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  • Coinbase Super Bowl ad

    Coinbase advertises during Super Bowl

    On Monday afternoon, the buzz amongst my colleagues in New York was the Super Bowl from the night before. In particular the advertising and one advert by Coinbase sparked more discussions than others. The advert was divisive. Some people that there was something wrong with their smart TV which had triggered a dodgy screensaver. One person even first thought that the QRcode would take them through to a site that might explain whatever ransomware had hijacked their TV.

    They scanned the QRcode but it didn’t work properly. The reasons for it not working were twofold:

    • The contrast in the QRcode background and foreground wasn’t large enough for certain colours and so wouldn’t scan
    • The coinbase website fell over. This would be spun as unprecedented demand, but the reality was poor execution

    A game console style ROM screen revealed at the end that it was Coinbase. The management would likely pass the whole car crash off as growth hacking.

    Growth hacking

    Growth hacking as a term was attributed to a blog post by Sean Ellis back in 2010. But as a concept it goes back much further. A classic example of growth hacking could be considered to be FMCG staple of ‘buy one, get one free’ or BOGOF. The master of the growth hack was David Wallerstein came up with the idea of supersizing popcorn servings in the 1960s. Wallerstein came up with a behavioural change experiment as business idea based on the insight of that people might want to buy and eat more popcorn, but were simply ashamed of buying two bags at the cinema. Wallerstein was successful in his experiment. Wallerstein was appointed by Ray Kroc to the board of McDonalds in 1968 and then rolled out larger servings in McDonalds restaurants, if you’ve ever been asked if you want a ‘large meal’ with your burger Wallerstein was responsible. This created a whole range of products in restaurants and supermarkets called expandables, from large meals to multi-packs of products.

    A more recent example would be the signature on hotmail.com emails that encouraged whoever received them to get their own email address at hotmail.com. This was effective back when most people had a work or college email address and wanted a home account for personal communications like finding a new job. Gmail took a slightly different approach with an invite scheme that saw early adopters clamouring like they were trying to get in the door of Studio 54 on a Saturday night.

    The original idea of growth hacking is to try a small marketing tactic and refine it based on the feedback that you get. In reality that gets translated into poor thought out showy tactics focused on the short term. The reason for this is that test and learn is done over a short time period and doesn’t incorporate marketing science. The Coinbase advert was a classic example of this.

    Buzz marketing

    Growth hacking is influenced by a number of things. One of which was the concept of ‘scrappiness’ in start-up marketing.

    Startup scrappiness

    During the original dot com boom new online businesses wasted a fantastic amount of money on ineffective advertising. The most iconic example of this would be the pets.com sock pocket advert that featured in the 2000 version of the Super Bowl.

    Car with Yahoos
    Courtesy of Yahoo! Inc. Co founder David Filo is hanging from the rear of the car.

    You saw some businesses like Yahoo! try to do brand building advertising in a more cost effective way. This was known internally at Yahoo! as buzz marketing and in the US, it had its own team.

    Examples of buzz marketing included wrapping employees cars that had been volunteered in the Yahoo! brand. This was listed in the employee handbook as a free ‘perk’ of working at Yahoo!. There were some conditions like you had to keep the wrap on for year and a good behaviour clause.

    The world's first (only?) purple Zamboni

    There were also some sponsorships like the ice machine at the San Jose Sharks stadium and some high traffic billboards. Yahoo! used to have a billboard alongside the 101 freeway going into San Francisco and another in Time Square, New York.

    Our San Francisco billboard

    While the lesson of ‘go for business models that make financial sense’ seems to have been lost as we left the dot.com era further behind. The idea of ‘scrappiness’ stuck. It fitted with the wider concept of ‘struggle culture’ in entrepreneurship.

    In technology, marketing = sales

    On one level, the problem isn’t Coinbase but the technology sector. The truth is that for the most part technology companies don’t do good marketing. My hypotheses around the reasons for this are:

    • Technologists aren’t marketers. For the original technology firms, the products found their own market. Over time a salesforce was introduced and for complex products there might be pre-sales and post sales consultancy. They don’t really know much about marketing science. The sales funnel is the one ‘marketing model’ that managed to make it into Microsoft® PowerPoint® says a lot about the nature of this understanding.
    • To a technologist, every problem looks like a technology challenge. So the answer for great marketing is either in kludges aka hacks, like the Coinbase advert, or algorithmic in nature. And those algorithms are usually based on a poor understanding of marketing featured in the point above
    • Technologists think short term. Brands are transitory if you are looking to be bought out, or are built ‘organically’ in the hands of the victors (Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Tencent or Alibaba). So building a brand is an alien concept. Why build a brand in a world when you believe in disrupt, or be disrupted? Contrast that with the FMCG world where brands have considerably longer lives. The Nestlé Kit Kat chocolate bar is 86 years old at the time of writing. Procter & Gamble’s Bold washing powder (laundry detergent) is a spritely 57 years old. Baileys Irish Cream liqueur is 48 years old, as is the Mobil 1 range of synthetic engine oils, oil filters, chassis grease, transmission fluids, and gear lubricants. If we think of technology brands with that kind of longevity its likely to be the incumbent telecoms companies, Fujitsu, Hitach and IBM. At the younger end would be the likes of Verbatim, AMD, Intel, Oracle, Western Digital, Microsoft, Apple, Acer and Atari.
    • Disrupt or be disrupted creates delusion. If you believe in the disrupt or be disrupted manifest destiny of technology you probably believe that your ability to market is better than established brands that are actually marketing organisations

    I would guess that Coinbase marketers would tick at least some of these hypotheses. It probably doesn’t help that organisations who should know better are starting to buy into this ‘disrupt or be disrupted’ model.

    Cost of reach

    So, if you’re a technology company like Coinbase, who believes in disruption and ‘knows’ how to market better than marketers? The simple answer is that while digital has managed to get marketers to use its platforms, it has failed to offer the most competitive cost per reach. To achieve the same goals Coinbase would have had to spend an order of magnitude more on YouTube than TV to reach an equivalent audience.

    Brand building

    Finally the reason why the advert contrasted so sharply with the other content that ran during the Super Bowl was because everyone else focused on brand building rather than on brand activation. The reason why they are going for brand building is that the work will keep paying dividends for years. This is something that digital transformation doesn’t reflect well through its algorithms. The Coinbase approach was the equivalent of a TV ad that said click here.

    More information

    Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup | Startup Marketing (July 26, 2010)

  • Esprit + more news

    Esprit

    The rise and fall of Esprit, SF’s coolest clothing brand – Esprit appealed to the youth with a message of lefty, post-racial harmony. Wild prints, bright colors and baggy silhouettes reigned. Their tote bags and T-shirts hung from all the coolest shoulders, adorning fashion plates with the legendary Esprit logo. With the logo’s omnipresence at the time, it may as well have been Supreme for the teens of the late ’80s and early ’90s. – the article skips over some of the awful things that Esprit did to its Chinese emigrant workers in San Francisco.

    esprit
    Esprit Store in Gentings Casino, Malaysia by Ryan Lackey

    The success of Esprit was down to its ‘Europeaness’. It had a Benetton kind of vibe, because they shared the same advertising creative and a similar approach to interior retail space design and bright colours. Esprit eventually listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange but never got its mojo back. The clean logo was designed by John Casado, who had worked for Apple on the Macintosh icons and New Line Cinema

    China

    Chinese documentary prompts rare criticism of Xi’s anti-corruption campaign | Financial Times – Analysts said the negative reaction to Zero Tolerance suggests the decade-long campaign has not sealed public confidence in the party’s ability to investigate itself for graft, which remains widespread….“Getting caught doesn’t mean you are more corrupt than others,” said a former official at the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the highest government agency responsible for investigation and prosecution of criminal cases. “It just means you have bad luck.” – such a good read and reaffirms much of what I saw in China, prior to and during the early Xi premiership. The way it falls is arbitrary in nature and usually linked to power struggles

    Economics

    China’s ‘Common Prosperity’ to Squeeze Cash-Strapped Local Governments – WSJ – pledges on education, healthcare and public housing is expected to be funded by local governments whose main source of revenue is selling land to property developers, so you can imagine that’s going to work out well….. NOT

    Ethics

    For Olympic Sponsors, ‘China Is an Exception’ – The New York Times – At the bottom of the slope where snowboarders will compete in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, an electronic sign cycles through ads for companies like Samsung and Audi. Coca-Cola’s cans are adorned with Olympic rings. Procter & Gamble has opened a beauty salon in the Olympic Village. Visa is the event’s official credit card. President Biden and a handful of other Western leaders may have declared a “diplomatic boycott” of the Winter Games, which begin next week, but some of the world’s most famous brands will still be there. The prominence of these multinational companies, many of them American, has taken the political sting out of the efforts by Mr. Biden and other leaders to punish China for its human rights abuses, including a campaign of repression in the western region of Xinjiang that the State Department has declared a genocide. – at the end of the day, brands are more afraid of Chinese consumers and the Chinese government than they are of western governments and activist consumers

    Instagram and TikTok pull ads from startup Cerebral linking ADHD to obesity | NBC News – the lesson of this is correlation and casuality are different

    Germany

    Latvia slams Germany’s ‘immoral’ relationship with Russia and China | Financial Times and this which is largely down to Germany: EU gives China a nudge rather than a slap over Lithuania – POLITICO. Let’s see what Germany does about: Slovenia latest EU nation hit by China for backing Taiwan | World | The Times – Slovenia provides more products and components to German industry

    Innovation

    A remote village, a world-changing invention and the epic legal fight that followed | Financial Times – interesting dispute with Ocado

    In Depth: New Zealand Fruit Giant’s Kiwi Battle in China 

    Online

    Implications of Revenue Models and Technology for Content Moderation Strategies by Yi Liu, Pinar Yildirim , Z. John Zhang :: SSRN – We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform. For the purpose of maximizing its own profit, a platform will balance pruning some extreme content, thus losing some users, with gaining new users because of a more moderate content on the platform. This balancing act will play out differently depending on whether users will have to pay to join (subscription vs advertising revenue models) and on whether the technology for content moderation is perfect. 

    We show that when conducting content moderation optimally, a platform under advertising is more likely to moderate its content than one under subscription, but does it less aggressively compared to the latter when it does. This is because a platform under advertising is more concerned about expanding its user base, while a platform under subscription is also concerned with users’ willingness-to-pay. We also show a platform’s optimal content moderation strategy depends on its technical sophistication. Because of imperfect technology, a platform may optimally throw away the moderate content more than the extreme content. Therefore, one cannot judge how extreme a platform is by just looking at its content moderation strategy. Furthermore, we show that a platform under advertising does not necessarily benefit from a better technology for content moderation, but one under subscription does, as the latter can always internalize the benefits of a better technology. This means that platforms under different revenue models can have different incentives to improve their content moderation technology.

    Has Instagram Lost its Organic Reach? What to expect for 2022  – Fanpage Karma Blog – treading that same like that Marshall and Whatley found for Facebook in their Ogilvy white paper Facebook Zero

    Security

    AUKUS: Strategic drivers and geopolitical implications – Britain’s World – as much about cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, and additional undersea capabilities as nuclear submarines

    What China thinks of possible war in Ukraine | The Economist – Both see a world order being reshaped by American weariness and self-doubt, creating chances to test and divide the democratic West. Chinese and Russian diplomats and propaganda organs relay and amplify parallel narratives about the benefits of iron-fisted order over American-style dysfunction. Joint military exercises demonstrate growing trust – but China will be very cautious and nationalists want the Russian Far East back where it belongs as part of China

    FBI considered using Pegasus spyware for US domestic surveillance | AppleInsider

    Technology

    Will China dominate the world of semiconductors? | The Economist 

    The scramble for semiconductors is our era’s industrial Great Game | Financial Times

  • Spanx + more news

    Spanx

    Spanx commits to all-female board after Blackstone investment — Quartz – More than  a quarter of board seats in the Russell 3000 Index belonged to women during the last quarter, compared to 15.1% just five years ago, according the corporate leadership research firm Equilar. Still, just 84 of these boards had achieved gender parity, meaning that they were represented by 50% women. And companies still struggle to achieve adequate racial and LGBTQ representation on their boards as well. Justine Smyth, chair of the New Zealand telecommunications company Spark, has suggested that while the first “diverse” appointees on company boards may feel like tokenism, those members can help advocate for change once they are given decision-making power – Spanx is an American underwear company that does foundation garments to make the wearer appear thinner. Spanx innovated around testing with real people, having multiple sizes and packaging colours that increased brand salience. The back story of Spanx is similar to the ‘founder in a garage’ story that was the starting point of many Silicon Valley firms. Spanx is a private company. It is interesting that Spanx are taking private equity money from Blackstone rather than going public. Will we get to a situation in the future where all-women boards like Spanx come under the kind of pressure that all-men boards come under now? If we got to that stage, then we’d have equality. I think that will be a while.

    Business

    Effects of China’s regulatory onslaught felt in Hong Kong as large IPOs fall by the wayside | SCMP – the Hong Kong government is involuting towards the mainland so this is to be expected

    With seaports jammed, cargoes are taking to the skies | Financial Times – the rise in air freight prices is fascinating

    Oil refinery woes raise concern in Westminster over financial backers | The Guardian – sounds like a later era Le Carré novel

    China

    Piraeus port deal intensifies Greek unease over China links | Financial Times

    Consumer behaviour

    British leavers and remainers as polarised as ever, survey finds | Brexit | The Guardian

    Economics

    China’s central bank says spillover from Evergrande crisis ‘controllable’ | Financial Times

    Chinese developer Sinic defaults as Evergrande deadline looms | Financial Times

    ‘We’ve woken up’: attitudes change as Saudi Arabia kick-starts job market | Financial Times

    America’s political and business elites no longer agree on China | Financial Times – more like Jack Welch created shareholder value mindset has severed the link between Wall Street and the public good and this is the most obvious fissure

    America, China, and the Tragedy of Great-Power Politics | Foreign Affairs

    U.S., trading partners urge China to liberalise further | Reuters – interesting WTO developments

    Ethics

    Microsoft Executives Told Bill Gates to Stop Emailing a Female Staffer Years Ago – WSJ – interesting that we haven’t seen this kind of expose about Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs. Secondly, there is the timing with Mr Gates’ divorce. Finally, all of the money and hard work to reinvent Mr Gates as a philanthropist looks as if its becoming undone. While Mr Gates

    The soft bigotry of America’s cultural left | Financial Times – imposing conformity through intimidation is not what is supposed to happen in democracies, still less on their most-prized campuses. Crushing free thought is McCarthyism. This new consensus is profoundly illiberal. It treats a person’s race as their primary fixed identity and assigns roles on that basis. This obliterates the individual moral autonomy on which liberalism rests. Since everything in society boils down to race, everything must change. California, for example, is trying to alter its mathematics curriculum to downplay the idea there are right and wrong answers in the science. The debate is fuelled by a proposal for new math standards called “A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction”. The framework states that “objectivity”, “worship of the written word”, and “either/or thinking” are tools of white supremacy

    EVs Are the Future, but Are They Really All That Eco-Friendly? – Robb Report

    Finance

    Goldman Sachs granted full ownership of China securities venture | Financial Times

    Reforms in Hong Kong Encourage Homecoming of Offshore Funds | Winston & Strawn LLP – In July 2021, the Hong Kong government gazetted a fund re‑domiciliation mechanism to encourage offshore funds set up in corporate or limited-partnership form to register in Hong Kong as OFCs and LPFs, respectively. This mechanism does not create any new legal entity; therefore, it does not require the dissolution of the original funds or require investors to exchange their interests from the old fund to the new fund. Upon re‑domiciliation, these funds would be de‑registered in the original place of incorporation and would have the same rights and obligations as any other newly established OFCs and LPFs in Hong Kong. The Wealth Connect, which formally commenced trading on September 10, 2021, allows Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be offered to mainland Chinese investors in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. This adds to the Mutual Recognition of Funds scheme, which started in 2015, allowing Hong Kong-domiciled funds to be distributed in mainland China. These connect schemes serve as another incentive to encourage fund managers to re‑domicile offshore funds to Hong Kong – I suspect that this is designed to do a few things over time.

    • Allows Chinese citizens on the mainland access to more ways to do investments, whilst still being in full view of the Chinese government.
    • It allows the Chinese government to expand ‘capture’ of western financial institutions
    • It will allow China to put pressure on VIEs ran out of the likes of the British Virgin Island and similar territories out of scrutiny

    FMCG

    Procter & Gamble increases marketing spend by 30% | Advertising | Campaign Asia

    Unilever warns of even higher inflation next year | RTÉ News

    Hong Kong

    How Hong Kong’s Elite Turned on Democracy – The Atlantic – there is something performative about the face and patriotism on display that I suspect may be driven less by a drive to get on and more by the fear of what might happen to them or their loved ones if they didn’t

    Sleepy Hong Kong residents get 5-hour “Sleeping Bus Tour” | The Standard

    Innovation

    EETimes – Samsung Foundry Promises Gate All-Around in ’22 – Interesting new transistor type

    Synopsys, Dassault Systèmes team for lighting digital twin | EE News Europe – automotive focus

    ARM launches virtual modelling toolchain to boost AIoT development | EE News Europe – AIoT – AI in the internet of things

    Luxury

    Prada’s back-to-back game-changing campaigns: What drives a luxury brand from cat-walk to wet market? – reminds me of a project that Motorola was thinking of doing back in early 2005 linking London and Chicago

    Marketing

    Purpose could be ‘the death of brands’, warns Byron Sharp

    Media

    Mediatel: Mediatel News: John Lewis goes woke and the paradox of ESG – fraught creative

    Apple’s privacy changes create windfall for its own advertising business | Financial Times – “Apple was unable to validate for us that Apple’s solutions are compliant with Apple’s policy,” he said. “Despite multiple requests and trying to get them to confirm that their products are compliant with their own solutions, we were unable to get there.” Apple said its privacy features were designed to protect users. “The technologies are part of one comprehensive system designed to help developers implement safe advertising practices and protect users — not to advantage Apple.” – this has my spidey sense tingling right now

    What blockbuster? China spurns Hollywood’s advances | Financial Times – “If I was an investor, I would be very concerned about a strategy at this point that depended on access to the Chinese market and the good graces of Chinese film regulators,” said Aynne Kokas, the author of Hollywood Made in China and a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. “To make very expensive films in anticipation of being able to deliver them to the Chinese market and then not being certain that’s possible is actually a much more financially irresponsible strategy from my perspective.”

    Why your ad next to trendy pimple-popping, mukbang, and ASMR videos missed the target | Marketing | Campaign Asia – great research, context is everything

    Online

    China Said to Weigh Opening Tencent, ByteDance to Search – Bloomberg – this could be good for Baidu if it can show superior search

    Facebook confronts growth problems as number of young users in US declines | Financial Times – this isn’t news at all

    Retailing

    Alibaba Faces New Threat: an Evolving Chinese Shopper – WSJ – consumers have started to embrace new ways of shopping that favor browsing and interaction over targeted product searches. That trend has left Alibaba playing catch-up in some areas, and competitors have used the shift to gain a foothold in the world’s largest online retail market. Alibaba remains the leading platform in online shopping, but its share of China’s retail e-commerce market has fallen to a projected 51% in 2021 from 78% in 2015, according to research firm eMarketer. Interesting that WeChat, BilliBilli, Pinduoduo and Douyin are claiming part of the e-commerce pie. What this article doesn’t cover is the relative importance by comparison of O2O (offline to online) (paywall)

    Inside the John Lewis nightmare | Financial Times

    Security

    At least 13 phone firms hit by suspected Chinese hackers since 2019, say experts | Hacking | The Guardian

    US intelligence officials warn companies in critical sectors on China | Financial Times – many businesses were not aware of the direct and hidden links between Chinese companies and universities and state security, or that Beijing was using a “whole of government approach” to obtain technology – more likely that they don’t care

    Telecoms

    Half of Americans Might Switch to Starlink Once Widespread Service Rolls Out / Digital Information World

    Web of no web

    Insight SiP announces funding for IoT security program | EE News – securing RF modules in IoT devices

    Wireless

    Apple is Still the Most Profitable Smartphone Company in the World / Digital Information World

  • ORAN problems & other news

    ORAN

    O-RAN in uncertain future – Although Europe’s four major telecom operators – Vodafone, Orange, Deutsche Telekom, and Telefonica – had signed memorandum of understanding on the implementation of Open RAN (ORAN) based networks in Europe in early 2021, Rakuten Mobile’s ongoing operating losses have put uncertainty to ORAN’s future. Rakuten Mobile is the only major telecom operator to adopt the ORAN architecture for its 5G network, but the financial results of the company for the first quarter of 2021 showed an expansion of 265% on year in its operating losses to JPY97.2 billion (US$880 million), the largest in the past five quarters. The company’s operating margin also reached negative 141.7%, down 77.4% on year. However, Rakuten Mobile’s revenues still grew JPY19.1 billion and 38.5% from a year ago to JPY68.6 billion for the first quarter of 2021. The figures show the company has continued to see its mobile business growing, but the high costs from its operation kept the company suffering losses. – so what are the hidden costs of ORAN? What is different about this ORAN situation conceptually to the use of white boxes in complex enterprise IT systems? Would this question have pointed towards the kind of problems that ORAN has been encountering?

    Banking

    US Graduates Are Snubbing Junior Banker Jobs Citing Work-Life Balance – I think that they will be replaced by candidates from China, India and other countries instead

    Consumer behaviour

    Men are much less likely to read books by women | Canvas8 – male readers are significantly less likely to opt for fiction books written by women. Of the top ten best-selling female authors, including Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, and Danielle Steel, only one of five readers are male, whereas for the top male authors, including Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, 45% of readers are women. Meanwhile, data on Goodreads shows that enjoyment levels are not impacted by sex – on Goodreads, men give an average rating of 3.9 out of 5 to books by women while they give books by men an average of 3.8 – Sieghart’s interpretation of the data misses a key assumption that many women authors write books that don’t appeal to the majority of male readers interests, where as she assumes that they are not accorded as much authority as male ones. Those that do enjoy the kind of content that these women authors write find as much enjoyment in it. Examples of authors that cross the gender popularity gap include Gillian Rubinstein (aka Lian Hearn), Ursula Le Guinn and JK Rowling. TL;DR – sometimes its the product doesn’t float their boat rather than sexism

    In case you didn’t notice, nationalism in China at the moment is a bit cray – by Kevin Carrico – NSL can’t cancel me – TL;DR some Chinese academics believe that the US could have used a ‘Ming the Merciless’ style weather weapon to cause floods in China. A good number of Chinese netizens find this credible. Nationalism and gaslighting is a dangerous combination

    Screen Use Strongly Linked to Failing Eyesight in Children – After over a year spent indoors staring at movies, TV, and video games, scientists say that near-sightedness and other vision problems are skyrocketing among children

    Economics

    The young ‘lie flat’ as China’s growth model begins to fray | Financial Times – the money quote in this article for me is “The bulk of China’s population is doing worse in net terms as housing affordability continues to worsen and access to education and health becomes ore and more costly” – sounds like a lot of western developed economies. The key question is what impact this unfairness might have on the relationship between the populous and the communist party of China

    Germany

    Handel mit China: Braucht Deutschland eine Wende? | Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung – there are more important things than doing good business in China. Germany’s foremost business paper editorial swipe at Angela Merkel and selected big German enterprises (Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank, T Systems and Volkswagen Audi Group)- short of name checking them with IG Farben I couldn’t see what else FAZ could do

    Innovation

    China’s CATL unveils sodium-ion battery to diversify from lithium — Quartz – this was going to have to happen sooner rather than later due to the challenge of sourcing lithium. It will be interesting to see how recyclable these batteries are

    Japan

    China and South Korea car makers vying for SE Asia EV market – surprising that Japan isn’t in the mix given their factories in the region? For instance, Toyota has a major plant in China

    Saitama man repeatedly steals food from store by making his phone say “PayPay♫” | SoraNews24 -Japan News- – clever mix of social engineering and mobile payments in Japan

    Legal

    UK’s Draft Online Safety Bill Raises Serious Concerns Around Freedom of Expression | Electronic Frontier Foundation – which attempts to tackle illegal and otherwise harmful content online by placing a duty of care on online platforms to protect their users from such content. The move came as no surprise: over the past several years, UK government officials have expressed concerns that online services have not been doing enough to tackle illegal content, particularly child sexual abuse material (commonly known as CSAM) and unlawful terrorist and extremist content (TVEC), as well as content the government has deemed lawful but “harmful.”

    2022 Beijing Olympics: Sponsors Grilled on China Human Rights Abuses – Variety – AirBnB, Coca-Cola, Intel, Visa and Procter & Gamble are going to have a bumpy ride in their home market

    Two arrested over online calls for boycotts, threats against Hong Kong broadcaster TVB | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – continuously and widely disseminated a large amount of messages through social media groups and pages, intending to smear the media organisation, and also to use threatening means to pressure different advertisers into stopping advertising with this media. [Their] goal is to cause reputational and financial damage,” said Superintendent Wilson Tam of the Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau. – sounds like what pro-Beijing politicians have done on several occasions. Angry emojis organised was seen to be criminal damage

    Marketing

    Internet backlash against Fila sportswear after Hong Kong badminton player seen drenched in sweat | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – that has screwed Korean owned Fila brand in terms of clothing performance

    FundFemme – I think what the site is trying to do is good. The thing I don’t like about this is the cynical approach of WundermanThompson who are trying to distract and run crisis comms on their unfair dismissal of Chas Bayfield and Dave Jenner. The domain was registered on June 30th via Squarespace

    Security

    Chinese hacking group APT31 uses mesh of home routers to disguise attacks – The Record by Recorded Future 

    Phantom Warships Are Courting Chaos in Conflict Zones | WIRED – Bergman has found no evidence directly linking the flood of fake AIS tracks to any country, organization, or individual. But they are consistent with Russian tactics, says Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. “While I can’t say for sure who’s doing this, the data fits a pattern of disinformation that our Russian friends are wont to engage in.”

    Streetwear

    Foot Locker targets Japan and sneakerheads with atmos purchase — Quartz – I can understand why Hidefumi Hommyo would want to sell, but I do wonder if the heat will move on from Atmos now the with the footlocker buy. More related content here.

  • Eliot Higgins & things from last week

    Eliot Higgins

    Eliot Higgins talks about the origins of Bellingcat. The investigations that Bellingcat has done to date and some of the techniques that it uses in investigations. Higgins has written an account of Bellingcat which goes into open source intelligence and new investigative journalist techniques. Bellingcat are also famous for their courses, where they pass on their expertise in open source investigations.

    The Go! Team

    The Go! Team released a new video which makes good use of a photocopier effect to animate the band members. Pow is the usual mix of genre bending power pop that The Go! Team are known for.

    SK-II

    SK-II has commissioned some lovely films to support their ‘Change Destiny’ brand purpose. You have a mix of gaming, 3D animation and anime in these films. Working on Dove, there was the mantra real women; which went into the core of the brand’s creative. But that misses the online world which we now operate in and is often more keyed into our inner world than the real life around us. SK-II is owned by Procter & Gamble; who have been making leaps and bounds in terms of their approach to brand purpose. More related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/pguAbHCrxzA
    https://youtu.be/pmZr-AcYQs8

    This was something I hadn’t come across before, in 1974 a set of 4 LP records were released that had actor Nicol Williamson reading The Hobbit. Williamson is better known for his role of Merlin in Excalibur. One of his last film appearances of Williamson was the role of Cogliostro in the 1997 live action adaption of Spawn. This film is still vastly underrated. Williamson left us in 2011. This recording just hints at his acting skill. During the 1960s and 1970s he was considered one of the greatest actors of his generation alongside Albert Finney which is high praise.

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