Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Coldcut + more things

    CLOT Magazine | COLDCUT, a journey through cut and paste and audiovisual innovation – great overview of Coldcult creative efforts and an interview with the group. Coldcut started off as DJ / producers and along the way evolved into multimedia artists as well. Along the way Coldcut founded the Ninja Tunes record label, and in Hex helped push forward multimedia just before the web came along.

    Flickr Takes Another Sad Turn, Gets Bought by Something Called SmugMug | Gizmodo – I am thankful that flickr hasn’t been shut down but pensive over what the plan SmugMug has. The sale of flickr means that I am pretty much done as an Oath customer then with the exception of Yahoo! Finance news content. More flickr related content here.

    Do Chinese Luxury Consumers Care About British Heritage? | Jing Daily – In the West, we buy into lifestyle brands—we like brands that can sell us everything. But the Chinese consumer likes to go to a specialist for each item. They like to buy their knitwear from one place and their shoes from another. They value quality and are willing to pay for it. – which is where premium streetwear gets in the door

    Facebook – Bipedal voting | Radio Free Mobile – interesting analysis

    EX-99.1 Amazon letter to shareholders – quite a scary document via our Matt

    Agency Layoffs Or Agency Calibration? | Forrester Research – examine the characteristics of the players winning creative assignments for digital experiences. Tech consultancies like Accenture Interactive, Deloitte Digital, IBMiX and PwC are successful with system integration and digital experiences. Their combination of data, strategy, implementation and creative is a potent offering for marketers. Yet, their ability to capture the essence of the brand is still developing. For agencies – large or small, public or independent – brand creativity is differentiating

    A Renewed Vision For WPP | Forrester Research – I don’t think that a technology leader would get creative businesses and you’d end up with yet another ad tech business with the rest of the value withering away but interesting reading

    The Battle for the Gayborhood Has Become A Passive-Aggressive Turf War – I was reading this and thinking about the way Canal Street in Manchester became invaded by hen parties from across the UK from the late 1990s onwards

  • Martin Sorrell & other things this week

    Martin Sorrell

    The Martin Sorrell departure from WPP was like an earthquake in the marketing and advertising industry. Sorrell started at Saatchi & Saatchi before building WPP as a marketing services conglomerate with global reach. I decided not to write a post on his retirement because there were more questions than answers. A couple of things saddened me:

    • The Martin Sorrell departure was assumed by some outsiders to be part of the #metoo movement. This seems to be a default setting for many now
    • Headlines like the Globe & Mail that talked about Sorrell’s departure as the end of the Mad Man era. You have journalists and the sub-editors that they work with having no understanding of the industry that they cover. Martin Sorrell was a major factor in the end of the Mad Man era; moving advertising from being the closest thing in business to art, to something numeric in nature. One could argue that technology has moved the bar too far in terms of removing the craftsmanship all together, but that’s a discussion for another day about Google and Facebook rather than about WPP

    More information on the Martin Sorrell departure from WPP
    Why WPP’s Cryptic Handling of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation Is the Wrong Move | AdWeek
    WPP Claims It First Learned of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation From His Own Internal Memo on Saturday Night | AdWeek
    With Martin Sorrell’s resignation at WPP, the Mad Men era truly seems over | Globe & Mail – (paywall)

    Wetherspoons leaves social

    Wetherspoons walking away from social media. Again the whys and wherefores of this seems to have as many questions as it does answers. As an outsider, their digital strategy and execution on social channels was patchy at best. It wasn’t something that Tim Martin was that committed to anyway. It probably won’t make that much difference to their business. More related content here.

    Whilst as a marketer I can point to high street brands to who do social really well (Paddy Power, Poundland or Tesco Mobile a number of years ago); there are a lot of mediocre brand accounts.  I can see the argument for going all-in, or not at all.

    Music

    Tim Westwood recording of De La Soul freestyle throwback – never heard before! – YouTube – this was apparently done for the Westwood Rap Show sometime in the early 1990s.

    This Sould Out tune seems to bridge the gap between disco and the late 1980s / early 1990s Italian house sound popular in the North of England.

    Shinsegae Food

    Lastly, here’s one of them ads that never got approved by the client. Shinsegae Food is the food manufacturing arm of Samsung in Korea. Samsung is completely vertically integrated with these food products often sold in Samsung owned restaurants and Shinsegae department stores which can be paid for with a Samsung credit card. Mamee is a Malaysian manufacturer of instant noodles. The video is a satirical take on a usual Korean drama trope.

  • Tony Kaye + more things

    Director Tony Kaye happy to be working and out of ‘Hollywood jail’ | The Drum  – He says that a story arc doesn’t really matter in six seconds. “I think you can throw anything at it, as long as it’s quite clear what it’s for. If you’re working under 20 minutes, in my opinion, you don’t need any structure. You can be as fragmented or as crazy as you want.” – Tony Kaye was a legend in the advertising world, creating some of the most iconic adverts of the 1980s and early 1990s. His Hollywood debut was American X, a brilliant provocative film with the troubled production. This saw Kaye go to the ‘Hollywood jail’ of the title where he could not get work in the film industry.

    Hackers stole a casino’s database through a thermometer in the lobby fish tank – Business Insider – “It’s probably one area where there’ll likely need to be regulation for minimum security standards because the market isn’t going to correct itself,” he said. “The problem is these devices still work. The fish tank or the CCTV camera still work.” – it’s Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in real life. The internet of things is now an under assessed security vector. In the right hands, a lot can be done with very little computing resources and computers have become pervasive in nature.

    An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It | New York magazine – this just scratches the surface, but is an interesting read

    The Finns who refuse to give up on Sailfish OS | Engadget – given the challenges that ZTE faces. Jolla with Sailfish OS would be an ideal technology stack on their foreign handsets, particularly if they can do an English language version of the Yandex app store. That way they won’t have to localise all of their offerings as a replacement for Google Mobile Services (GMS) layer in Android. More related content here.

  • GDPR resources

    Partly due to Cambridge Analytica, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going to have a more profound impact on data usage globally. GDPR would have been seen as an extra-legal reach, but Facebook is making it look like a good idea.

    I thought I would pull together a few resources that I thought would be of interest around GDPR since there is a lot of snake oil being sold as consultancy around it at the moment. I am not going to pretend that I am an expert, so I thought it would be useful to share some of the GDPR related resources that I have been looking to learn from.

    Not only in terms of what the regulation is, but what techniques can be deplored to act in the spirit as well as the letter of regulations. Demonstrating a basic respect for the consumer won’t harm any brand, but might point to badly designed KPIs that direct and digital marketers might be measured from.

    Andreessen Horowitz put together a good podcast on it.

    Privacy by Design – The 7 Foundational Principles by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D. (PDF) – is a must read paper for creative agencies and product teams. It is based on work that was started in the late 1990s. Cavoukian lists a site as a reference ‘privacybydesign.ca’ – but that seems to be down.

    1. Start by thinking about privacy by design from the start or as Cavoukian says preventative rather than remedial, proactive rather than reactive
    2.  Privacy as the default setting
    3. Privacy embedded into the design of systems and processes (which sounds like a reinforcement of her first point
    4. Not viewing consent in terms of a zero-sum
    5. Privacy secured throughout the lifecycle from end to end.
    6. Being open and transparent about processes to keep the organisation honest and stakeholders informed
    7. Respect for user privacy based on a user-centric ethos

    Via James Whatley’s newsletter this article on UX –  GDPR: 10 examples of best practice UX for obtaining marketing consent seems to be complementary to Cavoukian’s work. This is in sharp contrast to the dark patterns often used to force consent by many sites.

    More related posts here.

  • Dyneema + more things

    Dyneema

    The Lifestyle Applications of Dyneema – Core77 – the interesting thing for me is how old Dyneema is and how long it has taken to adopt the product. Back when I first started work before college, I worked briefly for DSM – the maker of Dyneema. Dyneema and Dupont’s Kevlar both required exceptionally pure chemicals in their process. Kevlar reputedly had to scrap a third of the product made. Both were expensive and used in special functions:

    • Ships ropes
    • Motorcycle crash helmets and robust composite moulded products
    • Ballistic vests and bullet proof armour
    • Climbing ropes

    Business

    PR Agencies Need to Be More Diverse and Inclusive. Here’s How to Start. | HBR – starting points valid but nowhere near the whole formula. Angela has written an interesting article on diversity and inclusive agencies. But Angela misses so many other data points:

    • That PR degree courses are often 90+% female graduates
    • That the industry (like advertising) does really poorly at retaining older (40+ year old) staff.
    • In the UK PR agencies struggle to attract graduates from working class backgrounds as well as from minority communities

    The article is behind a paywall. More related information here

    Mark Zuckerberg in Washington DC on machine learning and hate speech. Bringing their security team up to 20,000 people to look at issues like this. Hate speech is hard to compute in comparison to (Islamic) terrorist materials. I am guessing that what constitutes hate speech changes country by country (and its interesting that Facebook is looking at this from a global perspective, rather than placating the US first). Secondly, the language that constitutes hate speech evolves to circumvent restrictions and incorporate memes a la Pepe the Frog.

    Culture

    North Korean defectors are learning English so they can survive in South Korea | The Outline – interesting English loan words in South Korean language

    The Facebook Current | Stratechery – well worth a read

    Luxury

    Streetwear Reigns Supreme, Say Teens | News & Analysis, News Bites | BoF  – The growing popularity of streetwear negatively impacted Nike, as their appeal among teenagers dropped from 31% to 23%. In contrast, brands like Vans and Adidas have successfully leveraged an “open-source” approach, allowing pop culture to shape their brand image and consumer perception.

    Marketing

    Chinese International Students Are the New Brand Champions | Jing Daily – 31 percent of Chinese students in New York and Boston escort friends and family on shopping trips at least once every three months. Thirty-four percent purchased luxury goods to take back to China at a similar frequency

    The clock is ticking for brands to ‘go native’ | The Drum – highlights issues with native ads such as ROI