Creative agency Endeavour sent out the first Christmas card that I received. This year they focused on content rather than design with everything that you need Christmas 2020 – Endeavour.
There was guidance on how to make paper Christmas trees including a green PDF that you can print out if you don’t like the snow white look of unprinted paper and a Spotify playlist.
The Financial Times have put together a series article looking atThe Future of the City. The City in question being the London’s international financial services sector, whose traditional home is the City of London – think Wall Street in New York, or Central in Hong Kong. I found How London grew into a financial powerhouseparticularly informative and all the articles are chock full of charts.
A relatively modern Carroll family Christmas tradition has been my Dad and I watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It will carry extra weight this year due to social distancing and the recent death of John Le Carre. My Dad read his books whilst working shifts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He used to buy books second hand from a florrid looking book dealer in the local market. I in turn, read my Dad’s books (Len Deighton, Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre) as I went through the early years of secondary school. Le Carre was the only one of these authors that I decided to read more than once.
This time, we’ll both be watching them on Blu-Ray whilst keeping the video open on FaceTime to discuss it as we go along.
It doesn’t get more 1990s than this. A skateboarder reading his self-authored poetry. Mike Vallely a professional skateboarder. If my memory serves me right, Vallely rode for Powell Peralta (Bones Brigade) factory team a few separate times during his career. In this video he gives the poetry reading in a LA skate shop back in 1996.
https://youtu.be/QTr2Mvz873c
The Luxury Society held a panel in Shanghai talking about luxury brands and the digital behaviour of the Chinese consumer. More luxury related content here.
Revealed: China suspected of spying on Americans via Caribbean phone networks | US news | The Guardian – China is alleged to have used Caribbean phone networks to conduct its surveillance. I’d imagine that they aren’t the only people to do this – At the heart of the allegations are claims that China, using a state-controlled mobile phone operator, is directing signalling messages to US subscribers, usually while they are travelling abroad. Signalling messages are commands that are sent by a telecoms operators across the global network, unbeknownst to a mobile phone user. They allow operators to locate mobile phones, connect mobile phone users to one another, and assess roaming charges. But some signalling messages can be used for illegitimate purposes, such as tracking, monitoring, or intercepting communications.– always use a VPN when roaming whether it’s Caribbean phone networks or elsewhere. We don’t know which Caribbean phone networks are vulnerable, could it be Digicel? More security related posts here.
LS Keynote Shanghai 2020: The Digital Transformation of International Brands in China – studies by Boston Consulting Group for the luxury sector showed that 93 per cent of purchases in China are influenced by digital touchpoints – which is significantly higher compared to the 60 per cent observed in the global market. This makes developing digital offerings in China more significant for luxury brands. On top of its external transformation, it is also crucial for brands to establish an effective organisational structure and infrastructure internally. When it comes to creating omnichannel experiences, the development of online channels should be done so in tandem with offline touchpoints, opined Liang. Any projects that straddle online and offline must be supported by frontline staff – something he sees as a key challenge for luxury brands today – interesting stuff from Luxury Society
To the moon and back, Chinese R&D is leaving the US behind | Financial Times – Once upon a time, the US government invested heavily in research. US federal R&D spending surged after the Soviets launched Sputnik, peaking in 1965 at 11.7 per cent of federal spending and at 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product. Frontier discoveries from that time led to the internet and GPS, the global navigation system. But in the decades since putting a person on the moon, US government investment in ideas has waned. In constant dollars, Nasa spending had fallen by more than half by the early 1970s; it has been flat ever since. By 2019, total federal R&D spend constituted just 2.8 per cent of all federal spending and just 0.6 per cent of GDP — the lowest since the start of the cold war.
US orders emergency action after huge cyber security breach | Financial Times – Hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world use SolarWinds’ Orion platform. The US department of Homeland Security’s cyber security arm ordered all federal agencies to disconnect from the platform, which is used by IT departments to monitor and manage their networks and systems. FireEye, a leading cyber security company that said it had fallen victim to the hack last week, said it had already found “numerous” other victims including “government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East”.
‘This Feels Uncomfortable’: Nike Tackles Racism In Japan – observers criticised Nike for misunderstanding or disrespecting its host country — as if racial prejudice were somehow a component of Japanese culture that should not be challenged. The issue is more complex than both the content and the censure suggest, but the reaction was a reminder that Japan is still less accustomed to ‘purpose-driven’ brand work than many economically advanced markets. It also underscored that extreme right-wing views exist in Japanese society, even if people rarely give voice to them in an offline environment. For some ordinarily bold brands, it is likely to prompt a round of second-guessing before adopting a sensitive social topic as part of their marketing efforts. “People think discrimination isn’t part of Japanese life, but it is,” said one Japanese in-house communications head at a multinational consumer-facing company, who wanted to remain anonymous. She added that she did not see the work as offensive but as helping to raise awareness of unconscious bias. At the same time, she said she would weigh the risks with extra care before embarking on any diversity-oriented campaign
China pulls back from the world: rethinking Xi’s ‘project of the century’ | Financial Times – two Chinese banks lent $462bn, just short of the $467bn extended by the World Bank, according to the Boston University data. In some years, lending by the Chinese policy banks was almost equivalent to that by all six of the world’s multilateral financial institutions — which along with the World Bank include the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the African Development Bank — put together. In global development finance, such a sharp scaling back of lending by the Chinese banks amounts to an earthquake. If it persists, it will exacerbate an infrastructure funding gap that in Asia alone already amounts to $907bn a year, according to Asian Development Bank estimates. In Africa and Latin America — where Chinese credit has also formed a big part of infrastructure financing — the gap between what is required and what is available is also expected to yawn wider. China’s retreat from overseas development finance derives from structural policy shifts, according to Chinese analysts. “China is consolidating, absorbing and digesting the investments made in the past,” says Wang Huiyao, an adviser to China’s state council and president of the Center for China and Globalisation, a think-tank. – there are limits to what even China can do to defy economic laws. Overall the infrastructure costs of the British empire were much higher than is generally realised
I was inspired to write a 2020 media diary after re-reading a post that I had contributed to Stephen Waddington’s blog back in 2015 that looked at my online and offline media consumption. Prior to COVID; it wouldn’t have changed that much from the 2015 variant. In fact in 2020, a lot is still the same through COVID. A number of the changes had happened had been driven prior to COVID.
But lets start off the 2020 media diary with the COVID effects.
Zoom fatigue
When I started off working in agency life. Being able to work from home wasn’t possible for a couple of reasons. I didn’t have my own space that I could work at. Even if I could, I would need to find a block of work where I would need to write and concentrate rather than bounce ideas of colleagues.
I idealised working from home as a bit like the early bits of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Working in my pyjamas, with a kick ass hi-fi. The future is more banal. I own a nice Sony pre and power amp combo rather than a Carver Audio system based around the M-500t power amplifier.
But what its actually meant was an extension of the working day and a blurring of the line between work and personal time. I empathised with those people I saw using the edge of the bed as an office chair and their dressing table as a desk on Zoom calls.
Zoom fatigue set in. Zoom was tiring for a few reasons. Calls were often stacked up one after the other. Secondly you couldn’t carve out blocks of time for it like email. Instead its a constant low level presence; rather like Stack or WhatsApp groups. When you did a group video call, there is a lot happening on screen and its much more of a cognitive load than your average meeting. Finally there is the extension of the working day.
And no, I haven’t managed to work in my dressing gown.
Return of the desktop
If I had written my 2020 media diary before March, I would have referenced discussions around ‘post-PC age’; even if it wasn’t mirrored in my own behaviour. I primarily used my Mac for content creation because I spent a lot of my time outside the home. Not being so mobile has meant that my iPhone has been used less and my Mac has been used much more.
Continuity provided integration across my iPhone, iPad and Mac. All my messenger apps have a desktop client, which I can toggle between on the Mac. A lot of the apps in my personal use made no sense as I have been by my home entertainment set up all the time. Ocado stopped supporting their mobile app as they become overwhelmed with orders; which meant that my shopping was completed on my Mac. My iPhone was then only really useful as a phone.
Messenger for keeping in touch and on track
I have been using messenger clients for almost as long as I have been online. I used to have them all together in an app called Adium X on the Mac. Unfortunately that isn’t possible any longer. Instead I am using a hodge podge of clients
WeChat, LINE, Signal, Skype, Apple Messages, Slack, Zoom, Teams, WhatsApp and KakaoTalk. Over the past 12 months Signal has become very popular and I am using WeChat with contacts inside and outside China much less. Signal took off because of concerns about privacy amongst my network at home and abroad.
Secondly, I have been using my Mac as my primary messaging device which was definitely an effect that COVID had on my 2020 media diary.
From always on to keeping it off
When I started to use internet based services, you made an active decision to get online. You dialled up or logged on. For the best part of the past few decades we moved towards an always-on world. People often complained about the amount of email received at work; the way the email client was a constant draw, when they could be getting things done instead. First my Mac at home was constantly connected to the internet and mobile phones allowed us to be called directly on the go. Then we had mobile email and a nascent web experience. From there it was apps. My 2020 media diary has seen this accelerate even further. Immediacy has been accelerated even further and has been making people burn out and feel sick.
Turning off and keeping the internet off has now become an active decision. All be it, one that has become much harder to make.
Flickr is an archive
Flickr is still my visual archive and an essential part of my 2020 media diary; but since I have been out and about much less. Its less of a source of anxiety for me since Smugmug purchased it from Yahoo!
Facebook is private groups
I continue to use Facebook in a similar way to developer friends using Stack Overflow or other forums for professional social discourse on a couple of private groups. I go directly into the groups, I don’t bother looking at the home page news feed.
Twitter: paring back
Back in 2019, I started to cut back what I posted on Twitter and how long I wanted it to be on there. Generally posts won’t last more than a week on my profile.
My Instagram has been paired back and just shares a record from my collection now and again. Just enough activity for people to know that I am still alive, but that’s it.
Media content
2020 saw me bulk up my vinyl collection. I bought digital music and vinyl records on Bandcamp. I also bought CDs and vinyl from the Discogs marketplace.
The major change has been the way I listen to my music. When I was out and about I use a late model iPod Classic upgraded with 256GB flash memory storage. My listening has now moved to my Mac. I invested in a high quality pair of headphones (Beyerdynamic x Massdrop.com DT177X Go for home listening, they are 32 ohms which makes them very easy to drive). I don’t have to worry about driving them with a big amplifier. I also don’t need noise cancelling to deal with the the clutter of my office surroundings. My Bose headphones are charged but unused for the past eight months.
I have been using my Mac’s native Podcasts app and have pretty much given up watching news from the major UK news channels. The whole Brexit debacle and a failure to hold politicians of all parties accountable meant that I instead listen to content from the likes of RTÉ, CNBC, NPR, NHK and KBS instead. I get this content via their podcasts.
I still have an Apple TV box that I use for Bloomberg TV, Yahoo! Finance (which is surprisingly good), Netflix, Amazon PrimeVideo and iTunes store content.
News is print, the web and RSS.
Given everything that has been going on, I decided to invest in a print and digital Financial Times subscription. Why print? I like to scan my news quickly on the newspaper with my morning coffee. I can then dive into stories that catch my eye in more depth online. Placement on print provides a layer of context that digital doesn’t really have.
My RSS reader of choice is still Newsblur.com. That is now supplemented through email updates from Sinocism, the China Research Group and a whole pile of marketing and advertising newsletters.
I still read magazines. I am currently subscribed to Monocle and the US edition of Wired magazine. I have print and digital access to both.
Search promiscuity
I still bookmark with pinboard.in and now have almost 55,000 bookmarks at the time of writing. This represents a ‘trusted universe’ of web pages that I often search in first before going to DuckDuckGo and then Google. I use DuckDuckGo as my first option of search engine. It isn’t because it the best, but for many searches its good enough. Going there first means that I am giving Google less of my data, which has incremental benefits from a privacy point of view. I would like to see DuckDuckGo improve the quality of its organic search results, but that is likely to be a slow process since it is based on Bing search technology.
Brands that cut through
I first wrote the headline brands that cut through in my 2015 post. And I started to question as I wrote my 2020 media diary, what does cut through mean in a COVID world? I don’t need the kind of purpose advertising that Dettol came up with in the UK.
For many of the brands that I like, the product is the marketing – the online marketing efforts of these brands are coincidental.
COVID tested service brands. Ocado came close to losing me as a customer.
Hermes reinforced my impression of their service being dreadful.
The Royal Mail and Parcelforce delivery people continued to shine. Though I have qualms about Amazon’s business practices, they did what I wanted them to. Prior to lockdown I had upgraded my parents to a newer model Apple iPad and have Facetimed them every day. Each day the quality has been consistently good.
If one brand stood out in terms of its marketing, it was Carhartt US stood out for me this year in the way that it tried to be useful in a low key way to the essential workers and first responders in its customer base.
Authority in crisis
Five years ago, if you had told me that I wouldn’t be listening to the BBC any longer and that the prime minister would be so bad at handling a crisis. I wouldn’t have believed you. It sounds like some fantastical dystopian vision. Some institutions have managed to burn through a lot of latent goodwill, moral and intellectual authority. But it’s not just the UK. The Hong Kong government has issues that go beyond the 2019 protests; with a diffusion of power and responsibility. In the US, the Trump administration was surreal. The one bright light being Mike Pompeo, who was at least consistent with regards China.
Examples of the kind of good leadership that we should expect, stood out for their abnormality; when in reality it should be the other way around. Democracy should give us great leaders in moments of crisis, shouldn’t it?
Veering towards the jackpot
In William Gibson’s last two books The Peripheral and Agency, there is the concept of a slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. It isn’t one thing that does the human race in like a meteor, a rogue AI or a nuclear holocaust. Instead its a slow drumbeat of events over decades: changes in weather, mass pandemics, flood, drought and populism.
I’ve previously enjoyed William Gibson’s visions of the near and far future. It taught me a lot about technology and where the rubber hit the road between tech and people. 2020 has felt like we’ve veered towards the jackpot. Now having lived in Hong Kong post-SARS, I realise that feeling is overly dramatic. We have historically lucked out in the west. COVID-19 posed a unique challenge, because you spread the virus before you exhibit symptoms, which is remarkably different to SARS and other conditions. I hope I am here in five years time to review this 2020 media diary and write a more upbeat 2025 media diary.
Different times | Campaign magazine – It’s tempting to look at the best of today’s creatives and compare them with the greats: David Abbott, John Webster, Helmut Krone, George Lois, Ed McCabe, Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, Paul Arden, Sir John Hegarty. And to think there’s no-one around who could hold a candle to any of them. But is it a fair comparison? They were working with account men like Frank Lowe, Tim Bell and Nigel Bogle, they were working with media guys like Mike Yershon, directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, and planning hadn’t even been invented then. Of course it was easier to do great work, everyone wanted great work. There weren’t hundreds of TV channels and big data and micro-targeting, and ad tech, and dozens of different platforms, and five campaigns shown at creative pitches. What was wanted was quality not quantity, one fantastic ad not a dozen space-fillers. It was, in fact, much easier in those days to do great work. Sure the competition was tougher, but everyone was agreed on what they wanted, ads that made the public sit up and take notice. I know the people working today may not have stood up against the greats. But I’m not sure that if any of the greats had been working today, they would have been able to produce great work either. – Dave Trott on the futility of comparisons that relate to now, versus then and changing ad environment for creatives (and everyone else for that matter). The contrast in creatives and their output is very striking. One cannot ignore the nature of the medium in the creative process. The move to social seems to have kneecapped creatives and creativity. By comparison earlier media revolutions like television enhanced creativity. Creatives were constantly learning new ways of creativity within the medium. The copywriters seems to have reduced their standing in creatives even more than visual designers. How can platforms provide creatives with a similar range that legacy media did? What can creatives do to recover their own mojo as a profession? More marketing related content here.
Pop Mart/Asian IPOs: go figure | Financial Times – Pop Mart, which sells $8 boxes of figurines, has taken advantage of its newfound popularity to join the listing boom in Hong Kong. Shares nearly doubled in value on the first day of trading on Friday. As with other recent Asian listings, a redirection of money previously set aside for the postponed Ant Group listing appears to have fuelled the frenzy. Demand has also been boosted by the approaching holiday shopping season.
Coca-Cola Launches Global Creative and Media Agency Reviews –Coca-Cola is launching a full global review of its media buying and planning services. The creative portion of the review encompasses creative, experiential marketing, production management and shopper marketing. “We are on a journey to fundamentally transform and dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing investments,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told Adweek. “By improving our processes, eliminating duplication and optimizing spend, we will generate significant savings to fuel reinvestment in our brands. “Media and creative agency services require significant investment from our brands. They are also a crucial component of our ongoing digital transformation journey to drive our business. With that in mind, we have decided to undergo a complete redesign of our media and creative agency models in an effort to align the strategic, operational, and commercial needs of our new, networked organization,” the spokesperson added. “This will necessitate a full review of our media and creative planning and buying practices, as well as our media and creative agency appointments and commercial relationships around the world. We expect this process will be completed by the end of 2021.”
Pompeo shames MIT, calls Chinese authorities ‘jackbooted thugs’ in remarks about academic freedom | South China Morning Post – “A Fulbright student coming in from some country ought not be returned to their home country and to suffer from the jackbooted thugs that now want to take the information that they got, send them back into the United States only to have them just take a little bit more information that they’re going to hand off to the Chinese [Ministry of State Security] … or the People’s Liberation Army”, he said. “MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks,” Pompeo said in his opening address. The school’s president, L. Rafael Reif, he added, “implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors”. – interesting, if true, that US universities are no platforming politicians to avoid offending Beijing
The Hottest Campaign Ads on Twitter Didn’t Really Work: Study – The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for. The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested. – I think that there a lot of lessons for creatives and strategists in this piece of research in terms of eliciting behaviour change, beyond politics
A transatlantic effort to take on Big Tech | Financial Times – Companies are counting on the incoming Biden administration, which will include a number of tech-friendly officials from Barack Obama’s time in the White House, to help them stand up to Europe. It shouldn’t. One of the huge risks for the new administration is that it will be seen as too cosy with concentrated corporate power. Witness the cries already coming from the left about some of Mr Biden’s appointees who have backgrounds in private equity. Individual appointees should be judged on their own merits. If we didn’t let anyone from either the finance or the technology industries into the new administration, we would be the poorer for it. Take Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who is now Mr Biden’s chief markets adviser. He cleaned up derivatives trading while at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years – grab the popcorn
About Google’s approach to research publication – Google Docs – A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date
Hong Kong’s Civil Servants Under Siege – The Diplomat – I think the oath taking is a big deal. If you don’t sign it, they will immediately assume you will be against the government one day. Most of us don’t agree with this practice. Those who are almost retired and are older think it’s quite normal. They stress that Hong Kong is a part of China, and civil servants have the responsibility to uphold the policies issued by the government and support it no matter what we think. But most of the newer recruits, what we care about is that freedom of speech is protected. The Basic Law guarantees our freedom of speech. No matter what career we have, we should enjoy this right.
Wikipedia Matters by Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer and Slivko – we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’ choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia in- creases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities. The impact is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on Wikipedia (PDF)
Inside a Technics SL-1200 turntable with DJ Fix founder Jon Hildenstein
ZAK Agency did some qualitative interviews amongst young people for their opinion on diary products.
Opinions on dairy products
And if you’re tired of dairy farming, what about cows as a method of carbon capture? Courtesy of Rabobank. The theory is that by carefully managing grassland grazing, farmers can feed their livestock and maximise carbon capture. Part of this process is helped by the use of virtual fencing on the open range. I am sure that it makes sense from a mathematical point of view, but what about growing natural forests?
Opinion | When Can I Get a Coronavirus Vaccine in America? – The New York Times – I know, I know. You’d much prefer to hear about the minutae of my fingernails than another coronavirus post. I am not trying o do anything but point out to you the great interactive infographic in the article. You put in some basic detail and gives you an idea of where you would be likely to sit in the queue.
It bases your placement on the following information:
Age
American county where you live
High priority profession status (medical worker, teacher, first responder etc)
COVID related health risks
Its all rather clever.
Taiwan’s flag carrier EVA Air have released a waterproof packable jacket that caught my eye. As airline merchandise goes its subtly branded on the hood. The print design, cut and fabric give it a look that would be at home on screen in either Blade Runner or Cyberpunk 2077.
