Ged Carroll

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  • October 2023 newsletter – 3rd time’s the charm

    October 2023 newsletter introduction

    As I write the October 2023 newsletter. it’s getting noticeably darker outside earlier, but the sunrises reward us with a wider variation of colours. And we all have Halloween to look forward to. This is the third issue and I am still finding my way writing these things. I hope that the third time’s a charm, but I will let you be the judge of that. You can read the earlier ones here.

    Strategic outcomes

    I looked into where the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’ came from. Apparently it comes from Old English Law, if a prisoner survived three attempts at hanging and survived, they would be set free.

    Last of Days

    You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. Let’s get it started!

    Things I’ve written.

    • Climate despair – how NGOs and companies are failing young people in the way they talk about climate change and what they can do to change their communications to increase active participation in reducing the degree of climate change.
    • Technopolarity – how technology is subverting the power structures of elected governments and instead empowering the likes of Elon Musk.
    • Clustomers – how Intuit MailChimp’s ad campaign, whilst clever, might reinforce C-suite misconceptions around marketing and advertising

    Books that I have read.

    • These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life – RyanHoliday.net – whilst its not a book, it does contain great advice for readers
    • Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Fogg’s simple model for understanding individual behaviours has helped drive everything from health campaigns to online services. Tiny Habits how consumers and businesses can help foster behavioural change, one tiny habit at a time. More on my review of the book here. 
    • The long awaited Mick Herron book The Secret Hours did not disappoint. It’s from the Slow Horses universe, but not a Slough House story per se. More than a nod to Boris Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary and prime minister. I will leave it at that rather than give you plot spoilers.
    • China A History by John Keay. Keay’s book was recommended to me by a number of people. In 535 pages he attempts the impossible in terms of covering China’s history as a civilisation through the start of Xi Jinping’s first administration. It’s a dense read – it’s well written, covering the complexity of history well. The current communist government is barely a footnote (ok exaggerating a bit here), but it puts things in perspective.
    • Spain A History edited by Raymond Carr. The book highlights the notable trends, intellectual and social, of each particular era in its history. Roman rule created the notion of ‘Spain’ as a distinct entity. The chapters on the Visigoth monarchy, Moorish Spain, the establishment, an empire, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all chart the cultural, political and economic arc of Spain. It then goes on to explore 19th century liberalism and the pivot during much of the 20th century towards authoritarian rule, followed by a return to democracy and onwards up to the 21st century. My favourite chapter was about the Visigoths, which was a period I didn’t know much about prior to reading this book – the author did a particularly good job of bringing the Visigoths to life on page. 

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Halloween. I have been looking forward to the holiday for at least a month. Growing up in an Irish household with rural origins, I had an appreciation of the changing seasons and loved the traditions around Halloween, especially tales of the fairy forts and the banshee. It’s also a big money earner, in the advertising world allowing for interesting tactical executions that couldn’t otherwise be attempted. Outside advertising, ignoring increased food sales, a third of consumers will spend 51 – 100 USD on putting together their own costume, or buying one off the rack. The most hardcore 10% of those surveyed admitted to spending 250+ USD.

    I was not into costumes, instead I look forward to the most is my Mum’s barmbrack. For the first time in a few years my Mum baked a few barmbracks and sent one of them to me. It’s a Halloween tradition. The barmbrack itself is a spicy fruited bread with a texture somewhere between brioche and and a pan loaf. Traditionally, the brack would contain a ring or trinket, which would turn up in a random slice.

    When I was small, commercial bakeries still used to have a an aluminium ring that looked like it was from a cheap Christmas cracker contained wrapped in greaseproof paper baked into the brack.

    barmbrack

    Downloadable recipe PDF here (Dropbox) or here (Google Drive) if you fancy baking your own over the weekend.

    While we’re on the subject of food, Hope & Glory’s collaboration between Lick paint and Heinz ketchup for a ketchup shade of wall paint creates talkability, though I wouldn’t be buying it for my own home.

    lick

    Buoyant Bob – I am stil not sure if Buoyant Bob is a social object, a brand, both or something else. Buoyant Bob was a successful entry into the US cannabis marketplace. The brief in the campaign was to work around restrictions in cannabis advertising and show it as the most fun brand in the space. 

    Buoyant Bob was released as a single: retail takeovers, vinyl records at dispensaries, and fans sharing Instagram Stories using “The Man Who Got So High” all followed.

    OnlyWatch – an auction in Geneva in aid of research Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy features one-off luxury watches from all of the major Swiss timepiece houses. Some of the entries are unique colour ways but Bulgari went the extra mile with their Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble. Their watches are already well known for being some of the thinnest timepieces available. A tourbillion is a demonstration of the watchmakers art. The one in this watch is just under 2mm thick – that’s just over double the thickness of a credit card for a moving mechanical assembly. And then they managed to cover the entire titanium case and strap of the watch in marble and make a marble dial – without making the watch any bulkier than its usual ridiculously slim case. It’s not something I would wear even if I could afford it, but I am in awe of the ingenuity. 

    bulgari one off for OnlyWatch 2023
    Bulgari for OnlyWatch – Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble

    Finally Dentsu Health published a great must-read byline on how media and entertainment can aid health equality. More here.

    Things I have watched. 

    I got to see The Boy and The Heron early at the BFI London Film Festival. You won’t get any plot spoilers from me here. Official release is December 26 in the UK, December 8 in Hong Kong. It’s Studio Ghibli, what else do you need to know?

    General Magic – a great documentary about a Silicon Valley start-up of the same name.. Back in the early 1990s General Magic was as visionary as Apple and as hyped as WeWork. If you’ve ever worked with a start-up or care about technology give it a watch. More on my thoughts here.

    The Pentagon Papers – Despite this being a made-for-TV film, James Spader does a great job of playing Daniel Ellsberg; the RAND researcher to gave the materials to the media. In terms of pacing acting and storytelling, I would put this on a par with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s film adaptation of All The President’s Men. 

    Tampopo is a beautifully shot Japanese film with comedic moments that tells the story of a widow, her son and their ramen shop. More on what I thought of here.

    A relatively modern Halloween tradition in the Carroll family has been watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – recommended for young and old alike. While my Dad and I usually end up watching The Crow later on.  If you want more classic horror, then you could do worse than watching the livestream by the Creature Features show.

    Useful tools

    ITV Adlabs and Magic Numbers recovery budget planner

    Pretty much essential to look at if you have responsibility for UK media spend at a brand. This allows you to examine various scenarios and see likely outcomes based on media spend. More here.

    Google bundles generative AI and LLM with search

    I downloaded Chrome especially to try this out, it looks a bit more mature than Bing’s initial integration of ChatGPT. Go here to give it a try if you’re a Chrome browser user.

    Post-It Z-Notes

    You’re workshopping something with clients or thinking something through on your own – Post-It notes are key. The own brand ones can vary from really good to useless, so spend a bit more and get proper Post-It notes. In fact, I’d advise that you go one step further and get Post-It Z-Notes. The notes alternate sides in terms of where the ‘sticky end’ is and if you lift them from the pad you get a ‘Z’ before they peel away. They come away effortlessly and work brilliantly if you have them in a desk holder.

    Foldable wireless keyboard

    At the start of my career, I used to have a Palm PDA ( personal digital assistant – think a smartphone, without the phone and communications bit). I also had a long commute to Luton on a daily basis. I got a lot of reading and writing done thanks to a ‘Stowaway’ foldable keyboard made by a company called Think Outside. The company no longer exists, but the desire to be able to turn my iPhone into a simple writing tool lives on. Recently, I have been using this foldable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds up, can be used on a train seat table or even an economy class aircraft seat and recharges easily. The keyboard isn’t the usual rubbery mess that you tend to get in a lot of these devices. It’s one fault so far is that it feels flimsy, but I have already got my money’s worth out of it in just a few months. I fire up the iPhone’s notes app and get to work. I can then edit and refine once I have a bit more time on my Mac at a more convenient time.

    The sales pitch.

    Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my October 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR CLOCKS BACK BEFORE YOU GO TO BED ON SATURDAY. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan + more stuff

    Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan

    One of the best YouTube channels that I currently subscribe to is the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. I used to enjoy visiting the Foreign Correspondents Club in Hong Kong. I particularly enjoyed their public talks. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan seems to run to a similar model as its Hong Kong counterpart. Its YouTube channel shares the regular public talks that they host by a wide range of experts. More Japan related content here.

    Ronnie Drew on the Dublin Pub

    Ronnie Drew of The Dubliners talks about the iconic nature of the Dublin pub. O’Donoghue’s was famous in Irish music and particularly famous for the short film O’Donoghue’s Opera, which Drew starred in.

    Incremental metal forming

    Additive manufacturing has managed to offer substitutes for short runs of moulded, cast or milled parts. Incremental metal forming offers a similar substitute for complex stamped parts. It’s an area that is is being currently developed. This has more potential than you would think due to the high cost and commitment to tool making needed if you wanted to use a process like progressive stamping.

    The Boy and The Heron

    The Boy and The Heron aka How do you live? is Studio Ghibli‘s latest film. I picked through the trailer with friends who are fellow Studio Ghibli fans. The Japanese movie title references a Japanese book How do you live? which features in the films universe. How do you live is a book where an Uncle documents his discussions with his nephew as the boy faces up to the challenges of childhood. In some respects How do you live? reminded of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World – in terms of feeling, if not style.

    How do you live? is as well known in Japanese circles as a children’s classic in the same way that Ursula LeGuinn’s The Wizard of Earthsea would be known to English speakers. But in English it doesn’t have the same cultural resonance, so hence the much more descriptive The Boy and The Heron. We were all relieved that the film is not a 3D CGI work like Earwig & The Witch.

    Looking at the trailer it evoked memories of other Studio Ghibli films

    I got to see the film at a special screening at London International Film Festival. But not going to share any spoilers until well after it goes on general release, save to say it’s well worth watching, but you knew that anyway.

    Create real magic

    Coca-Cola tapped into the trend for generative AI to allow consumers to remix existing advert artwork and make their own version. As far as I know Accenture was one of the main agency partners involved. This is less about the future of advertising and more about how the technology itself has become the meme, rather like all things cyber in the mid 1990s.

    A la Soledad O’Brien presenting with a Leo LePorte voiced avatar on MSNBC show The Site during 1996 and 1997.

  • Clustomers

    Intuit Mailchimp are brave in terms of the the approach that they take to their marketing and Clustomers is a prime example of this.

    Clustomers is a great campaign that builds on the frustrations that marketers face about segmentation and personalisation of communications. It is fantastically single-minded in its execution, which is what you want in an effective advert. I could have been seen how the rats nest of people could have come across as creepy rather than surreal and the art direction gets the tone right wonderfully.

    But I think that the communications around clustomers to be more nuanced.

    The Clustomers campaign

    The Clustomers advert itself is the first point of evidence I would use is a brand building, distinctly non-personal campaign. The fact that I am writing about it, speaks a lot to its ‘talkability’. It has carved out its own small part of culture.

    It looks to place MailChimp as the marketing technology vendor for start-ups and small to medium sized businesses. But like many political campaigns, it promises a simple solution to a challenge that might be more complex.

    But this isn’t a campaign that will be only seen by the small business owner, or someone with a slide hustle. The message of personalisation might be received, without the nuanced understanding of marketing that MailChimp has demonstrated in the way that they’ve built the campaign. CFOs don’t have a sufficient understanding of marketing to understand this. For many of them it’s just a set of line items on the wrong side of a spreadsheet.

    C-suite misconceptions

    As I’ve said, I think that the message Clustomers gives is problematic in a wider context. A good deal of that problem is down to business founders and the C-suite having fundamental misconceptions on what marketing communications purpose is and how it does it.

    Advertising isn’t fluffy or all about colouring in. It’s a legitimate and important tool for driving business success. The trouble is that CEOs, CFOs, founders and investors sometimes forget that fact. They’re sceptical about advertising at the best of times and often pull the plug when the economy feels wobbly.

    Dr Grace Kite, Marketing Week

    Clustomers fuels a perception that personalisation is the key to marketing and by implication performance marketing is the only marketing required. The reality is more complex. The Ehrensberg Bass Institute’s Byron Sharp talks of ‘smart mass marketing’ and brand building as being the key for the majority of marketing activity in conjunction with personalised communication. The Institute of Practioners in Advertising has been doing sterling work trying to educate the C-suite, but technology specialists like Adobe, Google and Meta have been negating a lot of that good work done.

    Portumna

    Prior to COVID-19, back when I presented a lot more in public I used to present the following slide and when I talked to it I probably reflected some of what MailChimp customers would look for, and was behind Clustomers.

    Portumna is the closest market town to where my family originated. My cousin still works part-time on the family farm. Portumna has been a commercial centre for centuries because of geography. It sits at a strategic crossing of the River Shannon. The Shannon divides the east of Ireland from the west of Ireland and has been a shipping way from centuries past to the present day.

    portumna

    A number of the shops including grocery stores, hardware and farm supplies, the sub-post office and the local pharmacy are family businesses. At least four generations of shopkeepers in the town knew my family and did business with them over the centuries.

    There were life-long relationships formed. When I go home, I am loyal to the grocery store and pharmacy that my Uncle and grandparents used. The shopkeepers understood the needs of relatives who lived in the area and the kind of farm that they ran. The kind of online marketing that clustomers seeks to bring forward, is the kind of relationships that were in place in Portumna for centuries.

    But those relationships were not just about personalised communications. There was a wider cultural context and even ‘brand’.

    • The fact that the family in question had built up trust in the community.
    • That they were known to be ‘respectable’.
    • That they had delivered for my family and people that they new in the past.
    • These brands were local oligarchs. They had one or two competitors at best.

    So the customer mental models around farm supplies, the butcher or the grocer were very strong and constantly reinforced. And this is the kind of stuff that advertising as part of non-personal communications is best at doing.

  • A Diamond is Forever + more things

    A Diamond is Forever

    DeBeers have resurrected their tagline A Diamond is Forever. What’s interesting is that DeBeers is focusing the campaign only in China and the United States. Whilst the heritage of A Diamond is Forever may resonate with the American audience. I am less sure about how it might resonate for Chinese consumers.

    While diamonds are a good store of value, the move towards guo chao – Chinese things for Chinese people is another dynamic that may affect receptivity.

    DeBeers

    Beauty

    Gen X men prefer gently-scented bodycare products over heavily-scented ones | Mintel – Despite having body odour concerns, Gen X doesn’t go for heavily scented products as they have dry, sensitive and acne-prone body skin. Among Gen X, itchiness, excessive sweat and rashes concerns stood out from those of other consumers. They are also concerned with the odour associated with the result of sweat.

    Japan’s Fukushima wastewater release sparks Chinese hesitation in J-beauty | Cosmetics Design Asia – much of this is down to how Chinese rhetoric has affected Japanese country brand perceptions around the purity aspect of quality.

    China

    EU to launch anti-subsidy probe into Chinese electric vehicles | Financial Times

    China’s business confidence problem | Financial Times 

    Chinese state media censors itself after highlighting poem about corrupt leaders | China | The Guardian

    Intelligence services set to unmask China spies | Daily Telegraph 

    Jeep Parts Prices Soar Over 10 Times in China After Local Producer Went Bust

    Economics

    The Pursued Economics of advanced economies.

    https://www.youtube.com/live/dYR8sF12TW4?si=Nq6ZFAGDcRHKbStT

    Future Horizons drops bearish stance, lifts chip market forecast | EE News Europe – still negative, but not as a large drop predicted, which indicates less precipitous economic decline.

    FMCG

    Welcome to the Anti-Woke Economy | The New Republic – A fledgling parallel economy has emerged on the right, hawking everything from coffee to vitamin supplements to anti-abortion protein bars. But can a business movement born of political and cultural grievance be viable over the long term?

    Health

    Breaking Through Depression; The Balanced Brain – reviews | The Guardian 

    An inconvenient truth: Difficult problems rarely have easy solutions | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core – Individual-level interventions are often interesting and easy to implement, but are unfortunately ill-equipped to solve most major global problems (e.g., climate change, financial insecurity, unhealthy eating). Resources spent developing, pursuing, and touting relatively ineffective i-frame interventions draw resources away from the development and implementation of more effective s-frame solutions. Behavioral scientists who want to develop solutions to the world’s biggest problems should focus their efforts on s-frame (system level) solutions

    Ideas

    The AI and Leviathan series examining what it means if AI did actually change everything including extreme techopolarity.

    • Part 1 – institutional economics of an intelligence explosion
    • Part 2 – preparing for regime change
    • Part 3 – techno-feudalism

    My friend Gerd Leonhard has a more techno-utopian view, but acknowledges his vision is a best case scenario.

    Innovation

    Sony harvests electromagnetic ‘noise’ and offers milliwatts EE News Europe 

    How to Depolarize American Democracy – by Dexter Roberts 

    Luxury

    How the metaverse downturn is benefitting digital designers | Vogue Business 

    Marketing

    Dentsu launches paid search tool that uses AI to speed up creativity and optimization – Digiday – d.Scriptor — a new proprietary offering it’s developed to supercharge paid search, mainly in the area of ad copy development but also as a means to optimize and adapt execution. Dentsu is announcing the tool today, after pilot testing over the last several weeks. It’s meant to help with boosting the volume of creative messaging with an eye toward improved engagement rates, as well as to speed up the process of creative experimentation, and cut down on the time required to perform optimization tasks – the more variants that you cram into a Google Adwords programme the better a job it can do on optimising display based on what works. I spent a lot of time coming up with variants in spreadsheets to do this when I was freelancing

    Media

    Nobody Will Tell You the Ugly Reason Apple Acquired a Classical Music Label

    Exclusive: The Economist adds podcast subscription tier

    In Its First Monopoly Trial of Modern Internet Era, U.S. Sets Sights on Google – The New York Times – about two decades too late. The EU gatekeeper move is very interesting: Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers | European Commission

    CAA Sold to French Billionaire François-Henri Pinault – The Hollywood Reporter 

    Online

    We’re Updating our Community Standards – Linktree – changes on conditions, particularly focused on sex work, presumably to cover themselves from US legislation. There are also restrictions on regulated sectors like vaping and alcohol

    Can Yahoo Be Saved? How Apollo Is Rebuilding an Internet Icon — The Information

    Retail

    Levi’s chief digital officer on the strategy to triple e-commerce sales | Modern Retail

    Security

    New vehicles a “privacy nightmare” where you consent to carmakers collecting data on behavioral, biological, even sexual activity | Boing Boing 

    Afghanistan is the fastest-growing maker of methamphetamine, UN drug agency says | MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報 

    Software

    LLMs have serious problems

    Apple Boosts Spending to Develop Conversational AI — The Information 

    When AI Begins to Replace Humans – by Rex Woodbury – how CAPTCHAs are improving machine learning

    China’s Horizon Robotics to Transfer Hundreds of Employees to Its JV With Volkswagen Unit

    Technology

    Groq Demonstrates Fast LLMs on 4-Year-Old Silicon – EE Times 

    Generative AI exists because of the transformer | FT

    Apple & Qualcomm – Gritted teeth – Radio Free Mobile

    TSMC to invest in Arm and Intel subsidiary IMS Nanofabrication | DigiTimes – the ARM investment will get the headlines but the more interesting technology is in the IMS Nanofabrication aspect of the deal

    Telecoms

    Network quality is still very important for German telco customers—but that’s only half the story – Kearney

  • Technopolarity

    Ian Bremmer at the Eurasia Group has been talking about Technopolarity throughout 2022 and has amped up the discussion in recent months.

    Bremmer’s hypothesis is that big technology companies and their leaders will create power structures that will challenge the powers of governments. I was reminded of the different ‘country franchises’ that populated the future America of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. Snow Crash envisaged a Randesque libertarian hellscape with no power centre.

    The biggest technology firms are designing, building, and managing an entirely new dimension of geopolitics. In this new digital space, their influence runs deep, down to the level of individual lines of code. They’re writing the algorithms that decide what people see and hear, determine their economic and social opportunities, and ultimately influence what they think. Individuals will spend more time in digital space in 2022, at work and at home. Much of this time will be spent in the “metaverse”—an emerging, more immersive version of the web where all the problems of digital governance will be magnified. The metaverse (or more accurately, multiple metaverses) in turn will increasingly rely on economic systems based on decentralized blockchain platforms that governments are already struggling to control.

    Bremmer, I., Kupchan, C. (January 3, 2022) Risk 2: Technopolar World. United States: Eurasia Group.

    Aside from the power of the metaverse, Bremmer & Kupchan largely got things right. The Eurasia Group positioned technology giants along three axes. The degree to which the companies matched the following archetypes:

    • National champions.
    • Globalists.
    • Techno-utopians.

    In general, Chinese companies were national champions, while their American counterparts were predominantly globalists. The European Union has attempted and largely failed to bring a degree of control, curbing the excesses of technology companies.

    China has cracked down on companies that it felt was too big. The digital space itself has a Randian view of global leadership, ignoring the consequences and the responsibility of their power.

    Algorithms as destiny

    Bremmer’s initial thinking on technopolarity was focused on the role of algorithms underpinning online services. More recently, he has focused beyond platforms to look at the nature of ‘artificial intelligence’ and its ability to upend geopolitics.

    Emotional contagion

    As far back as 2012, Facebook had conducted a study in ’emotional contagion’ by altering the news feeds for 700,000 users and it was all completely legal. The feeds were changed to reflect more positive, or negative content – to see if seeing more sad messages makes a person sadder. The experimental subjects were not given any warning and their emotional state was by analysing changes in their language on the platform.

    And I am not even pointing out the effect that social media can have on its audiences in general without experimentation.

    Elon Musk’s Technopolarity

    Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk; brought the concept of Technopolarity to life. In the book Isaacson discusses decisions and actions that Musk made over the Ukraine war. Musk because of his personal concern about Russian escalation, disabled the Starlink service covering occupied Ukrainian territory to disrupt Ukraine’s military efforts including marine drones. So Elon Musk essentially made a decision that directly affected US defence efforts to support Ukraine. It could have even resulted in the destruction of American military equipment donated to the defence of Ukraine.

    Musk has had conversations with Vladimir Putin like he was a head of state and even the US government has been careful about how they deal with him.

    “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue”

    Colin Kahl, former under-secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon
    Starlink

    Kahl’s attitude to Musk is at odds to the fate of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio who went to jail after he was found to be a barrier to the NSA’s domestic surveillance plans, in particular the MAINWAY database. Nacchio was convicted of insider trading. Nacho’s successor also held outing after 4 years, discussions with the NSA went nowhere. A quick trawl of Twitter history would be enough to find evidence to put Musk on trial should the US government wish to do so. What’s happened to government power in the decades since Nacchio went to jail?

    The New Yorker went on to describe Elon Musk’s power as ‘shadow rule‘. Musk isn’t elected. He isn’t even responsive to his shareholders. His Twitter account is a testament to his mercurial nature.

    What’s more concerning for US government wonks is that Musk’s Tesla mega factory in Shanghai leaves him exposed to manipulation by the Chinese government. For instance, they could pressure him to turn off Starlink across the Pacific adversely affecting Taiwan, Japan, Australia and US forces in the region. The Ukrainian experience suggests that Musk would not hesitate to put American lives on the line, or see Taiwan handed over the horrific barbarity of Chinese invasion.

    More related content here.