Search results for: “buzz marketing”

Things that caught my eye this week

House music producer Roy Davis Jr put together an amazing mix for Phonica Records and I have been vibing off it for most of the week.

Roy Davis Jr for Phonica Records

An old, but good music video put together by my long time colleague Haruka. It’s a mix of found footage and painting done on 16mm film.

Gates to the city by Haruka Ikezawa

I’m not so sure if it was the best portable stereo; but the JVC / Victor RC-M90 was an archetypal boombox of the 1980s beloved by hip hop fans and gadget lovers. Techmoan does a good tour of the device. What’s interesting is how quality seems to have reached a peak in the late 1970s, early 1980s in hi-fi equipment. Quality seems to have declined as more overseas manufacturing was undertaken by the Japanese brands.

If you are buying a major Japanese brand like Sony etc; try to buy a ‘Made in Japan’ product is still a great rule of thumb. More gadget related posts here.

Leo Burnett did a great advert for McDonalds. It tells the story of story of a single mum trying to get her son into the Christmas spirit. However, she faces an unresponsive child; until his inner child wins out. The Drum did a walk through of the ad with the creative team who worked on it at Leo Burnett here.

Leo Burnett for McDonalds UK

Finally, the IPA did a three hour webinar A New Way to Track Consumer Demand, that is now available online.

Finally Sony launched the PlayStation 5 in the UK this week. As I write this, there is a strong secondary market at three times the original retail price of the consoles. They’re the hot item for Christmas.

This was supported by buzz marketing with a takeover of London Underground signs at Oxford Circus station. The square logo (all the shapes are from the PlayStation controller) contrasts with the closed Microsoft store behind it.

Social media spread images of the signs and it was all very nice. I think part of its success was the counterintuitive aspect of a stunt in a high footfall area in central London – during the COVID19 lockdown, when other brand marketers are spending their budgets online…

https://flic.kr/p/2k8BWxw
London Underground sign photo by Ian Wood

Bonus content: Clifford Stott is an expert in policing. He walked away from a Hong Kong government review into the 2019 protests. He goes into failings of the review and everything that went on in this report: Patterns of ‘Disorder’ During the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong: Policing, Social Identity, Intergroup Dynamics, and Radicalization by Clifford Stott, Lawrence Ho, Matt Radburn, Ying Tung Chan, Arabella Kyprianides, Patricio Saavedra Morales.

He talks about his findings with the Hong Kong Free Press.

November 21, 2020
The influence post
Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.

Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.

I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year. Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.

This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.

This time last year I noted:

Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?

Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.

Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit

A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers

The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?
- Are they bots?
- Are they stolen accounts?
- Are the user accounts active any more?
- Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.
The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?
- Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money
The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?
- Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
- Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
Trends in influence

I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.

Global interest in influencers have been accelerating

There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing

There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work

All of which supports the following hypotheses:
- it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
- A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
- A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
- Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
What would influence look like?

Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.

If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.

Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.

How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?

Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.

Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format

That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.
- Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
- Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
- Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production
All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?

Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.

Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:

Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.

This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).

It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:
- Consumer marketing
- Mature product sectors
- Mature brands
You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.

Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
- There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
- Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
- You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
- You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
- You can lock out rivals out of relationships
More information

Mark Ritson: How ‘influencers’ made my arse a work of art | Marketing Week
Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks – Stanford University and Facebook Data Science
PLOS ONE: Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks by Lorenzo Coviello,Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer,Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
Senior Execs Not Convinced About Social’s Worth | Marketing Charts
Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy – Cha et al (2010) – (PDF)
Visualizing Media Bias through Twitter. Jisun An. University of Cambridge. Meeyoung Cha. KAIST. Krishna P. Gummadi. MPI-SWS et al – (PDF)
Mr. Bags x Longchamp: How to Make 5 Million RMB in Just Two Hours | Jing Daily
It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers
June 25, 2018
Cannes and VidCon outtakes
Cannes and VidCon – I had the chance to read around a lot of the stuff around the events and listened to Ogilvy’s webinar. Here were the key things that struck me.

There is blind faith amongst brand about the benefits of influencers and social. I find this particularly interesting because it represents a number of challenges to the status quo:
- This first struck me when I saw Heather Mitchell on a panel at the In2 Innovation Summit in May. Mitchell works in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well
- The default ethos for most brand marketers is Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. Most consumer brands are in mature categories, engagement is unimportant; being top of mind (reach and repetition) is what matters
- Brands were looking to directly engage with influencers at VidCon with trade stands and giveaways at the expo. This was brands like Dove. Again, I’d wonder about the targeting and ROI
Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

Publicis and Marcel. Well it certainly got them noticed. There has been obligatory trolling (some of which was very funny). I tried to make a sombre look at it here: Thinking About Marcel (its about a nine minute read) – TL;DR version – its a huge challenge that Publicis has set itself. One interesting aspect to point out is the differing view point between WPP and Publicis. WPP has spent a lot of time, effort and money into building a complete advertising technology stack including advanced programmatic platforms and analytics.

WPP hoped that this would provide them with an unassailable competitive advantage. The challenge is that the bulk of growth in online spend is going to Facebook and Google – who also happen to have substantive advertising technology stacks.

I can’t help but wonder if this shaping is Publicis’ top line thinking? Scott Galloway posted a very sombre chart about this. If Google and Facebook hit their combined revenue targets this year, it will have a dramatic effect on the number of people employed in the major advertising groups.

To put Galloway’s numbers into context, the projected number of jobs lost in the advertising industry this year would be roughly the equivalent of every man and woman around the world currently employed at vehicle maker Nissan. And that’s just 2017.

If you paid attention to the Marcel concept film you would have noticed that the client service director is partly displaced when a client uses Marcel to directly reach out to Publicis experts.

If Marcel, just makes information easier to access internally; it could save the equivalent time equating to almost 1,600 employees (out of Publicis’s current 80,000 around the world).

People equate to billings as these marketing conglomerates are basically body shops in the way they operate. So it will adversely affect the value of the major marketing groups.

If that isn’t grim enough, Galloway doesn’t even bother to take into account the Chinese ecosystems which is digitising at a faster rate than the West. China also has a longer history of platforms and clients being directly connected – cutting out the media agency.

These changes in the advertising eco-system has huge implications about the erosion in brand equity over time. Amazon’s move to surpass other retailers also is about the erosion of brand power. Combine this with the increasing ubiquity of Prime and all brands start to look the same as private labels.

Thankfully the disciples of Byron Sharp still realise that there is power (and lower CPMs) in using television as a mass-advertising medium which is why FMCG product still spend 90% of their budget offline.

The best thing IPG, WPP, Omnicom and Publicis could do right now is spend a lot of money ensuring that every marketing and MBA student have copies of Mr Sharp’s books. If they haven’t been translated into Chinese, that might be an idea as well.

SnapChat is in its difficult ‘second album’ phase. Back when music came on physical media and record labels invested in developing artists as a longer term proposition than a reality TV series there was the ‘second album’ phase. Artists often struggled to bottle the lightning that gave them a successful first album. They usually had the money and resources to throw at it, but it was hard to be a consistent performer.

For example Bruce Springsteen only really became successful in the U.S. with his third album Born To Run – that level of record label support wouldn’t happen now.

On one level SnapChat has matured. It had a big presence at Cannes and its Snap glasses displaced VR technology as the worn product. It has been under assault. Major content providers like the BBC are choosing Instagram’s stories over SnapChat’s offerings. Even Twitter is getting back in the picture. Ogilvy’s team at VidCon talked about how Twitter had been successfully engaging with influencers and offering them support and attractive content monetisation offers.

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July 6, 2017
Yahoo’s downfall
I’ve seen a lot written about Yahoo’s downfall.

Most of it lacks insight. And at the most basic level lacks precision. Yahoo is an employee who works at Yahoo! or Y! (the Y-bang). It was the best culture I ever worked in; and the most dysfunctional company that I ever worked for. I got to work with amazing people at a company that managed to fumble the ball on opportunity after opportunity. Most analysis you see comes from outsiders who lack insight.

So when I came across this question on Quora and decided to post my answer. I’ve shared my answer on this blog with additional data points and information on ‘Yahoo’s downfall’.

This is a big question. In the answers that it will receive you are likely to see:
- Difference of opinions about the reasons of the decline
- Differences of opinion about when the decline actually set in. Which begs the question was the downfall that drastic?
Before we get into the why, lets think about the nature of businesses.

Public listed companies generally don’t last forever

The AEI said that 88 per cent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1954 are gone. Yahoo! is between 21 and 22 years old depending which way you count its age.

Yahoo! has outlasted many of its peers:
- Excite – merged with @Home Network in 1999. It went bankrupt in October 2001. It was sold in December 2001. By 2007, the business was broken up by territory.
- Lycos – was sold three times, each time for a fraction of the purchase price
- Hotbot – bought by Lycos
- AltaVista – minority stake sold to CMGI in 1999. Bought by Overture in February 2003. Yahoo! acquired Overture in July 2003
Only MSN remains of the original brands that it competed against. If MSN wasn’t a Microsoft business, its survival would be questionable. Microsoft’s online services lost money from 2006 through 2010. By comparison, Yahoo! has kept making a profit – despite its issues.

Macro-effects

The technology sector has become a hunting ground for active investors. Back in the 1980s, American publicly listed brands were attacked by investors:
- RJ Nabisco – leveraged buyout by KKR
- Gulf Oil & Unocal – T. Boone Pickens had failed bids for both oil companies but made a large profit on his holdings
- TWA – leveraged buyout by Carl Icahn. Icahn’s business practices were responsible for its bankruptcy in 1992 and 1995
- Revlon – acquired in a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman, much of the business was broken up to pay for the deal
In the 1990s, factors changed:
- Credit lines for deals dried up as some leveraged buyouts proved to be bad for investors
- Businesses developed more effective defences including poison pills, golden parachutes and greater debt
- Overall value of the stock market increased. This reduced the amount of opportunities to get companies on the cheap
Moving forward 20 years, the technology sector became in a similar place

Historic technology businesses have moved from being high growth to value businesses. This changed the nature of investors interest in them.
- Microsoft gave a seat on its board to an activist shareholder ValueAct Capital
- Apple started paying dividends and raising the debt on its balance sheet to fend off Carl Icahn
Google’s unique two-tier shareholding structure has proved to be an effective defence so far.

A business like Yahoo! looks like a classic corporate raid target as its value is less than the sum of its parts. It has a regular cashflow that could service a lot more debt at current interest rates. It has assets that can be quickly sold.

Capital has become much cheaper. This is partly a result of low interest rates set to keep the economy out of trouble in 2008. But there is also a lot of foreign capital and pension fund money looking for a home.

Missed opportunities

Given that we have the perfect vision of hindsight, Yahoo! missed key opportunities. Here are some of them.

Yahoo! failed to buy Google

Yes, Yahoo! did fail to buy Google. And their competitors failed to buy Google as well. Excite rejected the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000 in a deal arranged by Vinod Khosla. By comparison Terry Semel, then CEO of Yahoo! failed to buy Google for $5 billion. At the time Yahoo!’s entire market value was roughly $5 billion.

Yahoo! failed to buy DoubleClick

While Yahoo! was playing catch-up with Google on search. Google outbid the online industry to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. DoubleClick provided advertisers with more opportunities to place banner ads than Yahoo! did.

Yahoo! failed to buy Facebook

Terry Semel offered $1 billion for Facebook in 2006. Semel wouldn’t go to $1.1 billion Facebook’s board wanted.

Yahoo! failed to sell to Microsoft

I don’t think that the Microsoft deal was a serious offer. There are reasons to be suspicious:
- Microsoft couldn’t make its own online business profitable at the time. The deal was unpopular with shareholders
- Yahoo!’s contribution to the open source community would have been an antitrust issue
- It would have to get through approval by Japanese competition authorities
- It would likely have to get through Chinese antitrust authorities
Yahoo! didn’t communicate these risk factors to shareholders. Which then left the door open for the Microsoft-funded Carl Icahn coup later on.

Yahoo!’s board has failed the company

I think that there is a stronger argument for this when you look at their selection of CEOs over the years
- Tim Koogle – led Yahoo! on the upcycle of the dot.com boom. He resigned and replaced by Terry Semel during the bust that followed.
- Terry Semel – was a senior media industry executive who bought the business out of the bust. He never got the product and never used email. He never managed to build a media company despite his Hollywood heritage.
- Jerry Yang – history will look with more favour on Jerry Yang in the future. He did the Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba deals which are the most interesting parts of Yahoo! today. As a CEO, his time was consumed by Microsoft’s hostile bid
- Carol Bartz – Bartz was a Microsoft approved appointee. Her deal on Facebook Connect saw the social network build its business on the back of Yahoo!’s user database. Bartz does the Microsoft search deal badly. She also launched mobile apps that were bad. The one thing she needs respect for is her approach to marketing. Bartz realised that she needed to promote the entire Yahoo! brand. Although there was a buzz marketing team in the US, most marketing was based around products. Unfortunately the execution of the brand campaign was poor. This was partly because it was led from the US with little engagement of regional and national marketing teams.
- Scott Thompson – stayed for five months. Allegations were made about his education, better due diligence on his recruitment required.
- Ross Levinsohn – Ross served as interim CEO after Thompson left. It is hard to know what CEO he would have made. But his successor seems to have borrowed his strategy.
- Marissa Mayer – Despite the goodwill Mayer had going into the job she hasn’t managed to change Yahoo!’s current business. That the company’s strategy is being driven by activist shareholders says a lot.
Problems in execution

Yahoo! had its fortune hitched to brand display advertising. Growth has dropped in this for the past ten years. Yahoo!’s declining advertisng revenues started in Q2 of 2006. Part of the problem was that Yahoo! had been too successful to begin with. Yahoo! sold its display advertising for way more than it was worth.

Yahoo! failed to monetise search as well as Google. And then handed its search business over to Microsoft, who failed to do as good as job as Yahoo! managed on its own.

Yahoo! failed to execute in mobile, despite some smart early efforts. Photo community Flickr was the default photo app on Nokia’s N73 blockbuster smartphone. The N73 launched at the end of April 2006. It was was one of the last things I worked on before leaving. Given that headstart Flickr could have been Instagram. Instead its a more specialist community of ‘proper’ photography enthusiasts. Yahoo! Messenger and Mail both worked on Nokia handsets from the mid-2000s. Yahoo! Go was an app which provided access to services including:
- Flickr
- Address book
- Calendar
- Email
- Maps
- Search
- Content: news, weather, finance, sports, entertainment
It could have provided the same function that Android provides for Google, but Yahoo! considered as ‘beta software’ right up to it’s demise in January 2010. Yahoo! has been providing Apple with weather information and stock data for the iPhone. Yet it hasn’t managed to build a successful iPhone app.

One way of illustrating the decline of Yahoo! in mobile is to look at the user numbers of Yahoo! mail, which seems to have peaked around September 2011.

Hotmail shows a linear increase over time, likely due to organisation changes as it has moved to the cloud and Gmail takes off, presumably on the back of Android – though iOS users also have Gmail accounts.

Yahoo!’s acquisition process was broken. Ever since Yahoo! wasted 1 billion dollars buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com the business slowed down. Broadcast.com was a scare on the collective memory. Capital decisions took longer, acqusitions took longer. The cheque book was harder to open. Under Marissa Mayer, it was finally let loose, but the purchases seem to have made little difference.

Yahoo! failed to become a media company. Back when I was at Yahoo! we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone – a sort of proto Vice News in 2005. Despite Semel’s Hollywood background, he and following CEOs never made it work. Despite the fact Yahoo! had joint ventures with TV networks in Australia and Canada. When Marissa Mayer finally managed to get talent in the door, audiences had moved to other sites:
- Gawker Media
- Buzzfeed
- Daily Beast
- Aol’s blog network
- Huffington Post
Yahoo’s downfall in social is spectacular. Yahoo! owned pioneer social brands, any of which could have been the Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp:
- Yahoo! Chat – chatrooms were the Facebook Groups of yesteryear. Yahoo! was doing social before it was a thing
- Delicious – neglect, internal politics and corporate interference meant that Yahoo! never capitalised on Delicious. Despite its tribulations there are some people who still use it, though I am not sure why
- Flickr – corporate interference and neglect destroyed the potential growth of photo sharing site Flickr. The site is kept going as a photographic enthusiasts community. It could have been Instagram. Thankfully, Yahoo! only spent $30 million on it
- Yahoo! Messenger – Yahoo!’s Messenger had a poor mobile client, but could have been WhatsApp. Facebook dominates the sector along with Tencents WeChat, NHN’s LINE and Daum Kakao’s KakaoTalk
- Tumblr – Yahoo! was forced to writedown the value of Tumblr to nothing. The company failed to monetise the popular blogging and curation platform. Tumblr is one of Yahoo!’s few products that attracts a millennial audience
Yahoo! products had a poor experience. I launched over 14 products at Yahoo! in just over a year. I only ever used 2 of them on a regular ongoing basis – Delicious and Flickr. Other products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! MyWeb 2 – fell into three categories:
- Dogs to use – particularly in the set-up part of the process
- Not particularly useful – Yahoo! Answers, great idea in prinicple but poor cultural fit. That poor fit meant that it filled up with noise, Yahoo! Answers isn’t as useful as Quora
- Strangled soon after birth – so it became frustrating to commit your time to them as a user
Politics paid a part in this process. The Communications group (responsible for Messenger and Mail) had a lot of duplicate products. Yahoo! Photos was a bad version of Flickr. For storing your bookmarks there was:
- Yahoo! Bookmarks
- Yahoo! MyWeb
- Yahoo! MyWeb 2
- Delicious
This all bogs management down and sucks away resources. There were also so many projects that never saw the light, due to constant changes in priority. More Yahoo!-related posts here. What do you think brought about Yahoo’s downfall?

More information
Fortune 500 firms in 1955 vs. 2014; 88% are gone, and we’re all better off because of that dynamic ‘creative destruction’ | AEI Ideas
Microsoft’s Bing/MSN Results Truly Horrifying — Loss Rate Balloons To ~$3 Billion A Year | Business Insider
Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price | Minyanville
A Microsoft First: Activist ValueAct Gets a Board Seat – WSJ
How Yahoo! Blew It | Wired
Yahoo! Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today’s Valuation | Business Insider
Sorry Microsoft, Yahoo — Google Just Got Bigger | Ad Age
April 26, 2016
Naspers + other news

Naspers

Red-Hot Web in China Richly Rewards Foreign Investors (David Barboza/New York Times) – great to see that Naspers were getting a bit of respect. Naspers is a South African media company that moved into online retail and venture capital investing. Naspers were fortunate to buy into Tencent in 2001 and become their largest shareholder. Naspers then went on to invest in mail.ru and a number of Indian online startups. Naspers also is Africa’s largest subscription TV provider. Naspers also has a share in Ctrip – China’s answer to Expedia.

Business

Is it really a tech bubble, or is it something else? — GigaOM – narcissism and a tech bubble

Profits Way Up at China’s Tencent As WeChat Goes Global – WeChat now up to 396 million active users

No matter what the boss says about flextime, get to work early – Quartz – morning bias

Consumer behaviour

Phablet Use Distinct From Smartphones, Tablets Re/code – interesting research and bad news for media companies hoping that phablets will be a gateway for streaming and slide loaded content

The new opium of a stressed people | FT – rise of buddhism amongst China’s middle classes

How is Renren Doing in China Social Media Now? | ChinaInternetWatch – about 51 million monthly unique users – no social versus gaming breakdown on this though. Partly down to the fact RenRen is a specific lifetime thing. You are on there during high school

Design

The History Of Dive Watches | aBlogtoWatch – interesting evolution of design

Finance

WePay Blames “The Rules” For Withholding Medical Funds from Sex Worker | Valleywag – still pretty disgusting given that this was for emergency medical services. There are rules and there is knowing when to lift them

America has a new subprime problem: cars | Quartz – not really surprising when one thinks about how the US manufacturers have been propping up car sales with low interest loans before, during and since the financial crisis

FMCG

Digital Intelligence :: Unilever supports start-ups with global digital platform – interesting move, reminds me what PepsiCo and Kraft attempted to do over the past few years

Hong Kong

Li Ka-shing’s rumoured plan to reduce investments ‘could damage Hong Kong’ | South China Morning Post – it makes sense for Mr Li to diversify, Hong Kong is optimally priced; there are bargains to be had elsewhere

20 fantastically helpful IFTTT recipes – the title exaggerates

Ideas

Shanzhai: China’s Collaborative Electronics Design Ecosystem | The Atlantic – interesting how the rise of the maker movement has changed Shanzhai meme from quirky shadowy tech pirates to collaborative design in western media

Korea

How Naver Hurts Companies’ Productivity | WSJ – surprising critique of Naver. Korean consumers wouldn’t use it if Google offered a better search function in Hangul

Legal

That Oracle-Google Appeal | ongoing – interesting analysis by Tim Bray, a prominent contributor to the OSS movement and former Googler

Amazon Patented Taking Pictures In Front of a White Background | Geekosystem – they’ve just patented pack shot photography?

Luxury

Rich pay, rich clients, but luxury retail jobs go begging | South China Morning Post – mainland clients are considered difficult

The Launch and Fall of Burberry’s Tmall Flagship Store | ChinaInternetWatch – really interesting analysis of Burberry’s attempt on TMall

Economist: China Luxury Slowdown ‘Short Blip’ In Big Picture | Jing Daily – expectations that the slowdown will see mass affluence purchases in the future

Marketing

PwC: Marketers not moving fast enough to mobile | Marketing Interactive – While there is plenty of money in social media marketing in mainland China, there’s still not enough attention to the fact that accessing ads and special deals from mobile is just different

Ignore the Silicon Valley Twilight Zone | Marketing Forward – I think that this is the rabbit hole WPP is a risk of going down

REPORT: Engagement Optimization ‘Isn’t The Best Bet’ For Facebook Advertisers – Facebook is a display advertising platform rather than an engagement platform

Geo-Target the Right Audience For Your Tweets With Sprout Social | Sprout Social – this could change the way brands think about Twitter, moving to a global page model, rather like Facebook

Dixons and Carphone Warehouse: A Merger Driven by Interconnectivity | Euromonitor International – personally I think Carphone Warehouse is attaching itself to a turkey. Regardless of any Internet of Things synergies there maybe, the customer service culture of Carphone Warehouse is alien to Dixons. Richer Sounds and Empire Direct may have made more sense?

OnePlus Smash the Past Winner Receives Empty Box, Uploads Unboxing to YouTube | Droid Life – it sounds like buzz marketing gone horribly wrong

9 Successful Ways to Recruit Market Research Participants | PARC blog – good advice

The Trouble With App Install Ads | Ad Exchanger – expensive despite driving growth for Facebook

Media

BBC News will post live #indianelection results via @WhatsApp – 1st serious wide scale ‘commercial’ comms use?

Daring Fireball: ‘For Me, the Movies Are Like a Machine That Generates Empathy’ – I really like this phrase, great films like Blade Runner for me were more than the moving image or ‘air-conditioned darkness’ as Sir Run Run Shaw put it

TV Show Renewals Could Hinge On Social Engagement – focus on quality of viewership with social engagement as a proxy measure

“24″ Win Fails To Boost Youku Tudou | Young’s China Business – probably down to government regulation of media sector

The audience solves a mystery in this real-time interactive TV show powered by a South Korean startup – it reminds me a lot of Majestic

Netflix’s Neil Hunt Says Personalized Recommendations Will Replace The Navigation Grid | TechCrunch – not so sure how I feel about this. It could be reductive since it relies on past behaviour and loses what little serendipity one gets through browsing and discovery to broaden taste and usage

Online

China’s Top Mobile Social Apps by Time Usage | China Internet Watch – why Weibo is overrated and WeChat is so powerful

Meet the People Behind the Wayback Machine, One of Our Favorite Things About the Internet – “The average life of a web page is about 100 days before it’s either changed or deleted,” says Kahle. “Even if it’s supported by big companies: Google Video came down, Yahoo Video came down, Apple went and wiped out all the pages in Mobile Me.” Interesting dichotomy between permanence in terms of effect on reputation versus transient nature of pages

The Wayback Machine Passes 400 Billion Indexed Webpages | TNW – impressive scale but this misses out on the explosion of content created by social network platforms as walled gardens, and that may not be a bad thing

Retailing

Mapping Our Interiors – NYTimes.com – interesting business model by IndoorAtlas, if you are in retail, you should be embracing this

Security

New feature helps Facebook grow ears | FT – integrates with TV (and presumably radio ads?) but you have to wonder about the privacy aspects of this

NSA spying is causing Americans to self-censor their Internet activity | VentureBeat – if you substituted PSB for NSA and Chinese for Americans this could be any other article about China in the western media

Alibaba’s Cloud Business Expands With Hong Kong Data Center | Data Center Knowledge – gradual internationalisation

Chinese Cyber Attacks Trigger US MIDLIFE Crisis | VICE News – interesting analysis the recent U.S. action against China

Taiwan

Taiwan makers struggling to automate equipment | DigiTimes – current automation offerings don’t suit their businesses so the likes of Foxconn et al are developing and manufacturing automation inhouse

Technology

I, Cringely Apple’s iPad Problem – they last too long, more like a PC than like a mobile phone

Users folder vanished after OS X 10.9.3 update? Here’s a fix • The Register – nifty help out

China Bans Use of Microsoft’s Windows 8 on Government Computers | Re/code – if the Chinese government don’t trust it, should consumers?

Chinese Tech Startups are Building Steaming Projectors to Beat Smart TVs TechNode – makes sense when one things about home space

“Tech companies are being left to make all the decisions” | Dezeen – interesting perspective on wearables

Sichuan professor makes biocoal out of leftovers | WantChinaTimes – interesting, particularly as food waste recycling is a bugbear in waste disposal. How can the collection be done efficiently though?

American TV dramas attract high-end ads in China | WantChinaTimes – not terribly surprising as they reach an English speaking, often foreign educated technocratic middle class

Web of no web

Mapping The Hidden Cost Of Mobile Apps | MobileGroove – will be reviewing my use of some of the apps mentioned

Wireless

Bounden on Android delayed: we need your help – Game Oven – rather reminds me of PCs and driver problems, were Sound Blaster compatibility meant that you might be able to get audio on a game

So where are we going in Mobile? | DigitalEvangelist – interesting piece by Ian Wood. The most depressing thing I find out about this is the wasted R&D when so much hard innovation is going begging

Communities Dominate Brands: Lets Do 2014 Numbers for the Mobile Industry: Now we are at 100% Mobile Subscription Penetration Rate Per Capita Globally – that headline number now isn’t as meaningful as it could be. I personally have two numbers on one smartphone. 3UK via the SIM and China Mobile Hong Kong via Jego. It also conceals the continuing gulf between established markets, the developing world and the astonishing acceleration of APAC markets

Huawei Ascend P7 Review | BGR – interesting review of Huawei Ascend P7, interesting that they still have sluggishness issues and the skinning that makes it look like a shanzhai version of iOS7. You would have to pry my iPhone from my cold dead hand though

May 25, 2014

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