Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Twitter bars intelligence agencies + more

    Twitter Bars Intelligence Agencies From Using Analytics Service – WSJ – I don’t think that this will affect Twitter’s revenue that much. I also don’t think that Twitter bars intelligence agencies will restrict their access to information overall

    China white-box players leaving tablet market and pushing into new applications – focus instead on ‘two-in-one’ device, robots and VR goggles. Expect keener pricing due to competition

    Xiaomi seems kinda desperate for you to get excited about its big new phone – make or break time in China’s tough smartphone market for Xiaomi and its eco-system

    China Exports Stabilized in April Amid Weakness in Currency – Bloomberg – interesting variances in top line take aways from this. Reuters described exports and imports as ‘lower than expected’

    Calls for Reckitt Benckiser boycott in South Korea — FT.com – Korean consumers are forcing supermarkets to withdraw Reckitt Benckiser products from sale.Figures are hard to verify but it apparently due to a company product injuring about 180 women and small children. 103 of them were killed, the rest suffer from horrific lung damage. The active ingredient polyhexamethylene guanidine was found to cause severe lung damage. Kids with oxygen tanks are not what company investors want to see. Back in the UK, the CEO’s pay rise has made more news, the communications team dodged the proverbial bullet. More on FMCG related items here.

    5 latest changes to WeChat Public Accounts – WalktheChat – the ID changes will affect the way teams can effectively manage accounts if working in an agency

    Luxury brands embrace digital storefronts in China, but will they click with buyers? | South China Morning Post

    Getting Next-Gen Messaging based experiences — to work — UX/UI developments, advances and innovation — Medium

    Yahoo investor hits back at ‘patent troll’ critique of activist shareholder Starboard Value – patent trolling is repeatable revenue which is what the activist has

    After The Download: When Apple Turns Off The iTunes Store – When new formats race to the fore it is easy to make the mistake of taking an eye off the legacy formats. This is risky because they usually still account for very large portions of existing revenue

  • Heavens Bankers by Harris Irfan

    I was given Heavens Bankers to read as a friend. I can’t say I had thought that much about Islamic finance before. I knew that it had a couple of patches of ‘heat’ behind it in the banking sector. One was in the late 1990s. It then took a back seat post-911 and took off again as Dubai boomed.

    It helps that Harris was not only an insider, but passionate about banking in its widest sense. He’s also sickening polymath who is a top flight racing driver.

    History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. – Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

    Irfan delves into the intricacies of how modern Islamic finance grew and contracted. The industry he provides us an inside view of is now worth a trilliion dollars.  The start of history like most things were pretty straight forward. As the industry grew more arcane and complex financial instruments became the norm. This reminded me of a lot of Mark Lewis’ Liar’s Poker. Lewis dealt with bonds and modern derivatives became so complex customers didn’t understand them. The Savings and Loans debacle of 1985-1996 foreshadowed subprime mortgages.

    Where Irfan really excels for the non-banker as reader is in his ability to break down the basics. He takes the concepts many of us learned in business or economics classes back into pre-medieval history. He provides a historical perspective on modern capitalism as we know it. So the book becomes invaluable regardless of how you feel about the current economic system. The background gives you a more informed perspective. More on Heavens Bankers here. More book reviews here.

  • Gucci apologises + more things

    Gucci apologises for sending warning letters to Hong Kong shops over paper handbag offerings – context, context, context. Paper items are burned as offerings for the dead to take them into the next life. It tends to be things that they loved or are likely to need. Gucci apologises because it got context wrong, there is zero cannibalisation of Gucci bag sales. More on luxury-related items here.

    Facebook drives more traffic to articles, but Twitter users spend more time reading them – Do small screens translate to shortened attention spans? Not so, suggests a new report from Pew Research Center. Turns out mobile users are spending twice as much time reading long-form articles

    Majority Of Germans Think The Media Is Controlled By Political, Economic Elites – According to a recent survey, the majority of people in Germany view the news media as simply a pillar of the government and the powerfully elite – which will have an impact on trust

    China’s Internet Giants Back A Smartphone On Four Wheels – smarter cars a la Tesla

    Canada cites espionage risk from two Huawei employees, saying it plans to reject their immigration applications | South China Morning Post – Huawei still has a trust gap. Canada might be especially sensitive given how throughly pwned Nortel was by China based hackers in years prior to their bankruptcy

    Dentsu Aegis Network Buys Hot Chinese Agency With Focus on Mobile, Retail, WeChat | AdAge – congrats to VeryChat

    Killing an American icon: Fuel delivery start-ups could downsize U.S. gas stations | SiliconAngle – something about this feels iffy to me. Service stations have a lot of safety restrictions for good reason, that could fall between the cracks in the ‘Uber model’. The margins in running gas stations are actually about the convenience store part of the business, not the fuel. It may make more sense in electric vehicles with easily swappable battery packs???

    Apple to Revamp Streaming Music Service After Mixed Reviews, Departures – Bloomberg – if the sub-editor had honesty tourettes this would read, ‘Veterans scarpered, Apple strives to make streaming service less shit’. ★ Apple Music and Coherent Product Design and Marketing | Daring Fireball – John Gruber on Apple Music, he is less negative than Bloomberg

    BlackBerry brings video calls to BBM on Android and iOS; North America only for now | VentureBeat | Apps | by Paul Sawers – way too late for many people to care – way behind Skype for Business let alone LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc etc

    Huawei G9 Lite released in two versions in China | Gizchina – interesting positioning as it seems to sit awkwardly between Honor and Huawei’s P series

    The Who, What & Why of Activist Investors’ Attacks | EE Times – McKinsey seem to have incredibly rose-tinted glasses about this, presumably not to disrupt business in other practice areas such as banking…

    The truth about social media algorithms – and why marketers should welcome rather than fear them | The Drum – basically the spiel that he gave at We Are Social last week

  • Millennials are people too

    Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

    Show this to as many marketers as you can.

    Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

    You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

    Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

    But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

    That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

    While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

    Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

    My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

    More on millennial related topics here.

  • Chinese industrial decline + more

    Chinese industrial decline – It is hard to explain to people the diversity of China. If you’ve followed China as a subject area you’re used to discussions around tier one to six cities. We tend to buy into ‘Blade Runner’ China because its the tier one and two cities that you end up visiting. Its pretty much the same with the media. I really like this New York Times documentary that deals with the slowdown of heavy industry in Northern China and apparel manufacturing in Guangzhou province in the South.

    Chinese industrial decline in this documentary shows off it’s rust belt and left behind areas. This city’s mayor and is project is a microcosm of the efforts going on.

    China has been in a constant state of reinvention. I worked out of old electronics factories in Shenzhen that had been turned into offices and creative studios, with Shoreditch style retail attached. Whilst, Shenzhen is famous for manufacturing, the reality now is more complex. It has a thriving finance sector that China hopes will eclipse Hong Kong.

    Further up the Pearl river delta cities like Dongguan were industrialised by Hong Kong entrepreneurs and became crucial parts of the global fashion supply chain. Here too changes is happening, areas of Dongguan are being repurposed as tech campuses. Huawei built their ‘European theme park’ campus there. Of course, the unskilled workers get replaced. They move further inland along with some of the industry.

    Some of the industry, has moved abroad. China has become too expensive and onerous to deal with. In the North, heavy industry was built at break neck speed relatively close to coal fields, rather like the UK during the industrial revolution. During this go-go time China could use or export all the steel old. After the 2008 Olympics China started aiming for more sustainable growth and heroic efforts became surplus production.

    A Brazilian flavoured tune as a free download Oya’ Indebure feat. Laudir de Oliveira | DJ Nu-Mark. However, don’t mistake free, for low quality, this is an amazing tune. More on DJ Nu-Mark here.

    Maybe a team up with Scanner would have been more appropriate but liking Jean-Michel Jarre + Edward Snowden – ‘Exit’

    May the 4th aka Star Wars day saw geeks dominate the web, I did really like Japanese airline ANA’s rendition of the Star Wars theme purely from aircraft related found sounds

    TBWA in Amsterdam pulled together these clever DJ controller place mats for McDonalds. It shows how much is now possible with printed circuits. I love the combination of material smarts and  creativity.