Ged Carroll

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  • Brexit part 1

    Why I am writing a post called Brexit part 1? Generally I find politics a bit too grubby and dirty for this blog and have only touched it when I absolutely, positively didn’t have a choice. So expect Brexit Part 1 and Brexit Part 2.

    On June 23, 2016 the UK goes to the polls to vote on whether the country should stay in or leave the European Union.

    Over the next few days I will be writing two posts (this is the first one). The first of which is about how it has all been presented. The second post will be a guide for my non-UK based friends on what the hell it all means.

    Political marketing generally isn’t the most amazing work, though there have been iconic campaigns. Given the momentous decision ahead of voters you would think that there would be a creative advertising campaign.

    The US has led the way in iconic political campaigns. My favourites being the ‘Daisy’ ad used by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

    Ronald Reagan’s ‘It’s morning in America again’ which is curiously soothing yet exceptionally emotive

    Barack Obama’s simple messages of ‘Hope’, ‘Change You Can Believe In’ and ‘Yes We Can’ together with a focus on repetition and reach brought out the vote in his favour.

    The UK has come up with good campaigns too; the Saatchi brothers ‘Britain Isn’t Working’ that helped get Margaret Thatcher the first time around. Ironically the poster doesn’t contain real unemployed people, but 20 Conservative party members shot over and over again to create the ‘conga line’.
    Labour isn't working
    It is such an iconic poster that the Labour party still has to jump over the hurdle of proving it wrong 30 years after its publication.

    By comparison Vote In’s adverts lack… creativity and any sort of emotion to pull the audience in. It is like they are selling machine parts to procurement professionals, not a life-changing decision.

    Ryanair’s campaign discounted flights for expats to come back to the UK and vote to remain has more engaging creative. WTF.
    ryanair

    Vote Leave isn’t much better. Let’s start off with their domain strategy ‘voteleavetakecontrol.org’ – Google’s Adwords team must have been rubbing their hands with joy. For a campaign the ideal URL would have been voteleave.co.uk (which is a rick roll link) or brexit.com. According to redirect on brexit.com

    www.Brexit.com & www.Brexit.co.uk were offered to the various national Out campaign groups for no charge.
    After no contact was offered in response it is now up for sale.
    £3500

    School boy error. If you look at their content, they have managed to latch on to emotive themes, but the production values of the material look as it has been done by Dave in Doncaster who does wedding videos on the weekend.

    And as we have less than a week to go to the polls the quality of the marketing isn’t likely to get any better.
    Around London
    In fact, the best piece of advertising for either side that I have seen was in Whitechapel. It is simple, snappy, emotive and likely done by an art student given the lack of declaration of campaign affiliation (i.e. a call to action to visit strongerin.co.uk or a claim that it was done on behalf of ‘Stronger In’ or ‘The In Campaign Limited’).

    One last thought to ponder in this post

    WPP in particular has a reputation for hiring marketing talent from political campaigns, and these people are sold on to clients as fresh thinkers and doers for their brands. Positive examples of this would be Obama campaign veterans Thomas Gensemer and Amy Gershkoff, or my old colleague Pat Ford who worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign.

    There will be marketers getting jobs with serious salaries on the back of this work and the designer of ‘Brits Don’t Quit’ will be working in an intern farm somewhere if they’re lucky. Life just isn’t fair.

    You can read Brexit part 2 here.

    More Information
    Campaign on Labour Isn’t Working.
    Ryanair’s EU referendum ad investigated by police | The Guardian – it might be illegal, but at least it has a pulse.
    Thomas Gensemer LinkedIn profile
    Amy Gershkoff LinkedIn profile
    Patrick Ford LinkedIn profile

  • Velvet by Brubaker & Breitweiser

    Velvet is the antithesis of mainstream comics. In a world of Marvel-dominated culture, it is hard to imagine more realistic material. Ed Brubaker got the freedom to publish Velvet after several years at DC, Vertigo and Marvel.

    Velvet is a welcome antidote to the superhero genre of graphic novels. Instead, you get a cold war era spy drama with modern storytelling. Velvet tells the story of a middle-aged Anne Bancroft-like secretary and one-time agent. The story gets going when she is set up for murder by persons unknown.

    In this respect, it outlines the kind of spy plot that would be familiar to readers of Len Deighton or Alistair Maclean. Brubaker’s choice of the early 1970s goes back to a pre-cellphone and computer age. This provides him with a broader canvas to work with.

    The story feels modern in its non-linear narrative that moves back and forth between 1956 and 1973. The story zips through Europe across both sides of the Iron Curtain as Velvet tries to find who set her up. The comic features highly kinetic action reminiscent of Matt Damon-era Jason Bourne.

    The first two volumes of it are available here and here. Volume three is due out in September. More book reviews here.

  • TAG Heuer + more things

    TAG Heuer Pushing Brand in China, as Rivals Scale Back | Business of Fashion – it makes sense given the lower price point of TAG Heuer watches. TAG Heuer is in an interesting place. Due to the government clampdown on corruption, the market for ostentatious watches has been curtailed for the time being.

    You could dispute whether TAG Heuer is even in the luxury space. Its range competes with the likes of Tissot on the bottom end and touches on Omega at the top end. The positioning that gives it a (temporary) tactical advantage in the Chinese market, leaves it vulnerable to the Apple Watch, which seems to have devoured the mid-market aside from rugged models. More on luxury here.

    iPhone Future — Monday Note – great piece of analysis

    Death to the Mass — Whither news? — Medium – the article proposes that content no longer king, and neither is distribution. Obviously if true, it would have major implications for the media sector. Jeff talks about conversation being more important now, which is an interesting framing of the challenge. I’d look at the opportunity as filtering or curation, and possibly social. Though in these times trust has declined alongside distribution.

    This Company Might Make Apple and Google Irrelevant — NewCo Shift — Medium – dramatic title but interesting write up on Viv. Viv seems to be a ‘Wildfire’ type personal assistant proof of concept. The idea is that it would displace the intelligence of Siri or Google on the devices. Viv hopes to upend the current platform model. Just because it’s good technology doesn’t guarantee success. It is interesting to reflect again on how mobile carriers went from having the platform business in their hands to poorly compensated dumb pipes for the likes of Facebook, Google and Tencent. And why they are now starting to retreat from the nascent global empires that they built in a fit of hubris.

  • Throwback gadget: SnapperMail

    Thinking about SnapperMail takes me back to end of 2001, I started to prepare for leaving my job at Edelman. This meant upgrading my home IT set up. I picked up an iBook. The iBook was Apple’s consumer-orientated laptop made from 1999 to 2006. Mine was a second generation ‘Snow’ laptop with a G3 processor, dual USB sockets and a combo drive which allowed me to watch DVDs and burn CDs.

    I used the move to go on the first version of OSX. The move also meant that I got a new email account, my default account to date. It had two key attributes:

    • No adverts, so it looked professional in comparison to having a Yahoo! or Hotmail email address and it wasn’t tied to an ISP.
    • IMAP support which allowed me to use my email account across different devices that syncs across the devices. POP3 downloads the  emails from the server to the device, so is ideal only for when you are accessing email from one machine

    My iBook was my only source of email access whilst I left Edelman, freelanced, and then eventually joined Pirate Communications. My first smartphone was a Nokia 6600, which I used alongside a Palm  PDA – l got this sometime around the end of 2003. The 6600 supported IMAP out of the gate, it was slow, but I was connected.

    The 6600 was eclipsed by Palm’s Treo devices which were a better device. I moved from the 6600 and a Palm Tungsten T3 combo to a Treo 600 smartphone in January 2005.

    The process wasn’t smooth. The Treo was sufficiently fragile that I got a translucent silicon jacket that worked surprisingly well with the keyboard and screen protector to look after the touchscreen. Software wise the Treo 600 was a step back from the Tungsten T3 PDA. The screen was smaller and the software felt sluggish in comparison. I had deliberately chosen the 600 over the 650 because I had previously worked agency side on the Palm account and been a long-suffering device owner so knew how crap they were at bug fixes on new devices. The media didn’t call the former Palm CEO ‘Mad’ Bill Maggs for no reason (just sayin’).
    snapperfish limited
    Unfortunately Palm had not been as progressive in comparison to Nokia with its default email client. The software didn’t support IMAP. Fortunately I used to follow Mitch Kapor’s blog and he had recommended SnapperMail: an app from a small New Zealand company SnapperFish.

    SnapperMail was a compact modern email client. It has a number of features that we would expect now:

    • It supported IMAP
    • It supported SSL client to mail box encryption*
    • it was really easy to use
    • You could work with attachments including zipped files**
    • There was no restriction on the file size of attachments, the only restriction was your email account rather than your email client

    This looks like the kind of technology you would have thought Palm should have done. At the this time Palm were competing against Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003, BlackBerry 6200 series, 7100 series and early 8700 series. Yet the default email client was back in the 1990s.

    *The full-fat application cost US$39.99

    **SnapperMail came bundled with HandZipper Lite which handled the compressed files and JPEGWatch Lite image viewer

    I used this alongside MetrO – a public transit directions app and QuickOffice Pro – to read Office documents as part of my modern smartphone experience. It wasn’t just me that loved SnapperMail, it was praised by Walt Mossberg back when he wrote at the Wall Street Journal.

    SnapperMail won two Palm Source (Palm’s software licence business) Powered Up awards in 2003. It was recognised as Best Productivity and Best of the Best Solution. More on Palm here. 

    More information
    SnapperMail Has Solid Software For Savvy Mobile E-Mail Users | WSJ
    QuickOffice
    MetrO – open source mass transit application
    PalmSource Welcomes Developers with Awards, New Tools; Announces New Licensees | PalmSource press room

  • Blockchain deals + other news

    The Dumb Money Is Chasing After Blockchain Deals | CB Insights – true enough. Warning incoming rant on blockchain. Blockchain has a relatively low transaction rate. Traceability is reliant on a reliable database rather than the decentralisation. You have better performing open source databases that aren’t dependent on the weakest link of the decentralised network. For really high translation rates you are better investing in an Oracle database and appropriate hardware support – either through a SaaS or in-house.

    Executive Shuffle at Cyanogen Amid Challenges – can Jolla step up or is it too on the ropes? Jolla has some interesting contracts with the likes of the Russian government for trusted mobile systems. Cyanogen sold purely on improvements in user experience, so Jolla’s security infrastructure has a clear benefit for enterprise users and carriers who don’t want a smartphone botnet.  Jolla also has a strong UX, it pioneered some tactile gestures and leveraged Nokia employees deep experience in mobile experience and understanding of consumer behaviour.  Jolla also has support on some Sony smartphones. The big issue would be the failure of Jolla to turn existing deals with handset manufactured into wide availability of consumer products. It hasn’t been alone in that respect. Both Cyanogen and Firefox OS had similar issues of distribution that would then aid adoption. More on Jolla here.

    Introducing 360 Photos on Facebook – every idea becomes new again. Back before the Internet there was QuickTime VR. This rolled on to the early net but the experiment was very patchy due  to the lack of bandwidth in comparison to today. Content and interaction wise there is clearly no difference from a the consumer experience between Facebook 360 and QuickTime VR. The question is how Facebook 360 goes forward, or if it just becomes a fad like QuickTime VR did before it?