Ged Carroll

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  • Saudi Arabia & things that caught my eye this week

    Saudi Arabia

    I spent a good deal of this week listening marketing research interviews including respondents from Saudi Arabia. What became apparent in the interviews is that Saudi Arabia and its society is changing. What would be expected to be minimum standards and norms acceptable in ad imagery is changing. The same phrases kept coming up:

    • It’s different now
    • Its not like it was
    • Saudi Arabia has changed

    I was wondering why I was surprised. I knew that big bands like BTS and top EDM DJs had played in the country and that it had developed a nascent coffee house culture.

    Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
    Riyadh, Saudi Arabia by Andrey Filippov

    But we all have engrained preconceptions and this week I was confronted by one. I won’t deny that it had a good deal to do with experiences friends had living the ex-pat oil worker compound life and the Jamal Khashoggi execution.

    The Disk

    The Disk: the real story of MP’s expenses is a documentary film by The Telegraph. Back in 2009; The Telegraph wrote a series of stories on MP expenses claims. Ten years later the newspaper is still making hay from the story with a podcast series going over how the story broke Serial style and a feature-length documentary film. It was a big story, but The Telegraph journalists have slightly inflated view of its importance.

    The Telegraph

    It raises some questions about changing news media economics. The old British adage that ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’ – meaning news is time-dependent is no longer true. This is the kind of film that I would have expected on Netflix or Amazon Prime; instead its a trailer for the podcast series. Any money that The Telegraph is making from YouTube advertising must be very small compared to how they are monetising the podcast series.

    Right Up Our Alley

    Right Up Our Alley is a promotional film for a company that specialises in operating drones for filming. The bowling alley featured is a classic slice of mid-century Americana design straight out of American Graffiti. The shots in one take are amazing.

    Stop Asian Hate

    Things came to a head this week with the shooting of eight people, of which six were Asian Americans. It was an inciting incident that ignited a push back in the east and southeast Asian community.

    This week

    The truth of it is that there has been a lot of prejudice in society that bubbles to the surface. East Asians are seen as ‘rich soft marks’ by petty criminals in London. Things that normally remain under the surface have emerged with COVID-19. The asian identity has been conflated with the Chinese communist party and its handling of the situation. If you’re part of the problem you probably wouldn’t even know what conflated meant and are unlikely to be reading this blog.

    More on what you can do here.

    Do Not Split

    Do Not Split is an Academy Award nominated documentary short film on the Hong Kong protests. It was shot by Norwegian director Anders Hammer for Field of Vision. It also featured in Vimeo’s picks of the day. It gave me goose bumps watching it, because of the familiarity of the areas in the film to me.

    This reinforced opinions I have formed about the resilience and professionalism of the police force that the protestors confronted, listening to research by Clifford Stott. I suspect that the Hong Kong Police would struggle to operate in Northern Ireland or even London during protests. At they’re confronted with at worst; is still exceptionally mild compared to marching season in Derry post-Good Friday agreement, let alone during the Troubles.

    There is a certain irony in this. The UK crowd control / riot policing model in the mainland and Northern Ireland was based on experiences shared by colonial police officers who’d served in Malaya, Aden, Kenya and formal knowledge sharing by the Hong Kong Police in the early 1980s.

    Secondly, the self-initiated implementation by the Hong Kong people shows up the Hong Kong governments early inaction on COVID-19.

  • UK China relations + more things

    UK China relations

    What to know about UK China relations in 2021 — Quartz – interesting that the author frames UK China relations in terms of Brexification. The reality is much more nuanced

    Culture

    The Gen X Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up | The New Republic – interesting take on things, though I disagree with a good deal of it

    Design

    Jeff Bezos and Amazon: A complicated design legacy – A major part of design’s value proposition is the process. Designers identify problems to create solutions. Amazon, on the other hand, has often identified solutions before naming the problem. Sometimes that approach worked. But often, it didn’t. And it created an ecosystem with a surprising number of hidden costs. “Amazon will never be a design-led company. It’s evident in the quality of the products they ship. And although the design is still thriving there, I don’t believe it’s fundamental to the core DNA of the company,” says a former Amazon designer who worked closely with Bezos on several products. “Just because there’s ‘customer obsession’ doesn’t mean there’s an investment in quality and design rigor.”

    Right to repair’ law to come in this summer – BBC News 

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s UA Cinemas lowers curtain for final time amid ‘devastating pressure’ of coronavirus pandemic; theatre chain had operated in city since 1985 | South China Morning Post – this felt big to me. Hong Kong has cinema attendance per head of population far over what you’d get in Europe which makes a city with the population of Denmark being historically the fourth largest cinema market. Some of the best times I had in Hong Kong revolved around trips to the cinema

    Japan’s SBI plans Hong Kong pullout on concerns over security law | Financial Times – I was surprised Yoshitaka Kitao came out so unequivocally against the national security law with the statement that ‘without freedom, there is no financial business’ – most companies have pussyfooted around the issue, like they have done around Brexit. SBI are also reviewing their presence in London

    StanChart tries to navigate moral minefield | Financial Times – really interesting read about he challenges that Standard Chartered is facing and how they are trying to manage them. It provides an unfavourable contrast for HSBC though both are a right mess

    Luxury

    Are Supercars a Good Investment? Experts Say Vintage Cars Are Risky – Bloomberg – interesting article

    Why No Other Luxury Company Compares To LVMH | Jing Daily 

    Dior Names Blackpink’s Jisoo New Global Fashion and Beauty Ambassador | Business of Fashion 

    Marketing

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – new agency conglomerate is financially engineered

    Media

    Netflix Begins Test to Crack Down on Password Sharing Outside Your Household – The Streamable – Netflix‘s next stage of growth

    Security

    The UK is secretly testing a controversial web snooping tool | WIRED UK – police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology that could log and store the web browsing of every single person in the country. The tests, which are being run by two unnamed internet service providers, the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, are being conducted under controversial surveillance laws introduced at the end of 2016. If successful, data collection systems could be rolled out nationally, creating one of the most powerful and controversial surveillance tools used by any democratic nation

    Technology

    Why I was wrong to be optimistic about robots | Financial Times – really interesting piece on the state of robotics in warehouse environments

    How Line built fact-checking into its encrypted messaging app – Rest of World 

    iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name | Engadget – I wonder if this affects other Oracle mail server instances

  • Ben Liebrand & things that caught my eye this week

    Ben Liebrand

    Ben Liebrand has been a name for as long as I have been buying records. According to Discogs; he has remixes that have appeared on over 800 albums, compilations and singles. This tells you a lot about the quality and longevity of his remixes. Dutch YouTuber Twan scored an interview with Ben Liebrand where he talks about his career.

    Lunar new year adverts

    WPP showcased work that had been done across their network for Chinese new year 2021. There was a mix of work there, some of it felt like WPP was having to do the creative equivalent of looking under the sofa cushions for change. For instance, Superunion showcased a browser game that they had built as a corporate greetings card for lunar new year. WaveMaker did a transport media buy branding a train interior for a hard candy brand. This could have been executed better. Yes it makes sense to drive awareness in high footfall areas, but shopping for lunar new year presents is usually done before travelling. Secondly, COVID meant that travelling home was discouraged; what was WaveMaker’s plan B for this scenario. Finally, the dressing of the train could have been done more creatively and involved more of a festive feeling.

    The highlight was a Mercedes Benz advert by Ogilvy shot by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar wai – the film taps into the emotion that surrounds Chinese New Year. This mirrors the emotive brief that Mercedes Benz pursued in their US Christmas ad campaigns over the past few years.

    Ogilvy’s work for KFC China taps into the increasing interest in winter sports that is driven by the forthcoming winter olympics in Beijing.

    I was surprised that there was no Ogilvy work showcased from outside China, for instance Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong.

    Machine learning stagnation

    Despite all the technology hype around deep learning, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors that conceals what innovation is happening in the field. The essay shows current machine learning development culture. The original essay is here and a video review of the Machine Learning Stagnation essay. Despite the title its a bit more uplifting than it implies.

    Retro Japan footage

    Yet more great stock footage from Japan in the 1980s. The first one is set to ambient music and shows everyday live in the town and country, alongside TV and film footage. Some of the footage seems to be near a US base. The significance of US cars in the footage is that they used to be popular with the yakuza – Japan’s native organised crime families.

    Fremantle Media have Thames TV’s complete archives including this b-roll of Japanese signage. They claim its Tokyo but some of it looks more like Osaka. It is a symphony of neon that Japan still does the best. It is worthwhile going through Fremantle’s b-roll archive if you’re an art director because of the variety of material that they have.

  • SITA + more things

    SITA

    SITA | SITA statement about security incident – this gave limited and basic information – specifically your name, membership number and tier, seating preferences and a code corresponding to your meal preferences. – according to Cathay Pacific. It looks like this attack on SITA was more about tracking the travel of persons of interest around the world; so more likely to be a state actor rather than commercial motives. China is known to use this kind of data to track and harass its enemies

    Business

    If you read nothing else here, read this piece of investigative journalism. It reads like something out of a post-Smiley John LeCarre novel – British American Tobacco Fights Dirty In West Africa – OCCRP

    Like China, The West Needs National Champions  

    China

    Jack Ma personifies the contradiction of China’s ideology | Financial Times – interesting end to the article, with a question about whether Goldman Sachs, BlackRock et al will be able to convincingly align themselves “politically, intellectually and emotionally” with Xi Jingping? How will the west regard Communist party cells in their management decision structures?

    China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows – I would imagine that this is a bigger problem for China than Russia. I think will continue to be a big issue for China and would be mirrored across other western countries across Europe. Worth reading alongside Xi Jinping turned me into a China hawk – POLITICO 

    The Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’ – Sixth Tone – interesting read on ‘peoples palace’ public spaces

    Luxury

    Kering bets on first-mover advantage with resale | Vogue Business – pretty much all the major houses now have a resale brand of sorts

    H. MOSER & CIE SWISS ALP WATCH FINAL UPGRADE | Watches News – I do like the sense of humour in the design

    LOEWE | The Loewe Show Has Been Cancelled – Loewe’s approach to marketing its spring and summer collection aped a newspaper to create a cookbook.

    Loewe virtual collection newspaper themed look book
    Website screenshot

    Marketing

    An Oral History of Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby Super Bowl Ad – this feels like the creative was done before the strategy which sounds completely out of whack

    Airbnb slashes spend in permanent shift from performance marketing to brand | Campaign – makes sense since AirBnB is ‘verging’ as Faris Yakob would say. And here comes the why: Why you need a strong brand to win in e-commerce: Adidas’ Simon Peel | WARC. More from Simon Peel here.

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – I was reading this by Nigel Scott. I suspect that he’ll be right. My main concern as a marketer is the piss-poor job that the martech stack players do, supporting brand building. The fundamental problem is they only view things from a performance marketing perspective because engineers, programme managers and even the company CMOs don’t get brand. These are the people that brought us growth hacking. Their model is a secondhand car lot salesman.

    Shoppertainment & Livestreaming Gain Steam in Europe’s E-Commerce | Alizila – QVC on your mobile…..

    Russia

    Why the Europeans Don’t Have a Russia Policy – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – the belief held by the older generation of German Social Democrats—and Christian Democrats—that Russia should not be isolated. This was the thinking behind Germany’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, which was begun by the Social Democrats in the late 1960s. That policy was based not only on the idea of dialogue with Russia but also on the notion of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through 

    Technology

    Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Countdown | The Science Behind the Sound | Qualcomm – I think that this sits between two stools. It isn’t hi-fi and it won’t be cheap.

    Wave Goodbye, Hello MIPS as Chapter 11 Resolved | EE Times – still has a strategic focus on the RISC-based processor architectures. They are looking to support a mix of legacy MIPS technology and a new “standards-based 8th generation architecture,” based on the open source RISC-V processor standard

    Can WhatsApp stop misinformation without compromising encryption? — Quartz 

    Don’t know how to train your dog? This device will do it for you – CNET 

    Tools

    I have been playing with this for a few days now and could definitely see a use for it – flowchart.fun 

  • Declare ads & things that caught my eye this week

    Declare ads

    YouTuber Tom Scott delves into the marketing industry and laws that force influencers to declare ads. It is worthwhile watching regardless of how involved you are in marketing. Scott points out what he considers to be inconsistencies in the principles of when to declare ads. In particular, he focuses on the role of product placement in film and TV programmes and the way that is handled.

    Future of

    Wired contributor and author of What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly has spent the COVID lockdown putting together some great talks on YouTube on the future of different aspects of technological progress.

    Kelly’s opinions are usually well thought out and the videos are better than sitting through a few conferences; especially TED conferences.

    SolarWinds

    World Affairs put together a great panel to discuss the recent SolarWinds hack and the impact it has had across both enterprises and governments.

    Celebrity Zoom Bombing

    I was listening to a podcast about a University of Sydney research paper on Zoom based culture building. TL;DR – it doesn’t work unless participation is truly voluntary. Most of them are painful. Lights and Shadows were commissioned to help help promote fun in a company corporate culture. Usually did creative events, but for COVID-19 they had to get creative in Zoom.

    Somehow they managed to get celebrities, or convincing deep fakes to bomb existing Zoom calls.

    Strong Enemy

    The strong enemy is Chinese Communist Party-speak for the United States. China increasingly sees its relationship with the US to lead to eventual war. Xi Jingping has been talking more about the strong enemy in speeches aimed at the PLA to get them ready for inevitable conflict with the US. Sinocism has this great essay on it all.