The playground behind the interviewee before it was refurbished in the early 2000s used to have a roundabout that I was thrown off at a tangent while it spun around when I was about 3 or maybe 4 years old and landed straight into a puddle. I wore a red hooded anorak made of a red sherpa fleece fabric with an elasticated hood, cuffs and bottom which soaked up half the puddle like a sponge. The photographer had his back turned to Grove Road and what is now an Iceland supermarket. Back when I fell off the roundabout it was a Kwik Save.
Struggling
Even back then it had a reputation of being a hard neighbourhood. Local shops such as Griffiths the butchers catered for a customer base struggling to make ends meet.
To the photographer’s left down the road a bit would have been a social club for (former) members of the Civil Defence. The Civil Defence Corps itself had been stood down in 1968. It was a solid working class area full of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who were employed either locally at the Lever factory next door or on the Mersey from the shipyards of Birkenhead to the chemical industry of the Mersey basin and assorted factories further afield.
Community spirit doesn’t pay the bills
By the 1980s, it looked worse for wear. There were few jobs, fewer still that paid well. And that was before unemployment and the heroin epidemic took their toll. As the economy picked up in the 1990s, the benefits didn’t make it to New Ferry. The one bright spot was a pirate radio station ran by community DJs playing house and techno records every night of the week close by to Grove Road playground. I’d held a couple of small (250 people) all night parties (acid house and garage) in the Civil Defence social club, with the blackout curtains keeping the noise and lights away from nosy neighbours and police patrols.
The people who ran the club put on breakfast for the revellers after the main event. We played ambient music from CDs supplied by a friend’s older brother (Tangerine Dream, The Orb, Vangelis, Kitaro, Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond and Abba’s Arrival) mixing between two Discmans as the tired revellers drank tea and ate bacon ‘bin lid‘ sandwiches while sprawled out on the floor.
Tickets were sold in advance and the venue details given out on the night by ringing an answerphone. Everyone involved broke even if they were lucky.
Despite being really hard scrabble there was a certain amount of community dynamism going on in the village hall. My Mum used to travel down there to go to knitting classes with older women, some of whom were Irish like her. They would knit for charity.
But all that won’t keep social decay from the door while the community is underemployed and underpaid.
No easy answer
The social decay described in the article isn’t something that happened overnight but over decades. There is no quick fix to the social decay of bad behaviour and feral gangs of children. It is not clear whether there is the commitment, investment, government will or the way to resolve this social decay.
The most individually logical thing to do in a time of social decay is thinking more about personal safety.
Techno-utopianism of early 2000s
Looking back the technology adoption of the 1990s and early 2000s was phenomenal. The mainstreaming of the cellphones, the PlayStation, home PC computers and internet access creating immediacy.
The changes wrought by mobile phones in particular are still rippling through the developing world.
Driving in Japan
I am a huge fan of walkabout and driving videos because you can tell so much about the environment looking at retail spaces, brands, clothing and social interactions going on around you. For instance Japan’s apparent rejection of the electric car for now, favouring hybrid vehicles instead. This particular one of a rural Japanese town gives you a good idea of where Studio Ghibli‘s work comes from.
Fintan O’Toole on Ireland
Great talk by Fintan O’Toole at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
I was inspired to write a 2020 media diary after re-reading a post that I had contributed to Stephen Waddington’s blog back in 2015 that looked at my online and offline media consumption. Prior to COVID; it wouldn’t have changed that much from the 2015 variant. In fact in 2020, a lot is still the same through COVID. A number of the changes had happened had been driven prior to COVID.
But lets start off the 2020 media diary with the COVID effects.
Zoom fatigue
When I started off working in agency life. Being able to work from home wasn’t possible for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have my own space that I could work at. Even if I could, I would need to find a block of work where I would need to write and concentrate rather than bounce ideas of colleagues.
I idealised working from home as a bit like the early bits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Working in my pyjamas, with a kick ass hi-fi. The future is more banal. I own a nice Sony pre and power amp combo rather than a Carver Audio system based around the M-500t power amplifier.
But what its actually meant was an extension of the working day and a blurring of the line between work and personal time. I empathised with those people I saw using the edge of the bed as an office chair and their dressing table as a desk on Zoom calls.
Zoom fatigue set in. Zoom was tiring for a few reasons. Calls were often stacked up one after the other. Secondly you couldn’t carve out blocks of time for it like email. Instead its a constant low level presence; rather like Stack or WhatsApp groups. When you did a group video call, there is a lot happening on screen and its much more of a cognitive load than your average meeting. Finally there is the extension of the working day.
And no, I haven’t managed to work in my dressing gown.
Return of the desktop
If I had written my 2020 media diary before March, I would have referenced discussions around ‘post-PC age’; even if it wasn’t mirrored in my own behaviour. I primarily used my Mac for content creation because I spent a lot of my time outside the home. Not being so mobile has meant that my iPhone has been used less and my Mac has been used much more.
Continuity provided integration across my iPhone, iPad and Mac. All my messenger apps have a desktop client, which I can toggle between on the Mac. A lot of the apps in my personal use made no sense as I have been by my home entertainment set up all the time. Ocado stopped supporting their mobile app as they become overwhelmed with orders; which meant that my shopping was completed on my Mac. My iPhone was then only really useful as a phone.
Messenger for keeping in touch and on track
I have been using messenger clients for almost as long as I have been online. I used to have them all together in an app called Adium X on the Mac. Unfortunately that isn’t possible any longer. Instead I am using a hodge podge of clients
WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype, Apple Messages, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Over the past 12 months Signal has become very popular and I am using WeChat with contacts inside and outside China much less. Signal took off because of concerns about privacy amongst my network at home and abroad.
Secondly, I have been using my Mac as my primary messaging device which was definitely an effect that COVID had on my 2020 media diary.
From always on to keeping it off
When I started to use internet based services, you made an active decision to get online. You dialled up or logged on. For the best part of the past few decades we moved towards an always-on world. People often complained about the amount of email received at work; the way the email client was a constant draw, when they could be getting things done instead. First my Mac at home was constantly connected to the internet and mobile phones allowed us to be called directly on the go. Then we had mobile email and a nascent web experience. From there it was apps. My 2020 media diary has seen this accelerate even further. Immediacy has been accelerated even further and has been making people burn out and feel sick.
Turning off and keeping the internet off has now become an active decision. All be it, one that has become much harder to make.
Flickr is an archive
Flickr is still my visual archive and an essential part of my 2020 media diary; but since I have been out and about much less. Its less of a source of anxiety for me since Smugmug purchased it from Yahoo!
Facebook is private groups
I continue to use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I go directly into the groups, I don’t bother looking at the home page news feed.
Twitter: paring back
Back in 2019, I started to cut back what I posted on Twitter and how long I wanted it to be on there. Generally posts won’t last more than a week on my profile.
My Instagram has been paired back and just shares a record from my collection now and again. Just enough activity for people to know that I am still alive, but that’s it.
Media content
2020 saw me bulk up my vinyl collection. I bought digital music and vinyl records on Bandcamp. I also bought CDs and vinyl from the Discogs marketplace.
The major change has been the way I listen to my music. When I was out and about I use a late model iPod Classic upgraded with 256GB flash memory storage. My listening has now moved to my Mac. I invested in a high quality pair of headphones (Beyerdynamic x Massdrop.com DT177X Go for home listening, they are 32 ohms which makes them very easy to drive). I don’t have to worry about driving them with a big amplifier. I also don’t need noise cancelling to deal with the the clutter of my office surroundings. My Bose headphones are charged but unused for the past eight months.
I have been using my Mac’s native Podcasts app and have pretty much given up watching news from the major UK news channels. The whole Brexit debacle and a failure to hold politicians of all parties accountable meant that I instead listen to content from the likes of RTÉ, CNBC, NPR, NHK and KBS instead. I get this content via their podcasts.
I still have an Apple TV box that I use for Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance (which is surprisingly good), Netflix, Amazon PrimeVideo and iTunes store content.
News is print, the web and RSS.
Given everything that has been going on, I decided to invest in a print and digital Financial Times subscription. Why print? I like to scan my news quickly on the newspaper with my morning coffee. I can then dive into stories that catch my eye in more depth online. Placement on print provides a layer of context that digital doesn’t really have.
My RSS reader of choice is still Newsblur.com. That is now supplemented through email updates from Sinocism, the China Research Group and a whole pile of marketing and advertising newsletters.
I still read magazines. I am currently subscribed to Monocle and the US edition of Wired magazine. I have print and digital access to both.
Search promiscuity
I still bookmark with pinboard.in and now have almost 55,000 bookmarks at the time of writing. This represents a ‘trusted universe’ of web pages that I often search in first before going to DuckDuckGo and then Google. I use DuckDuckGo as my first option of search engine. It isn’t because it the best, but for many searches its good enough. Going there first means that I am giving Google less of my data, which has incremental benefits from a privacy point of view. I would like to see DuckDuckGo improve the quality of its organic search results, but that is likely to be a slow process since it is based on Bing search technology.
Brands that cut through
I first wrote the headline brands that cut through in my 2015 post. And I started to question as I wrote my 2020 media diary, what does cut through mean in a COVID world? I don’t need the kind of purpose advertising that Dettol came up with in the UK.
For many of the brands that I like, the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental.
COVID tested service brands. Ocado came close to losing me as a customer.
Hermes reinforced my impression of their service being dreadful.
The Royal Mail and Parcelforce delivery people continued to shine. Though I have qualms about Amazon’s business practices, they did what I wanted them to. Prior to lockdown I had upgraded my parents to a newer model Apple iPad and have Facetimed them every day. Each day the quality has been consistently good.
If one brand stood out in terms of its marketing, it was Carhartt US stood out for me this year in the way that it tried to be useful in a low key way to the essential workers and first responders in its customer base.
Authority in crisis
Five years ago, if you had told me that I wouldn’t be listening to the BBC any longer and that the prime minister would be so bad at handling a crisis. I wouldn’t have believed you. It sounds like some fantastical dystopian vision. Some institutions have managed to burn through a lot of latent goodwill, moral and intellectual authority. But it’s not just the UK. The Hong Kong government has issues that go beyond the 2019 protests; with a diffusion of power and responsibility. In the US, the Trump administration was surreal. The one bright light being Mike Pompeo, who was at least consistent with regards China.
Examples of the kind of good leadership that we should expect, stood out for their abnormality; when in reality it should be the other way around. Democracy should give us great leaders in moments of crisis, shouldn’t it?
Veering towards the jackpot
In William Gibson’s last two books The Peripheral and Agency, there is the concept of a slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. It isn’t one thing that does the human race in like a meteor, a rogue AI or a nuclear holocaust. Instead its a slow drumbeat of events over decades: changes in weather, mass pandemics, flood, drought and populism.
I’ve previously enjoyed William Gibson’s visions of the near and far future. It taught me a lot about technology and where the rubber hit the road between tech and people. 2020 has felt like we’ve veered towards the jackpot. Now having lived in Hong Kong post-SARS, I realise that feeling is overly dramatic. We have historically lucked out in the west. COVID-19 posed a unique challenge, because you spread the virus before you exhibit symptoms, which is remarkably different to SARS and other conditions. I hope I am here in five years time to review this 2020 media diary and write a more upbeat 2025 media diary.
Lamborghini rockets onto TikTok with 3 million views in two days – When you are marketing one of the worlds supercars TikTok may not spring to mind. With the entry level models at £150k upwards, Lamborghini may be more expected in the FT. But the Lambo is the car of choice for many influencers. David Dobrik famously gave one to his best friend and a Google search shows many Drop Shipping courses feature a Lamborghini as the badge of success. Although rumour has it that many hire the Lamborghini for the day to film. And bear in mind the market for ostentatious expensive cars skews young. Premiership footballers and pop stars spring to mind. (A recent Miles Davis documentary has him driving a Ferrari in the early 60s). So Lamborghini are big on social and having a TikTok page makes total sense – Simon Andrews on the Lamborghini TikTok channel content. Being bucketed with drop shippers, top flight footballers and influencers as a Lamborghini owner wouldn’t necessarily appeal to me – but each to their own
What can Silicon Valley expect from Joe Biden? | Financial Times – Hours after the president-elect made his acceptance speech, his head of press, Bill Russo, retweeted a picture sent by Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian and film-maker. The picture showed outgoing president Donald Trump meeting Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg and commented: “One down, one to go.” Mr Russo added his own comment: “Hell yes.” It was the clearest sign that Mr Biden’s team share the antipathy towards Mr Zuckerberg and his fellow Silicon Valley titans that has built among Democrats over the past four years. – I wonder how this will play with the Silicon Valley titans who have bankrolled Kamala Harris’ political career?
Tim Wu, who worked on technology issues in the Obama White House, said: “There has been a shift since the Obama administration, even among the people working in that administration, in the way they think about power in the tech world.
What To Expect On Singles’ Day 2020 | Forrester Research – Alibaba has officially announced that 2020’s Double 11 shopping festival will have two phases: The first one began on November 1, and the second will begin on November 11. The first stage focuses on new brands, new products, and global exclusive items. The second stage will resemble that of the regular Double 11 promotions of past years. This makes the first stage an additional growth driver to ensure a grander Double 11 event. JD.com also upped its game and planned a four-stage Double 11 promotion, lasting from October 21 to November 13. Promotion schemes have become more varied and complex, too, including time- or category-limited red packets, preorder (with a deposit) exclusive offerings, member-exclusive promotions, and installment payments – complex value proposition that probably wouldn’t work in a market like the UK
Historically, social cryptomnesia has been used as a term to talk about the way movements don’t get credit for societal change. For instance, activists such feminism or the green movement don’t get credit for widespread acceptance of women’s rights or climate change. Instead politicians like Al Gore got the credit. Instead feminist groups and environmental groups are still stigmatised.
The BBC think that ideas espoused by groups like Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion maybe incorporated into mainstream thinking. Even as these organisations are demonised.
Although most of the discussion about social cryptomnesia revolves around activist groups, I think it’s bigger than that. We can see social cryptomnesia in wider cultural shifts. Hippies were thought of as soap dodgers and weed heads. Yet the values of free love and existentialism defined much of the behaviour change in mainstream society through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
Long after most punk rockers had shaved out their mohawk and put away their Vivienne Westwood bondage outfits; the DIY entrepreneur ethos lived on in media and publishing. You wouldn’t have had independent record labels, football fanzines or Vice magazine without punk.
Cryptomnesia is a term for when a forgotten memory is repackaged as one’s own. Think a lot of new age concepts like past lives, memory regression or alien abduction.
It also happens in more prosaic environments, where a memory is mistaken for an original thought. So when a colleague repeats something you said as their idea, they might genuinely believe its their idea rather than yours.
There has been a whole body of academic research done into the link between cryptomnesia and inadvertent plagiarism.
I decided to revisit the idea of orchestrated media recently. I had been working on the SEO of a post from 2011. This post linked out to an article by BBC research and development on orchestrated media.
The BBC where aware that media consumption had become more complicated. Attention whilst watching the TV at one time competed with the occasional trip to the kettle; or flicking through a newspaper that was to hand but otherwise undivided. What became the TV changed with the advent of content distributed over internet connections to the web and mobile devices. But it wasn’t only about the proliferations of screens, but also how it interplayed with other media.
It doesn’t necessarily imply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms. Nor does it imply the consumed content is related across the screens (e.g. an audience member may be using Facebook or Twitter for a completely unrelated purpose, while paying less attention to the TV show).
Thinking in those terms is perhaps unnecessarily limiting in scope and misses the broader picture around the opportunities of social media, creating more seamless media experiences, and how these flow from home environment to beyond.
This gives marketers a number of interesting things to think about. When is TV not TV. Think about live event programmes like The Apprentice or Britain’s Got Talent where social acts a ‘giant sofa’ as viewers share their opinions on what they see on screen. Twitter has tried to tap into this link between TV and discussion in its marketing efforts.
As broadcasters, the BBC started to think of the potential in a two-way conversation that was far more democratic than SMS polling, email or letter bags and phone-ins.
Orchestrated Media (OM)to refer to this experience of interaction, synchronisation, and collaboration of programme and companion content across devices. OM creates a new form of audience engagement with the broadcaster. Let’s start with some high level goals
• Enable interactivity around the content (voting, games) and synchronisation thereof, based on time and/or events (such as a producer-console triggered “button push”) • Enable richer exploration of programme • Enable social network interactions through sync-related information and content identifiers for replay purposes • Migrate content between the TV and mobile devices (such as a load-and-go service that runs overnight to load the mobile with video corresponding to the unwatched portion of a program, or a resume-for-home service that picks up viewing on the TV from where it left off on mobile)
Some of the necessary components in reaching these goals include • Visual feedback of shared interactions on TV screen • Private interactions on mobile screens • Support for not only live experience but also time-shifted and on-demand and pay-per-view ones • A back-channel to broadcaster for interactions, behaviour etc • Audio for different languages, directors commentary, clean audio etc, selectable per individual, synchronised to the programme • Accessibility for all above • Application life-cycle and runtime management
This seems to be aimed to provide a seamless anytime, everywhere experience. Think of the way services work in the background as part of Apple’s ‘Continuity’ service layer. As marketers, if we’re thinking about an orchestrated media landscape, how do we hand off between channels and provide prospective customers a similar kind of seamless experience. How do we manage long term and short term attribution and feed these insights into proportion of media spend?
