Ged Carroll

Search results for: “"Mark Ritson"”

  • Economics of YouTube + more

    lifeintaiwan have gone into the economics of YouTube by looking at their own channel in this video. It makes fascinating viewing and provides more questions than answers about the value of ‘influencer’ fees being paid in travel, beauty and FMCG sectors. It will provide additional grist on the economics of YouTube moving forwards

    Photochromeleon: Creating Color-Changing Objects – YouTube – I thought that this was projection mapping but it seems to be just variable light wavelengths. Really interesting applications from activations to packaging design

    The nth room sex scandal is a mix of dark web fears played out within a private Telegram channel. Some great explanations and vox pops interviews in Korea by Asian Boss. This scandal falls on the back of other sexual exploitation scandals in the Korean media, notably around the Burning Sun club in Seoul. It is also interesting how Telegram had been perceived as a super-safe channel for delivery of services, rather than building a dark web site. More Korea related posts here.

    Asian Boss vox pop interviews with the Korean public on the nth room sex abuse scandal

    Mark Ritson talks about marketing in the midst of a recession. If you do nothing else this week, get a CMO you know to watch it. The big thing to take away is the concept of eSOV. Although Ritson doesn’t mention this explicitly, this is the foundation of Proctor & Gamble’s success during the Great Depression.

    The history of Marriott carpet camouflage. Uniform History do some interesting design story videos and their April’s Fools videos tap into odd but true stories. Apparently this camouflage was for cosplay conventions in the US. The video then goes into a tangled mess of intellectual property, fair use, parody and cultural appropriation of a carpet. The thing has taken a life of its own. When Marriott refreshed its carpet choice the old ones were dumpster dived or bought up by cosplayers so that they could continue the convention tradition that had build up over a few years.

  • Corona brand + more news

    Mark Ritson: Coronavirus won’t hurt Corona, it will actually boost sales – differentiation, particularly at the symbolic level, was overstated. Any evidence that people perceived Brand A as vastly different from Brand B could be largely explained by its size and prior purchase experiences. Purchase caused brand image, not vice versa. Ergo building a brand image was waste of marketing effort. The big job of brand was to create salience, so a brand came to mind in buying situations. – Great discussion on the brand salience of Corona beer during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the flipside Corona probably won’t get a brand lift from the corona discussions around a solar eclipse either

    Pandemic brands – Wunderman Thompson Intelligence – nice counter-cyclical brand building and CSR during the corona virus outbreak

    Terabytes Of Stolen Adult Content From OnlyFans Have Leaked – There are communities on Reddit and Telegram dedicated to cracking performers’ accounts and sharing the content without their consent. Many of those videos eventually make their way to various tube sites. A similarly large, though different, OnlyFans leak was posted last Saturday to forums dedicated to cracking and leaking pirated content – that is one of the bleakest things that I’ve read in a good while. Especially given the amount of people who are turning to DIY porn on OnlyFans due to the corona virus disrupting employment for low paid services jobs and the entertainment sector

    Nando’s-inspired sex slang used by girls as young as 10 | Technology | The Guardian – you’ve got to wonder about what other level of monitoring and censorship is going on. I find this monitoring of kids distasteful.

    Second-hand clothes sales: fashion forward | Financial Times – vintage all over again. I wonder how the corona virus will impact the desire for pre-owned clothing?

    porsche to print giant fingerprints of customers onto hood of 911 sport cars | Designboom – not sure I think its smart to post a copy of a biometric data on the bonnet of your car. These are the kind of people rich enough to personal safes and secure rooms with finger print locks. I’ve got visions of hackers working out how to take advantage of this

    IBM and Microsoft sign Vatican pledge for ethical AI | Financial Times – the pledge, called the “Rome Call for AI Ethics”, will be presented on Friday morning to Pope Francis by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and John Kelly, IBM’s executive vice-president, as well as Vatican officials and Qu Dongyu, the Chinese director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation – so it wasn’t a Vatican driven initiative after all but a public affairs exercise

    Baidu/tech groups: traffic warning | Financial Times – But higher traffic does not equate to higher income for search platforms. The contrast is with gaming, where more time playing means surging in-game purchases. For Baidu, which makes about three-quarters of total revenue from advertising, that is bad news. Even before the outbreak, a slowdown in China had trimmed the advertising budgets of clients. Marketing campaigns have now been cut further. Cancelled events and concerts contribute to the malaise. Baidu’s biggest clients, which include online gaming companies, real estate developers and plastic surgery clinics, have little incentive to advertise. A surge in new sign-ups for online games means fewer game ads are needed. Demand for homes has plunged and some cities have banned home sales altogether. Plastic surgery clinics, a lucrative source of core ad revenues, are taking a hit.

    Twitter is testing new ways to fight misinformation — including a community-based points system – sounds curiously like Cory Doctorow’s concept of whuffie

    How to deliver the personalization consumers want while respecting the privacy they expect | Think with Google – I am not convinced by the focus on mass personalisation. What about brand, culture etc?

    Ogilvy brings on global executive creative directors for Instagram | Campaign Asia – God help us

    Volvo Trucks – The Tower By Forsman & Bodenfors, Sweden – THEINSPIRATION.COM – interesting that they got the head of their business directly involved

    Did America Forget How to Make the H-Bomb? – Mother Jones – and things are probably worse with processes reliant on electronic records

    Chinese navy accused of using laser on US military aircraft | Financial Times – This reads like something from a William Gibson novel

    Otl Aicher: The Olympic Designer Who Shaped Your Journey To The Toilet – Flashbak – Like a paperclip, we don’t think of Aicher’s pictograms as designed objects per se, but rather as the objects themselves. The chairs we own are someone’s take on a chair. That’s not the case with the average, everyday paperclip. It is what it is, a paperclip. That’s it. Objects at this level of comprehension are simply there. They feel as though they have always been there, and did so from the moment they were presented to the masses. In every country, in every city, they are simply there. In the case of Aicher’s icons they’ve become shorthand that everyone can understand, a set of simple shapes that successfully tells us where to go when we need to use a bathroom. – pretty much sums it up

    Google tops Facebook, Instagram in e-commerce activity, study finds | Mobile Marketer – context wins, but guessing that this may vary by category

    LinkedIn | Balenciaga Summer 2020 collection video – Jay Owens – This is a genius bit of media buying for a collection themed around power and power dressing. The catwalk show saw private equity associates, architects & engineers stalk an EU-blue stage set like a parliamentary building. Advertising on LinkedIn now is just 👌– nails context

    Featured Customer – Oscar the Grouch – Squarespace – I used to hate writing case studies for technology companies at the start of my career, but I do like this one that Squarespace did for Oscar the Grouch

    How Japan’s family businesses use sons-in-law to bring in new blood | Financial Times – For hundreds of years, owners of Japanese companies have been adopting their sons-in-law as a way to recruit talent — a practice known as mukoyoshi — giving rise to the saying “You can’t choose your sons, but you can choose your sons-in-law”. The histories of zaibatsu (conglomerate) families such as Sumitomo, Mitsui and Iwasaki (of the Mitsubishi group) are studded with adopted relatives and sons-in-law

    The Sun posts £68m loss as it pays out £27m in legal costs over phone-hacking scandal – However, revenue at News Group Newspapers for the 52 weeks ending 30 June 2019 were up, with total turnover growing to £420m in 2019 from £401.4m in 2018. Circulation of The Sun was down to 1.38 million last year from 1.51 million in 2018, and fell to 1.16 million from 1.28 million for The Sun on Sunday. – so despite revenue increasing losses were up. You also have to wonder how sustainable revenue increases can be with a declining audience

    Smartphone startups take on Google, Apple and put privacy first | DW – I just can’t see these taking off. Interesting data on Google and consumer attitudes

    How Adidas is using WhatsApp as a direct marketing channel – Digiday – The most recent example of the strategy was the “100% Unfair Predator” campaign. Earlier this month, Adidas opened up a hotline on WhatsApp for people in need of a footballer to cover for unreliable teammates on their team. Adidas-sponsored players were made available for games last week once fans had shared some basic information with the hotline such as the game they need the player for. The company’s marketers would notify fans on the morning of their game if their request was successful. The rented players turned up dressed in Adidas’ new Predator20 Mutator footwear. “We know our audience use it to share fixture info, team selection — and team-mates messaging to find last-minute replacements,” said Coveney. “WhatsApp was perfect for the more functional elements of the ‘Rent-a-Pred’ hotline as it allowed consumers to share private information one-to-one with us for review, before being allocated a Predator player near them.”

    Unilever kicks off strategic review of personal-care brands | Campaign Live – this could get interesting

  • Salience overloads advertising

    Salience is the buzz word of the moment in advertising circles.

    What is salience?

    According to Siri salience is a noun. It’s definition:

    the property of being particularly noticeable or important.

    Historically, when you tested an ad through the likes of Kantar. One of the attributes that an ad would be measured on is salience. Relatively recently salience has become a more important attribute in advertising from a marketing science point-of-view. But this shouldn’t be to the extent of eclipsing other attributes such as distinctive brand building.

    Salience becomes pre-eminent

    But now you see campaigns where salience is pre-eminent. I had only seen this in Asia in the past, where random endorsement choices looked to drive impact.

    At one stage in the early noughties you could see Jackie Chan side-by-side with over 20 products including:

    • Canon cameras
    • Mitsubishi cars
    • An anti-hair loss shampoo that allegedly contained carcinogens
    • Zhongshan Subor – games consoles with a basic home computing capability. Subor ‘Learning Machines’ had educational programmes, games and provided Chinese children with an opportunity to try computer programming. Think of it as an analogue the Sinclair range of home computers in the UK
    • Fenhuang cola drink
    https://flic.kr/p/8eXzEE
    Jackie Chan branded Canon Rebel T2i / EOS 550D via M.I.C Gadget

    A classic example of an ad that personifies salience is Burger King’s The Moldy Whopper.

    The campaign is a one-off stunt designed to drive water-cooler talk. Some colleagues were at a breakfast event last week. The outtake that they took from the event was that the future of advertising is PR. Or to be more exact the publicity stunt.

    I get it, creative directors are measured on memorable award-winning campaigns. They are less worried about effectiveness and brand lift. It’s sexy. And it moves things away from soul-crushing digital disruption-driven work. Big data, A-B testing that’s just aimed at sales conversion.

    But publicity is just a short term effect, contrast this with effective advertising that can keep paying off for decades!

    But when you’re doing stunt-after-stunt what does the brand stand for? I agree that a brand has to be distinctive, but to make a brand distinctive you need to reinforce it. Think about Coca-Cola; distinctive and instantly recognisable.

    Don’t believe me, here’s what Mark Ritson said about it. Ritson uses ‘brand image’ as a way to discuss brand distinctiveness and visibility at a granular level in the ad:

    The new global campaign from Burger King features a month old burger complete with the mould and decomposition that comes with it. Supposedly, this is a campaign aimed to promote the absence of preservatives. But is it good advertising? No. Showing a disgusting, mouldy version of your hero product to target consumers is – believe it or not – a really bad idea. So why are Burger King doing it? First, we see the ultimate exemplar of the focus on salience over image that is sweeping much of the advertising world. “It got me talking about it, so it is great marketing,” has been the response of many addled marketers to the new campaign. While it’s true that salience is a much bigger goal than we once thought, there is still a need to focus on brand image. All publicity is not good publicity. It’s also the latest in a long line of marketing stunts that Burger King has pulled. Hiding Bic Macs behind Whoppers in all their ads, asking consumers to order a Whopper online from a McDonalds, the list is long and stupid. It wins awards and gets marketers talking but it is eclipsed by KFC and McDonald’s less flashy, more enduring and more effective tactics. Same store sales growth over the last two years tells its own story. This is flashy, ineffective fare.

    Mark Ritson on LinkedIn

    Or Phil Barden who wrote Decoded:

    From a behavioural science point of view this is a bizarre use of marketing money; Firstly, our attention and perception are implicit (‘system 1’) processes that are stimulus-bound. System 1 can’t imagine, it responds to stimuli. Kahneman uses the phrase ‘what you see is all there is’ and it is the stimulus (what you see) that will be decoded using our associative memories. The brain metaphorically asks the questions, ‘what is it, what does it represent, what’s in it for me’? The answers to these questions are ‘rotten food’ and ‘nothing’ because rotten food is a threat to survival. This triggers ‘avoid’ behaviour. Secondly, this image is highly likely to trigger ‘reactance’ which is emotional arousal with negative valence ie it’s unpleasant. Thirdly, memory structures are built on the basis on ‘what fires together wires together’. In this case, Burger King and rotten food. Fourthly, the category is hedonic; it’s all about enjoyment. Rotten food and enjoyment have no implicit intuitive association. The only saving grace for BK may be that their logo is such low contrast and the food is so salient that the brand may not be attributed to the image.

    Phil Barden on LinkedIn

    Many of Barden’s points are very specific to the mouldy burger creative. But points like attention and perception are implicit processes that are stimulus bound works against salience. It triggers related memories, which is distinctive brand building allows you to tap into. The importance of hedonic enjoyment plays against a lot of shock tactics used to get salience.

    I am not saying that marketing campaigns shouldn’t have salience. Some of the best ads of all time use salience like Coca-Cola’s ‘Hilltop’ advert.

    But that they shouldn’t be salient at the expense of other attributes of brand building. A side serving of salience adds cut through to consistent distinctive brand building. But balance in different attributes for an ad is needed.

    For more on how to achieve a balance in attributes, I can recommend Building Distinctive Brand Assets by Jenni Romaniuk. The book is based on research by the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science.

    More on advertising here.

  • Galloway on Louis Vuitton & more

    Section 4’s Scott Galloway on Louis Vuitton. Professor Scott Galloway talks about the way Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer consumer’s needs and tastes.

    Modern consumers are younger and based in Asia rather than the traditional older luxury purchasers in Europe and the US. This has meant that digital became more important, as had casual luxury over formal luxury.

    All of that innovation was extended by Louis Vuitton with streetwear type drops rather than seasons. Shops are a brand experience in their own right. Including online games and pop-up Instagrammable stores. They focused on products that can be driven into the market faster with an agile supply chain.

    Casual styling allows you to go to smaller goods with a lower price point and replaceable more often.

    The line between streetwear and luxury has been blurred. More on luxury related issues here.

    A great mix of the hits of European disco producer Daniel Bangalter (Vangarde). Daniel Bangalter started with a husband and wife team, writing and producing their songs. Around this time, he partnered up with Jean Kluger. Their first project was a pseudo Japanese band called the Yamasuki Singers. It was the early 1970s and a bit strange. Kluger and Bangalter then went on to produce Ottowan including D.I.S.C.O. They also produced the Gibson Brothers song Cuba. You can hear the influence of his sound (and probably at least some of his studio equipment) in the Daft Punk sound.

    Daft Punk includes his son Thomas Bangalter. Apparently Daniel helped Daft Punk when they were starting out.

    Mark Ritson on 50 years of Effies. Some of the content is as worth watching as listening to Ritson’s commentary.

    Scott Galloway on online business. Some interesting points here

    Fabio Wibmer does to the Austrian city of Wien (Vienna) what Bullit did to San Francisco.

  • Juul sales halted in China + more

    Juul Sales Halted in China, Days After Launch – WSJ – this could be as much about IP as anything else that caused the Juul sales halted in China. The e-cigarette was invented by a Chinese engineer looking for a healthier option to cigarettes. Secondly tobacco is a monopoly in China run by a state owned enterprise that is a valuable source of government revenue. There are even tobacco sponsored universities. I am only mildly surprised that Juul sales halted hadn’t happened in the US, given that Juul is so popular with teens

    Trend-bucking Maccas turns back to tradition | The Australian – the most interesting implication of McDonald’s selection of W+K is what it says about client conflict. W+K already has the North American account for KFC and has been producing spectacular work for the brand. McDonald’s made no request of W+K to drop KFC in order to work for it, with its North American chief marketing officer, Morgan Flatley, noting the potential client issue “doesn’t concern us”. “We wanted to make the decision around getting the best work that this business deserves,” she said. – it wouldn’t have been that long ago that a major client would tolerate that degree of client conflict

    Exclusive: Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties – sources    – Reuters – the Australians were too scared of the Chinese to confront them about it at the moment. This is a situation that could

    Gasp | The Blogfather | Brand Building Breakdown – nice summary which emphasises why brand is more important than activation in terms of marketer focus

    McDonald’s picks Wieden & Kennedy New York as lead U.S. creative agency | AdAge – it “also suggests that a bespoke agency model … may not be the definitive answer for major marketers when it comes to creative partners.”

    The New Target That Enables Ransomware Hackers to Paralyze Dozens of Towns and Businesses at Once — ProPublica – similar to tactics that Chinese hackers have been doing for years. Yet another argument against cloud

    China’s TikTok social media app has captured the NFL, but not Hong Kong protesters – The Washington Post – you know ByteDance are censoring the sh*t out of it to keep the Xi administration happy, more online related content here

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Pablo Mauron, DLG (Digital Luxury Group) – luxury brands need to find ways to adapt and integrate their globally-developed creative assets for use in different markets

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Kai Hong, JINGdigital – how brands can truly engage and grow their WeChat communities with the right social CRM strategy

    LS Keynote 2019 Speaker Introduction: Jacques Roizen, EVP Digital Transformation and New Ventures, Baozun – the evolution of omnichannel retail and how brands can leverage new opportunities to create better customer experiences

    Frankfurt Motor Show: Winter Is Coming | EE Times – the moon shot of autonomous driving may one day lead to falling accident rates, but that the development costs — and liabilities of public testing — may destroy them on the way. Almost everyone has stepped back from the brink of a ludicrous business model. This begs the question about autonomous driving as a killer app for 5G

    Standing out is the key brand challenge, so great brands play with their codes | Marketing Week – purpose-wank aside, removing every single letter from your packaging is actually a very smart and very effective move. Because when companies play with well-established codes like this and remove or alter their appearance, the impact on salience and brand image is significantly improved – great article by Mark Ritson, but requires decades of brand consistency to work well

    Design: pharma’s next frontier | eyeforpharma – on human centred design

    Facebook warns about Apple iOS 13 privacy improvement – the blog post appears to be a way to get out in front of software changes made by Apple and Google that could unsettle Facebook users given the company’s poor reputation for privacy.

    The new Microsoft To Do is here – pity the poor product manager who is trying to transfer Wunderlist which built up an amazingly loyal following

    Underwear Ads Lose the Macho: How Marketing Has Embraced Real Men – The New York Times – I suspect that it’s like Gillette in that men who buy Hanes by out of habit and women buying for men are the people to influence

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