Ged Carroll

Search results for: “"Mark Ritson"”

  • Mental health data hack + more

    Hackers hijack and publish mental health data of hundreds of people – a scandal caused by the extortion of a group of hackers to a private company that provides mental health services as a psychotherapy center for the Finnish public health system. Finland claims to be at the forefront of digitisation and data security. The criminals managed to access the mental health data of thousands of customers of the Vastaamo after detecting vulnerabilities in their system.How can Vastaamo be sure that mental health data won’t be leaked or sold on in the future. Hackers have already targeted women who shop for plus size clothing with weight loss scams. Now imagine the ‘opportunities’ for bot based counselling, black mail or fake medications that mental health patients offer. Hackers would enrich this data and sell it on again and gain over time allowing for relentless targeting and retargeting of vulnerable people with mental health issues. Given the increase in mental health issues among adults, this would present hackers with a total lifetime revenue stream.

    Smart Solution: Laser Indicators to Make Backing Trucks Up to Loading Docks Easier – wonderfully clever piece of design

    Mark Ritson: Fred Perry must do more than stop selling the Proud Boys shirts – Indeed, if you really want to make something hot among any group, the use of faux-exclusivity or – even better – a genuine attempt to exclude people from the product typically sends them rabid with desire. De-list a salad cream and once-uninterested consumers start bulk-buying it. Make your clothing in sizes that won’t fit older blokes and they will queue up around the block to squeeze their big units into it. Shutting down sales of black and yellow Fred Perry shirts in America will have zero impact on the proportion of them being worn by the Proud Boys. It will most likely exacerbate the situation. Those who already own a shirt will treasure and wear it with even greater pride. And the rest of the membership will resort to the grey and black markets to ensure that they too look like all their fascist mates. – advertising is the way forward, though I would be doing a photo shoot with leather subculture members

    The 1.4bn-people question – Apparatchiks and academics alike struggle to take China’s pulse | China | The Economist – For decades the party had scorned opinion polls as bourgeois and unnecessary—it embodied the will of the Chinese people, so why ask them what they thought? But it has become more open to pulse-taking since Mr Yang’s ordeal, which was described in an article by Tang Wenfang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, published in 2018. Mr Yang says the party is “more paranoid” about public opinion than its democratic peers because it lacks elections or a free press for feedback – this also explains why IPSOS MORI type research is very hard to do in China

    China’s digital signage market to reach CAGR of 18.5% 2020-2024 – (paywall)

    Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police – The New York Times – “I am involved with developing facial recognition to in fact use on Portland police officers, since they are not identifying themselves to the public,” Mr. Howell said. Over the summer, with the city seized by demonstrations against police violence, leaders of the department had told uniformed officers that they could tape over their name. Mr. Howell wanted to know: Would his use of facial recognition technology become illegal? Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, told Mr. Howell that his project was “a little creepy,” but a lawyer for the city clarified that the bills would not apply to individuals. – I can see an increased pressure for legislation making videoing and photographing law enforcement a crime

    ‘Small-budget fallacy’ hurts marketing effectiveness | WARC – Marketers, similarly, erroneously presume that newer digital tactics represent the best approach for brands on a limited budget – a perspective countered by analysis of thousands of case studies from WARC. “Channels like content marketing, social media, influencer marketing, or online display are among the media more likely to create an effectiveness disadvantage,” Hurman said. “And some of those more traditional channels – like TV, PR, events or [direct mail] – are the ones creating an effectiveness advantage.” – Probably one of the most effective articles that marketers could read right now. I don’t disagree that influencers can be effective, but there seems to be a dataless cargo cult built up around it over the past few years.

    Mark Sedwill: Dominic Cummings undermined the government | News | The Times – He also conceded that Britain had at times been “naïve” in dealing with threats from Russia and China. “I think when we’ve allowed the rhetoric to suggest that countries with very different political systems, essentially authoritarian political systems, are edging towards our values and viewing the world, then we’ve probably been mistaken and have overstated the natural alignment.” – the tone towards China in political elites throughout the world is going a lot colder

    Donald Trump paid nearly $200,000 in taxes to China, report claims | The Guardian – paid more tax in China than in the US. I am surprised that more hasn’t been made of this

    Chinese tech firms eye Singapore base amid US-China tensions, coronavirus border closures | South China Morning Post – Bytedance and in particular TikTok data safety issue moves from US and Europe to Singapore

    Nearly half of internet users in Philippines pirate content | Data | Campaign Asia – I wouldn’t be surprised if that number was that far off in the UK given the amount of pirated content on YouTube etc

    If Crisis or War Comes – The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency – great advice in general here (PDF)

    Daring Fireball: The iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro – interesting thoughts on the iPhone 12s. What Gruber doesn’t touch on is the radio improvements, particularly in 4G. I suspect that smartphones are on a 4 – 5 year replacement cycle for many people

    Justice Dept. files long-awaited antitrust suit against Google | Ars Technica – why so rushed? There aren’t votes in this prosecution and going off without the required level of preparation against a well-resourced defence is very risky

    #DanceAwesome Hashtag Videos on TikTok – Samsung has low consideration amongst the young, they used the existing Samsung partnership with K-Pop girl group BlackPink (18.9 million fans on TikTok). A new track Dance Awesome was created with an accompanying dance. Black Pink give it some energy and the dance instructions got 2m views on YouTube. It felt authentic. It resonated with TikTok users. The campaign generated 5m user videos and over 20 billion views, though I would like to see how it affects longer term consideration levels. 

    Open backdoors into apps and adversaries will use them too | Financial Times  – it is interesting how long this has been discussed without significant action taking place. Japan underwent a sales boycott by China of rare earth metals ten years ago and this is still only at the discussion stages in the west

    Conoco/Concho: surfing the wave | Financial Times – interesting consolidation in shale oil businesses. I found CK Hutchison selling out at this time interesting: Cenovus snares Li Ka-shing’s Husky Energy in $7.8bn deal | Financial Times

    Toshiba launches global Quantum Key Distribution QKD business with UK factory – Toshiba estimates the QKD market to grow to approximately $20bn by 2035 and the company aims to take 25 percent of the market (approximately $3bn) in 2030. TDSL has been awarded the contract from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan to deploy and manage the QKD systems that will be installed at multiple locations on their network. Toshiba plans to deliver the system in the fourth quarter of FY2020 and the deployment will start to roll out from April 2021. Outside of Japan, Toshiba Europe worked with BT on the UK’s first industrial deployment of a quantum-secure network, while in the US, Toshiba has participated in the recent QKD demonstration by Verizon Communications with Quantum Xchange. – Fascinating, it means that banks and governments can have secure communications, but consumers can’t, at least until we have several qubits of quantum computing power in a desktop computer and PGP-type situation gain.

    Ericsson and China Telecom achieve 5G Standalone data call – Ericsson Spectrum Sharing is a new way of rolling out 5G that uses existing hardware, spectrum and sites, while enabling increases in mid/high band coverage. It enables 4G, 5G NSA NR and 5G Standalone to be deployed simultaneously across FDD spectrum without the need for dedicated 5G spectrum. With Ericsson Spectrum Sharing, 5G radio resources are shared on a 1 millisecond basis, maximizing spectral efficiency. Most 5G networks have so far been deployed in Non-Standalone (NSA) mode where the underlying 4G network layer supported the necessary signaling. SA removes this 4G dependency. – Great, but Sweden’s ban on ZTE and Huawei in their network is likely to kill off Ericsson’s potential business with China Telecom – Sweden bans Huawei, ZTE from upcoming 5G networks | Reuters 

    First room-temperature superconductor demonstrated | Smart 2.0 – I am skeptical. I wouldn’t have shared it at all but for the fact that the article is from from part of the EE Times group

    Apple Launches ‘Apple Music TV,’ a 24-Hour Music Video Livestream – Variety – MTV left the door open for this, surprised that it hasn’t been done before

    Taiwan’s top 100 brands: Line, Taiwan Mobile, Rakuten among biggest gainers | Campaign Asia – Among the worst declines this year, Japanese electronics brand Sharp and China-based smartphone maker Xiaomi. Sharp’s decline mirrors the waning power of Japan’s legacy brands that we have seen in several other markets this year. – To be fair Sharp’s star has been falling for a long time, which is why Hon Hai Electronics could purchase them. Even Sony is inconsistent across product categories. Toshiba and Hitachi are no longer really consumer names

    String of Firms That Imploded Have Something in Common: Ernst & Young Audited Them – WSJ – is Ernst & Young damaged in the same way that Arthur Anderson was after the Enron scandal or will they survive? It is easy to forget now, but even if Arthur Anderson has escaped the Enron scandal, there was also the WorldCom scandal to pull them down. This is why E&Y feels rather like deja vu

    The flipside of China’s central bank digital currency | ASPI – DC/EP intersects with China’s ambitions to shape global technological and financial standards, for example, through the promotion of RMB internationalisation and fintech standards-setting along sites of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In the long term, therefore, a successful DC/EP could greatly expand the party-state’s ability to monitor and shape economic behaviour well beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Another great paper by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. – I suspect that is the fear of most consumers with a government backed digital currency. I can also understand the concern regarding a digital reserve currency. It is also similar to what can be had with a lot of credit card payment system records

  • Cobblers

    Much of the work in the developing world relies on self employment. Be it farming, fisheries, a small retail operation or repairing products like cobblers or seamstresses. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, self employment accounts for over 70 per cent of the workforce *.

    my tie-dye Toms are here! I LOVE THEM. thank you @annzas!!!!!!!
    A pair of tie-dyed Toms shoes by Rachel

    Let’s use the brand TOMS for a thought experiment about self-employed cobblers.

    TOMS brand purpose came from supplying shoes to the poor. The brand story was that the founder met a lady in Argentina who was providing shoes to shoeless children. The iconic TOMS shoe is actually an alpargata. This is a style popular in Argentina. Blake Mycoskie came up with the TOMS name from ‘tomorrow’. The business promised to donate a pair of shoes for everyone bought.

    You could argue that those people who get the shoes, would likely be unable to buy their own. That it isn’t disrupting delicate market economies and the livelihood of some people in the developing world. But if you could afford to buy local shoes and chose to wear a donated pair – it would be rational decision to make. That would then disrupt the delicate market for cobblers.

    Globalisation

    Back when cobblers and boot makers started to disappear from the high street in the UK, the work started to disappear gradually. There was also a long process of industrialisation to make up for the jobs being lost. There was a process of creation and disruption in the job market. Cobblers business of shoe repairs and boot making bifurcated:

    • The Timpson type model that can repair some issues with modern formal shoes. The heels can be repaired on women’s shoes if they snap off. They cut keys, change watch straps, fit watch batteries and do engravings to keep the business ticking over
    • The Jermyn Street model where one buys a pair of shoes at a premium. They are made on a last with your name on; and repaired and resoled as necessary

    A lot of people now wear sneakers and casual shoes for most of the time. The way that they’re manufactured means that there is little that can be done to repair them.

    So going to a cobbler is no longer a mainstream regular activity for much of UK society. I very rarely wear formal shoes. I have a pair of black leather loafers by Churchs. I used to get them repaired by and old Irish gentleman called Mr Cavanagh. He eventually closed his shop when the business rates meant it was no longer viable. But until he closed I would bring shoes home to be repaired by him, as my Mam and Dad had also done.

    Getting back to our developing world cobblers. The problem in a lot of developing world countries is that there isn’t a similar employment substitution happening for local cobblers. Donated shoes come on top of deindustrialisation. TOMS does try to negate this impact and currently manufactures shoes in Kenya, India, Ethiopia and Haiti.

    But most manufacturing has been centralised in South and East Asia.

    Brand purpose and unintended consequences

    Mark Ritson discussed how brand purpose shouldn’t boost profit, but should become before profit **. When Uncle Ben’s changes its name to Ben’s *** and Aunt Jemima **** because of racial overtones, that isn’t brand purpose (or putting purpose into a brand).

    When an FMCG company stops using palm oil in their food products, that isn’t brand purpose. Brand purpose would be putting money into ways to support farmers so that they didn’t resort to slash and burn palm oil plantations.

    More marketing related content here.

    IZA World of Labor – Self-employment and poverty in developing countries *

    Marketing Week – A true brand purpose doesn’t boost profit, it sacrifices it**

    Marketing Week – Mars put purpose into Uncle Ben’s rebrand ***

    Business Insider – 15 racist brands, mascots, and logos that were considered just another part of American life ****

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    The Lebanese armed forces were celebrating their 75th birthday and wanted to celebrate the contribution that they make to society. So they worked with a marketing agency to come up with PEACECAMO. PEACECAMO is based on photographs taken of different humanitarian incidents over the years that were then rendered into camouflage. These uniforms will be worn when concealment isn’t necessary. For instance parades or humanitarian work. Its a lovely idea, unfortunately this happened before the Beruit port explosion, which has fractured the government from the Lebanese people. More information here. More design related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/m2IGeqRFj1Q
    PEACECAMO video

    Marketing Week columnist and academic Mark Ritson at the Amplify marketing festival. In this presentation Ritson talks about balancing short term and long term needs in marketing. If that sounds familiar, well that’s because Ritson was inspired by this article by Tom Roach here.

    Larry Shiller’s car collection and garage is a site to behold in terms of its scale. Although I wouldn’t be choosing any of these cars for myself I like the way he collects based on a narrow time period of design. You can see the jet age aesthetic coming through in the fins and tail lights.

    I like the way he is pretty much self-sufficient from a parts perspective. With enough time, he can handle most of the repairs himself. This wouldn’t be possible now with the rapid evolution in technology. It was simpler times; chip design and software are essential to most modern cars.

    Photographer Trey Ratcliff has been putting out these videos that would be beloved of VJs playing a rave in the early 1990s. Pull out your old Goa trance CDs and watch with this playlist for full effect.

    If Trey Ratcliff’s videos weren’t trippy enough for you maybe refractive glasses are what you need? Refractive glasses turn each firework into an explosion of hearts 

  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders

    Eat Your Greens is a selection of articles curated by Wiemer Snijders on all things that come up for discussion amongst account planners. Branding, marketing, some home truths about innovation and the value of creative. Much of it recycles the stuff that account planners know from reading Sharp or Field and Binet. In addition there are a few that specifically address diversity, inclusion – but excludes ageism in terms of the ways it talks about these as an issue.

    Where’s the value in Eat Your Greens? The answer to that question depends on where you are in your career. As someone who is established in my career, I found it valuable in a few different ways.

    Some of the essays from the likes of Phil Graves, Mark Ritson and Ryan Wallman, Rose and Faris Yakob, Byron Sharp and Amy Wilson are strong enough to make Eat Your Greens worthwhile in its own right. For instance here’s some of what Ritson had to say:

    “The modern marketer has created an entirely stupid dichotomy between ‘digital communications’ and ‘traditional communications’… There are just tactical tools, and they can only be valued and selected once a target and a position and a strategy are in place. What’s more, it’s clear that most successful campaigns combine multiple channels for optimum success. Most studies suggest that the more channels a campaign includes, the better the ultimate ROI.”

    Mark Ritson in Eat Your Greens

    Going through the essays allowed me to come up with recommendations of new reading materials referenced in the essays – I have been using it to bulk up my Amazon list.

    Essays that I would particularly recommend:

    • What Ails Marketing by Mark Ritson
    • Post-Truth Telly by Tess Alps
    • To Target Or Not To Target, That’s Not The Question by Shann Biglione
    • Everybody Lies – The Importance of Psychological Validity In Consumer Insight by Phil Graves
    • The Devaluation of Creativity by Bob Hoffman
    • Biting The Hand That Feeds Us? Why Advertising’s Love Of Novelty Is Doing Brands A Disservice by Kate Waters
    • Why Innovation Isn’t As Sexy As Business Books Promise by Costas Papaikonomou

    For busy marketers or junior planners, Eat Your Greens is a nice introductory point for a number of issues in marketing, such as the corrosive digitisation of marketing.

    I think it fulfils an important role. Particularly for junior planners as many agencies now rely on an army of freelance talent. Eat Your Greens isn’t a substitute for having senior staff developing younger account planning minds on the job. But given the current state of agencies, its probably one of the best options that we have. More book reviews here and my slowly updated bookshelf here.

  • Venture capital, clean tech + more

    Venture Capital and Cleantech: The Wrong Model for Clean Energy Innovation by Gaddy, Sivaram and O’Sullivan – venture capital investment is very inefficient according to this MIT paper. More venture capital related posts here.

    Why business in Hong Kong should be worried | The Economist – Hong Kong is trapped like the grips of vice. Its economy is dominated by finance and rent-seeking businesses – Simon Cartledge for Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, because these firms are over-represented in government, “Hong Kong’s single biggest disincentive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship—its high costs, especially for property—cannot be tackled.” That is why the back-to-business message is unlikely to resonate with ordinary Hong Kongers. This is probably why Hong Kong start-ups like DJI moved to Shenzhen to found their businesses. (Frank Wang did a lot of the key work on DJI drones whilst studying at HKUST. And even benefited from a small HKUST grant. But he moved across to Shenzhen to found the business itself in 2006.) Fintech has been a bit of a busted flush. It was the latest in a long line of business ideas like wine trading, the arts and medical tourism as failed niches for Hong Kong. Singapore seems to have been much more successful in business creation and seems to be seeing more venture capital interest. Current sectors in Hong Kong likely to be affected include the legal practices specialising in commercial arbitration. Without trustworthy commercial arbitration in Hong Kong doing business in China looks much less attractive. Singapore is trying to bridge the gap, but I suspect that there might be long term corrosion of Chinese business dealings. Digital companies and foreign banks face big worries. Between the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong National Security Law – Helping America to enforce sanctions would violate the security law. Not doing so would incur American penalties

    The untold story of Stripe, the secretive $20bn startup driving Apple, Amazon and Facebook | WIRED UK – what’s more interesting about Stripe is the brothers reading list

    Remarks to the Economic Club of New York – United States Department of State – interesting speech by Mike Pompeo

    What It’s Like to Escape the Mindset of a Conspiracy Theorist – Vice – fascinating psychology

    Barr warns against corporate America’s China ‘appeasement’ | Financial Times – “You should be alert to how you might be used, and how your efforts on behalf of a foreign company or government could implicate the Foreign Agents Registration Act,” he said, referencing a 1938 law that requires foreign agents to publicly identify themselves – those comments hit US banks, Apple and other US multinationals. Attorney General William P. Barr Delivers Remarks on China Policy at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum | OPA | Department of Justice – the US C-suite executives must be getting very worried about this

    Quisling

    The State of Strategy. A view from the Frontline | Noteworthy – The Journal Blog – great read and nails the issues affecting strategy and planning at the moment

    Mark Ritson: In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive – Companies see better profit margins and an almost unlimited customer base but miss the drastic reduction in barriers to entry. – so brand hyper-competition will ensue and the winner takes all model will extend beyond tech. Expect venture capital money to pour all kinds of weird industry niches as they try to pick category winners

    WeChat users in the US say a potential ban of the app would cut them off from friends and family in China | South China Morning Post – Banning it might be a mistake. It would be more worthwhile using WeChat data to investigate Chinese in the US with ‘anti American’ sentiment as it’s easy to surveill in comparison to other platforms. WeChat sends messages in the clear with no encryption at all. You then start using the Espionage Act or the Patriot Act prosecutions

    Chinese liquor group Kweichow Moutai tumbles after graft news report | Financial Times – Moutai sales are linked to gifting and lavish consumption and some have linked the share price increase with a corresponding uplift in sales and by implication graft. The damaging bit in the article is that Moutai’s former chairman Yuan Renguo quoted saying in private that sales linked to corruption are “a normal part of business” and that China’s corruption clampdown would not reach far enough to affect the company’s business

    Banning junk food from TV an ‘irrelevant symbolic gesture’ that won’t reduce obesity | The Drum – the argument whilst true won’t be believed by regulators. Their rationale would be why would junk food companies advertise if it didn’t work? The distinction of this is junk food brand fighting out with similar brands in its category won’t wash. Secondly, advertising bans worked in the past on tobacco products over time

    The party’s grip – Under a new national-security law, Hong Kong is already a changed city | The Economist – you have to wonder about the share run and will the pop of the bubble be blamed on ‘foreign interference’?

    Outrage Over China’s Treatment of Hong Kong Galvanizes the West – WSJ – Complaints about China have piled up in Western capitals in recent years, but it took Beijing’s new curbs on Hong Kong’s autonomy to galvanize them around something approaching a common cause. – In many respects its like boiling a frog in reverse, it is likely that China didn’t expect the frog to jump out of the pot, given that the heat had been on so long

    Opinion | A Coronavirus Care Package From China – The New York Times – After the Communist takeover in 1949, traditional Chinese medicine was institutionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill both a tangible need — credentialed doctors were scarce — and an ideological end: That system of knowledge is quintessentially and uniquely Chinese.  Today, the Chinese government sees a political opportunity in the continuing emotional appeal of traditional medicine. If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern alternative to Western medicine, they might also be more likely to accept the Communist Party’s governance model and reject liberal democracy

    Speaking in Tongues – Chinese Storytellers – such a great essay on the current challenge facing Chinese (and in particular Hong Kongers) writing for foreign audiences: a Chinese storyteller telling stories for an English-speaking audience in a divided world. As a writer who has called Hong Kong, Beijing and New Haven home, I find myself often in the position of what Zadie Smith once called “speaking in tongues”: equivocating between the lens of the insider and the outsider, examining the places I call home with both the “objective,” parachuted gaze of the foreign correspondent, and the emotionally implicated and invested eye of the local storyteller. Increasingly, that has felt impossible

    Google considers alternatives to Hong Kong for undersea cable | Financial Times – Hong Kong has – become less critical for not only US cloud providers but also their Chinese rivals, according to Tao Wu, a senior research analyst for Gartner, a tech research firm. “Singapore has become much more important than Hong Kong from a location and population perspective,” Ms Wu said. “Other top cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud are much more focused on south-east Asia to go global than expanding in Hong Kong.” – this will have a big impact for those property developers who’ve invested in data centres (internet hotels). Hong Kong’s financial position for international trading desks will also be diminished if international telecoms infrastructure starts to divert away from Hong Kong. From a pure connectivity point of view Korea, Singapore and even the Philippines start to look really good

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