Ged Carroll

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  • The Heat & more stuff

    The heat. At least in Hong Kong I lived with air conditioning, but there is no respite from the heat in London. In my area of London there hasn’t been much of a breeze either, the heat has been inescapable.  At least my music needed to be cool, and I reached back to nu-disco and space disco over the past few years. If there was one tune of the week it was this on

    Watch Kraftwerk Perform a Real-Time Duet with a German Astronaut Living on the International Space Station | Open Culture – literally out of this world. Kraftwerk pushing performance innovation after five decades.

    Carver M-500t power amplifier at the top

    I still lust after Ferris Bueller’s Carver M-500t power amplifier (on the top in the screen shot above), E-mu Systems Emulator II sampler and his l33t maker skills. Check out this blog that collated all the immense taste that went into his bedroom design: TimLybarger.com: Ferris Bueller’s Bedroom

    Scooter is one of those guilty secrets with catchy melodies and nonsensical lyrics that confound comprehension for English speakers. It was unusual to hear ‘How Much Is The Fish ‘ played on the piano and its a pleasant surprise. Scheps is better known as a classical pianist in Germany and has brand sponsorship deals with Audi and Chopard – so a world away from the image of Scooter.

    Here is the original for comparison purposes….

    As a student of Silicon Valley history, I was aware of General Magic. It is now getting a well deserved documentary about it. General Magic tried to build the predecessor of the Palm PDA and modern smartphones, before the the internet wi-fi and very nascent cellular networks. I’d heard of some people using them as a desk phone replacement

    Here’s the trailer

    Here is the documentary’s website

    Here is a guide to their DataRover 840F. Check out the skeuomorphic interface that is reminiscent of Microsoft Bob. Stylistically the fonts, design details and Easter eggs reminded me of the early Macs that I used. This isn’t surprising as it was started by Mac veterans.  Why is General Magic important now? Like the later PayPal mafia the General Magic alumni have been all over Silicon Valley developing some the most successful products and services. More on technology here.

  • Kickstarter

    If you’re reading this blog, you will have heard of the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. Kickstarter has become synonymous with crowdfunding and has become a verb. There are several crowd funding platforms out there including Indiegogo and China’s Demo Day but none seem to have caught the public imagination in the same way Kickstarter seems to have.

    Major companies like Sony have trialed offerings of products on crowdfunding platforms as a way of accessing market size and viability for new products. Bands from Public Enemy to unknown artists have financed their album recordings and production in a similar way

    Kickstarter failure rate

    I’ve personally subscribed to projects with very mixed results with Kickstarter projects that I have funded. My experience of my first couple of projects were very positive. My most recent experiences have been one of disappointment to the point that I no longer use it. They failed. There was production problems, the timelines over ran. And at least one of them looked as if they took the money and ran when the project seemed more difficult than they originally assessed it to be. 

    Therefore it was interesting to hear Kickstarter used in a different context, that reflects my experience with the platform.

    I like the Techmoan YouTube channel as a good deal of its content introduces retro technology, many of which is is equipment or media formats that I hadn’t come across previously.

    The channel host Mat used Kickstarter not as a brand, but as a verb to imply that a product was somehow inferior and lacking in quality. It has become synonymous with an amateurish effort. Just because technology and globalisation have democratised access to manufacturing; doesn’t necessarily mean better quality products. That can’t be good for the brand.

    This is on top of crowdfunding’s high degree of funding failures, product failures and increasing numbers of alleged fraud.

  • Crimson Hexagon + more things

    Facebook Suspends Analytics Firm Crimson Hexagon on Concerns About Sharing of Public User-Data – WSJ – Crimson Hexagon will likely get out of the penalty box soon, the co-founder works at a joint Facebook academic research partnership… Its also not that surprising what Crimson Hexagon did, given how crap Facebook is at providing data to social insights platforms like Crimson Hexagon or Brandwatch

    Congress is wrong to question Huawei’s academic partnerships | FT – op-ed by Eric Xu of Huawei, you could cynically interpret it as a plea for easier espionage and an interesting use of ‘freedom’ (paywall)

    INTERNET: Baidu Sambas Out of Brazil | Young’s China Business – There are lots of reasons for the inability of China’s Internet companies to succeed outside their home market. One is simply inexperience. But another is really the direct result of Beijing’s determination to set up what almost amounts to a parallel Internet in China that in some ways is identical to the global Internet but in others is very different. That strategy has helped to keep out most of the major global competitors in any meaningful way, allowing Chinese companies to thrive on their home turf thanks to their booming local economy. But that approach has also made these companies quite unprepared to compete globally, since they engage in many practices that are either unacceptable outside or simply undermine trust of local people. – China’s Galapagos syndrome: WeChat has NO end-to-end encryption, is censored worldwide for instance. Will only succeed in low risk categories – photo altering apps or casual games

    Why Hong Kong’s property bubble won’t burst anytime soon | HKEJ Insights – Hong Kong’s property market no longer serves only the city’s seven million people. We now must also serve a country of 1.3 billion with a growing number of rich people anxious to get their wealth out. Hong Kong’s red-hot property sector is a perfect place for rich mainlanders and international investors to park their money. Their hot money, combined with the local psyche that prices will continue to climb means the bubble will never burst. – You could substitute most of the world’s major cities as hot money from fast developing economy entrepreneurs and rent seek oligarchs park their hot money in property safe havens. Hong Kong isn’t going to see a tailing off of house prices until China deals with corruption.

    Amazon’s new Part Finder helps you shop for those odd nuts and bolts | TechCrunch – so cool,  I am just really scared that if I showed this to my Dad this ‘tinkerer’ element of his character would go into overdrive

    Publicis Groupe: First Half 2018 Results | Publicis Groupe – poor job done at controlling market expectations

    Android has created more choice, not less | Google Blog – yeah right. Basically we can’t get paid in data so pay us a licence fee. I wonder how much Google will have to pay to keep Google Search in the device if they do that. It could also create an opportunity for Oxygen, Yandex app store, Jolla and home grown distributions by the likes of Huawei instead

    Mark Penn on his update to MicroTrends

    Media – Twitter’s guide to getting the most out of the platform

    MEDIA Protocol – WTF

    Looking Through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State – The New York Times  – I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man’s face. But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. Seconds later, the people scattered. Their reaction was somewhat surprising. Chinese people often report that they’re comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched

    Amazon crashes just minutes into Prime Day | The Drum – makes you wonder about AWS availability and uptime…

  • Overlord & things from last week

    Overlord is an amazing genre mashing film. It’s not probably the best film, but does look like lots of fun. Overlord is named after operation Overlord, the allied codename for the battle of Normandy during the second world war. This immediately places Overlord in the hard fought battle to go inland from the beachheads.

    Prior to working in marketing I spent a brief time in the chemical and petrochemical industries. It was a time of my life when I was disenchanted with a scientist future in deindustrialising Britain. Instead I sought to try and work out what I wanted to do with my life beyond DJ’ing and living for the weekend. I worked on materials that were three times as strong as kevlar. Yet even now kevlar, Dyneema (that I worked on) or engineering plastic PEEK are still far from the mainstream applications. We don’t have everyday lightweight composite family cars. Yet materials hype like that around graphene assume that the material will be immediately transformational. This is a great video on graphene hype.

    If you are tech-orientated this video by Dr Kaizhong where he talks about his concept of the digital universe is interesting. More ideas related content here.

    I got this via Matt’s great Web Curios newsletter. It is not everyday that you see a western pop video shot in a middle class neighbourhood and apartment of Beijing.

    https://youtu.be/lGAhjnHvrNE

    Ogilvy put together a summary of what they thought were key themes from Cannes.

    I am not a big fan of deadmau5′ overly compressed pop sounding blend of dance music, but this video is mental. If you are watching Tomorrowland festival’s live stream over the weekend, you might think that the artist is thumbing his nose at his fan base. The video seems to parody archetypes of his fan base.

  • Marketers bookshelf recommendations

    Books

    My recommendations for a marketers bookshelf is based on my own reading. My own experience is very consumer, brand communications and behavioural change focused. Here’s some recommendations, they aren’t in a ranking or grouped in a particular order.

    Insights, planning and strategy

    Most marketing communications projects are trying to create some sort of behavioural change in the audience, so understanding more about persuasion has got to be a pretty handy thing right? Robert Cialdini  has two great works:

    How Brands Grow part 1 and part 2 – pretty much the modern marketers bible for B2C brands of various stripes. Byron Sharp distills down decades of evidence-based research that has been carried out by Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science attached to the University of South Australia. The research institute has got a who’s who of corporate sponsors supporting their work and using their data:

    • General Mills
    • Grupo Bimbo
    • Procter & Gamble
    • Red Bull
    • Unilever

    You get the idea. If the research is good enough for these brands, it’s good enough for you.

    A key part of planning is working out that insight which will speak to your target consumers. Trends books are sometimes a handy short cut to creating a first draft of a hypothesis. You can do worse than leave through pollster Mark Penn’s Microtrends, Microtrends Squared and Microtrends Cubed that he has built up. If you’re thinking about transformation then Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future is the Microtrends for digital transformation. Tom Doctoroff’s What Chinese Want: Culture, Communism, and China’s Modern Consumer – is a another great primer.

    The Long And the Short of It by Les Binet and Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era. Binet is a respected communications planning expert, he is currently head of effectiveness at Adam & Eve DDB. He has published some of the best works on marketing effectiveness for the IPA.

    If you studied marketing in college David A. Aaker is probably a familiar name. His Strategic Marketing Management book is often an introductory core course text. It used to double as a doorstop in a lot of dorm rooms that I visited. If you want to refresh your memory on branding he has written an accessible primer to recharge long lost lecture memories: Aaker on Branding: 20 Principles That Drive Success.

    Truth, Lies and Advertising – Jon Steel’s work on account planning is that rare thinking; a very readable text book. I like to go back to it to boil things down to first principles and forget complexity.

    Inspiration

    When you’re looking for inspiration, there are two good approaches:

    • Go lateral. Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies isn’t a book, but a set of 100 cards. Eno periodically suffered writers block in the studio and these cards are a successful approach that he developed over time with collaborator Peter Schmidt. It also works for finding your way through planning
    • Look back into time. If you are looking back into time, I would recommend Sun Tzu’s The Art of War if you are looking for inspiration on strategic approach. Buy the cheapest copy that you can get in print. Mine is covered in post-it notes and scribbles in the margins. More expensive versions have ‘business thought leaders’ trying to reinterpret it for you and just end up muddying the water. Those 13 chapters are well worth visiting on a regular basis. Bill Bernbach’s Book is a source of inspiration; as is the better known Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
    Communications

    How To Write A Thesis by Umberto Eco. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Ged have you lost your marbles, why would I care about writing a thesis?’ Eco’s book is a really good guide to collecting one’s thoughts and presenting facts gained through a comprehensive research process. As the old martial arts mantra goes: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Whilst Professor Eco isn’t a marketing scholar he knows a lot about thinking and being cogent.

    What about the last book on the marketers bookshelf? You’ve distilled all the knowledge from the rest of the books in this list, along with desk and possibly primary search.  You are ready to present your killer ideas to the client, or internal decision makers. Jon Steel has got you covered. Perfect Pitch: The Art of Selling Ideas and Winning New Business is a great refresher that helps shake you’re presentation game up.

    What books would add to a marketers bookshelf? If you have additional recommendations, put them below in the comments section. More related content here.