Search results for: “Byron Sharp”

Warped media constructs
Where did warped media constructs come from?

Warped media constructs as an idea originated from a few observations I made. The first was an article by Magic Numbers that examined the distribution of marketing spend across various media channels compared to the percentage of profit they generate. It was based on a piece of research done called Profit Ability 2.

A chart in the article caught my attention. While all channels contribute to profit, some have more comprehensive long-term effects than others. Any channel below (or to the right of) the red line represents a greater proportion of contribution to overall profit returns than the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to it.

Based on this chart: linear television, radio and podcasts and print advertising offer the best value for money for businesses.

What’s interesting is that two out of three of these channels are viewed as legacy media that brands are keen to move away from. When I worked at Unilever, the global media spend for the brands I managed amounted to about 92 per cent on television advertising. Some markets allocated even higher percentages.

The second influence for this post on warped media constructs was a post by Tom Goodwin.

Goodwin spent the best part of a decade working in senior roles for media buying businesses in very technology-centred roles.

It’s only just dawned on me that the reason Traditional Advertising is quite good and Digital ads are uniformly terrible is this.

Media owners always knew they were in the business of selling eyeballs.

Digital media companies think they are in the business of selling clicks.

Our core competence becomes how we see the world.

If you were a traditional media owner , your “job” was to attract , to respect , to inform, to tantalize, to satiate attention and repeat business

If you were a digital media owner, you were a tech company using algorithms to trick, harass, optimize, chase , game, attention by trying out any one of Billions of bits of content , made for free by users.

So while TV companies and traditional media owners are selling attention and eyeballs.

Digital media companies are selling clicks and data that show they create success.

The philosophy of traditional media is actually far more useful for longer term business success with advertising

For MOST companies of any scale, taste and longevity, digital media thinking is entirely wrong

But tech thinking swayed the market , they became so dominant and valuable, and profitable, nobody has the balls to call out how dumb this actually is and how much it’s degraded advertising.

I just wish we could apply the thinking of traditional media , the need to respect , to seduce , to value , to reward human attention , to digital media , because that’s where most people spend ALL of their time.
Tom Goodwin on LinkedIn

His post made me wonder about why such warped media constructs were widespread, when the flaws of lower performing media were readily apparent?

What does the data tell us about media?

The Profit Ability 2 research is a robust study of the UK media market. It took data from five media buying agencies looking at 141 brands in 14 sectors. it was based on a three-year media spend (2021-2023) and across ten media channels. Over a third of the brands matched pre-and-post COVID.

Retail media is one area that I would have liked to see examined in a bit more depth, given its rising popularity and ability to challenge generic PPC and online display advertising.

Media that is often the most lionised and championed by media agencies, notably paid social and programmatic display media were outshone by media types that have been declining investment by marketing teams over the past two decades.

This isn’t a new phenomenon as Ebquity research back in 2018, showed that there was a considerable gap between what marketers and agencies thought were effective, versus real-world evidence.

Secondly, this data indicates that brands are not using the channels in the best way for the long term interests of their business. There is also a correlation with declining campaign effectiveness rates.

Why do we have warped media constructs?

This pivot towards warped media constructs has benefited everyone but advertising agencies. And it would be reasonable to hypothesise that agencies chasing incremental growth, enterprise software vendors and consultancies have been leading large corporates up a digital focused route that provides data and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and marketing ROI.

Agencies’ legacy businesses are fading as the vast majority of
incremental marketing spend is directed online. Digital growth is
accruing to leading publishers, enterprise software and consultancy
firms, while technology enables marketers to do more in-house.
Market share loss is already evident in slower organic growth, but
trading multiples fail to recognise the heavy dependence on M&A.
Fragmentation. Almost 80% of every incremental advertising dollar spent globally accrues to digital. As their legacy traditional media businesses are fading, agencies are failing to capture digital growth, resulting in a lower market concentration in favour of new entrants empowered by technology
Redburn Atlantic (equity research paper): Ad Agencies Marginalised (2016) by Bianca Dallal, Matt Coupland and Mandeep Singh.

Advertising industry commentator Michael Farmer alluded to this change in his newsletter Madison Avenue Insights back in 2020.

Creative agencies have mastered the requirements of integrated campaigns, from TV to online video, websites, Facebook, Instagram, ad banners and e-mail marketing. It’s a pity, then, that this victory is being undermined by agency price-cutting strategies that leave agencies understaffed and underpaid. Senior agency executives need to create winning business practices – they’re losing the business war.
Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

Platforms like Facebook have repeatedly tried to prove that they can substitute for linear TV in advertising campaigns since the late 2000s with varying degrees of success.

The Devil is in the details.

Remember the question about what the data tells us about media? Let’s examine the data in more detail.

One of the key phrases on the slide plotting out the different media sources is ‘full profit returns’. This term is quite important to bear in mind. Consider how these media channels work.

Long-term memory model or brand-building channels
- Linear television adverts
- BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand)
- Radio and podcasts
- Cinema
- Online video
- Print advertising
Good brand building content that we are sufficiently exposed to can stay with us for decades and even become part of culture.

Short-term brand activating channels
- Generic PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
- Paid social
- Display advertising
This means that once you have clicked on the ad and gone to a destination, the advertisement has largely had its effect.

The Long and the Short of it

Now if we look at the performance of these media types over full payback, sustained payback and immediate payback we see that each these media channels serve short-term or longer-term goals. Time matters, Profit Ability 2 found that 58 percent of advertising’s total profit generation happens after the first 13 weeks.

If you are a digital-first organisation, or looking at ‘last-touch’ attribution, your measurement is capturing less than 40 percent of profit generated by advertising depending on the marketing mix of the campaign. Your organisation’s marketing culture could be leaving substantial marketing generated profits unharvested with an overly short term focus and less efficient over longer timelines than a financial quarter.

Binet and Field established some useful heuristics for thinking about marketing spend, which can help shape media choices from a macro perspective of brand-building and brand-activating activities.
- Immediate payback – profit derived in the same week as the advertising.
- Sustained payback – profit derived from week 14 to 2 years of advertising.
- Full payback – profit derived over the full 2 year period.
Anything above the yellow line makes a positive contribution relative to the proportion of marketing investment. Linear television works when used consistently and has a long-term impact.

Paid social media is about achieving immediate results, being a very tactical channel by nature.

Print advertising is unique in serving equally well across immediate goals, sustained campaigns, and delivering long-term results.

Each media channel can play its role based on the communication objectives. Their effectiveness also depends on how they work together.

A second consideration is the channel’s reach in the population. Print is interesting as a universal channel for consumers who read print publications, from older Telegraph readers to Monocle magazine-toting hipsters. However, it’s less useful if you’re looking to reach a football-mad teenager. Ebiquity in its analysis of Profit Ability 2 talks about a related concept called saturation:

The study analysed the saturation point for each channel, which is the last point where every pound invested in a channel generates at least £1 profit.

It found that TV has the highest saturation point. Advertisers can increase investment in TV to a higher level than other media and it will continue to generate a profitable return.

Based on immediate payback (i.e. payback within one week of investment), Linear TV advertising on average hits saturation at the highest spend level – £330,000 – nearly triple the equivalent scale of the next largest channel (Print) and over 8-times the scale of Online Video.
Profit Ability 2: The new business case for advertising | Ebiquity

Reflecting on my experience at Unilever: I wasn’t brought in to help digitise the marketing mix away from television because digital was an ineffective channel, but because linear television wasn’t as good a platform for reaching busy young mums as it had been previously. We had to broaden the media mix to reach them, which meant more investment in online video and paid social media.
In retrospect, we focused on reach, deprioritising consideration of the communication objectives. BVoD, radio, and podcasts might have had greater weighting if I were to do it again.

This might all change

If a channel became more expensive, you would get less value for your money; it would be equivalent to raising the yellow line. Conversely, reducing the cost of the media would be equivalent to lowering the yellow line.

Cost inflation

Price inflation for larger clients likely endangers cinema, display advertising, online video and BVoD in client budgets first. There may be a strong case at present to allocate more spend to channels that would encourage branded searches, to improve the effectiveness of a reduced PPC spend. Examples of these channels would include public relations, print advertising and television.

Job to be done / payback period

An emergency locksmith will have a very different budget and timeline for marketing return compared to an aftershave brand. The emergency locksmith wants to rank top in local search on mobile devices to get a call-out; they are far less likely to consider brand building and word-of-mouth. The exception to this rule would be at the top of the market, like Banham in central London, which would be providing more of a concierge security service.

Regulation

I have worked with pharmaceutical clients where most of the communications we were doing had to be addressed directly to healthcare professionals. In that case, you have a much more limited palette of possible communication channels.

You face a similar situation if you are looking to market regulated consumer products like sports betting, gambling, alcohol, cannabis and tobacco-related products or vapes. The channel limitations are based on screening off protected audiences or reducing the chance of positive brand attributions. Regulators don’t want smoking to appear cool.

So what’s the best media channel based on our warped media constructs?

It depends. The good news is that all advertising channels analysed in Profit Ability 2 generated a positive payback from advertising when sustained effects are accounted for.

You can find similar posts here.

More information

How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp.

Madison Avenue Insights | Creative agencies: winning the battle but losing the war

Profit Ability 2: Thinkbox report, Ebiquity write up, The new business case for advertising presentation.

What the latest effectiveness stats reveal about moneyball media choice | Magic Numbers.

The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies by Les Binet and Peter Field.

Ebquity | Intel (2018). Re-evaluating Media: What the evidence reveals about the true worth of media for brand advertisers. United Kingdom: RADIOCENTRE. (PDF).

Facebook is a lower quality medium than TV, says marketing academic – Brand Republic News

TubeMogul Partners With Facebook to Help Brands Extend TV Audience Reach to Digital | Adweek

Do TV Ads Drive Facebook, Twitter Engagement? (Study) | AdWeek

Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good -“There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.”

Facebook suffers setback in quest to topple TV ad dominance | Digital – Ad Age – couldn’t get sufficiently high rates on ads that it was showing on connected TV devices.

Facebook and Google, Two Giants in Digital Ads, Seek More – The New York Times – Facebook combining Nielsen TV data, treating its ads like TV. and Google plays catch-up with targeting by email address.

What’s behind P&G’s cutback on targeted Facebook ads? | EJ Insight (Hong Kong Economic Journal) – To reach 5,000 targeted viewers on Facebook, the spending needed can reach the equivalent of that required to reach a million TV viewers, according to Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, which tests ads for effectiveness

Thinkbox Media Mix Navigator.
July 1, 2024
CMOs
Premature obituaries of CMOs

Almost 11 years ago business academic Dominique Turpin wrote an article describing CMOs as ‘dead’. Turpin worked at the IMD business school in Switzerland and the article was a classic bid for thought leadership.

Alicia Tillman, CMO at SAP AG until 2021, at the time of writing CMO at Delta Airlines

It’s just the kind of thumb-stopping headline that drives readership of LinkedIn content where it was published.

… the decline in the CMO’s influence is alarming, especially at companies that claim to put the customer first but in reality are product-driven.

True, some companies have marketing in their DNA, especially firms that had a visionary founder with a great understanding of the customer. Examples include Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA or the late Steve Jobs at Apple.

But these are exceptions. The norm these days is that the CEO sets the overall strategy, the R&D and innovation teams design the product, and the CFO determines pricing and departmental budgets. No wonder some CMOs feel unloved and are considering a career change
Dominque Turpin – The CMO is dead (August 21, 2013)

Turpin goes on to explain what he believes that there are four causes, that together result in no CMOs.
- Most CMOs aren’t focused on planning and delivering customer value
- Short-termism has meant that organisations have become CFO-focused – a la ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch’s perception of shareholder value, rather than a balanced scorecard approach
- Marketing impact is hard to measure
- Organisations lack a clear understanding of what marketing is
Instead Turpin wanted to create a CCO role – chief customer officer. He saw that this role could sit with the CEO, the CFO or the former CMO. While the CFO as CCO might take the fuzziness out of marketing as Turpin put it, there would be a tension between their natural ‘ neutron Jack Welch’-nature and being customer-centric. What about the CEO? Turpin pointed out that they tend to come from engineering or finance. Both are efficiency focused disciplines with incremental short-term views. Again both are barriers to customer-centricity and would be largely blind to long term effects.

3G Capital

Move forward six years and a CFO-driven approach to running Kraft Heinz by 3G Capital saw a massive destruction of value some $15.4 billion from the $50 billion paid to buy out the business in the first place. The quarterly dividend got cut and shareholders filed lawsuits. The founder of 3G Capital talked extensively about the GE Way driven by Jack Welch as a key influence on their approach.

Scott Galloway

Professor Scott Galloway is a serial entrepreneur who is provocative, interesting and often right.

On CMOs Galloway said

“If you’re the CMO that shows up and says ‘I need more budget so that I can do a brand identity study, can spend money on advertising and get invited to great conferences and hang out with people who are more interesting and better looking than me by spending media dollars that are less and less impactful’ then you’re like the second lieutenant in Vietnam — you’re dead in 18 months or less,”
Scott Galloway

There is a lot to unpack in that statement, but it doesn’t spell the end of the CMO or advertising.

Pax Americana to Pax Australis

In this post Galloway taps into a wider criticism that we’ve seen of American marketers over the past few years. When I was in college American professors and marketing thinkers set the tempo for the profession around the world. As Mark Ritson recently wrote

In the 20^th Century marketing was American. The discipline, the theories, the textbooks, and the approach. To arrive at Wharton in 1994 was to see a future that was not just untenable in the UK, it was one nobody back home was even aware of. Marketing was a decade ahead of anything in the UK. The American marketers I met, academics and practitioners, were so advanced it made my head spin.
Mark Ritson – Effectiveness ignorance has left American marketing lagging behind the rest of the world (Marketing Week)

Text books by the likes of Philip Kotler and David Baker, were perceived wisdom of old white academics. None of this thinking was evidence-based; beyond anecdotal successful case studies.

One of the ‘secrets’ that marketers and CMOs at large FMCG companies like Mars, Proctor & Gamble, Kellogg’s and Unilever had was access to Australian based marketing science research. This was primarily via their long-term sponsorship of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute in Adelaide, Australia.

This body of research in turn shook up wider marketing thinking when Professor Byron Sharp published How Brands Grow. (There were other important works as well such as the UK based publications from the UK’s Institute of Practitioners in Advertising – notably The Long and The Short of it and Effectiveness In Context).

While marketing outside the US was shaken up by the works of Sharp and Binet, the US continued onwards in its marketing the way it always had.

Mark Ritson’s recent column on the state of American marketing caused international furore in the marketing community, despite Marketing Week being a UK-only publication. Ritson complained about American marketers lack of awareness about the importance of marketers effectiveness.

This comment on Mark Ritson’s post sharing the article, while humorous has a lot of truth in it:

Okay, okay. Stop throwing big words like vituperative and effectiveness at us simple-minded Americans. Sure, we handed the keys of marketing over to software engineers at the turn of the century. Maybe that led us to a fair bit of myopic strategery here in the very exceptional United States of America.

Based on the comments I’ve read, when asked to define effectiveness the answer provided is essentially #IYKYK. Why let a golden opportunity to school American marketers on the wise ways of the world beyond our ample shores slip through your fingers?

I don’t care if you call it Marketingwirksamkeit or efficacité du marketing, what matters is more than just numbers on the scoreboard, but how the points were won. Just the other day I was reading a scholarly piece on the effectiveness of meme marketing by the faculty of Griffith University in Queensland. It hit me. My American, effectiveness ignorance has blinded me. I now lag behind the rest of the world.
Michael Simmons, Sendofy

While the US obsessed over marketing technology, the rest of the world was attempting (imperfectly) to more knowledge about marketing efficiency and the marketing technology stack. Having worked in the technology sector, it was the last place I would have gone for marketing lessons. At best, marketing as a function was sales support.

A case in point in this mis-application of focus was the relative performance of this year’s Super Bowl advertisements. I realise that this delve into marketing efficiency has at least made the case for a dramatic change in US-based CMOs. But not so fast, CEOs don’t think that their CMOs and marketing teams are performing that badly.

CMOs: from the dog house to the boathouse

American agency Boathouse have been doing an annual survey of CEO attitudes to marketing and their CMOs. The third edition of this survey was published in January this year.

Some of the highlights of the report include:
- CEOs identified what they want their CMOs and marketing teams to address: driving growth, market share/sales, differentiation, improving brand reputation, and “transforming company narrative.”
- 49 percent of CEOs believe their marketing team is “best in class.”
- 40 percent of CMOs are rated “best in class.”
- One point I found quite interesting was that half of CEOs believe the short tenure many CMOs have “is a sign of success, not failure.”
- CMOs’ perceived trust with C-suite stands at 43 percent and 41 percent with the CEO. This has doubled over the three years that Boathouse has been running this research project
- In a bit of an odd note: CEOs believe CMO loyalty is growing, stating that “in a dramatic shift from 2021, the CEO’s perception of CMO loyalty is growing, [as] 8 in 10 CEOs perceive CMOs would take a bullet for them (up from 3 in 10 in 2021).”
- 76 percent CEOs are “integrating A.I. into their organizations” and 90 percent believe that 90 percent of their CMOs are engaging with AI for the benefit of the company in areas such as “content, analytics (about two-thirds), and customer experience or research (half).”
TL;DR CMOs don’t sound as if they will be disappearing in the next 18 months or so as Galloway believed.

C-suite without powerful CMOs get punished.

You could argue that CEO are the ultimate arbiters of CMO success, failure and tenure. But the reality for public companies is the large investors who can vote the CEO of most companies out of office. The key influencer in this decision process is the equity analysts who sit within, or advise client organisations such as fund managers.

Even if CEOs don’t think that their marketing is important enough to have a CMO, their shareholders will. Equity analysts have indicated that they rate brand strength and marketing as more important than reported profit, or leadership quality.

Given that most of the c-suite can’t speak or do effective marketing, they really need their CMOs. Companies like 3G Capital and Reckitt Benckiser have been punished in public markets for failing at marketing, despite operational and financial excellence. Unilever has been punished for its focus on ESG at the expense of brand building and is even under regulatory investigation.

More information

“You’re Dead In 18 Months Or Less”: Scott Galloway On The Future Of CMOs – B&T

UPS’ Removal Of CMO Role Reveals The Real Problem Facing The C-Suite

Boathouse CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO | Boathouse

Fortune 500 companies are cutting CMO jobs | Fortune

The Unspoken Truth About CMO Churn | AdWeek

Marketers, investing in market research is not superfluous | Marketing Week

Gartner Survey Shows 73% of CMOs Will Fall Back on Low Risk, Low Return Strategies for 2021

9 recent CMO departures that point to the radical transformation of marketing | Marketing Dive

Mark Read: CMOs have become too much like chief communications officers | PR Week

Coca-Cola’s decision to scrap the CMO role for a CGO should begin to pay off anytime soon | Observations In Marketing | The Thinking Marketer
March 21, 2024
Clustomers
Intuit Mailchimp are brave in terms of the the approach that they take to their marketing and Clustomers is a prime example of this.

Clustomers is a great campaign that builds on the frustrations that marketers face about segmentation and personalisation of communications. It is fantastically single-minded in its execution, which is what you want in an effective advert. I could have been seen how the rats nest of people could have come across as creepy rather than surreal and the art direction gets the tone right wonderfully.

But I think that the communications around clustomers to be more nuanced.

The Clustomers campaign

The Clustomers advert itself is the first point of evidence I would use is a brand building, distinctly non-personal campaign. The fact that I am writing about it, speaks a lot to its ‘talkability’. It has carved out its own small part of culture.

It looks to place MailChimp as the marketing technology vendor for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. But like many political campaigns, it promises a simple solution to a challenge that might be more complex.

But this isn’t a campaign that will be only seen by the small business owner, or someone with a slide hustle. The message of personalisation might be received, without the nuanced understanding of marketing that MailChimp has demonstrated in the way that they’ve built the campaign. CFOs don’t have a sufficient understanding of marketing to understand this. For many of them it’s just a set of line items on the wrong side of a spreadsheet.

C-suite misconceptions

As I’ve said, I think that the message Clustomers gives is problematic in a wider context. A good deal of that problem is down to business founders and the C-suite having fundamental misconceptions on what marketing communications purpose is and how it does it.

Advertising isn’t fluffy or all about colouring in. It’s a legitimate and important tool for driving business success. The trouble is that CEOs, CFOs, founders and investors sometimes forget that fact. They’re sceptical about advertising at the best of times and often pull the plug when the economy feels wobbly.
Dr Grace Kite, Marketing Week

Clustomers fuels a perception that personalisation is the key to marketing and by implication performance marketing is the only marketing required. The reality is more complex. The Ehrensberg Bass Institute’s Byron Sharp talks of ‘smart mass marketing’ and brand building as being the key for the majority of marketing activity in conjunction with personalised communication. The Institute of Practioners in Advertising has been doing sterling work trying to educate the C-suite, but technology specialists like Adobe, Google and Meta have been negating a lot of that good work done.

Portumna

Prior to COVID-19, back when I presented a lot more in public I used to present the following slide and when I talked to it I probably reflected some of what MailChimp customers would look for, and was behind Clustomers.

Portumna is the closest market town to where my family originated. My cousin still works part-time on the family farm. Portumna has been a commercial centre for centuries because of geography. It sits at a strategic crossing of the River Shannon. The Shannon divides the east of Ireland from the west of Ireland and has been a shipping way from centuries past to the present day.

A number of the shops including grocery stores, hardware and farm supplies, the sub-post office and the local pharmacy are family businesses. At least four generations of shopkeepers in the town knew my family and did business with them over the centuries.

There were life-long relationships formed. When I go home, I am loyal to the grocery store and pharmacy that my Uncle and grandparents used. The shopkeepers understood the needs of relatives who lived in the area and the kind of farm that they ran. The kind of online marketing that clustomers seeks to bring forward, is the kind of relationships that were in place in Portumna for centuries.

But those relationships were not just about personalised communications. There was a wider cultural context and even ‘brand’.
- The fact that the family in question had built up trust in the community.
- That they were known to be ‘respectable’.
- That they had delivered for my family and people that they new in the past.
- These brands were local oligarchs. They had one or two competitors at best.
So the customer mental models around farm supplies, the butcher or the grocer were very strong and constantly reinforced. And this is the kind of stuff that advertising as part of non-personal communications is best at doing.
October 21, 2023
Synthesis + more things
Synthesis

Synclavier Regen Synthesizer Introduction – Synthtopia – the old New England Digital Synclavier was a floor to ceiling rack full of equipment paired with a monitor mouse, computer keyboard and musical keyboard. Synclavier was an early digital synthesiser and then evolved to create the first digital audio workstation, featuring digital tapeless recording, digital effects, sequencing of instruments, sampling and synthesis. By 1980, the Synclavier 2 was launched. Then you started to increased adoption including Michael Jackson for this Thriller album and across the US film industry for sound effects work.

Producer Michael Hoenig circa 1987

The sampling and synthesis of Synclavier helped define the sound of 1980s record production for a wide range of groups from the era including
- Souxie and the Banshees
- Sting
- The Cars
- Depeche Mode
- Herbie Hancock
- Genesis
- Wally Badarou
At the time there was concern that the digital synthesis and sampling of the Synclavier would put live music out of the business, so many concert halls in the US banned the use of the Synclavier.

Mirage FM: how patten created the first LP made entirely from AI sounds | Dazed – Pattern’s album brings synthesis forward to the present day. A mix of crude pads and textures hint at how machine learning can change synthesis over time. At the moment, record labels are looking to restrict the use of machine learning, which they view as a similar threat to the MP3 format of the early 2000s and digital sampling from the early 1990s. Like earlier technologies, they will eventually make their peace with machine learning based synthesis and use the opportunity to further gouge artists and creators

Beauty

Coty Group Global Chief Brands Officer Stefano Curti on plans to triple its China business through a strategic shake-up

China

An in-depth look at China’s consumer electronics market | Daxue Consulting

Outsourcing of internal security operations

Ethics

The Sustainable Fashion Communication Playbook | UNEP – UN Environment Programme – interesting that this doesn’t look at the quality of clothing: making better longer lasting items

Hong Kong

Three years of National Security Law in Hong Kong: Farewell “special status”? | Merics – the NSL has severely reduced the rule of law in Hong Kong by granting the government powers to circumvent the courts and thereby deny defendants a fair trial. The case of media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai illustrates how this presents a risk to businesses and their property rights. The Hong Kong government froze Lai’s majority of shares in his company Next Media, which led to its liquidation and the end of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. The case is highly political and does not reflect the situation of most businesses, but it does show the power the Hong Kong government can wield over business. – German think tank on the NSL

‘Happy Hong Kong’: free coffee, discounts and 1-minute shopping spree up for grabs in HK$150 million retail promotion to get people smiling | South China Morning Post – but what doe these promotions do to brand? Byron Sharp’s work indicates that price promotions likely damage brand over time

Japan

Facing skills gap, Japan to train teenagers in battery tech – Quartz

RESTAURANT OF MISTAKEN ORDERS

Luxury

Rolex and Patek Philippe Prices Drop Amid High-Interest Rates and More – Robb Report

Marketing

Edelman Cutting Roughly 240 Employees Amid Reorganization | Provoke Media – Edelman is just the canary in the coal mine. Beyond (part of Next Fifteen) is closing down its London office, smaller agencies have been going to the wall and another of my former agency alma mater WE are laying off just under 5 per cent of their headcount. I don’t remember this happening during the 2008 financial crisis. There are likely to be several factors blamed:

Rising interest rates combined with already lean cashflow has driven some agencies to the wall
- Declining economic conditions has resulted in declining marketing budgets
- Some agencies (Edelman being a case in point) bulked up on talent, expecting a fast exit from COVID driven decline
- Brands are getting shaky on the commitment to brand purpose which will hit a lot of below the line agencies particularly hard
- More marketing spend is being spent on innovation with an expectation of cost savings down the line (particularly in production and across B2B marketing)
Brand Salience, Brand Availability and Other Metrics — Purdie Pascoe

Materials

Rheinmetall Presents Mobile Smart Factory for Mobile Production of Spare Parts for Battle Damage Repair – Soldier Systems Daily

Online

Russia’s digital scramble to control the ‘coup’ narrative – Coda Story

Security

“Russian spies are blowing up one by one:” Russian hockey player arrested on spy charges in Poland – War Is Boring

Russian Spies, War Ministers Reliant on Cybercrime in Pariah State | Dark Reading – lacking on the ground options to attack critical infrastructure due to decline in human spy network

Software

AI in chip design: Where does Cadence stand? | DigiTimes

Telecoms

China approved 6 GHz band for cellular services – PingWest

Hackers attack Russian satellite telecom provider, claim affiliation with Wagner Group | CyberScoop

Web of no web

Google reportedly gives up on making AR glasses—for the third time | Ars Technica

Wireless

MikroE welcomes back IrDA with Click board | EETimes – IrDA was first introduced in 1994 for consumer equipment but has since been used in areas such as power systems where a light-based system is safer or RF is problematic. It’s slow with data rates up to 115kbit/s at 1 metre. The reality is usually much slower. I used to use IrDA for transferring business cards of a few KB each which would take 30 seconds or more
July 1, 2023
Bob Hoffman + more things

Bob Hoffman

Bob Hoffman has been pointing out the problems with the way online advertising has been run for years. Bob’s book Adscam is probably one of the best critical examinations of the online media eco-system and the risks inherent in programmatic advertising.

Bob Hoffman got to speak with the European Parliament. Bear with it as audio improves through the recording.

He also spoke at the Digital Marketing is Broken event.

The main thrust of his argument about marketing effectiveness is supported by the works of Peter Field, Les Binet and Byron Sharp.

Economics

Interesting talk on the benefits and limitations of economic sanctions with a particular focus on Iran and Russia.

Ireland

I never realised that Sony had a factory in Ireland as early as 1960; Sony globalised production of transistor radios relatively early on in their production life. Compare this to the later US technology businesses setting up shop in Ireland over the next couple of decades. This also might go someway to explain why Sony was such a respected brand in Ireland and shows how visionary and experimental the Sony management were. These comments on Irish workers in 1963 versus their Japanese counterparts are interesting. The assembly workers don’t seem to realise the intrinsic value of (the Sony Japan-made) transistors that go into the products – this might be down to education as this was likely a soldering and screwing products together assembly line.

Suzuki-san points out what he thinks are flaws with Irish workers whilst recognising that this partly down to the different social contract between employee and business. Part of the problem was that Irish workers had the opportunity of going abroad without any government restriction compared to Japan. Suzuki-san didn’t believe that Irish workers are bad workers, but rather they require more investment to encourage them to become good workers.

Interesting perspective on the Windsor Framework from an Irish and EU perspective. Tony Connelly did one of the best podcast series on the Brexit process for RTÉ

Materials

I am a big fan of the Rose Anvil account for the way they take a deep dive into materials and shoe construction. Here’s a great example of their work which shows the design principle of what you leave out is as important as what you leave in a product.

Retailing

Olivia Moore on Temu e-commerce app. Her idea of ‘invisible AI’ is actually more prevalent than Ms Moore thinks, otherwise great conversation to listen in on.

Connie Chan does a short talk on the future of e-commerce.

March 31, 2023

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