Ged Carroll

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  • Ogilvy social trends + other things

    Ogilvy social trends

    Marshall and James delivered their Ogilvy social trends presentation on a webinar. Included in the Ogilvy social trends presentation is

    • Disposable / transient content
    • Brand banter
    • Sub-dividing communities using greater ad targeting
    • Twitter zero as the organic reach on the platform plunges towards zero
    • Platforms battle for video dominance
    • Rise in privacy facilitating services
    • Digital and identity are blurring the lines between aspiration and self actualisation

    Here is this year’s Ogilvy social trends presentation:

    Vintage logo design

    Flickr user Eric Carl has put together an amazing album of vintage logo design from the 1970s and they are truly splendid in monochrome. They are like set of post modern mons – the iconic symbols that Japanese clans used to represent themselves. They also feel timeless rather than trend driven.

    Great to finally see something we’ve been working on for a good while break cover. I have been working on a global website redesign and digital strategy for the Family Brands unit at Unilever. This is their worldwide margarine (and related cooking ingredients including cream analogues) product portfolio of products. A second project that I have been involved in is a set of adverts that will be rolling out globally. This is debuting in Mexico. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it as the new, new thing beckons.

    David Tran is a Vietnamese man of Chinese ethnic origin. Sriracha sauce actually has its origins in Thai cooking where is also called man phrik. The Vietnamese use it as a condiment for pho and fried Noodles. Huy Fong Foods is named after the Taiwanese owned freighter that got Mr Tran out of Vietnam in 1979. It is called Rooster sauce because of the rooster on the bottle. The rooster is on the bottle because Mr Tran was born in the year of the rooster. 

    Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz | 16 Things looks at the trends shaping the companies that they invest in.

    Rendering fractals using CSS3 and HTML (without the help of JavaScript) | Snowflake – they had me at fractal.

    DLD15 – The Four Horsemen: Amazon/Apple/Facebook & Google–Who Wins/Loses (Scott Galloway) – his delivery is almost like freestyle rap. Galloway highlights real concerns about the business models of Amazon, Facebook and Google; which are destroying wider economic value.

    Amazon has decimated whole industry sectors: retail and retail real estate. It has tried to disrupt publishing and media production. Galloway’s book The Four is less engaging than his keynote delivery. More on The Four here. 

    To support the launch of the film Doraemon: Stand By Me in Hong Kong, a mobile merchandise shop was created that paid homage to the robot cat.

    Hong Kong like other Asian markets (Japan, Korea, Thailand) is a huge market for cute character franchise merchandise.

  • Desktop and mobile messaging

    Whatsapp gets into desktop and mobile messaging

    Over the past few weeks WhatsApp has rolled out a web client to complement its previously mobile-only experience. From a technical point-of-view this was WhatsApp playing catch-up with its rivals.
    Mobile social network ecosystems
    Skype has long been a multi-platform desktop and mobile messaging system that made the leap to phones over eight years ago. LINE has had both desktop and mobile messaging applications for a while. WeChat had had a web interface for at least two years in addition to its mobile client and dedicated desktop clients for both OS X and Windows.
    wechat app
    Those whom I spoke to who had used the web interface talked of WhatsApp’s ‘unique’ way of handing off from mobile to the web through the use of QRcodes. And they were surprised when I showed them WeChat’s implementation that looked eerily similar and has been around for much longer.

    There is a certain paradox that the most successful OTT messaging platforms now have a presence on the desktop, yet instant messaging clients like Yahoo!, MSN, AOL and ICQ weren’t able to successfully move from desktop to mobile.

    So why desktop and why now?

    Is it about WhatsApp putting pressure on Apple to change its model to suit WhatsApp?

    The Messages app in iOS is secure, supports voice, photos and text messages. It offers much of the functionality of WhatsApp. WhatsApp complains that it can’t repeatedly charge on a yearly basis for its service on iOS, yet iOS has supported in-app payments for a while. I suspect WhatsApp wants to get a free ride or its beef with iOS is from some unstated reason.  In summary, whilst WhatsApp’s web service is only available to Android users, I don’t think that this is really about Apple.

    It is threatened by other apps?

    WhatsApp has a big presence across the world (outside of China) in the OTT messaging space with over 700 million active users. However other services are managing to increase their footprint.

    I took a straw poll of some friends with regards their messaging usage. Did they just leave one platform for another in the same way that Google won out in search or was there something else going on?

    Most people that I spoke to weren’t generally deleting  the more popular messaging apps and moving from one to the other generally. (They had tried and sometimes deleted the likes of Telegram or Wickr for instance). But they did have different groups of contacts in different places. So WhatsApp probably isn’t losing its spot on established users phones at all, and having a rival app on a phone isn’t likely to make WhatsApp lose out from being downloaded on a new phone.

    By all accounts, different messaging platforms are about different groups of friends and contexts. WhatsApp tended to connect with family more often than other messaging services.

    Is is about usage time?

    I suspect that this could be the case. It was interesting to hear a couple of friends talk about LINE. They commented that LINE had a range of stickers, but the main reason is that you can use LINE at work without having to use your phone and it be obvious with your boss. I think that this is where WhatsApp could be feeling a gap and decided to fill it.
    what is mobile
    It also begs a second question. When you have laptops that will run for 8 to 10 hours on a battery and slip in a bag like a tablet, is desktop yet another mobile device? The kind of work usage mentioned would also fit in nicely in a coffee shop or in front of the TV with the family; a subtle back channel to the outside world.

    My understanding was that WhatsApp was focused on getting people in the developing world on board, they provided a lean bandwidth frugal messaging platform that was leaner than Facebook. Instead, the web interface is more aimed at ‘first world problems’. More on WhatsApp here.

    More information

    Four Of The Top Six Social Networks Are Actually Chat Apps | Marketingland
    WhatsApp hits 700 million monthly active users — GigaOM
    Messaging app Kik passes 200M users | VentureBeat
    From Messaging Apps To Ecosystems : Line, WeChat, Viber & Others | LinkedIn
    Why Apps for Messaging Are Trending – NYTimes.com
    Every app is a communications app | Layer
    WeChat to overtake WhatsApp as top messaging app in India: GWI | Digital Market Asia
    WeChat Dominates APAC Mobile Messaging in Q3 2014
    Tencent Drafts Chinese Expats for U.S. Duel With WhatsApp – Bloomberg

  • Group direct messages + more news

    Now on Twitter: group Direct Messages and mobile video camera | Twitter Blogs – playing catch up with OTT messaging apps with group direct messages.

    Media

    Disney’s Maker Studios Struggles to Migrate Its Audience To Maker.tv – CMO Today – can’t get the traffic off YouTube

    Online

    Mayer’s Yahoo Plan Could Affect Softbank Interests – WSJ – it depends on who Mayer sells to

    Eric Schmidt Just Admitted Google’s Dominance Is Under Threat: ‘All Bets Are Off’ (FB, GOOG, MSFT) – actually not as billed but an interesting more nuanced portrait of the current landscape  by Schmidt who has become the most acceptable face of Google leadership. More here

    Tumblr Launches An In-House Ad Agency That Pairs Creators With Big Brands | Fast Company – interesting move, shame agencies aren’t stepping up to the plate

    Security

    Army Communications In Pacific Stretched, Tested « Breaking Defense – interesting discussion about data networks issues

    Technology

    Google Joins Apple, Others Cutting Off Crimea, Blocks AdWords, AdSense, Google Play | TechCrunch – interesting to see how this rolls out from a tech point of view. Russia does have replacements such as Yandex in search, advertising and Android app stores

    Davos 2015: Tech giants risk reputation, warn business leaders – FT.com – this is less about the tech sector per se and more about lightning rods of inequality and economic disruption; of which the tech sector is just one. The bigger question is whether issues like the dark side of free speech and privacy start to spark with consumers?

    Wireless

    Mobile internet slower in Hong Kong than mainland, S Korea | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – and the service I enjoyed in Hong Kong was significantly better than the UK…

    The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future | Fast Company – I don’t agree with some of the conclusions, but an interesting piece nonetheless