Ged Carroll

Search results for: “burger king”

  • Audemars Piguet + more news

    Russia Seized Millions of Dollars of Swiss Luxury Watches in Moscow – Russian customs service agents took millions of dollars of Audemars Piguet watches. Audemars Piguet had closed its boutique in Moscow. The Russians allege that Audemars Piguet was in breach of customs regulations. The reality is that its retaliation for Switzerland joining other countries in levying sanctions on Russia. In this respect its similar to the state-sanctioned theft of aircraft from Irish aircraft leasing companies. There are a few problems with these Audemars Piguet watches. The Russian market for Swiss watches in 2021, accounting for 260m Swiss francs (£212m) of shipments, according to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry; which puts the country in the top 20 acquirers of Swiss watches.

    Audemars Piguet 26320 Macro

    Audemars Piguet Offshore models are long sought after by watch collectors. The problem that Russia will have with the watches is the inability of them to be serviced. The company will have a record of the serial numbers involved and won’t service them when they come up for maintenance in a few years time. AP watches have a reputation for being great watches, but aren’t robust like say a Rolex in terms of their need to be serviced.

    Russia seems to be pretty determined to have western sanctions on the country for a long time to come yet.

    China

    China is making new billionaires much faster than the U.S. – I wonder how many of these are in areas like real estate

    Foreign businesses in China need to heed the lessons of Russian exodus | Financial Times

    Economics

    Republican stance on free markets is shifting when it comes to China | Financial Times worthwhile reading in conjunction with this Biden turns to former Trump officials on China competition bill 

    Energy

    China sets green hydrogen target for 2025, eyes widespread use | Reuters 

    EETimes – US Backs Accelerating Push for Fusion Energy 

    Oligarchs, power and profits: the history of BP in Russia | Financial Times

    Geely questions future in Russia despite opening for China’s carmakers | Financial Times – Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, noted that the Chinese carmakers are relatively inexperienced when it comes to maintaining a brand’s reputation in western markets. “They’ve never had to deal with these kinds of external pressures in how they were perceived by foreign consumers,” he said. “A lot of these companies, they’re going to have to do business in Europe, or they’re going to have to do business in the United States. If they seem too eager to fill that void [in Russia], I will bet you money it is going to have some backlash in those regions.”

    Ethics

    Google Ordered Translators to Replace References to Ukraine “War” | The Intercept – I think Google needs to get ahead of things like this by being transparent about ethical considerations on their corporate blog

    Finance

    Chinese ADR delisting threat looms over ETFs | Financial Times 

    Gadgets

    Apple Studio reviews are in | Boing Boing 

    Hong Kong

    Why I Won’t Walk Away From Hong Kong | Foreign Policy

    Ideas

    The Ukraine war is not about democracy versus autocracy | Financial Times

    Judy Asks: Are Europeans Ready to Pay the Price for Ukraine’s Sovereignty? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – The grim truth is that many in the West would be ready to accept compromises over Ukraine’s sovereignty in order to stop the war. In countries neighboring Russia, there is a strong understanding that such compromises would seriously weaken our security, hence they are ready to pay a high price to avoid them. However, among Western experts and policymakers, assessments of the balance between different interests seem to vary. The thinking that some degree of accommodation of Russia’s interests might be needed to reach stability has not disappeared. This is a dangerous and misguided logic

    Innovation

    EETimes – Patent Trends Foretell Chipmakers’ Fortunes 

    Lessons from History: The 1980s Semiconductor Cycle(s) 

    Chip-Making Companies Can’t Buy Enough Lithography Machines – ExtremeTech 

    At SXSW, A Pathetic Tech Future Struggles to Be Born 

    Japan

    EETimes – Denso Leads Quadric’s $21-Million Series B 

    Japanese company offers service that converts your child’s school bag into useful accessories | SoraNews24 -Japan News- 

    Korea

    South Korean super app Toss takes on SoftBank-backed Grab in south-east Asia | Financial Times

    Downtown Eateries Stay Empty as Workers Telecommute – The Chosun Ilbo (English Edition)

    Luxury

    Jean Arnault, scion of LVMH, on watchmaking’s Gen Z appeal | Financial Times

    Lanvin Group plans New York IPO in SPAC deal | Vogue Business – Lanvin Group, the fashion arm of Chinese conglomerate Fosun International which includes the French heritage label Lanvin, plans to list in New York in a SPAC deal, the second high-profile fashion firm to make the move since Ermenegildo Zegna late last year. Lanvin Group announced Tuesday it is combining with special-purpose acquisition company Primavera Capital Acquisition Corporation in a deal that values the group at $1.5 billion, according to an emailed statement. Lanvin Group expects to raise up to $544 million from the deal and from existing investors, and will use the funds to expand its portfolio, including future luxury acquisitions

    Inside the London agency bringing musicians and creatives to luxury campaigns | Vogue Business

    A South Korean Museum Is Refusing to Return Loaned Art to Russia – Robb Report

    Marketing

    Burger King France Lowers Whopper Prices to Offset Fuel Cost | Adweek 

    Materials

    Ukraine war to have ‘long-term impact’ on chip industry | Financial Times

    A Chinese Nickel Market Mystery – WSJ – Market ructions amid war aren’t unusual. But the London Metal Exchange’s retroactive cancellation of nickel trades this month appears to be unprecedented. One question is whether the Hong Kong-owned exchange intervened to rescue a Chinese nickel tycoon. – the exchange is owned by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

    Security

    Anonymous Hackers Fire ‘Warning Shot’ at Companies Refusing to Pull Out of Russia – HS Today

    EETimes – US Electronics Reshoring Plan Risks Missing the Boat 

    Viasat Satellite Hack Spills Beyond Russia–Ukraine War | WIRED UK

    The Central Bank of Russia is hacked by Anonymous group – Gizchina.com

    Taiwan

    Engrave Condition: Apple’s Political Censorship Leaves Taiwan, Remains in Hong Kong – The Citizen Lab

    Technology

    The Big Tech Antitrust Movement Is Finally Showing Results | Big Technology 

    Telecoms

    CEO Interview: Phil McKinney of Cablelabs – Lightning in a Bottle   – EETimes

  • A message from the future & things from last week

    Jolibee – a message from the future

    Filipino fast food restaurant Jolibee have created a series of films that tap into the zeitgeist. A message from the future captures Filipinos dreams for a post-COVID future, leaving hard times behind them. A message to the future is well worth watching, despite its efforts to pull at the heart strings

    The Jolibee contrasts sharply with the Burger King UK creative below, which just promises business as usual. More Jolibee content here.

    Burger King

    Burger King reasserts their brand proposition to UK consumers who are hopefully venturing back into their restaurants. There is a nod to the untrustworthiness of internet content and vegan options. At the centre of it all, reminding the audience what flame broiled actually means.

    It’s unlike the usual in-your-face disruption content that Burger King agency David Madrid has been doing over the COVID lockdown. The dark lighting draws your eyes into the protagonists, but also makes a Burger King restaurant feel unwelcoming. It is an interesting creative choice.

    McDonalds Singapore

    McDonalds Singapore has gone completely the other way and focused on cocooning, which they seem to be betting will be post-COVID behaviour. Singapore used to be all about eating out, from kopi stands and hawker food to high end eating; because real estate is expensive, the third space was your space. McDonalds think that this might have changed.

    Masters At Work

    Defected regularly puts up high quality mixes, but this one by Masters At Work particularly stood out. And I’ve been listening to it a number of times.

    https://soundcloud.com/defectedrecords/defected-radio-020421-maw-takeover

    Flight Of The Navigator

    I was just a few years too of the right age to be the target audience for Flight Of The Navigator. So I didn’t go to see it on release, but I appreciate the film and its one of my go to science fiction Blu-Rays alongside Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This video goes into how early 1980s technology managed to produce realistic effects of the curved mirror surface spaceship. What’s really interesting is how many practical (analogue) effects including trick photography and modelling there are in the film.

  • Sony Walkman ads + other things

    An amazing collection of advertising for the Sony Walkman from 1979/80 – 1990. These were Japanese domestic market adverts. They are chock of full of creativity in them. TV advertising seems to have been much more prevalent in Japan for the Sony Walkman. I would imagine that the adverts also had a halo effect on the Sony brand.

    By comparison this US market advert for the Sony Walkman is much more what I would have expected. Though it interesting that Sony did a 30 second TV spot for a particular model. The Sony WM-10 ‘Super Walkman’ was the smallest cassette Walkman that Sony ever made.

    It’s like a consumer electronics equivalent of a Faberge egg, as illustrated by this service video.

    While we’re on the subject of media players. French anime blogger Catsuka put together this amazing player of over 5,000 short films, adverts and music videos that draw on anime techniques.

    This cajun track by Blind Uncle Gaspard sounds more Bob Dylan than Dylan himself. The first time I heard it, it gave me goosebumps. The recording was apparently made on March 5, 1929 in New Orleans. Alcide Gaspard aka Blind Uncle Gaspard released five shellac records before he died. All were recorded in a few sessions in 1929 in Chicago and New Orleans. He died eight years later.

    Some recordings of his work have appeared throughout the years. Folk archivist Harry Smith released a recording in 1952 on the album The Anthology of American Folk Music of La Danseuse. Lan Danseuse was played with violinist Delma Lachney, whom Gaspard was known to perform with. His records didn’t sell when he was alive and it took decades for his work to reach a wider audience.

    Ogilvy’s DAVID have been doing a good deal of work tapping into gaming audiences for Burger King. This has had mixed results with the King of Stream campaign attracting a lot of negative attention. Burger King and DAVID seem to be focusing on the low cost of impressions, rather than a brand action. This is the latest case study that they have put online.

    One comment on the video stood out for me though:

    I picked Steve O as my under dog team without knowing this, i only found out today when a mate showed me lol

    YouTube user BADBOY

    How long can Burger King continue to mine gaming as a source of ‘cheap marketing’?

    Finally, I found this ‘making of’ video for a giant prototype nixie tube fascinating. Nixie tubes display numbers using cold cathode technology (fluorescent light bulbs). They are gloriously intricate which is shown in this video where they attempt to make a giant prototype.

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    Burger King King of Stream campaign conducted in conjunction with Ogilvy agency DAVID based in Madrid, Spain. The King of Stream makes sense when you look only at the data. Target young people who do gaming. Presumably there is some group cohesion data or insight that shows a propensity to eat fast food with gaming.

    However what would have been an interesting half-formed idea in a brainstorm seems to have had a negative impact in real life. Often what makes sense on Excel isn’t that smart when it meets the real world.

    It reminded me of the introduction to Robert X. Cringely’s insiders story of the PC industry, Accidental Empires written in the 1991:

    … PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.

    Robert X. Cringely – Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date

    Spreadsheets and the data models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction. And King of Stream seems to be the advertising equivalent.

    The use of bot powered donations to Twitch with the donation sizes related to Burger King special deals had an adverse effect on the gaming community on Twitch for a few reasons.

    • Burger King is a big brand, yet isn’t engaging with the community in a respectful way. It was culturally tone deaf.
    • This was the bit that surprised me the most given Ogilvy’s reputation around its use of behavioural economics or behavioural science in campaigns. The ‘donations’ are miserly. There is a lot of psychology around the value of donations or gifts. If it really want to engage with the gamers, why not sponsor them?
    • The execution was intrusive and felt like spam

    More on this can be found on the King of Stream by reading this thread here. More on other Burger King campaigns here.

    https://youtu.be/236KSswX7v4

    Celebrating Hong Kong style milk tea. According to the descriptor on this video is made by the Cui Brothers in Hong Kong; though I suspect it might be carefully edited from other films. It features classic Hong Kong dishes including French toast and pineapple bun with butter.

    Indigo Gaming have put together this guide to cyberpunk culture. It is called part one, was done months ago and there doesn’t seem to be a part two yet. Part one of this guide to cyberpunk culture is worthwhile watching on its own.

    The best of dance music over the past 30 years or so in a Soundcloud account – The Classic Mix CD Series | Free Listening on SoundCloud – mix CDs were time capsules of what was hot in different clubs at the time. They owe their origins to the mix (cassette) tape packs that club promoters used to sell of their nights. Mixmag took that concept and came up with the first properly licensed recordings.

    The original ones were done as one track per DJ mix. At the time CD players would in a space between each track recorded on a CD. Even early versions of iTunes used to do the same thing with both mix CDs and recordings ripped of mix CDs.

    At their height, they were an amazing money maker for record labels. They received steady royalty payments from licensing their tracks to appear on these mix CDs. For example Gat Decor, who had a break out single called Passion – appeared on 191 compilations and mix CDs.

  • Autopilot Whopper + more things

    Burger King’s Autopilot Whopper campaign reminds me of a lot of the classic work that Crispin Porter Bogusky have done for Burger King over the years. The Autopilot Whopper is based on the insight that Tesla cars machine learning powered vision system that helps with self driving function mistakes the Burger King logo for a Stop sign.

    https://youtu.be/A0cb7wZVFf4

    Autopilot Whopper entertaining with this schadenfreude around Tesla technology. And it also lands the message that the Burger King drive through is as good a place to stop as any.

    YouTube announced the winners of its 2020 YouTube Works awards. I would strongly recommend that any brand planners bookmark this in their browser and dip in on a regular basis.

    The one that really piqued my interest the most was Hulu’s campaign for live sports that tapped into a growing consumer cynicism around influencers. The sports linkage was using NBA basketball players as the influencers.

    The iconic Zero Halliburton briefcase stuffed with cash, that more money is thrown into as ‘Hulu has live sports’ is mentioned riffs on the old McDonald’s initiative. The McDonald’s scheme that paid rappers for name checks on songs and mixtapes. It also tapped into how consumers view influencers.

    Public Enemy came back when we most need them. Flavor Flav seems to have patched up his beef with Chuck D. Public Enemy have partnered with DJ Premier to capture the zeitgeist. Black Lives Matter, COVID19 and chaotic leadership feature in State Of The Union (STFU). DJ Premier’s product references earlier Public Enemy works scratching in sounds of early Public Enemy vocals in this track. The beat is more laid back than what one would expect from the Bomb Squad production team. But the Public Enemy fire in the belly is still there.

    The step chickens are a meme driven ‘cult’ that have sprung up on TikTok. More accurately they are a directed community. Here’s the founder on how they came about. Their heat has been parleyed in a community for a new app. From a product point-of-view, this means that something like TikTok could lose chunks of its user base IF the step chickens phenomenon was widely and successfully replicated. Given that it was a mix of smarts, happenstance and pure luck it isn’t likely: sorry brands.

    German China-focused think-tank MERICS had a thoughtful presentation put together on the Hong Kong national security law. The presentation focused on the impact for the financial services sector. But there similar lessons to be drawn for professional services (accounting, management consultancy, legal firms). And only for a a slightly lesser effect on the strategy and planning functions of creative agencies, or counsel based PR functions.

    On reflection, I would be concerned about how some of the creative briefs for China-focused campaigns that I have written would have faired against the Hong Kong national security law. Probably not that well.

    What immediately becomes apparent is the implications for quality research into companies and economics won’t meet international standards. Which means more fodder for the likes of Muddy Waters Research LLC. It likely indicates a conscious effort for China to decouple from the international financial system.

    The calculus behind the Hong Kong national security law seems to be that the Chinese government think yet another (internal) market for Chinese stocks will be a better deal than the traditional gateway to and from China Hong Kong has provided. I am not sure what this bet will mean. Shenzhen already has a robust stock market by Chinese standards; would China really need Hong Kong? Without the gateway role, Hong Kong would also find it harder to be the point of capital departure from China for high net worth citizens. Dampening capital flight would definitely hold some attraction to the Xi administration.

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