Hong Kong is familiar to many westerners as a backdrop for gangster films from Enter the Dragon to Jackie Chan’s Police Story, PTU and the Infernal Affairs trilogy.
In fact, the society is much more organised and less violent than the likes of the UK. Even the old public housing projects in Aberdeen don’t really compare to south London. However, why let the truth get in the way of a good story or movie? Which is why the Beijing Olympics mascot Jingjing made me laugh.
You can see Jingjing giving it the full gangster style in shooting. Also note the red face of drunken rage. And he is also an accomplished fighter and tasty with a baseball bat. This has been featured across Beijing 2008 marketing materials and souvenirs.
On a more serious note the games event pictograms are an interesting organic interpretation of what Otl Aicher did for the 1972 Munich Olympics. You can see them in this surround at the Bank of China building (click on the picture if you want to see in more detail.) They remind me of early Chinese character pictograms in terms of their feel, a kind of future primitive design aesthetic. You can see how pride and nationalism are coming through in the designs.
Here is the notes that I made mostly from the morning sessions of the mobileYouth trend workout. There will be presentations and videos of the event available from their site next week. I was speaking on a panel later in the afternoon so was able to pay attention to the earlier panels.
Graham Brown – mobileYouth, the organisers of MobileYouth trend workout
Event introduction
Young people spend about 1.3 trillion USD per year, 130 billion of which is spent on mobile services (or roughly ten per cent of their total income). This impacted the sales of chocolate, music (in the form of CDs) and cigarettes
Young people spend an average of 20 – 25 GBP per month
Mobile services of young people grow at about 4.5 – 5.0 per cent year-on-year. This growth comes at the expense of, and in competition with television, entertainment and clothing
Brown asked the audience of mobile operators to think beyond ARPU and instead think about lifetime spend. By the time that consumers are 33, they have already completed half their lifetime spend. Yet this is the age group that is currently most attractive to carriers looking at the ARPU model. It was an interesting counterpoint to marketers viewing the grey market as the next big opportunity.
Mobile marketers run the particular risk of ending up with an aging or aged brands due to the virtue of a misplaced focus. Brown delivered a case study on Harley Davidson to prove his point. In the 1960s circa Easy Rider, Harley Davidson was a youth brand, now their average customer age is 51 years old.
If things carry on this way, in a little over twenty years, their customer base will be 70, possibly only ready to ride a zimmer frame. According to Brown the consumer lifecycle begins at 10 years old.
Geoff Goodwin and Marc Goodchild – BBC
Children still view as much children’s television as ever, however their consumption of television overall has declined as expected
The BBC is now looking for integrated media properties and partnerships. No one organisation has it right, hence the need for partnerships. Young audiences churn at an incredible rate so the BBC is constantly having to rework itself to remain relevant, rather than having the brand advantage that most people thought they had.
Important mobile technologies for young people are FM radio, SMS and Bluetooth. This low-level tech is because most young people get by with found technologies: hand-me-down mobile phones, an old TV from the living room or a discount model picked up at ASDA or Tesco and vintage computers from work or the living room.
Roundtable: Johan Winbladh mobile channel editor – Danish Broadcasting, James Davis head of mobile – News International, Michiel de Gooijer business development manager – Endemol, Giovanni Maruca director interactive and mobile EMEA – Paramount and Tim Hussain head of mobile monetisation – AOL UK
Mr Winbladh was the hawk in the discussion: mobile devices weren’t ready to put to the kind of mobile experience that users wanted and the industry thought was appropriate, whereas the other audience members felt that the latest generation of mobile handsets and all you can eat tariffs are readdressing the issue.
Maruca was excited about the way that advertising could be delivered in a context aware manner. By adding value to the advertising it can become unobtrusive and essentially no longer be advertising, but information.
Roundtable: Richard Miller general manager for consumer convergence – BT and Derrick Heng director segment marketing and communications – Singapore Telecommunications Limited
BT’s vision of Wi-Fi as a mobile technology is at odds with the GSM/W-CDMA orthodoxy of the mobile industry.
SingTel in contrast has complete fixed and mobile integration and pay TV. SingTel segments its customer base and actively manages the customer relationship with a long-term view. They provide email to mobiles on an ad-funded revenue model. In Singapore the killer apps for mobile usage by young people were email and SMS. By comparison audience member Jonathan MacDonald sales director of Blyk pointed out that for UK mobile users the three killer apps are voice, SMS and the phone’s alarm clock.
The audience debate then raged, the killer application for young people is doing the basic things well, providing decent customer service, having a decent relationship with the clients and not charging them excessively for that relationship. More related content here.
Bill and Dave were better known now by their surnames: Hewlett-Packard. It is familiar to consumers as a brand of printer, laptops and digital cameras sold in supermarkets up and down the country. Some may remember that they had a Watergate-type moment recently and a woman CEO who made a dogs dinner of things.
I visited Boeblingen (near Stuttgart) – the European headquarters of Hewlett-Packard in the late 90s and left deeply unimpressed by a large but seemingly directionless technology behemoth. We were on the cusp of the internet, while they were talking about printing brochures on demand. While this was happening the best internet search engine at the time, Alta Vista, had been built by their long time rival Digital Equipment Corporation.
Malone in his book Bill and Dave gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.
From a PR perspective, I found facinating the way Bill and David self-consciously built their own personal legends which helped support and extend the HP Way. The company’s culture was built, extended and modified in a deliberate, planned manner unparalleled in any other company. Their culture was what PR people would now call thought leadership – which feels very now given the start of interest around brand purpose.
Bill and Dave wrote the book on corporate reputation without the help of big name agencies and invented the elements as they went along, combined with a wisdom worthy of Solomon. More book reviews here.
Cringely inspired me with a tale of extraordinary people, strong personalities and a bit of youth rebellion. Cringely touched on the contribution of early pioneers like Doug Engelbert and Bob Metcalfe, but placed most of his emphasis on Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal tells the story from the point-of-view of J C R Linklder, a polymath who was instrumental in putting in place a lot of the projects and infrastructure that was needed to make the necessary developments. Linklider was a psychologist by training who realised the power and potential of technology way before it was possible.
Waldrop tells the story well, painting Licklider as a human being: a wonderful polymath, parent, researcher and a useless manager. He also paints the broader historical picture taking in ARPA, DEC, Xerox PARC, Al Gore and the Information Superhighway. More technology related posts here.
PR Week (subscription required) published the PowerBook this week, featuring 500 of the most prominent people in PR, it had a selection of questions that painted an interesting portrait of the people listed. BlackBerry’s at the ready, with leisure time facilitated by iPods and TiVo-equipped home entertainment systems, they are used to dining in London’s best restaurants – there wasn’t too many surprises amongst the preferences of the 500.
It also struck me that the same questions could paint an interesting picture of the digital marketing blogosphere. What would my own responses look like?
Job: Lead consultant (EMEA), Digital Strategies Group
Address: Waggener Edstrom Worldwide 10 Southampton Street London WC2E 7HA
Telephone: +44 20 7632 3800
Born: 19XX
Home town: That’s a complex question. The place I felt most at home is Hong Kong. I grew up in the north west of England and the ancestral family farm in the west of Ireland. For better or worse, London is where currently where I call home.
Lives: London
Family: No
Best career move: Getting made redundant from my blue-collar job in the oil industry, which set me on my current career path. Little did I know what that would entail.
Which company / brand do you most admire? Rolex
Which business / organisation leader do you most admire? Larry Weber – who was the first agency leader that I worked for. It also reminded me that its disappointing to meet your heroes. He is a lovely, but far from perfect character.
Boss who most inspired you: Cathy Pittham, who was the managing director of the first agency I worked for down in London.
Most essential read: Wired magazine
Most essential viewing / listening: Wall Street Journal Tech News Briefing podcast
gave me a better appreciation of Hewlett-Packard. He brings into perspective how important Bill Hewlett and David Packard were to the technology sector and modern business practices.