Ged Carroll

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  • Yoshiharu Sato & more

    Yoshiharu Sato

    I am a big fan of Studio Ghibli – a kind of Japanese thinking mans Disney Studio. One of their alumni Yoshiharu Sato has branched out and produced this amazing advert for a Japanese alcohol brand with a strong theme of nostalgia. Like Studio Ghibli, Yoshiharu Sato creates amazingly emotive animation.  The Ghibli heritage Yoshiharu Sato got working on the likes of Arrietty, My Friend Totoro and Porco Rosso can also be see in these bread company adverts.  

    Liam Neeson

    Before Christmas Fox Studios had used LinkedIn to launch the latest in the ‘Taken’ series of films with Liam Neeson’s character Bryan Mills riffing of his ‘particular set of skills’. Well we now know who won the endorsement from Bryan Mills and here it is. Neeson has one of the best voices in Hollywood, distinctive, yet clear. It’s like Sean Connery but with less fluff and more steel. 

    The Prodigy

    The Prodigy are back and their latest track Nasty has a psychedelic urban fox video to accompany it. The fox living in urban areas is the European equivalent of the trash bandit raccoons in North American cities. There is a darkness to the artwork that matches the music. This is a world away from the jester outfits of the early Prodigy rave tracks. 

    INK Hotel, Amsterdam

    INK Hotel in Amsterdam have used storytelling to create a unique recruitment video. It is labouring heavily on the cast metaphor that service industry businesses have adopted a la Disneyland. But it is still beautifully made as a film. It is also likely to engage prospective guests based on this insider view

    Autodesk

    CAS software company Autodesk have an artist-in-residence programme called Pier 9, and created a great video about it. In some respects it reminds me of where Intel went with its creators partnerships organised by Vice Media

  • Li Ka shing + more news

    From ‘superman’ to ‘big tiger’, Li Ka shing loses favour with Beijing | South China Morning Post – interesting analysis of the changing sentiment of the Chinese government to Li Ka shing. Li Ka-shing has managed to walk his own path, even compared to other Hong Kong oligarchs. He was also able to play well with westerners. Li Ka shing was just just a man with a plastic flower factory and a headful of ambition until he persuaded HSBC to help him acquire property during the 1967 riots. HSBC bought into Hutchison Whampoa in 1979, got rid of the current taipan Douglas Clague. They then lent Li Ka shing the money to buy the business, including HSBC’s own 22% stake at a knockdown price of 639 million Hong Kong dollars. A large amount of money, but still less than the value of the assets being bought. Li has become even richer thanks to skilful use of the conglomerate discount phenomenon

    Consumer behaviour

    The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis: Drivers of Prediction Accuracy in World Politics – Journal of Experimental Psychology – interesting traits and teams rather than individuals tend to do better. It would be interesting to see how this affects the wisdom of crowds given they are a mass of individuals rather than a team per se (PDF)

    FMCG

    Most Energy Drink Companies Market to Minors, Report Finds | Time – this could be a ticking time bomb from a regulatory point of view

    Media

    Case Study: How Huawei turned its smartphone business around | Marketing Interactive – superlative headline but interesting overview of programmatic buying in China via iClick

    Millward Brown Digital partners with Snapchat | Research Live – interesting they can tell an ad

    Vinyl’s difficult comeback | The Guardian – interesting opportunity for manufacturing record press machines

    Online

    LIVEhouse.in – Online Broadcasting Service – really cool Asian content

    Security

    UK’s Cameron won’t “allow” strong encryption of communications — GigaOM – this is the most disturbing stuff I have seen and read in a long term, the Home Secretary is a political role by its very nature. It is not even an independent judiciary signing off. Secondly, given the poor understanding of technology by the body politic in the UK it doesn’t inspire confidence – if there is a back door for HMG, there is a back door for an abusive third party. Finally this is crush or encourage innovative start ups who focus on privacy to move offshore – Shoreditch to Berlin for instance. More related content here.

    Wireless

    BlackBerry Responds to Media Report – Press Releases – not talking to Samsung, it didn’t sound like it made sense to me

    Smartphones At Tipping Point In China | Young’s China Business – domestic Chinese smartphone market likely to contract 10 per cent over the next year – shipments of all types of cellphones actually plummeted 22 percent in China last year to 452 million units, led by a 64 percent plunge in 2G models and 46 percent drop in 3G ones. (Chinese article) China’s mobile users now number 1.28 billion, giving the nation a penetration rate of 95 percent. 

    Smartphone shipments didn’t fare nearly as badly as the older 2G and 3G models, but were still down 8.2 percent last year to 389 million units. That means that a hefty 86 percent of all cellphones shipped in China last year were smartphones, which were rapidly flooding the market as new players jumped joined the space and older ones ramped up production. 

    It’s worth noting that the 389 million figure is unit shipments and not actual sales. I suspect a big portion of those smartphones — perhaps as much as 20-30 percent — are still sitting in distributor warehouses and on store shelves as unsold inventory due to the market saturation – expect channel clearing sales or developing market dumping

  • Changing definition of what social means

    What social means

    This inspiration for this post about what social means came from working with business-to-business marketing clients and prospects. Its based on thinking I’ve done over the past six months or so. Based on the experience I had talking to clients and the work that I have been doing I came up with a what I’ll describe as a working hypothesis.
    Sale

    The past Cluetrain Manifesto

    For a number of years, business and consumer social marketers have taken The Cluetrain Manifesto as their talisman. What social means was defined by a series of statements or beliefs outlined in the book. The outcome was that social media marketing was seen in terms of  re-defining the relationship between stakeholders and a business. This was around a number of values including:

    • Transparency
    • Speedy response
    • Humane
    • Resp0nsiveness

    What social means now

    What social means has changed, at least in Europe. I would put part of the change down to technological capabilities influencing the philosophy around social and the fact that business-to-business are measured exclusively on sales when they are not corporate HQ. And if they are corporate HQ for a non-US domiciled company the focus is much more quarterly results-orientated, so even the corporate social accounts are expected to carry their weight in terms of delivering regular prospective customers.

    The focus has changed:

    • Brand communities and corporate reputation have given way to performance marketing
    • Influencer programmes have given way to prospect-baiting content marketing
    • Engagement has given way to CTA (call to action) and customer path to purchase
    • Building customer loyalty has given way to purchase satisfaction

    The emphasis has moved from the brand to performance marketing, even for what would be seen to be corporate communications. The fig leaf of reputation used to protect corporate PR has been torn away in social media. A secondary aspect of this is a less tangible decline in the stock of social media or community professionals at least within the business-to-business context.

    Whilst the organisations I have been dealing with are in the early stages of thinking about marketing automation, with only a few going through the costly integration process for the likes of Eloquia or Pardot – the philosophy behind them has become the defacto view.

    I spent far too long writing this post, in between starting drafting this post and pressing publish, two of the authors (David Weinberger and Doc Searls) responsible for the Cluetrain Manifesto have updated it to reflect marketing realities online which broadly touch on areas of my hypothesis and I have included a link at the bottom.

    In the words of Bill Hicks business-to-business marketers run the risk of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

    More information
    The Cluetrain Manifesto
    New Clues
    #NewClues and #VRM – Watching The Watchers

  • NSA spying + more things

    Former MS privacy chief warned of NSA spying | Telecom Asia – The issue is that most privacy laws were drafted to cover communications, not computing and that technically it is possible to encrypt data and store it securely in the cloud. However, that is not possible if one wants to compute with that data – NSA spying is just the canary in the coal mine. What is being done on NSA spying today is also likely being done by the Chinese MSS, the main European powers, the British and the Israelis. Swiftly following them will be the UAE and Saudi Arabia followed by regimes across the world

    Here’s What Some Teens Are Using Instead Of Snapchat And Instagram To Share Pictures In Class – interesting that this is innovative and yet people have been Bluetoothing content for years

    Xiaomi Confirms It Sold 61M Phones In 2014, Has Plans To Expand To More Countries | TechCrunch – so Xiaomi is valued at roughly 750 dollars for each handset sold this year?

    Alcatel’s new Pixi smartphone can run Windows, Android, or Firefox OS | The Verge – interesting move, curious why SallfishOS isn’t getting any play

    How to get 35 million downloads in 7 weeks / The short head of Apps – part 1 | The Short Head – great data analysis on app downloads with data via Appbrain

    U.S.: No alternate leads in Sony hack – Tal Kopan – POLITICO – this is starting to get embarrassing

    ‘Monster Strike’ Gives Former Social Media Giant Mixi a Second Act – NYTimes.com – really happy for the people at Mixi, I thought their first mobile social network was a smart play, but you can’t fight Metcalfe’s Law

    montblanc timewalker urban speed smart e-strap turns a timepiece into a smart watch | Design Boom – interesting less in the ‘extinction of Swiss watchmakers’ which isn’t on the cards (by tech companies anyway) and more in the user context in the design, the information conveyed is discrete, glanceable and filtered only for the really important shizzle

    Only 5% of US iPhone users say they’re very likely to buy an Apple Watch – not terribly surprised suspect its more aimed at China, Korea, Japan

    Fintech Trends in China to Watch in 2015 | TechNode – P2P consumer lending and comparative shopping engines a la moneysupermarket.com

    Moth City – great digital comic

    Is Xiaomi developing its own operating system? | WantChinaTimes – interesting that this is focusing on low-end handsets and is seen to be a target for FireFoxOS rather than Android or SailfishOS

    One Of The Most Elaborate Alternate Reality Games Ever Is Launching In 2015 | ReadWriteWeb – really interesting idea

    At CES let’s just concede defeat for an open standard for IoT | GigaOM – no XML for the IoT?

    Huawei Smartphone Shipment Rocketed Over 40% YOY to 75M Units in 2014 | Technode – focus on cheaper handsets rather than trying to crack premium

    Leaked NSA Documents Reveal The Best Way To Stay Anonymous Online | Business Insider – but will that stack perform at a usable speed?

    LG brings LINE to internet enabled fridges, ovens, washing machines and more | SiliconAngle – what is the user context that this envisages?

    JR Rolls Beacon Navi for Tokyo Station | Wireless Watch Japan – interesting internal navigation application of beacon (low power Bluetooth technology

    Dark Mail specifications – step on the road to strong email protection

    Hands On: How Haptic Technologies Will Bring Touch to VR | Make Use Of – break out your Nintendo PowerGlove. More on haptics here

    China Blocks Access to Google’s Gmail as Ban Escalates – Bloomberg – just formalises what has been going on

    From Gongkai to Open Source | Bunnies Studios – really interesting examination of IP differences and opportunities

  • New Balance China & things that made my week

    New Balance China made a video out of what looks like a product photoshoot of different MT580 colour ways

    New Balance China like New Balance Japan seems to move to its down design language.

    I had fallen out of touch with podcasts since the demise of Lawrence Staden and Stephen Bell’s ‘Loz n Belly’ weekly commentary on economic issues a few years ago, but got hooked again when I was introduced to Studio 360’s American Icons programmes. If anyone has any recommendations for good financial and economic podcasts let me know in the comment box below and will give them a whirl.

    I thought it was just my perception that OS X had slowed down somewhat over the past couple of iterations, but this video gave me some food for thought.

    I am just a sucker for fractals. I spent far too much time in college in front of a Mac 7500 and a colour monitor going deeper and deeper into a Mandelbrot set, so this video really resonated. Play it on full screen, sit back and enjoy

    I have a boundless fascination of mechanical watches and this teardown of a Rolex Submariner brings home the miracle and beauty of their mechanical engineering. Rolex do slow and steady innovation in their movements. They also use a high degree of automation in the manufacture of their parts – all of which is done on-site. Rolex keeps is assembly process largely secret, but likely involves a high degree of precision assembly automation that would be more impressive than even Hon Hai Electronics efforts in China. You can take your Apple Watch and shove it. You can see more luxury related content here.