Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk is marketed as a Trump presidency book.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis mass paperback cover.
The Donald
The Fifth Risk starts off by telling the story of Chris Christie. How he helped the future Trump administration organise a government in waiting. Christie and the team are let go. Trump was worried about spending money.
Given the revelations about Donald Trump’s finances in the New York Times; I can understand his desire to control cash flow. This goes some way to explaining the problems filling senior government places.
A second thing comes out in the first part of the book; Trump’s instinct to value personal loyalty. Which is fine; but doesn’t scale that well. That meant that people were often unsuitable for the jobs that they were given.
A final trait that came through was a massive root-and-branch concern against climate change.
So Lewis doesn’t say that much about the Trump administration that we didn’t already know. But that is only 30 percent of the book.
What the government does
The remaining 70 percent of the book tells the stories of different departments of the US government. The vital, complex roles that they play. He peels back the complex relationships between the federal government and the states. That interface builds in a lot of waste and inefficiency – to meet state political goals.
Lewis gets experts to explain how welfare payments work and why they’re needed. Or how departments like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Energy benefit the country.
Lewis also covers what motivated some of the government service. TL;DR – from the new deal to the Kennedy administration young Americans felt that they could make a real difference. They felt inspired in a way that probably only clergy or military service personnel feel now.
Finally, touches on risks. The fifth risk that the Department of Energy expert talked about was programme management. This is where the name of the book comes from. How is programme management a risk?
If a department is managed by someone who doesn’t understand the area involved.
Realpolitik – NASA was for years a victim of pork barrel politics and the o-ring failure that happened on the Challenger disaster was a function of it
If an administration takes a short terms, or small government world view.
In praise of Keynesian economics
The examples in the book tear away at the popular narrative around big government. Of inefficiencies and long queues of rapacious welfare queens.
It shows all the things that the government does for the collective good. Things that the market wouldn’t be able to address. It also shows the hucksters involved in the markets. In particular calling out Accuweather’s founders Barry and Joel Myers. That Lewis hasn’t been sued by Myers adds to the veracity of his claims.
This is essentially a criticism of the economic orthodoxy that has governed both of America’s political parties for the past 40 years, since the Carter administration. In this respect, the educated reader would appreciate that it fires a shot across the bow of all parties. From Sanders and Biden to Trump.
Style
I was introduced to Michael Lewis as a writer, when I read Liar’s Poker in college. It is a deeply personal book, full of humour and self examination. In it, he provides the ley reader an insight into the financial services system. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to have much impact as the financial recessions following the dot com boom and the housing crisis proved.
He then wrote a slew of books that owe a good deal to the new journalism style of Tom Wolfe. His writing covered sports, financial crises and politics. Some of the books were very of their time, such as The Future Just Happened, Boomerang and Panic!. Others like Liars Poker, are ageless. A couple of his books were made into films of the same name: Moneyball and The Big Short.
The Fifth Risk still feels like the classic Michael Lewis new journalism style. But it also feels like it has an eye on a documentary adaptation. In this respect he reminds me a lot of Ben Mezrich in term of his cinematic approach to writing.
The author of The Big Score is a lifetime inhabitant of Silicon Valley, Michael Malone. Malone went to school with Steve Jobs and spent his entire working life as a journalist covering technology companies of the area. His own career sounds like a veritable history of technology sector business reporting. Malone had written and or edited for the San Jose Mercury News, Fast Company, Upside, Forbes (ASAP), The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. Now he co-hosts a weekly podcast on the goings on in Silicon Valley.
The book was originally published in 1985 and has been finished prior to the launch of the Apple Macintosh. At the the time of writing, Malone had been an early to mid-career journalist.
Silicon Valley time capsule
His book is time capsule of how Silicon Valley would have likely seen itself. The people portrayed in it lack the kind of artifice that pioneering PR people like Pam Edstrom would later drum into a young Bill Gates with media interview training and briefing books. Companies have since gone a step further and seldom engage with the media at all; instead putting out news by blog post or staged video production a la Apple under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.
Steve Jobs on Apple’s future back in 1997
When we come to understand modern-day Silicon Valley five decades into the future, we won’t have the same level of intellectual honesty that we have in The Big Score because the artefacts and interviews will be so vanilla.
The book had become a largely forgotten business history book. Michael Malone revisited much of the history of covered in the book with a slightly longer term perspective in his 2002 work The Valley of Hearts Delight, which covered the history of the area from the 1960s to the dot com era. While The Big Score might have been forgotten, it was resurrected when Stripe through its publishing arm put it out again in 2021. They did this because while the book was forgotten by the general public, it has been read in libraries by university students and in their own collections by people like me who followed the technology sector.
Getting things wrong
In the introduction to the book, late career Malone freely admits the three things that he got wrong in The Big Score:
The impact of the internet. While it didn’t reach public consciousness until I was in college; as a high schooler in 1969 Michael Malone had got a chance to try the ARPAnet during a class visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News had been using email and bulletin boards as part of their business process and offering since the 1980s. Yet Malone’s past familiarity gave him little idea of what was likely to lie ahead. His elevated access as a journalist to the great and the good of the technology sector didn’t help either; in fact Bill Gates made a similar error to Malone in the first edition of his bookThe Road Ahead. Gates worked very quickly with the publishers to get out a second edition that corrected his mistake. But I think Malone’s inability to see and his intellectual honesty about that is instructive for all of us
While he had the chance to meet Doug Engelbart, Malone wrongly assumed that Engelbart was an eccentric inventor trying to get people to pay him his dues for technology that got bypassed. So, Engelbart doesn’t feature in The Big Score at all, despite The Mother of All Demos
Intel’s Andy Grove, who Malone now considers to be the most important business man in the history of Silicon Valley doesn’t get a prominent role in the book. That’s not so bad as Andy Grove managed to write a lot in his own right, notably Only The Paranoid Survive
The Big Score on excess, greed and ethics
Malone’s The Big Score like Robert X Cringely’s later work Accidental Empires wastes no time in showing Silicon Valley’s underbelly. At the time of writing there was a large amount of industrial espionage happening between hardware companies, many start-ups were being developed by greedy experienced executives and top performing workers were burning out by trying to keep up self medicating with drugs and stimulants and alcohol to take the edge off. Something you still see today with engineers using Adderall to help them focus.
In this respect The Big Score is very different from other works that cover this era such as Chip War, Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
The Big Score by Michael Malone tells the tale of Silicon Valley before the Apple Macintosh and the large media companies of Yahoo!, Excite, Alphabet or Meta et al.
While the counterculture did play a substantial role in the PC revolution, much of early Silicon Valley was about trying to accumulate wealth and while the successful are lionised for a while; most people did middling to ok at best. There was a work culture of hard working and hard drinking which meant that marriages didn’t last. The first barrier that Silicon Valley broke through was one of class, if you were bright and successful enough, class didn’t matter.
Robert X. Cringely in his later book Accidental Empires talked about how Bob Noyce (a key player at Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) was rejected from joining a local country club despite his business success. Class still existed, but not within these companies to the same extent. Michael Malone in The Big Score conveys how the culture clash over class between its workers and those who funded it, ripped apart Silicon Valley and created an explosion of semiconductor companies that dominated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s and beyond.
While Silicon Valley provided a greater egalitarian opportunity for the corporate man who worked there, women are seldom mentioned.
(Aside: At the start of my career in agency life I had LSI Logic as a client. LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor. Even then at the height of the dot com bubble; ‘real men’ were engineers or salesmen and women worked as secretaries or in public relations. As the company had grown their female corporate marketing manager had been pushed out of the headquarters and to the far flung European office, which was the smallest part of the business were she could do the least damage. I still remember how awkward it was to see her treated with distain by her main colleagues. She had many faults, but the treatment lacked decorum and discretion. This kind of culture is fostered from the top of an organisation down. Despite all this she had still been granted shares in the business and a good deal of share options meaning she could be comfortably well off and fund various American christian endeavours.
I even got to meet Corrigan, the son of a Liverpool docker came across as a Silicon Valley analogue of Michael Gambon’s character in The Layer Cake – rich but not sophisticated. Someone who mistook his mix of hard work and good fortune as a divine right.)
While much is said about the egalitarian nature of David Packard, William Hewlett and Bob Noyce, they still had the social conservatism of Leave It To Beaver. Malone eulogised Hewlett and Packard in his later award winning business history Bill and Dave. The Big Score portrays them with a clearer eye. But Bill and Dave came out later on when Silicon Valley was starting to lose its moral compass. H-P under Carly Fiorina had ruptured the H-P way and was an indicator of what was to come – so Malone recast them as mythical heroes.
Silicon Valley soap opera
Malone’s description in The Big Score of the break away of talent from Shockley Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor is accurate. But the story itself is engaging in the same way that the family drama of the soap operas that my Mam used to follow.
Stripe Press
Stripe Press have given The Big Score a much needed needed design refresh. They typography makes it easy to read and the book is immensely well read. The hardback cover, binding and paper are high quality for a book of this nature. It is the kind of book that will be an heirloom that can be handed on down to the next generation. If not for the value, for the historical knowledge. Beyond the self penned introduction at the front, the contents of the book itself were left alone.
Recommendation?
If you are student of Silicon Valley history or have read Malone’s other books The Big Score is a great complementary read. The republishing of the book by Stripe Press is timely given the fads of the metaverse and NFTs that have swept through the technology sector recently.
However if you wanted one book to start you off on your Silicon Valley journey, I wouldn’t recommend it. I would suggest that you read the following books before getting to The Big Score. Its not because these books are better, but that they provide a better initial entry point into the world of Silicon Valley and its history. Malone’s book was written relatively early one and other books can provide a better basic knowledge framework because of The Big Score‘s age:
Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. There are similarly great books to read like Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late – but they aren’t as entertaining to read as Accidental Empires and pull their punches in order to be seen as ‘serious’ business books
Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed.
Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and lore. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way.
Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller is a think tank wonk and history professor who tells the story of the semiconductor industry specifically through its relationship with the military industrial complex and its relationship with national security. Chip War deservedly was recommended as one of the FT’s business book’s of the year 2022.
Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein. Fred Vogelstein is an experienced journalist who most notably covered the technology sector for Wired magazine. If your familiarity with the tech industry starts with Google and Apple. Dogfight is a great entry point.
The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0
Welcome to my September 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 14th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong and dealt with Chinese accounts, the number 4 was considered unlucky, rather like 13. 14 is even worse due to it sounding so similar to ‘is dead’ or ‘will be dead’ or ‘will be certain to die’ depending on the variant of the spoken language used. In other cultures the symbolism of 14 is more nebulous at best.
September got off to an odd start, we seem to have had all the seasons, rather than settling gently into the run up to autumn. I managed to avoid traditional mooncake during mid-autumn festival celebrations that I attended. My waistline was thankful for the #ROMO (relief of missing out).
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Being on the ground in Merseyside as the Southport stabbings unfolded gave me a different perspective on things.
How generative AI features are affecting the Google search experience and much more.
My reading for September 2024 slacked off a bit as real world obligations kicked in.
The Old Woman With the Knife worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work.
Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists.
Things I have been inspired by.
AI proficiency.
Section, the education company founded by Professor Scott Galloway has AI proficiency as a key element in its offering. They have put together research to show how low the current level of proficiency is. They consider this research a rallying cry; but the results could also be reflective of a technology adoption curve that isn’t moving at the speed of hype, which is what came through in my examination of public discussions during the summer.
Secondly, research from the Upwork Research Institute implies a higher a higher adoption rate of generative AI, but lower success rate with the outputs generating inefficiencies rather than productivity gains. Part of the problem seems to come from organisational leadership and the way generative AI is being implemented.
WARC have published a report which looks at What’s working in generative AI from a marketing perspective. Some of the ideas like synthetic data in market research are not quite in prime time yet and generative AI’s large carbon footprint can’t be ignored.
Digitalisation and brands
Harvard Business Review published research that indicated a weaker relationship between profit share and brand in certain types of businesses. On the face of it, this supports Scott Galloway’s ‘end of brand‘ hypothesis. WARC covered the research paper in depth pointing out that for each percentage gain in market share highly digitised businesses gain 0.19% increase in profit compared to 0.26% in less digital businesses. This seems to be due to a multitude of factors:
Efficiency gains due to digitalisation have an effect on the existing profit prior to the market share. Efficiency is the main selling point of much digital automation from CRM systems to performance advertising.
Market power of larger companies ( a la Google).
Perceptions of quality – digital-only companies might look more reputable due to the lack of real-world signals to the contrary
Market share (and brand) still matters, but it hits different depending on the business. B2B and growth hacking business approaches gain less than consumer orientated businesses. A larger dataset of Kantar-sourced data analysed by Oxford University researchers found that better brand effects were down to ‘difference’ as in how customers see – and experience the brand – as being different enough from competitors.
FEAST
FEAST is an occasional magazine and curated set of events all about food and its ingredients. If you are a strategist working with a food or beverage client it’s well worth exploring their archive as a source of inspiration for insights given its in-depth and thoughtful arts-based approach.
Streaming plateau
I finally got to dive into Ofcom’s Media Nations research report. I recommend that if you are involved in the advertising-media industrial complex in any way shape or form, spend some time reading it. On the plus side, survey respondents consider accurate balanced news as a key part of the public service mandate of radio and television. Secondly during 2023, broadcast brought many of us together still for key events including the first episodes of tentpole series.
Ofcom
More dispiritingly, I realised that amongst the tentpole TV series was season 23 or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. TV advertising revenues declined faster than online video revenues grew and subscription based video on demand take-up plateaued. It’s pure speculation on my part, but this might have been reached because COVID accelerated adoption.
Finally, as a film fan who buys Blu-Rays of films that don’t appear on streaming services consistently, the amount of time watching DVDs and and Blu-Rays have a very small usage across all age groups. I don’t think that’s good news for arthouse and cult cinema.
Things I have watched.
The Crow – less of a remake of the iconic Brandon Lee film and more of a reinvention of the franchise. It’s a good if unengaging film, many of the young adult audience I went to see it with won’t have the original or the comic books as a reference point. It has been described on other parts of the net as ‘the worst movie of the year‘. This is probably a bit unfair; there is a lot of ‘straight to Netflix’ dross out there. FKA Twigs character in the film grew on me as I watched it.
The last time I saw The Terminator in a cinema was in a double bill with the then newly launched Terminator 2 at the then new Odeon multiplex in Bromborough. I got to see it again thanks to a 4K restoration. Despite having seen The Terminator several times on tape, DVD and Blu-Ray – this time it hit different. It hit harder and it was all down the way the screen filled my vision and the punch of the sound track. Despite in-home cinema set-ups, you just can’t get at home unless you live in a large industrial unit sized home. The analogue special effects held up surprisingly well and the plot was just as taunt as I remembered it. There was less people in the cinema than for the screening than for TheCrow.
As I write this, I have just watched episode one of the latest series of Slow Horses. It has gotten off to the high standard set by the previous series and book. Time to put on my Roddy Ho t-shirt again.
Useful tools.
Table Capture
If you’ve ever tried to cut and paste a table and data from a website into an spreadsheet and then spent the rest of the afternoon parsing it in cell-by-cell you will appreciate the benefit of this browser extension.
Humaniser for GPT created content
If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve used services like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini as a starting point for copy, or to summarise documents. UndetectableGPT looks at providing alternatives to ‘tell-tale’ phraseology in generative AI copy.
Data analysis
Groupt will take a CSV file and categorise the data including visualisation, so you only have to focus on wrapping a narrative around it to fit into the wider storytelling of your presentation.
The sales pitch.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my September 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into October and crispness of a bright autumn morning!
In my take on the 2024 iPad Pro I am going to look at things through three lenses and after the initial hot takes have cooled down. These three lenses are:
Hardware
Semiconductors
Advertisement
Apple and Microsoft both push their most powerful tablets like the 2024 iPad Proas creator tools. However, at the time of writing I have been working alongside creative teams in a prominent ad agency and both the creative and strategic elements of the work we were doing were pulled together using different software, but the same hardware. Apple MacBook Pro computers and large secondary monitors. An illustrator attached a ‘graphics tablet‘ alongside their laptop to provide additional tactile control, just in the same way I am known to use an outboard Kensington trackball for additional fine control in creating presentation charts.
Where I have seen iPads used:
Senior (older executives) replying to emails – I suspect its because the screen is bigger than a smartphone.
As a media player device. The iPad is the travel and bedside equivalent of the book and the portable DVD player.
As a presentation device. Friends that give a lot of public presentations at conferences and one who works as a university lecturer both use the iPad as device to present from in place of lugging around a laptop.
In all of these use cases, there isn’t that much to differentiate iPad models and the main limitations are user intent or software-related.
My parents use an iPad I’ve bought them to keep in touch with me. We started using an iPad as a Skype client over a decade ago. Then iMessage and FaceTime started to make more sense, particularly has they started getting Skype spam. It’s the computing equivalent of a kitchen appliance: largely intuitive and very little can go really wrong – that’s both the iPad’s strength and its weakness.
Secondly, there is the confusion of the Apple iPad product line-up, which is at odds with the way Apple got its second wind. In Walter Isaacson’s flawed autobiography of Steve Jobs, one of the standout things that the returning CEO did was ruthlessly prune the product line-up.
He made it into a 2 x 2 grid: professional and consumer, portable and desktop. For most of past number of years, the iPhone has gone down this ‘pro and consumer’ split.
The iPad line-up is less clear cut to the casual observer:
iPad Mini
iPad
iPad Air
iPad Pro
In addition, there are Apple pencils – a smarter version of the stylus that used to be used prior to capacitive touchscreens became commonplace. Some of these pencils work with some devices, but not others. It’s a similar case, with other Apple accessories like keyboards that double as device covers. All of which means that your hardware accessories need an upgrade too. This is more than just getting a new phone case. It’s more analogous to having to buy a new second monitor or mouse every time you change your computer.
With all of that out of the way, let’s get into hardware.
Hardware
The 2024 iPad Pro launched before the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, so we had no idea how the device will work together in conjunction with iPadOS 18. Addressing long term criticism of using the iPad is as much about software as it is about hardware.
The 2024 iPad Pro still doesn’t have a definitive user case, but Apple decided to focus on creativity in their marketing.
Presumably this is because the main thing to celebrate about the 2024 iPad Pro is increased computing power and creative apps are the most likely to make use of that power. For many ‘non-creative’ use cases, the previous generation of iPad Pro is very over-powered for what it does.
Some of the choices Apple made with the hardware are interesting. The existing iPad Pro is a thin, lightweight computing device. The 2024 iPad Pro is Apple’s thinnest device ever. This thinness is a clever feat of engineering, but so would be an iPad of the same size, but with more battery capacity. Instead Apple made the device made things a bit thinner device with exactly the same battery life as previous models.
The iPad Pro uses two screens one behind the other to provide deeper and brighter colours at a resolution that’s extremely high. This provides additional benefits such as avoiding screen burn-in which OLED screens were considered to be vulnerable to.
The camera has moved from the side to the top of the 2024 iPad Pro in landscape mode. This has necessitated a new arrangement of magnets for attachments, which then drove the need for new accessories including the new Apple pencil pro.
Semiconductors
The M4 processor is Apple’s latest silicon design and represents a move on from the current processors in Apple’s Mac range.
It is made by TSMC on a leading edge 3 nanometre process. This is TSMC’s second-generation process. Having it as the processor in the 2024 iPad Pro, allows Apple and partners to slowly ramp up production and usage of the new processor to match gains in semiconductor chip yields. This will give them the time to iron out any production challenges and resolve any quality issues. Relatively low production volumes would be a good thing, prior to the processor being rolled out more widely.
Apple seems to be designing the M-series processors in parallel to the A-series processors used in iPhones and iPads in the past. They seem to have them in mind for a wider range of devices.
Advertisement
Apple previewed an advertisement to promote the 2024 iPad Pro.
Crush has been executed with a high degree of craft in the production. It had a lot of negative reactions from celebrities and current Apple customers who saw it in terms of:
It being a wider metaphor of what technology was perceived to be doing to creativity. For instance, Hollywood actors and screen-writers are concerned about streaming and the effects of large language models.
Destroying real-life artefacts that consumers have attached meaning to. For instance, I use digital music, but also have a physical music collection that not only reflects my taste, but much more. Real-world experiences now provide respite from the digital world.
With product launches like the iPhone 3, Apple created adverts which were less of a literal metaphor for everything that could be crammed into the device by using show-and-tell.
Reversing the Crush! ad makes a similar point, but in a less oppressive way.
And as with everything else in life, there is seldom a time when an idea is truly new. There was an ad done by BBH London which used a crush metaphor to demonstrate all the features in LG’s Renoir phone circa 2008. As this circulated around Apple was perceived as being a copycat.
Presentation
Given that Apple events are now largely virtual post-COVID we didn’t have a positive live audience reaction amongst those who ‘got it’ to guide public opinion. Instead it was left on social media ‘contextless’.
The Apple exhibition centre at the new ‘space ship’ campus, doesn’t seem to be used in the same way that Apple did live events prior to 2020. Apple held small event screenings for journalists in New York and London.
But was Crush! bad?
When I first saw it, I thought that it was good from a craft point of view. I was a bit surprised at how dark the lighting was, it felt a little off-key.
My personal opinion about the concept was that it felt a bit heavy-handed because it was so literal. The creative brief done by a strategist is usually the jumping off point, not the literal creative concept.
But that doesn’t make it bad advert, it just felt not particularly clever for someone who is probably more media-literate than the average person. I would go as far as to say, it would have been unlikely to win creative advertising awards.
But I was also aware that my opinion didn’t mean that the ad wouldn’t be effective. Given the 2024 iPad Pro’s role as M4 guinea pig, Apple probably weren’t hoping for barn-storming sales figures and in the grand scheme of things the advert just wasn’t extremely important.
I was probably as blindsided as Apple was by the depth of feeling expressed in the online reaction.
TL;DR I don’t know if Crush! really is ‘bad’. Let’s ask some specific questions about different aspects of the ad.
Am I, or the negative responders the target market?
Maybe, or maybe not. I don’t have a place in it in my current workflow. I still find that a Mac works as my primary creative technology device. What about if Apple were aiming at college kids and first jobbers? These people wouldn’t come to buying the 2024 iPad Pro with the same brand ‘baggage’ that me and many of the commentators have.
Working in marketing, the 1984 ad and the Think Different ads were campaigns were classics. Hell, I can remember being a bit of an oddball at college as a Mac user. I helped friends get their secondhand Mac purchases up and running.
Going to coffee shops or working in the library and seeing a see of laptop lids emblazoned with the Dell, Gateway, Toshiba and H-P logos. If people were a bit quirky they may have a Sony Vaio instead.
I remember the booes and the hisses in the audience at MacWorld Boston in 1997, when Apple announced its partnership with Microsoft.
Even when I worked at Yahoo! during the web 2.0 renaissance, Mac users were second-class citizens internally and externally in terms of our product offering.
In the eyes of young people today Apple was always there, front and centre. The early iPad or iPhone experience as pacifier. The iPhone has must-have teenage smartphone. The Mac at home and maybe an Apple TV box.
Finally many high performing adverts of the past aimed at young adults have left the mainstream media and tastemakers non-plussed.
How did the ad test?
According to anecdotal evidence I have heard from people at IPSOS; in a survey they found that about half the respondents surveyed said they would be interested in finding out more about the 2024 iPad Pro. The younger the respondent, the more likely they were to be interested in the device.
System 1, tested the ad and found that it performed 1.9 out of a possible maximum score of 5. In System 1 parlance this indicates somewhere between low and modest long term brand growth derived from the advertisement. The average score for US advertisements is 2.3. But over half of ads that were run in the Super Bowl this year scored between 1 and 2. Which would imply that the ad could be improved; but the devil might be in the details as implied by the IPSOS research.
Is Crush! just a copy cat?
You can have the best creative director in the world who has seen a lot of advertising, but they might not know all advertising. Secondly, the advertising industry is getting rid of long term professionals. According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising no one retired from the industry in 2023, as staff were ‘phased out‘ of the industry way before retirement age. All of which means that there isn’t the historical memory to know if a campaign is sailing close to plagiarism.
And it isn’t just advertising. Earlier in my career, I got to see former business journalist and newspaper editor Damian McCrystal speak at a breakfast event. One thing stayed with me about his presentation, in which he talked about the financial industry:
The reasons why we make the same mistakes over-and-over again is because ‘the city’ has a collective institutional memory of about eight years.
Damien McCrystal
So we had Northern Rock, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, despite the fact that pretty much every financier I have ever met had read Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis. This was based on his experiences as a banker navigating the Savings and Loans scandal of the 1980s and 1990s.
So no, despite the similarity of the LG Renoir advertisement, I don’t think that Crush! was an intentional copy.
The inspiration for this post on every old idea is new again came from my opening up Rakuten‘s Viber messaging app on my iPhone. Viber is a messaging platform and also does voice over IP, including out to the phone network. It is a hybrid of Skype and WhatsApp in terms of functionality. Viber is popular in parts of Asia, much of central and Eastern Europe, Greece and Russia – often as a second string to Telegram or Zalo.
Scratchcards, giveaways
I saw the following image in Viber.
Viber’s scratch card giveaway promotion.
Which took me right back to roughly the same time of the year back in 2012, when I worked at Ruder Finn and did a similar digital scratch card execution to promote The National Lottery scratch cards in the run up to Christmas.
I was fortunate to work with a great creative and technology team: Stephen Holmes and Dru Riches-Magnier on the project. The promotion was executed within a high security environment because Camelot’s IT standards were way beyond what we usually worked with.
Here’s the case study that I wrote up about the scratch card project in my portfolio.
This was the most stressful time I had during my time working at Ruder Finn and one of two high points in terms of the work that we did.
So when I saw the Rakuten Viber execution, I had a deja-vu moment and the epiphany that every old idea is new again.
Strawberry fields forever & the square mile
So how do we get to a point where every idea is new again? Years ago I used to DJ in bars, clubs and parties. A couple of young lads on a music production course saw a record label release one of their assignments to tap into the psychedelia and dance-indie hybrid sound. The record was a cover version of a Beatles track with a Soul II Soul type break beat underneath. It became successful and topped the charts.
There were a surprising number of people who didn’t realise that it was artfully created cover version of The Beatles, I even heard the original described as a poor version of Candy Flip.
Newness is a matter of perspective. This was brought home to me at a talk that Damien McCrystal gave years ago. This was about the time that he was a business columnist at The Observer. I can’t remember the context but McCrystal said that the memory of ‘the square mile’ (think Wall Street in US parlance) was about eight years.
Which was the reason why the 2008 mortgage crash looked eerily like the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s. And that is despite most of the people in investment banks having a passing familiarity of Michael Lewis’ insider account Liar’s Poker which outlined how derivatives fuelled much of the 1980s Savings & Loans crisis.
I got to read it in college, despite having no interest in entering the world of finance. By and large I managed to stay clear of finance aside from being an in-house marketer early on in my career at what’s now HBOS and credit card provider MBNA. I also had a bit of early luck in my career timing, as I left MBNA before the payment protection insurance scandal hit the sector.
This was the classic example of every old idea is new again, but with the added wrinkle that a bad set of ideas can suddenly turn into good ones over time.
But as a strategist, this taught me to be careful on interventions pointing out a given concept is an old idea, given that every old idea is new again at some point.
