at the moment looks like an Austin Allegro hitting a brick wall at a moderate speed, collapsing like a crisp packet and killing its union jack clad occupants

    On to things that made up my week:

    Back in the day, consumer products brands used to do a lot of advertising to build brand equity. It is interesting that marketing thinking is starting to sway back to that being a good idea again. Reality check, it never was a bad idea, but marketers focused too much on short term effectiveness in isolation. Agencies were fine with this due to the profits available on digital media sales.

    An example of the power in brand advertising was work by McCann Worldgroup in Hong Kong for Nescafe Black. Which paid homage to a well known hair dye advert from the 1980s. Bigen hair dye went big on reach and repetition during the 1980s; its recall and memorability helps Nescafe’s ad work 30 years later. Actor Kenneth Tsang is probably not disappointed by the ongoing work either.

    This video on Amazon sponsored brands ad format reminds me a lot of the arbitrage opportunities that used to be common in early search advertising. It goes to underscore how much Amazon has taken away from Google et al in terms of product and shopping related searches.

    MIT released a video on how self driving cars can work on country roads (without the complex prebuilt LIDAR maps associated with current driverless cars efforts)

    Neopets was one of them child oriented social environments with games of a similar vintage to Habbo Hotel and Disney’s Club Penguin. It also has an odd startup story behind it. Watch the video and be amazed. More online related stories here.

    Wu-Tang Clan celebrate the 25th anniversary of their break out album 36 Chambers  with an appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk concert.

  • The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

    The Dark Net had been sitting on my shelf for a while. Jamie Bartlett works at Demos, has written for The Telegraph and writes books looking at the intersection between radical politics and technology.

    The Dark Net provides an overview of how politics and social forces have adapted to the internet. Bartlett is largely non-judgemental. In some respects it seemed to a series of essays that followed the Mondo ethos of documentary media. Something that’s factual, yet chosen for shock or entertainment. This was especially popular in the 1960s as these films competed for audiences against early television programmes across Europe and the US in the early 1960s. 

    It felt like some of the content was put in to spice book up, which is the reason why I thought it was similar to Cavara, Prosperi and Jacopetti’s film Mondo Cane 50 years earlier.

    Libertarianism was beneficial to the early web:

    • Privacy infrastructure including strong cryptography. This enabled everything from e-commerce and banking to secure communications. This has built new businesses, made banking and share dealing more convenient and helped protect people from authoritarian regimes. The downside is that it also makes criminal activity harder to detect than in the clear communications, but then so does a hand passed note with paper and a pencil
    • Fighting surveillance legislation – unfortunately authoritarian regimes caught on fast the potential of the web, so their efforts have been uneven

    The Dark Net shows how the libertarianism that spawned the early web has:

    • Weaponised social interactions as the network of people online grew massively
    • Driven extreme marketplaces, due to the lack of regulation and lack of similar values with early netizens
    • Drove the development and adoption of cryptocurrency. More accurately facilitated the adoption of cryptocurrency. A lack of trust in offline institutions like banks and governments accelerated the adoption of cryptocurrency as a store of wealth
    • Facilitated reinforcing communities to encourage suicide, racial hatred and eating disorders

    More security related content here.