Ged Carroll

Blog

  • H1, 2018 most popular posts

    Happy Back to the Future Day

    I took a little bit of time to reflect on the content that I have been writing, what can I learn from it and how I can reuse these learnings? Specifically what are people finding of interest? This couldn’t happen without people actually reading the content, so thank you for reading; feel free to come back on a regular basis. Over the past six months readers like you have found the following articles of most interest. In reverse order

    Reuse, Re-edit, Remix and Recycle – if you read the industry publications we here about personalised ad creative driven by ad targeting. But often the core creative and is created unnecessarily. Instead, what’s the minimum viable creative tweak that can be used? How do we extend the smart processes of reuse, re-edit, remix and recycling into this world?

    This Wasn’t The Internet We Envisaged – in the word’s of Terry Pratchet:

    “If you do not know where you come from, then you don’t know where you are, and if you don’t know where you are, then you don’t know where you’re going. And if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re probably going wrong.”

    So it was time for reflection in order to get a perspective as the regulators and media discovered Facebook, Google and Amazon where not models of virtuous conduct.

    The Biggest Public Relations Agencies Stuckness and Market Dynamics – The Holmes Report came out with their top 250 (biggest) PR agencies around the world in terms of billings. I decided to delve into the numbers for financial years 2014 – 2017.

    This supports a hypothesis of slowing market growth and solidifying market dynamics at a macro level. Strategic acquisitions start to make less sense compared to improving efficiences and effectiveness.

    Throwback Gadget: Bose Wave System – usually my gadget reviews tend to be some of the better performing content. The Bose Wave review was the only one that appears this time around.

    Social Networks 10 Years Ago – a reflection on what a more diverse social media eco-system looked like.

    The Advertising Industry Post – the macro effects buffeting the world’s largest marketing services conglomerates.

    Mercedes China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are 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

    Personal online brand – at a time when we’re seeing social media turning into walled gardens. David Gallagher asked the Twitterverse if he should have his own site?

    Twitterverse: @wadds says I need a proper blog. I say I can do it on LinkedIn or Facebook. What say you? Build my own?

    I weighed in on why he should and how I manage the process.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – Winston Sterzel did a good video for the average bystander on the Chinese smartphone eco-system. I thought it was a good film to share with marketers  – with a bit more background information answering some of the ‘why’ in terms of market dynamics.

    App constellations 2018  research – I built on work that I had done in 2014 and 2016, comparing the rate of growth across different companies apps based on Fred Wilson’s definition of app constellations. This was also the post that took me the longest to research!

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  • Advanced engines + more things

    Troublesome advanced engines for Boeing, Airbus jets have disrupted airlines and shaken travelers | The Seattle Times – this isn’t like the new engine in your car. The advanced engines in a jet engine are exposed to more heat and pressure than you can imagine. When you’re working on advanced engines for aircraft; you’re operating at the bleeding edge of materials and engineering. New metal alloys, titanium, engineering ceramics and carbon fibre all started in advanced engines for aircraft.  What’s interesting is the way the problems have assailed multiple engine builders at the the same time. Almost as if there is a roadblock in the technium for advanced engines

    Lost Liverpool #13: The Beat of Bold Street Part 2, the Mardi Gras and G-Love – Getintothis – wow I read this and it brought back a lot of memories. G-Love was the closest thing to the legendary Shoom vibe in Liverpool. It was a different kind of crowd to what you saw at the Quadrant Park or even Garlands. G-Love at the Mardi Gras is what I’ve measured every club experience against since and most of them have been miserable failures by comparison. Early Cream felt austere and corporate with its ‘no jeans’ dress code.  G-Love was part 1960s love-in and part rave. It was Ibiza without even knowing where the Balearic islands were.

    Crown, a new app from Tinder’s parent company, turns dating into a game | TechCrunch – yet another thing for incel subculture to complain about

    Death of the landline? Why we are hanging up on the ‘home phone’ – Independent.ie – in my parents case its cheap calls to Ireland. Though its hard for them to justify the landline because of the amount of spam calls that they receive

    Encrypted Messaging Apps Have Limitations You Should Know | WIRED – these limitations are well known, yet law enforcement continues to want in the clear messaging only. The fig leaf of a magic key just indicates their deliberate techno-ignorance

    Nike scores big in Chinese KOL competition | Campaign Asia – Nike is killing it in China thanks to understanding local culture and global youth culture.

  • Seventeen by Hideo Yokohama

    Seventeen by Hideo Yokohama

    Seventeen follows Yokohama’s first break out book translated into English; Sixty Four, but it isn’t a sequel or a prequel.

    Hideo Yokohama is a former journalist. he used to write for the Jomo Shimbun, a regional paper in Japan. It was obviously easy for him to write about life as a journalist. Yokohama-san captures the atmosphere in a news room. The egos and tensions. Perhaps the biggest tension being the solitary nature of being a writer, whilst participating in the team effort of a daily miracle of creating a newspaper.

    It describes a pre-internet world, where pagers were hot items, cellular phones were starting to make an appearance but outrageously expensive. Two-way radio sets were commonly used by taxi-companies, field services organisations (utility vans) and possibly media who couldn’t afford cellphones.

    Seventeen isn’t a straightforward book to read, it has parallel narratives that wind together. One narrative is that of a senior journalist in a local paper in 1985 in the aftermath of Japan Airlines Flight 123; the world’s largest loss of life in a single aircraft accident. The second strand is the journalist some 15 years older; preparing to climb a rock face with the now adult son of a friend who died at the same time as the air crash.

    The book mixes the existential crises of the journalist in both home and professional life; with the emotion involved in reporting such a horrific event. Yokohama  captures the politics and internal pettiness of his office colleagues and the perverse nature of the company chairman.

    Seventeen is a great read, which I can highly recommend as a summer holiday read. More book reviews can be found here.

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  • Checkout free retail + more things

    Exclusive: Microsoft takes aim at Amazon with push for checkout free retail | Reuters – I hope that checkout free retail works better than self service checkouts. Also will checkout free retail work well in low trust societies? More related content here.

    The Ruggedmen and the End of Free & Easy – but out of the Ashes is born something new

    Are Apple AirPods Any Good? – The Atlantic – interesting observation on the changes on consumer behaviour using AirPods

    Why the Future of Machine Learning is Tiny | Pete Warden’s blog – and not AI – the early 1990s use of fuzzy logic is a better analogue

    Upscaling of Sneaker Brands Threatens Luxury Fashion | Jing Daily – Gildo Zegna, CEO of Italian luxury fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, attributed the rising price of sportswear sneakers to their rise in emotional value, “If there is one product today that is impulse driven and creates emotions among consumers, it is the sneaker (…) you are talking about people spending $100 to $700 on a single pair.”

    Publicis publicity win was bigger than the bot | Special: Cannes Lions – Ad Age – Publicis campaigns won’t be absent from Cannes after all, because clients and partners stepped up to pay for the entry cost for a few hundred campaigns

    Volkswagen tests quantum computing in battery research | eeNews Power – chemistry makes sense as it works on low qubit machines. Involvement with Google and D-Wave is a blow to IBM

    Monzo’s big smart bank move links your money to Alexa, Twitter and pretty much anything else | WIRED UK – I find this quite scary

    Customer Experience Trends In China, 2018 | Forrester Research – Today, China has become so innovative that businesses in mature Western markets are taking note. The country’s tech giants are blurring the boundaries between digital and physical and expanding the reach of their platform businesses with new value propositions

    Microsoft acquires a whole bunch of game studios | TechCrunch – interesting how Microsoft is going about this. Steam is looking like the future of gaming

    About the Finder… | Ars Technica – the finder is a bug bear since I started as a Mac user and the lack of positive change in Mojave is no different

  • Hiroshi Fujiwara & things from last week

    I first knew of Hiroshi Fujiwara though his work on old school Japanese hip-hop label Major Force. He was cited as an influence in Bomb The Bass’ first album Into The Dragon. His influence has been much bigger in terms of streetwear and Harajuku culture that fuelled fashion and culture of the past two decades. He is now collaborating Moncler and did some media interviews :

    Thailand is famous for emotion-filled adverts and this Sunsilk film is no exception, dealing with family acceptance of Kathoei (กะเทย). Its a beautiful piece of work by JWT’s Bangkok office.

    I’ve never worn Doctor Martens myself but they were often seen in the school yard and during my early working life. They are as British as Marks & Spencers chicken tikka masala. I thought product had been moved offshore as part of globalisation, but it seems that there is still a small production facility in the UK. The process of how the shoes are made is fascinating.

    The application of machine learning in the criminal justice system is something of concern. The natural inclination of authority is to inflate itself with every tool that progress provides.

    Great documentary on Chinese wealthy migration away from China. The move to Vancouver was pioneered in the early 1970s with wealthy Hong Kongers preparing for its handover in the decades to come. They’ve been followed families who got rich on the mainland following the opening up of the economy.

    It reflects the reality of major cities around the world now as capital flight out of China continues. Non-domestic earnings (like that from Russia and Middle East) is a factor driving unaffordability of housing. The experience of Mau and the opening up founded a culture of ‘now’. This has manifested itself in different ways: capital flight, having a bolt hole abroad and a foreign passport in case things go suddenly bad. It also explains historic product quality issues as entrepreneurs think about the now and let the future take care of itself, preferably while you have gone abroad to live a comfortable life.