Ged Carroll

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  • The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

    I had The Shockwave Rider on my list of to read materials as it was a proto-cyberpunk novel, and finally got past my inertia when John Markoff recommended it.

    The Shockwave Rider

    Brunner was a British science fiction writer who did his best work in the 1960s and early 1970s in this book he reflects on a connected world not too far away from the one that we live in. Despite Brunner’s roots he manages to speak with a confident American voice in his writing; something that I don’t think is a bad thing, but caused friction with his contemporaries.

    The Shockwave Rider Plot

    The main protagonist is a hacker who has used his skills to conjure new identities and ends up starting a revolution through the creation of computer viruses and worms. Brunner is credited with introducing the concept of the modern computer worm.

    His work reflects a different society to our own where our identities can be broken (if you have the skill or the money) and a new one forged – a vision 180 degrees away from what governments, advertisers and social networks want. He is on to something with The Ear – a service that audiences can contact and will be listened to in privacy and without judgement. The secular confessional it represents feels like something the world needs as a counterweight to the cognitive dissonance and connectivity-as-social-value of social networks like Facebook and SnapChat.

  • Richard Edelman is wrong, PR isn’t at a crossroads…

    I recommend that readers check out Richard’s PR is at a Crossroads post. Edelman cites changes at PR agencies owned by marketing conglomerates as indicators. He thinks this due to a lack of confidence in the PR industry. There may be some truth in it; 2016 had the lowest annual growth in seven years for Edelman. As PR is at a crossroads, on the cusp of transformation? No, it is already being transformed.

    Richard Edelman, head of Edelman PR

    Public relations has already crossed the Rubicon. The Rubicon crossing happened years ago. Richard noticed the signs back in April 2011:

    …as PR continues to expand, encompassing digital, research, media planning and content creation, should we consider rebranding ourselves as communications firms?

    At the time the question was prompted from London colleagues. Richard disagreed with the premise.

    By 2012 Edelman was in the AdAge Agency A-list in the US. In March 2015, Edelman’s boiler plate changed from:

    Edelman is the world’s largest public relations firm…

    to

    Edelman is a leading global communications marketing firm

    Edelman hasn’t been a PR agency for the past 2-5 years. The transformation in the industry has been going on for at least a decade.

    Why this has happened is down to six factors:

    • Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing
    • Technology-driven marketing strategy
    • CMO perspectives shaped by marketing thinking
    • Talent
    • Advertising changes
    • Media landscape changes

    Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing

    Lets break things down a bit, some bits of PR are about the corporate parts of a company.
    Corporate PR covers a large area including:

    • Public affairs
    • Educating investors
    • Shoring up shareholder confidence
    • Internal communications
    • Community affairs

    Some corporate and social responsibility actitivities could fall under PR. When we’re talking about who is responsible for organisation moral purpose /meaning. This should come from the CEO down.

    Thinking about marketing communications the situation changes a lot. It depends on the sector and the audience that you are communicating to. For consumer marketing; the role that PR plays as part is a subordinated part with the marketing mix. Byron Sharp’s works How Brands Grow (parts 1&2) outline PR’s small, but intricate role with clarity.

    For mature consumer brands, engagement (and by extension PR) is less important. Instead the focus would be on efficient reach and frequency of repetition. Being top of mind is more important. The only way for marketing communications-orientated PR teams to grow their billings is service expansion.

    Technology-driven marketing strategy

    Many business-to-business marketers are using content marketing as a key channel. The content shaped by analysis from marketing automation software.

    In marketing automation, strategy is outsourced. Rules embedded in the software platform dictate approach. PR becomes a source of content to feed the machine. The idea is to determine an effective approach. Then optimise to reduce the price of engagement over time. I could write a blog post or two about the problems with this approach, but it is tangental to PR. Content creation is an opportunity for PRs, all be it one with perpetually squeezed margins.

    Mature research and academic thinking on effective marketing

    In B2C marketing there are large research projects on what works. These include Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the IPA. In marketing mature consumer brands, we know that reach, frequency and recency matters. Engagement is less important. Public relations then becomes an afterthought at best. Taking an integrated media planning led approach makes sense.

    There isn’t a comparable set of research for the PR industry like IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass. Outside the US public relations generally doesn’t have budgets for tools and data. Clients tend to be more action-orientated. Media agencies tend to have the best insights – which aids planning and creative.

    The benefits of an integrated advertising-led approach goes back decades. Edelman cites Y&R’s ‘whole egg’ concept. Dentsu’s ‘Cross Switch Marketing’ is similar with roots going back to the 1960s. The PR industry mistook integrated thinking for a primitive view of PR practice. The reality lies somewhere between communications myopia and macro marketing thinking.

    From a CMO perspective

    • PR spend is a small part of their budget. It may not even sit in their budget if there is a CCO (chief communications officer) role in the company
    • PR isn’t supported by good quality secondary insights like the IPA or Ehrenberg-Bass
    • Advertising works
    • Advertising agencies foster high trust through visualisation of ideas backed by insights
    • Media relations is low cost, low efficiency but can be high engagement
    • Integrated simplifies the client/ agency dynamic (one ass to kick)
    • Successful integrated agency engagements. Examples include Red Fuse (Colgate), GTB (Ford, Purina) and TBWA Media Arts Lab (Apple)
    • The memory of Enfatico has disappeared

    Talent

    Edelman has done a better job than most agencies in getting digital and paid media talent. I’ve worked as an in-house marketer. I have worked as a PR person. I’ve also worked in PR agencies doing digital and paid media. I now work as a strategy director in a creative ad agency and the difference is huge.

    For most specialists working in a PR agency can be thankless task:

    • PR agency leaders don’t get other disciplines. This is particularly true outside North America
    • I’ve worked with too many agency leaders who think digital is an infographic or a video
    • The briefing process in PR agencies is awful. ‘We’ve got a video, make it viral’ was the worst brief I had
    • Outside North America budgets are very tight
    • You can get better working conditions elsewhere. Tools, people you can learn from, research and ambience. Real conversation at a PR agency: “can you wear a shirt and suit?” “Why?” “We’d just like it” “Can I quadruple my day rate?” “No, why?” “That’s my inconvenience of wearing a suit fee”
    • PR agencies don’t win the awards that matter to us. PR publications wring their hands about the lack of PR wins at the Cannes Lions. This matters for your career

    If you have capability built up in the ad agency, creative shop or media agency; use it. Publicis, WPP and Interpublic have deep expertise they can draw on. Publicis talks about this as ‘The Power of One’. It is much easier than recruiting more technical, creative and planning talent into a PR shop.

    Advertising changes

    As PR has changes so has advertising. There is a far greater understanding of what efficient and effective looks like. While I lament the the decline of advertising’s golden age; multichannel storytelling has improved. Advertising agencies have learned how to combine earned and paid media. Earned media is an incremental revenue increase advertising agencies. Advertising agencies have done earned media and not even thought about it being PR.

    By comparison creative represents a big budget bump for your PR agency. That causes the client to pause and think. The expansion of advertising has wiped out the crossroads; so PR isn’t at a crossroads anymore.

    Media landscape changes

    As advertising has changed so has the media landscape. The online environment is shaping out with two winners around the world. The pattern of online advertsing spend is clear. Everywhere outside China online advertising is static; only Facebook and Google see increases. In China, is is Tencent due to WeChat that wins. Sina benefits from Weibo. Baidu would have been an obvious winner due to it being a Google analogue. Instead Baidu’s earnings have been static.

    This decline in media fortunes adversely affects editorial space. This impacts the efficiency of media relations. By some accounts in the UK there are now 3 PR people for every journalist. PR agencies have needed to expand beyond media relations. This means trying to get more involved in owned and paid media. The challenge is that advertising agencies are also in that space – extending their storytelling. In the case of the media landscape, PR isn’t at a crossroads because the crossroads no longer exists it has become a singularity at the centre of the media sector

    More information
    PR not communications | 6am blog – yeah I called bullshit on this one. I could afford to be right; Richard had a global family business to defend
    Whole Egg Theory Finally Fits The Bill For Y&R Clients: Global Agency Network Of The Year: Team Space System A Winner For Citibank, Others Set To Follow | AdvertisingAge
    The Dentsu Way – a great book, right up there with Ogilvy on Advertising in my estimation

  • Pam Edstrom

    PR Week and The Holmes Report carried an obituary for Pam Edstrom who passed away last night. I worked at her agency for a few years and came across her a few times.

    Pam had an intensity and an energy to her. She was also a true believer; you could break her open like a stick of rock and there would be the Windows squares running through her. For many years Pam Edstrom was the media voice of Microsoft. She had a tremendous belief in the ability of IT to deliver tremendous things. If you’ve read this blog you’d realise that I’m not a true believer in the same way that Pam Edstrom was; we were on opposite sides of the Windows | Mac (and Unix) religious divide.

    Pam had an absolute focus on controlling the message and organisational process (optimised for alignment to Microsoft) and championed ‘gold standard’ delivery. Over time Microsoft came to represent more than half the agency billings.

    My Pam Edstrom story

    When I worked at the agency building digital capability, I also was assigned to keeping the company name in the usual industry debates. I found it handy to do as it kept my PR skills warm as I did the nascent digital work at the time. I managed to keep a constant drip feed of coverage in the industry media.

    At the last minute I was asked to arrange a profile of Pam. Clare O’Connor who worked at PR Week at the time agreed to write a profile – Pam Edstrom, the doyenne of tech PR.  Give it a read as it captures Pam quite well.

    The article was taking ages to come out as it was ‘evergreen’ appearing some six months after the interview had taken place. Clare asked Pam for the name of a journalist who she interview for colour about Pam Edstrom. 

    The article threw a bit of a curveball when a longtime journalist contact was asked about Pam Edstrom and referred to her daughter Jennifer’s book Barbarians led by Bill Gates. The initial reaction from Pam Edstrom was to tell PR Week that if they ran a story mentioning ‘the book’, they would never get a Waggener Edstrom story again. I pointed out that we  didn’t have that outsize an impact in the marketing press, that Microsoft had in the enterprise tech press and PR Week wouldn’t care.

    I never did  hear if Pam got to thank the New York Times’ Steve Lohr for bringing up that book. More information here.

  • Bruno Kahl + more news

    Bruno Kahl

    German Intelligence Chief Bruno Kahl Interview – SPIEGEL ONLINE – really interesting interview with Bruno Kahl. Mr Kahl is a career civil servant rather than a spook who became management. The insights that Bruno Kahl shares are very interesting:

    • America First didn’t affect intelligence sharing
    • Daesh has fallen into a franchise model
    • Turkey’s aborted military coup was over the concern of being purged, which happened anyway
    • Russia is less of a threat than IS

    More related content here.

    Business

    IBM, Remote-Work Pioneer, is Calling Thousands Of Employees Back To the Office | Slashdot – damning indictment of teleworking and the power of technology

    As Uber Woos More Drivers, Taxis Hit Back – NYTimes.com – when will Uber’s cheap capital and toxic culture run out of road and become this decade’s pets.com

    Consumer behaviour

    Escape to another world | 1843 – changing gender roles, changing expectations of what they can achieve and escapism

    China has overtaken Japan in South Koreans’ worst countries list, new survey claims | South China Morning Post – big longer term issue for the Chinese, probably bigger than they realise at the moment

    Alienation 101 | 1843 – Chinese student experience in the US

    Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds – NYTimes.com – fire the millennials in your social team

    Are Teenagers Replacing Drugs With Smartphones? – NYTimes.com – drugs replaced by digital alternatives?

    Gadgets

    SoftBank Drops $100 Million Investment in iPhone Rival – WSJ – stops investment in Andy Rubin’s next thing (paywall)

    Apple announces a new, cheaper iPad in hopes of stopping sales slump – ExtremeTech – interesting that they are prepared to make a thicker product

    Handsets at MWC: Same But Different | EE Times – from the perspective of electronics engineers

    Innovation

    The economic rationale for public R&I funding and its impact – Research policy and organisation – EU Bookshop – good reading material showing the importance of government R&D spurring private enterprise innovation

    Legal

    Apple invents a Unique Air-Tight Protective Case for Future iPhones with a Smart Communications Component – Why does the notification have to be digital (thinking Sony’s Sport Walkman and Discman designs were secure closure was self evident)

    Lawyers and Academics Warn UK Against Criminalizing File-Sharers | Torrent Freak – interesting work by media lobbyists, it will go south when it starts catching casual middle class criminals

    South Korea Finds Qualcomm Prevented Samsung From Selling Its Exynos Processors – Slashdot – smoking gun…

    A Small Table Maker Takes On Alibaba’s Flood of Fakes – NYTimes.com – Alibaba’s PR pain

    Luxury

    De Grisogono Offers You a ‘Botler’ | New York Times – interesting Facebook Messenger usage

    What’s Gucci? | The Outline – stunned by this social strategy and not in a good way

    Nike Sees Online Search Spike from China’s Consumer Rights Day | The Daily | L2 – oh Consumer Rights day – that festival of bashing the west….

    Hong Kong jewellers poised for joy as Chinese big spenders return | South China Morning Post – I guess its also about creating portable wealth as capital restrictions continue and change

    Media

    What Marketers Should Expect from Search in the Future – Think with Google  – reading this makes me think that Jeff Weiner’s direction at Yahoo! Search was right; just the way to achieve it should have relied more on machine learning

    Why advertisers are pulling spend from YouTube – Business Insider – interesting mix of motivations

    Facebook Goes Full “Black Mirror”: How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday… – In some ways this is worse than Microsoft Passport; that the IT industry and privacy wonks fought off in the early noughties

    Aral Balkan — We didn’t lose control – it was stolen – interesting framing of the modern day online media industry

    Online

    Here Is a Tweet Venture Capitalist Benedict Evans Just Deleted [Updated] | Gizmodo – EPIC

    Security

    QR code scams rise in China, putting e-payment security in spotlight | South China Morning Post– interesting attack vector

    Eeben Barlow’s Military and Security Blog: OVERCOMING THE CRISIS IN COMMAND – interesting essay on how the analogue between business management and military command is causing problems in the military

    Technology

    Beijing public bathrooms equipped with face scanners in a bid to save toilet paper-Sino-US – there is something wrong about the economics of this, unless the average Chinese person is the pink panther of toilet paper?

    Demis Hassabis plays to DeepMind’s strengths by using artificial intelligence for social impact – interesting read. One pout stood out though wasn’t Google X and Google Research supposed to be the kind of medium / long term research DeepMind claims to be. Secondly, there is no ‘general purpose’ AI in DeepMind’s current vision or structure

    Telecoms

    Mobile data became China Mobile’s biggest revenue driver in 2016 | total telecom – margins on data razor thin by comparison though, WeChat turning China Mobile into a dumb pipe

  • Jump Around – 25 years later

    It’s hard to believe that the House of Pain’s Jump Around turned 25 last week. The iconic intro from ‘Harlem Shuffle’ used to be a call to the dance floor when I used to play it on Wednesday night sets at a late closing wine bar in the North West of England.

    The video fired my love of American workwear, previously I’d only really seen this worn on African-American  artists. I loved the form follows function, timeless style and burly nature of the garments. I hunted down supplies of Carhartt and Dickies in Leeds and Covent Garden – it’s kept me warm and dry ever since.

    More importantly it was emblematic of an Irish blue collar swagger that the UK Irish community just didn’t have. The closest thing we had was the shambolic Pogues or wit of Dave Allen which he welded like a katana in the hands of a samurai. We were much more heads down as the troubles in Northern Ireland and sectarianism impacted our lives.

    This was a spectacularly mean-spirited time; where the government used the police to beat the miner’s strike into submission and wilfully demolished the weak industrial base to build the financial services sector. Acid house and rave were created partly because the youth wanted to escape through hedonism.

    The post Good Friday Irish experience of Irish emigrants just a few years later was rather different. Britain was on its way to Cool Britannia liberalism – when being in an Irish pub, no longer meant keeping an eye out for Special Branch agent provocateurs or well-known grasses.

    Jump Around cemented Irish Americans in modern culture. While the community has diffused throughout the US and new migrants are more likely to be IT and financial professionals than construction workers, our mark has been made. More related content can be found here.