Ged Carroll

Month: February 2015

  • Ogilvy social trends + other things

    Ogilvy social trends

    Marshall and James delivered their Ogilvy social trends presentation on a webinar. Included in the Ogilvy social trends presentation is

    • Disposable / transient content
    • Brand banter
    • Sub-dividing communities using greater ad targeting
    • Twitter zero as the organic reach on the platform plunges towards zero
    • Platforms battle for video dominance
    • Rise in privacy facilitating services
    • Digital and identity are blurring the lines between aspiration and self actualisation

    Here is this year’s Ogilvy social trends presentation:

    Vintage logo design

    Flickr user Eric Carl has put together an amazing album of vintage logo design from the 1970s and they are truly splendid in monochrome. They are like set of post modern mons – the iconic symbols that Japanese clans used to represent themselves. They also feel timeless rather than trend driven.

    Great to finally see something we’ve been working on for a good while break cover. I have been working on a global website redesign and digital strategy for the Family Brands unit at Unilever. This is their worldwide margarine (and related cooking ingredients including cream analogues) product portfolio of products. A second project that I have been involved in is a set of adverts that will be rolling out globally. This is debuting in Mexico. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enjoy it as the new, new thing beckons.

    There was the usual marketing folk shoe-gazing about the American Super Bowl ads, here they are if you have somehow managed to miss them over the past week. I am finding that there is less and less material to fuel client discussions from the Super Bowl adverts over the years, despite it being one of the best brand building / reinforcement opportunities available in any media market.

    Finally, Apple’s financial performance dominated mobile related discussion. It highlighted to me how commoditised around AndARM (Android and ARM) the mobile handset industry has become with vendors not learning from past PC industry lessons. The analogue of Wintel (Windows and Intel) is becoming increasingly common in the mobile industry. More related content here.

  • O2O (online to offline) big in China

    My friend Sam Sun used to flag up O2O as the most important trend he saw when we worked together on mainland Chinese campaigns. O2O means online-to-offline. An integration of digital marketing tactics with marketing to drive retail footfall.

    O2O in China

    In China, there is real consumer demand for this type of marketing. Tencent surveyed WeChat users and found out that 13 per cent of them would prefer to have O2O adverts in their moments (think a stream of friends Tumblr accounts or Facebook’s news feed).
    wechat_moments_advertising_consumer_preference

    There is a whole eco-system that the Chinese can tap into.

    QRcodes have greater customer acceptance in Asia than in Europe, where despite the efforts of Pepsi and other brands to encourage consumer adoption, it has been tepid at best. QRcodes are often confused for barcodes and take-up is a fraction of that in other countries like Japan. By comparison here is the picture of a real estate advert on the table of a Chinese fast food restaurant in Shenzhen.
    Ridiculiously small QRcode on these property ambient ads

    In-store wi-fi in the UK is often clunky, poorly run by a major carrier like EE or a specialist provider like The Cloud. By comparison, in China, Tencent’s WeChat provides a turnkey solution for retailers, restaurants and bars to provide wi-fi and build their social following in a relatively painless manner for the consumer. (Though the software used by the retailer needs regular updating to keep up with Tencent’s ambitious development of the platform).

    On the face of it however China isn’t the most promising market for O2O. It is a vast, diverse country, which makes it hard to build a truly national network of retail outlets. It has a dominant e-commerce platform this is more like eBay than an Amazon in that it doesn’t compete directly with its merchants. Secondly, the cost of labour and the huge funds available to internet companies mean that building a logistics network is more likely to succeed than it would do in a more expensive country like the UK or US.

    O2O in the west

    Contrast this with the west, where Scott Galloway predicts Amazon’s demise because of the unsustainable cost of its product delivery system. Galloway hypothesises that ad-hoc logistics networks based on the sharing economy a la Uber and clicks and mortar businesses like Tesco offer a better alternative. Apparently doing the warehousing towards the edge is more cost beneficial than the Amazon model.

    In the west, we seem to be on the cusp of a range of technologies that could make indoor location, identity and marketing a whole lot easier.

    Hong Kong developers Green Tomato, have used ultrasonic signals and low power Bluetooth to allow applications to interact with their surroundings from sports check-ins to shopping mall navigation.

    Low power Bluetooth beacons have been experimented with by retailers for encourage mobile augmented shopping and by organisations including Japanese Railways to aid indoor navigation. CSR and other companies have talked about using wi-fi as an indoor navigation aid. Further out quantum technology offers highly accurate GPS type location finding within buildings. All of this technology has the potential to further move O2O further forwards, if the user experience is made sufficiently simple and seamless. In the meantime the humble QRcode soldiers on connecting consumers and retailers in Asia.

    More information

    WeChat Adds Wi-Fi Solution to Public Accounts | Technode
    China consumers voice their preferences for WeChat Moments ads | Resonance China
    Proposes new indoor requirements and revisions to existing E911 rules | FCC
    New indoor positioning system lets you do Batman-like echolocation on your phone | ExtremeTech
    CSR claims it will be able to fix your indoor location accurately | VentureBeat
    UK military creates quantum compass that could be the successor to GPS | ExtremeTech
    JR Rolls Beacon Navi for Tokyo Station | Wireless Watch Japan – interesting internal navigation application of beacon (low power Bluetooth technology)
    WiFi Chip Tracks Indoor Location | EE Times
    Five examples of how marketers are using iBeacons | Econsultancy
    Mapping Our Interiors – NYTimes.com – interesting business model by IndoorAtlas
    Grindr – Lisa Page – HyperIsland – really interesting insights on LBS design
    Green Tomato Limited