Ged Carroll

Month: June 2018

  • The Bureau season 3 & other things

    The Bureau season 3 on Amazon. It is one of the most well written series I have watched in a long time. The Bureau season 1 and 2 where taunt thrillers that were James Bond reimagined by John Le Carre. It is the show that Spooks should have been. The ending was on a cliff hanger and I didn’t think that we’d see The Bureau season 3 The Bureau season 3 sees our protagonist captured by ISIS. Guillaume Debailly is captured by ISIS who know him by his former cover of Paul Lefebvre.

    A brass band cover  of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name

    This amazing episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert featuring Rakim (of Eric B & Rakim fame). What people tend to forget is the difference that Rakim made to hip-hop. Before him, most rappers rapped on the beat. Rakim used his rhymes the way a jazz musician plays their instrument. They go around the beat, yet are in time.

    With Amazon delivering analytical data like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more sites signing up to Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme, even if they don’t want to sell anything for the beast of Seattle. The recommendation areas draws from its massive retail data set that shows what consumers are interested in across various different product categories.

    This week I have mostly been working my way through John Kelly’s Mystery Train for my listening pleasure.  Kelly is a veteran Irish DJ who has a rare skill in the quality of his sections. Naturally this is all backed by the massive music library of RTÉ. The original run of it in the mid to late 1990s was legendary and thankfully Irish state broadcaster resurrected it. Kelly just nails music selection. More culture related content here.

  • Preparing to get a brand on social media

    Master TV Control Room 2

    In order to get a brand on social media it isn’t about dropping brand assets on social channels but thinking about what it actually means.

    Distillation of this process is likely to appear on a social media document:

    • It contextualises why social, there must be a business and brand reason to be there beyond ‘well everyone is on Facebook’ in order to get a brand on social media
    • An explanation of how to use the document. Those involved need to view the document as a ‘north star’ for social. It needs to be clear that the document is a set of guidelines, but not immutable
    • In order to get a brand on social media, you need to understand what what will look and sound like

    How the brand manifests itself on social:

    • What’s the brand’s tone of voice on social media channels. Does it want to want to sound like an everyman, does it want a bit of distance and gravitas,  does it want to be an authority on a given area?
    • What’s the personality? If it was a person, what kind of person would it be. This frames the content, what questions it will answer and the view point that it will take. It’s adding extra dimensions that won’t necessarily be applied in public relations, print or even TV advertising due to the nature of social channels
    • What are the content pillars? Think of this as the core messages. Every piece of content created and shared will demonstrate at least one pillar. These are typically things like organisation innovation, heritage, values, point of leadership (thought leadership, authority / expertise, style leadership etc)

    Cross channel rules:

    • How will you handle hashtags
    • How ill you handle localised domain names? (Will their be local domains?)
    • Who has the right to publish what first? For instance if you look at sports brands like Nike or New Balance; you’ll see that soccer related content first appears on their specialist football channels
    • Should local channels link back to ‘global accounts’?
    • Are there any sponsorship or IP-related watch outs? When I worked on New Balance; any club kit related content had to feature a minimum of three players. Otherwise there would be problems with the players other sponsors (notably their boot sponsors and their agents who would be looking for another pay day). Who needs to approve use of sponsorships and how long will approvals take? Can you do a flow diagram to provide insight into the process? How do you handle successes or set backs of partners?
    • How do you handle rumours and speculation? (New iPhone launch or renewal of sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods)
    • How do you handle images that might have a competitor brand in shot?
    • Do you ignore controversial news?
    • Will you share partner content? What channels and handles are legitimate partner content to share?
    • What kind of tools will you put in place? Large brands often use an intermediary platform like Percolate that provides measurement, asset management and an approvals workflow as needed. It even allows the localisation of content by the local brand team

    Social channel-specific rules

    • How often will you post on a  given channel? This might be dictated to you by the kind of account you have on some channels like WeChat. With most others it will be driven by audience content consumption. Twitter generally lends itself to more frequent posts than Instagram or Facebook
    • Specific channel aims over the coming year
    • How will the channel be used? Are there particular segments that it is good at reaching?
    • What kind of content can be published? Example content categories. Best practice executions from other (non-competing) brands to get best practice ideas

    Social crisis response

    • Crisis like accidents have an incident funnel marked by small events, the more of these that happen, the harder it is to climb out of the funnel.  The trick is to limit these before they take you down the funnel.
    • Have a clear workflow in place to handle negative criticism. The US Air Force had a really good workflow to borrow from.
    • Real-time monitoring should highlight things before they escalate. How is this intelligence distributed and to whom?
    • Who is going to be part of the decision group, you’ll likely need people from: customer services, product expert, public relations, management. How will you ensure that employees and the supply chain speak with one voice?

  • The influence post

    Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.

    Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.

    I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year.  Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.

    This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.

    This time last year I noted:

    Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.

    Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?

    Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.

    Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit

    A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers

    The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?

    • Are they bots?
    • Are they stolen accounts?
    • Are the user accounts active any more?
    • Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.

    The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?

    • Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money

    The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?

    • Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
    • Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
    Trends in influence

    I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.

    Global interest in influencers have been accelerating

    Influence: Google Trends

    There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing

    Influence: Google Trends

    There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work

    Influence: Google Trends

    All of which supports the following hypotheses:

    • it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
    • A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
    • A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
    • Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
    What would influence look like?

    Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.

    Slide4

    If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.

    Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.

    How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?

    Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.

    Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format

    That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.

    • Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
    • Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the  high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
    • Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production

    All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?

    Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.

    Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:

    Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.

    Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.

    This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).

    It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:

    • Consumer marketing
    • Mature product sectors
    • Mature brands

    You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.

    Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
    • There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
    • Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
    • You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
    • You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
    • You can lock out rivals out of relationships
    More information

    Mark Ritson: How ‘influencers’ made my arse a work of art | Marketing Week
    Edelman Digital Trends Report – (PDF) makes some interesting reading
    Instagram Marketing: Does Influencer Size Matter? | Markerly Blog
    Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Danny Brown & Sam Fiorella ISBN-13: 978-0789751041 (2013)
    Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach
    Quantifying the Invisible Audience in Social Networks – Stanford University and Facebook Data Science
    PLOS ONE: Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks by Lorenzo Coviello,Yunkyu Sohn, Adam D. I. Kramer,Cameron Marlow, Massimo Franceschetti, Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
    Senior Execs Not Convinced About Social’s Worth | Marketing Charts
    Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy – Cha et al (2010) – (PDF)
    Visualizing Media Bias through Twitter. Jisun An. University of Cambridge. Meeyoung Cha. KAIST. Krishna P. Gummadi. MPI-SWS et al – (PDF)
    Mr. Bags x Longchamp: How to Make 5 Million RMB in Just Two Hours | Jing Daily
    It’s time that we talk about micro-influencers

  • German nuclear plant + more things

    German nuclear plant infected with computer viruses, operator says | Reuters – So Sarbannes Oxley meant that a lot of corporates disabled USB ports. Technology company Huawei used to have ‘dirty machines’ and clean machines. Neither of which were connected by a network. The same was true in many agencies where I worked. Yet a German nuclear plant allows easy access via USB. Secondly, why do the USB chargers on airplane cockpits have any intelligence at all that would store a virus and allow it propagate? I would be very paranoid about using any USB chargers in coffee shops or an aircraft seat moving forwards. This is the problem when everything from light bulbs and doorbells now contain a Linux server. More security related content here.

    Ogilvy’s rebrand reveals an ad industry in confusion | Thomas Barta – an inhouse marketers perspective on things. If you substituted the word advertising for PR in this as a discipline it could be an analysis of all agencies.

    iPhone maker Foxconn is churning out “Foxbots” to replace its human workers — Quartz – I am not convinced that they will be that successful. This is partly down to some of the manual dexterity required being similar to a watchmaker in some parts of the assembly. And that is down to Apple driving an industry race to squeeze phones into tighter factors for the guts. The process is repeatable, but hard to deliver. Back in the day Japanese consumer electronics manufacturers used to use pick-and-place machines for a lot of consumer electronics. It is why Japan went more towards micro-chips faster than players like Philips. Japan did a lot of component standardisation in terms of sizing and connectivity to the board. The boards were relatively simply designed and gave a bit of latitude to allow for a lack of precision from the machines. That meant slightly larger goods. More expensive devices like Sony’s Walkman  Pro, were handmade because they crammed so much technology inside them .

    [Publish] Facebook Profiles can no longer be connected to Buffer Publish – Buffer FAQ – well that’s a bit of a bummer. But you can still publish content via more expensive systems like Percolate. Is this Facebook trying to discourage organic content from anyone but brands (that spend advertising money?)

  • Cyberpunk 2077 & other things

    E3 largely past me by, except for this trailer for forthcoming game Cyberpunk 2077.  Loving the William Gibson’s sprawl trilogy era meets synth-wave vibe to Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077 is being developed by the same studio that adapted The Witcher books to computer games.

    This is a few years old, but Blu e-cigarettes put together a good documentary seven-episode series on dance music and DJ culture that is well worth watching

    Think influencers can be filled with entitlement, who inflate their follower numbers and leech off marketing budgets and want an alternative? You wouldn’t be alone. Virtual personalities have been a thing for a few years in Japan thanks to  Yamaha’s Vocaloid software; you have a purely artificial ‘idol’ (popstar) who appears as a hologram. Virtual YouTube personalities have followed and it was only a matter of time for one of them to start speaking in English to increase their reach.

    I’ll let Sakura Fujima introduce herself. And here’s the kind of content we can look forward to expecting from her

    I’m a big fan of Carhartt and love this advert

    MTV are looking to get hold of some sweet streaming production money by bring back golden oldies including Daria. Expect more dry witticisms and the same monotone delivery that was very gen-X zeitgeist. This time Daria is becoming more woke, by blowing off her bestie Jane and focusing on her black friend Jodie instead.

    While its not likely to affect your post club kebab shop any time soon big food has been showing some interest in automation (like McDonald’s self-service ordering and apps). There will obviously be a trade-off between the likely returns on capital expenditure versus the ready availablility of cheap flexible labour. The number of available products for sale and their relative complexity is another consideration. This Bay Area installation is taking things to their logical conclusion.

    creator burger robot serves this gourmet diner classic for 6 dollars from designboom on Vimeo.