Ged Carroll

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  • MWC 2015 from the Sidelines: Day Zero

    Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2015 in Barcelona has kicked off, though for many of my Racepoint colleagues the event started months ago. During this week we’ll see the pay-off from preparation that involved long days and late nights burning the midnight oil.

    I won’t be there this year and so have been watching the event unfold from the sidelines.

    In contrast to previous years, MWC 2015 now has a de-facto day zero as HTC, Huawei, LG and Samsung all launched consumer devices on the Sunday. Android devices are no longer lagging in industrial design with all the smartphones launched eschewing plastic in favour of a metal chassis, or glass and metal case design; in order to provide a premium-looking product.

    Secondly wearables are improving in leaps and bounds with the Android Wear devices looking more polished than the new Pebble discussed over the previous few weeks. The Apple Watch won’t have the same gap in industrial design to competitor products that the Apple iPhone enjoyed on launch.

    HTC launched an Occulus Rift rival in association with games platform Valve. However the Vive was notable more for its clunky industrial design rather than technological disruption.

    Whist there were great leaps forward being made in product design for wearables, online discussions still centred around smartphone devices, with early adopters being focused on device core hardware – at the expense of features that provide a differentiated consumer experience.
    pr

    It was immediately apparent from running analytics on online chatter was the prominence in social as a vehicle for challenger brands to get their message across, and the huge interest in MWC launches from the US.

    country by country
    Would a device launched at the US CTIA event have a similar global consumer impact?

    There is a wider question which remains to be answered regarding the efficacy of a ‘going early’ media launch strategy at MWC; particularly when one’s competitors have all adopted a similar strategy.

    It is hard to judge the answer to this question purely on the response to the Microsoft and Sony events earlier this morning. It would be unfair to compare their relatively lacklustre handset line-up in comparison to the day before. Whilst HTC, Huawei, LG and Samsung focused primarily focused on premium devices, Microsoft and Sony featured at least some mid-market handsets.

    More information
    LG launches LG Watch Urbane at MWC, but disappoints with lack of G4 flagship | The Telegraph
    MWC 2015: Huawei MediaPad X2, Watch, Talkband N1 and N2 | GSM Arena
    Live from Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event at MWC! | Engadget
    MWC 2015: HTC One M9, Grip hands-on | GSM Arena
    Pebble Time: Hands-on with the most successful Kickstarter project ever | Pocket Lint

    All the day  derived in the charts using Sysomos MAP.

  • Singapore police + more things

    The Singapore Police issued this video where a cardboard cut-out sign warning shoplifters is brought to life, hilarity ensued amongst Singaporean netizens

    Post by Singapore Police Force.
    Disclosure: Singapore Home Team is a former client. The Singapore Home Team is made up of the different services that sit under the Ministry of Home Affairs including the Singapore Police. Guns n’ Roses Welcome To The Jungle for two cellos. It sounds more of an emotional roller-coaster this way than the original version by Guns n’ Roses. In that respect it reminds me of The Nursery remake of Haunted Dancefloor, originally recorded by Sabres of Paradise. IAB on how to get consumers to actually use an app rather than just download it. A focus on putting the core focus of the app front and centre. Being able to reengage is also important. Focus on an app to do one thing really well rather than being a Swiss Army Knife type approach to app development. Like anything else, if the app doesn’t add value, it doesn’t make a difference. I surprised to hear that apps were used as a display campaign by brands. Amazing ‘flow motion’ video that showcases Dubai. It highlights the way Dubai architecture feels like a letter from the future. This is partly due because there was little in Dubai prior to the modern city being built. More on the history of Dubai can found here. The soundtrack of the week was this great tech house mix by DJ Rolando Rolando relocated from Detroit to Edinburgh, Scotland since he became famous with Jaguar. He has his own label R3 (which stands for Roland Rocha Records) The records tend to fit into the melodic side of techno, what would be later called tech house. With the move to Europe eventually came a residency at Berlin club Berghain.

  • 8K resolution & other things

    NHK unveils 8K tech | TelecomAsia – of course the challenge is having a TV big enough to make 8K worthwhile. 4K is the height of digital experience at the moment. If you go to watch a film in the West End on a digital projector, you will be watching 4K rather than 8K images. Secondly pixel density like 8K is only one aspect of image improvements. Others including high dynamic range images that are brighter and clearer. Finally the controversial double frame rate of 60 frames per second. This is supposed to provide smoother movement, but has proven to be a divisive experience with cinema audiences. Particularly when it was used on Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. More related content here.

    China

    Foreign manufacturer exodus from China | Quartz – however a lot of business isn’t moving because of the depth of expertise and clusters of related businesses that they rely on. This has been a bit overwrought and there is also further inland opportunities

    Consumer behaviour

    Where’s Britain spending? Barclaycard – interesting Q4 data (PDF data)

    Culture

    An Everton Fan On Why Scousers Hate The National Team – Sabotage Times – the complexity of national identity played out on a small scale

    Finance

    Hong Kong’s unwanted HK$1,000 banknote is the money launderer’s medium of choice | SCMP – intersting that cash usage has increased by 6 per cent in real terms. Something to ponder on in the face of cryptocurrency and electronic payments

    FMCG

    Krispy Kreme ‘KKK Wednesdays’ Facebook ad – Business Insider – I can’t believe that they went there. You would be hard pressed to make this up.

    Ideas

    London is changing – interesting experiment by Central St Martins

    Japan

    Press Releases : DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom Develop New Indoor Navigation Technology | NTT DOCOMO – really interesting move on indoor where2.0 services between DOCOMO and ZENRIN DataCom. I know that a wide range of vendors from aerospace and defence giant EADS to Ruckus Wireless that have explored this area over the years

    Luxury

    Wine fortunes take off for labels featured on inflight menus | SCMP – inflight cuisine is a great marketing opportunity for wine brands

    Media

    YouTube makes a move against brand-sponsored videos | Digiday – this is huge for the likes of PR agencies and networks like Nuffnang

    Online

    spaceprob.es catalogs the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy – beautiful site

    Introducing TweetDeck Teams | Twitter Blogs – tries to win back users with Tweetdeck Teams against Hootsuite

    Apple – Press Info – Apple to Invest €1.7 Billion in New European Data Centres – data centre for Athenry, County Galway, hopefully the area will get a backbone upgrade to match

    Security

    Pages – Update on the SIM card encryption keys matter | Gemalto – Initial conclusions already indicate that Gemalto SIM products (as well as banking cards, passports and other products and platforms) are secure and the Company doesn’t expect to endure a significant financial prejudice – if the hack was that obvious surely it would have been picked up before now and of flagged? If the security services dd their job well there would be few fingerprints

    The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle | The//Intercept – that completely screws Gemalto

    Software

    Avicii and Other DJs Produce Hits Using Pirated Software | Torrentfreak – interesting connection to Universal Music’s Per Sundin

    Web of no web

    Daring Fireball: Thinking About the Split in Apple Watch Sales by Model – basically the WSJ numbers are rubbish, especially with luxury consumption down in China

    Why the Internet of Things matters – and what it means for marketers everywhere | Percolate – (PDF)

  • A Twitter experiment on fake followers

    In 2013, I worked with a number of companies and executives that has used services to inflate their Sina Weibo accounts standing with fake followers.  (In case you haven’t heard about it, Sina Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging service). Often this was seen as a cheap way of getting an ego-boosting metric on their account or showing a positive delta relatively cheaply.

    The idea of follower count as a measure of worth can be seen in real life. Look at the front cover of magazines and the value of a celebrity is often measured in the number of followers that they have.
    Untitled
    Take this Elle magazine cover and interview with Kim Kardashian. Kardashian’s social media presence is as much a mark of status as a Hermès Birkin bag.
    ingrid's birkin
    However with Birkin bags going for as much as £55,000 online (holds head in hands and rocks slowly back-and-forth), getting fake followers on social platforms like Twitter might be a bit easier. If Twitter isn’t your thing, there are a number of suppliers of fake followers for Instagram, fake YouTube subscribers and fake Facebook likes too.

    I want to reiterate this here, acquiring fake followers is a cross-platform issue, Twitter is just a handy canary in the coal mine. The reason for this is the amount of tools that are are available to measure Twitter as a platform and the prevalence of its use amongst media elites.

    Looking at the variety of fake follower services, it seems to be a thriving business. A quick search on buy twitter followers cheap gave me over 31,100,000 results according to Google, and who am I to argue with their maths?

    De Micheli and Stroppa estimated that fake accounts used as fake followers accounted for 4 per cent of the Twitter user base, whilst Twitter claimed that the number was 5% in the S-1 document it filed prior to its IPO. The estimates of fake accounts on Sina Weibo are thought to be as high as 30% of the user base – it is hard to tell because Chinese Weibo consumption tends to be largely passive using it as a news stream rather than a ‘social’ channel.

    Politicians and celebrities have both been caught out using fake followers to bolster numbers (presumably to add credibility to their social presence).

    So what are the benefits and how does it work?

    I added 55,000 fake followers on Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

    The process itself is really easy. The fake follower services generally accept payment by PayPal and have easy-to-use e-commerce services. The followers are generally delivered over two-to-five working days.

    First I tried buying a big batch of followers, 50,000. The supplier delivered 56,000+ followers, but the number declines by about 100 followers over a week or so. This number seems to be pretty consistent. I can’t work out if this is just a common business practice or a part of Twitter’s ongoing conflict with fake accounts.

    The purchase didn’t:

    • Move my Klout score
    • Improve the quality or number of organic followers that I received

    I made a second purchase with a different vendor for 5,000 fake followers. This was delivered over five days, again an extra 10 per cent of followers were added on the top by the vendor and a similar decay pattern of about 5% of the followers occurred. This small increase had more of an effect on Klout causing a temporary bump in the score.  It has a more pronounced effect on Sysomos authority measure bumping my authority from 7 to 9 out of a possible 10.

    It didn’t improve the volume or quality of followers that my account got organically.

    With both vendors at least 5 per cent of the accounts that they used seemed to real people’s dormant accounts that had been co-opted into the fake follower game. There obviously seemed to be a market in taking over accounts that had been dormant for over 12 months. None of the fake follower accounts were set to private – this could factor into developing a heuristic for looking at fake follower accounts?

    My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system. More related content here.

    More information

    Pay up and embrace Twitter’s fake followers | Marketing Week
    Fake Twitter followers: An easy game, but not worth the risk | The Next Web
    How the market in ‘fake’ Twitter followers works | Yahoo! News
    Rihanna Loses 1.2 Million Instagram Followers After Spambot Purge | Gigwise
    Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots | The Verge
    Twitter and the underground market by Carlo De Micheli & Andrea Stroppa at 11th Nexa Lunch Seminar, Turin, Italy (May 22, 2013) – PDF
    Inside a Twitter Robot Factory | WSJ
    Twitter Admits 5% Of Its ‘Users’ Are Fake | Business Insider
    I Bought 10,000 Fake Twitter Followers. Why Didn’t Klout, Kred (or Others) Notice? | Ignite Social Media

  • Marketing singularities

    This post was prompted by a couple of conversations over the past few days that culminated in the idea of marketing singularities.

    Conversation number one

    A friend pointed out that they’ve got a new job, just received a document on what we’re doing from my global social agency ‘X’. What’s your opinion of them and where do you think client and agency responsibilities should lie? Question number two didn’t really get answered as ‘X’ is a social agency? was a much more interesting talking point. Would they be any good, when did they become a social agency? What just happened? The upshot of it is that social is a thing that everyone is now an expert in.

    surveillance sticker art

    Conversation number two

    I was in conversation with a potential technology vendor for a specific project and I outlined the point solution that I liked about their product, which was something that made them a particularly good fit for said project. They then explained to me why they were so much more than the point solution I required and were in fact a complete CRM-type solution.

    Other peers (let’s not call them competitors, as they have a slightly different world view and do slightly different things) have been acquired by CRM or software vendors. Those that were too big to buy have done deals to integrate their offering as a kind VAR-like partnership.

    Structure

    What these two conversations are indicative of are a pair of marketing singularities.

    Think of marketing as a broadly horizontal industry sector rather than the vertically integrated leviathans that are often brought to mind by the words Martin + Sorrell or the letters W, P +P respectively.

    I would consider the marketing groups to be more analogous to conglomerates than integrated marketing creatures. Competing clients and bespoke client needs create the need for different marketing brands and single purpose agencies but for many parts of the business they tend to operate independently from a day-to-day operation. Collaboration and genuinely integrated working are journeys to be yet taken rather than destinations that they will be soon arriving at.

    WPP are an interesting organisation in that as a conglomerate they have tried to build a vertical stack of agencies and technology vendors. They own a variety of technology companies particularly involved in the purchasing of online advertising (programmatic advertising or real-time bidding as it has been called in the past).

    There has been concerns amongst amongst the ad worlds largest clients that groups may use their privileged position as vendor and agency to play against their clients. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of both agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    So there is both client pressure and expertise factors that come into play which suggest the horizontal model is likely to be dominant for some time to come – now matter how many spreadsheets using a Monte Carlo method are developed by investment banks predicting a sure-fire success.

    However within this  horizontal model there some consolidation happening. On the one hand tools are rushing towards total customer information awareness. The key problem is one of structure, tools are used to selling into one kind of person (someone like me), not re-engineering a business from the ground up. Secondly relationships with agencies are not going to provide the kind of trust and access that would be required to fulfil the full potential of this vision.

    You could imagine the conversation in the board room

    Hi Mr CEO, Sterling Cooper Draper Price, the marketing agency the last CMO appointed want to re-engineer our business with their social software.

    Wait a minute Mr CTO, when did we have Sterling Cooper on board? What happened to McMann and Tate?

    They were fired two years ago by the last CMO, who left six months ago

    Our current CMO handed in her resignation yesterday, to start her own yoga retreat franchise. No doubt the new one will want their own agency…

    Ok, so a bit of poetic license is used in this thought experiment, but the point is suppliers like marketing agencies tend to be changed more frequently than the vendors of key business systems. Something has to change radically for this work.

    Whilst on the agency side of things everyone has tried to ‘own’ the social space as there is client fatigue over what that now means. And while social is now something everyone does at a marketing agency level, there are less individuals who are willing to admit that they have a specialism in it; as it seems to have about as much long term career growth in it as being a CB radio operator. More marketing related content here.