Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Holly Herndon + more things

    Holly Herndon

    Holly Herndon and Jace Clayton in conversation. Holly and Jace are interesting characters. They are academics, at least one published book author and artists. They have explored areas such as sampling themselves and the use of machine learning in composition and sound creation.

    Holly Herndon on process is fascinating. I think this has wider implications for creative industries. It does raise question about the nature of creation itself in terms of intellectual property.

    James Lavelle

    James Lavelle on the history of Mo’Wax. These films by FACT magazine are nice. Although they miss a few things.

    Lavelle’s impact goes beyond music:

    • James Lavelle has been a taste maker, he helped popularise a lot of Japanese clothing including A Bathing Ape (BAPE) in the UK and Europe
    • Lavelle’s Unkle was more than a music brand. There was a strong focus on merchandise and clothing including the Surrender streetwear brand. The merchandise was a great product as you can see in Lavelle’s archive. You only see Surrender items come up on eBay every so often because they are so valued and highly prized by owners. The big issue seems to have been one of distribution and hype. There is no interest on the likes of StockX for these items despite the heat behind designers Futura and manufacturers Mediacom and BAPE – again distribution would have been so important for awareness

    Lavelle has managed to self destruct and reinvent himself, which is only obliquely touched upon in this footage.

    More on the history of Mo’Wax. There is more serendipity in this than this video lets on. Also Japan’s Major Force Records needs more kudos than seems to happen in this video. If you liked this it is well worthwhile checking out the

    Sleep app pivot

    How J&J Research Led From Bath-Time to a Mobile Sleep App | Digital – AdAge – fascinating story how consumer insights can dramatically shake up product development and or service design

  • PR, Not Communications – revisited

    In April 2011, Richard Edelman wrote a blog post in defence of public relations. The blog post PR, Not Communications was in response to a question from an employee in the London office

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

    He then went on to give a spirited defence of Edelman being a PR firm with seven points, there is a link at the bottom of the page to Richard’s post, take the time out to go and read it.

    My own view on the matter was more akin to the London employee, partly because I worked in digital and saw changes there in terms of competitors, clients and the flux in brand positioning of the agency that I worked at. My response to Richard’s post is in the links below.

    By 2012, Edelman had been listed as number eight on the AdAge Agency A-list in the US. And by the end of March 2015, Edelman’s boilerplate changed on its own press releases, from:

    Edelman is the world’s largest public relations firm, with more than 5,000 employees in 65 cities, as well as affiliates in more than 35 cities. Edelman was named one of Advertising Age’s “A-List Agencies” in both 2010 and 2011, and an “Agency to Watch” in 2014; Adweek’s “2011 PR Agency of the Year;” PRWeek’s “2011 Large PR Agency of the Year;” and The Holmes Report’s “2013 Global Agency of the Year” and its 2012 “Digital Agency of the Year.” Edelman has been awarded seven Cannes Lions including the Grand Prix for PR in 2014. Edelman was named one of the “Best Places to Work” by Advertising Age in 2010 and 2012 and among Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Edelman owns specialty firms Edelman Berland (research), Edelman Deportivo (creative), BioScience Communications (medical communications) and agency Edelman Significa (Brazil). Visit http://www.edelman.com for more information.

    To:

    Edelman is a leading global communications marketing firm, with more than 5,500 employees in 65 cities worldwide.  Edelman partners with many of the world’s largest and emerging businesses and organizations, helping them evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations.

    Edelman was named one of Advertising Age’s “Agency to Watch” in 2014; one of Forbes’ “14 Most Influential Agencies of 2014”; and The Holmes Report’s “2013 Global Agency of the Year.” Edelman was awarded the Grand Prix Cannes Lion for PR in 2014 and was among Glassdoor’s “Best Places to Work” for the third time in 2014. Edelman owns specialty firms Edelman Berland (research) and United Entertainment Group (entertainment, sports, experiential), a joint venture with United Talent Agency. Visit http://www.edelman.com for more information.

    The change of descriptor from ‘public relations firm’ to ‘communications marketing firm’ appearing in the first sentence of the new boilerplate. The move seems to be in somewhat of a transition, for instance at the time of writing , Edelman’s UK website still has metadata when you use Google search that says:

    Edelman is the world’s largest public relations firm, with more than 5000 employees in 65 cities, as well as affiliates in more than 35 cities.

    So what does this all mean for public relations? Is PR dead, when the world’s largest PR firm no longer admits that’s what it does?

    The answer like the industry is more complex. PR skills are still in demand. But agencies that have provides these services have either cemented themselves into niches or expanded their service offerings beyond the traditional PR toolkit.

    PR has become more pervasive as it has gone incognito.

    More information
    PR, Not Communications – Edelman 6am blog (Richard Edelman’s personal blog)
    A response to: ‘PR, Not Communications’ | renaissance chambara
    Edelman Is No. 8 on the Ad Age Agency A-List
    Edelman Chicago Appoints David Greenbaum Managing Director, Digital | Edelman Press Releases
    Edelman Appoints Martin O’Reilly as New Global Chief Information & Technology Officer
    Is PR dead? | renaissance chambara

  • Online advertising targeting

    Ad blocking has become a thing; with a UK government minister likening it to a protection racket kneecapping online advertising targeting. This felt similar to  the the early 2000s and political action against file sharing.

    A cursory glance of publicly available data shows a few  things:

    • Correctly targeted advertising (in terms of content type, context and placement) would have a substantial receptive audience – if consumer opinions are to be believed
    • Current advertising technologies are negatively impacting consumer web experience by driving up page load times dramatically
    • Ad-blocking usage is steadily increasing, so governments have their work cut out regulating it out of existence

    This starts to paint a picture of something being broken in the way advertisers deploy targeting technologies and the way targeting technologies work.

    Government regulation is only likely to delay industry change. If the music industry is an analogue to follow ad blocking would look at legal means to slow things down and then technological means to resolve the issue.

    The bigger question is, is the problem resolvable? The ad industry is being squeezed on multiple fronts:

    • Ad blockers don’t like the detrimental user experience that they get from interception-based advertising and extremely long page load times
    • The economics of ad funded content doesn’t work for a lot of online publications, leading to a flight to subscription based business models. This would negate ad blocking; because there would be less ad inventory to block
    • Power in online advertising is coalescing in the hands of Amazon, Facebook and Google in the West. In China the equivalent companies would be Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. Ad blocking is probably the least of many online advertising companies worries
    • In general, online advertising is used in an ineffective short-termist way. Marketing campaigns are becoming less efficient. Marketers are starting to pay attention to this, although the change may take a lot of time. Again this represents a bigger worry in the medium to long term for online advertisers than ad blocking

    More information

    IAB Ad Blocking FAQs 2015 (PDF download)
    IAB Believes Ad Blocking Is Wrong
    Adblocking is a ‘modern-day protection racket’, says culture secretary | The Guardian
    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers – telecoms edition
    Advertising isn’t the problem with ad-blockers

  • Lotte + more news

    Lotte

    Lotte shareholders reject bid to remove Chairman Shin Dong-bin as family feud continues | The Japan Times – particularly interesting Chaebol feud given the unique Japan-Korea structure of Lotte. Lotte in Korea is huge in FMCG, entertainment, hospitality and retailing. Lotte has been driven out of China by the government. More Korea related posts here

    Business

    Changing of the Guard – Edelman – nice bit of shade by Richard Edelman on group margins and independent versus publicly listed holding groups

    Consumer behaviour

    Which Generation is Most Distracted by Their Phones? | Priceonomics

    Economics

    Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – In mature economies, higher productivity typically is required for sustained increases in living standards, but the productivity numbers in the United States have been mediocre. Labor productivity has been growing at an average of only 1.3 percent annually since the start of 2005, compared with 2.8 percent annually in the preceding 10 years – Silicon Valley failed

    How to

    Tracking story changes with NewsBlur – as if NewsBlur’s learning technology and mobile clients aren’t enough, being able to track changes on stories is a powerful online journalism tool

    Ideas

    The People’s Net – Douglas Rushkoff’s original article on the dot com crash for Yahoo! Internet Life revisited for the current age of unicorns – Time to channel my inner Dave Winer – Joi Ito’s Web and Joichi Ito on the same theme

    The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox – scientific explanation behind Trump but also the pervasive fear of terrorism that has gripped the west

    Korea

    As 4th trial nears, Samsung asks judge: Make Apple stop talking about Korea | Ars Technica – it because perhaps they’ve mentioned the dishonest involvement in political slush funds as background to explain relative brand honesty and trustworthiness?

    Media

    Maxus launches mood-based planning tool | Marketing Interactive – interesting, particularly with political campaigns

    Welcome to the Era of Programmable Marketing – The AppNexus Impressionist – great primer on programmatic

    China’s new television rules ban homosexuality, drinking, and vengeance – Quartz – so that leaves dramas about patriotic war against the Japanese sans Nanking massacre and dramas about Mao sans cultural revolution

    Online

    Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino – TorrentFreak – Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds – interesting article that touches on the enterprise use of BitTorrent. I suspect Apple’s use of trackers is IP enforcement related

    Retailing

    It’s Discounted, but Is It a Deal? How List Prices Lost Their Meaning | NYTimes.com – interesting article. I remember being shocked when I was first guided through Shenzhen’s markets where products originally destined for UK markets were sold to local consumers – with price reduction tags already attached.

    No surprise with Powa | Steven Prowse – almost as good as The Kernel’s legendary dissection of SpinVox

    So how much was Powa Technologies really worth? | FT Alphaville – clear gap between claimed value and real value even before administration (paywall)

    Adidas to operate 12,000 shops in China by 2020 in bid to tap growth in leisure wear, sports participation – interesting that they are going to 3,000 additional real-world stores rather than focus on e-tailing (paywall)

    Security

    Swarm of Tiny Pirate Transmitters Gets the Message out in Syria – could also reinvigorate pirate radio…

    The FBI Might Be Apple’s Best Ally In iPhone Encryption Flap | Fast Company – the government messed up and its backfired

    Software

    Microsoft canceled $8 billion Slack bid due to Bill Gates and Satya Nadella pushback – Business Insider – Qi Lu would have known Butterfield from Yahoo! ,both worked in the search business at the some time

    Why I’m breaking up with Slack | Quartz – interesting perspective

    Wireless

    In Search of the Amazingly Elusive Non-Smartphone Owner | Recode – not really surprising. I imagine the privacy aspects might encourage a small set to follow them

  • 6 things learned in a corporate environment

    The idea for 6 things learned  in a corporate environment came from having spent four months working day-in, day-out onsite at a large corporate.

      • The working environment is very different to an agency. My desk had to become much more portable. Since the space was all hot-desking with only team PAs assigned permanent desks.  This meant no reference charts stuck up or post-its around the monitor. Instead I boiled my process down to the laptop, a notebook that acted as my organisation memory and a day book that focused on my tasks. That was it, no further paper work
      • Many of the traditional spaces for memos weren’t available. So the back of a toilet door with its regularly updated notices was a lifeline to what was happening where. The coffee machine, once a traditional networking point was less useful as hot desking meant that your serendipitous meetings are random in nature. They often lack the depth of what you have an agency environment. These aren’t shallow people, its a level of impermanence built into the working space
      • The importance of mobile was brought home to me. Each desk space had a phone. You keyed in your number and a PIN and your direct dial number moved with you. But 20 per cent of these phones were out of action at any given time. This wasn’t a problem as people tended to use their mobile phones a lot. We used to talk a lot, over bridged conference call numbers. You would see people on calls pacing the floor listening and talking on their calls via headsets plugged into their mobile handsets. For the first few minutes it feels slightly weird
      • Sustainability and being environmentally friendly were more than having a prominent recycling bin. There is an application that reminded me any time I printed something just how bad I was for the environment. Being green was thoughtfully built into processes rather than bolted on as an afterthought
      • Admittedly, my time at Yahoo! was in a very different company and culture, but being a client is very much a team sport. You only have a limited amount of control, a lot of work has to be done by consensus and through a process. You feel like a very small cog in that process and every small gain was an appreciable win. Making this happen takes up an inordinate amount of time
      • It seemed to be timely when writing this post that I read this article Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – new enterprise software like Workday is still as reassuring clunky as their forebears. Many of the same problems of collaboration and information sharing are still being resolved

    What other things learned in a corporate environment have you come across?