Search results for: “naughty elf”

  • Brands using politics + more

    Brands using politics as a trope. First up, Kelloggs Korea’s campaign for green onion flavour Chex breakfast cereal. They were allowing consumers to ‘vote’ for the president of Chex.

    In 2004, Kellogg’s Korea decided to hold a cute little promotional contest online: an “election” to decide “the President of Chex.” The two candidates were the delicious chocolate “Chekkie,” and the hideously green “Chaka.” Chekkie promised that if they won, they would find a way to add even more chocolate to Chocolate Chex, while Chaka promised to imbue the cereal with stinky green onions. One thing the adults at Kellogg’s were sure of was that kids hate, hate, hate green onions, so Chaka would be an easy fall guy, Chekkie would emerge victorious, and Korean customers would be so excited about Chocolate Chex that they’d purchase millions of boxes.

    The Takeout

    A Boaty McBoatFace-type polling disaster ensued. And it inspired this tremendously trippy ad.

    The second brands using politics trope example was for a grape candy brand by Mann Sales Co. I still can’t work out if its a hoax, but it was doing the rounds on a few ad planning groups. There was an interesting dichotomy. People in the ad planner groups didn’t like it because it fell down from being politically incorrect on so many levels. I personally thought that it went too close to the bone. But then I was was too conservative versus the general publics interpretation of Poundland’s naughty elf campaign. A small unscientific straw poll of friends in the US saw the funny side of it.

    1908 Candy

    Mann Sales Co. and 1908 Candy

    Of course none of this is quite as bad as a time when I was working with Chinese clients. American colleagues used campaign marketing in democratic elections as the ultimate brands using politics as marketing trope.

    They cited the use of data by the first term Obama election campaign to show how their wonkish staff could aid the client’s marketing internationally and in China. It was all about how Chinese companies could learn from democracy.

    It was only when they came out of the meeting that I got to tell them that Twitter was banned in China. It was super awkward.

    On work doesn’t happen at work by Jason Fried. A key quote:

     some people might say email is really distracting, I.M. is really distracting, and these other things are really distracting, but they’re distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing. You can quit the email app; you can’t quit your boss. You can quit I.M.; you can’t hide your manager. You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you’re available, when you’re ready to go again.

    Jason Fried
    Jason Fried at TED

    Musique Strategies – oblique and practical strategies for music – what happens when modern music production meats Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies. This has been put together by Danny Taurus, one of the unsung heroes in UK dance music production. Back in the early 1990s he founded Dansa Records which put together some banging tunes. He’s revived the label and releasing new material from his new base in Los Angeles.

    I am not too sure where Apple was going with this working from home ad, but I suspect it was empathy and brand awareness. If you’re working from home, you’ll have experienced all of these challenges by now and know who your technical partners are. It is an entertaining six minutes though and sometimes that’s enough.

    Apple Inc.

    Finally, this video is a two-minute work of love featuring the sites and sounds of Hokkaido. It reminds me of the way Sergio Leone’s camera work as tightly linked with the music. In this video the edits and footage both move along with local sounds from Hokkaido, Japan.

    NEEDaFIXER on Vimeo
  • Gaytime ice cream and other news

    Gaytime Ice Cream

    Unilever under fire over Gaytime ice cream in Indonesia | PR | Campaign Asia – no idea where they got that idea, I imagine it could become a cult brand if launched elsewhere. Gaytime ice cream makes me think of a more innocent time in my life when, if I was home from school, I would be sat down with Marie biscuits and a cup of Barry’s tea by my Mum. This was a thinly veiled bribe to be quiet, which wasn’t really needed.

    The reason for this ritual would be a soap opera called Harbour Hotel and a chat show called The Gay Byrne Show. Both where on RTÉ Radio 1. Back then gay could mean happy; or in the case of Gay Byrne it was short for Gabriel. The radio meant that voices from home where beamed into our house around the clock via medium wave and long wave.

    https://youtu.be/hByFDVwiQq8

    Of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned it at my English school as there would have been an ocean of sniggers. The Muslim outrage at Gaytime also mirrors the PC revisionist view of The Flintstones ‘we’ll have a gay old time’ lyric in their theme tune. Apparently its original meaning of happy or fun, was interpreted as being intolerant of the LGBTQ community.

    Business

    The One Number You Need to Grow | HBR – original HBR article which introduced NPS

    Consumer behaviour

    Citizens’ Voices: Insights from focus groups conducted in England for the project, At Home in One’s Past. – Demos – Demos went fishing to understand the effects of nostalgia across Europe (the UK was merely the first interviews that they did).  Instead, Demos got insights into the motivations for Brexit. A lot of this lines up with what I wrote before the vote. What pops in this (subjective) qualitative feedback is:

    • The problems that the Labour Party faces with Corbyn and the general distrust of politicians in what should be ‘heartland’ seats
    • The continued credibility of Nigel Farage
    • The anti-German sentiment. The EU was seen as a German vehicle to win the war again by stealth – this has almost a Basil Fawlty quality to it. But at least some of the panelists believed it was true
    • How the political divisions around the societal change driven by Margaret Thatcher’s government reverberated into the Brexit vote

    Economics

    The continental divide? Economic exposure to Brexit in regions and countries on both sides of The Channel – Chen – 2017 – Papers in Regional Science – Wiley Online Library – interesting research on impact of Brexit across EU

    Retailing

    Amazon Is Thriving Thanks to Taxpayer Dollars | New Republic – The tech giant has received more than $1 billion in tax breaks. The government is also funding food stamps for many of its workers

    Poundland’s naughty elf campaign which riffed on British smut and the ‘Elf On A Shelf’ franchise affected consumer attitudes to the brand according to YouGov. The research is at odds with the overall positive response it got from Twitter (outside the London media-advertising industrial complex) – YouGov | Poundland’s X-rated ads generated publicity, but consumer perception has dropped

    Technology

    Noah Smith on Twitter: “1/OK, a thread about Bitcoin. (but really about nominal vs. real quantities)” – really interesting thread

    Three Thoughts on Day One at CES 2018 – not surprised that computing is moving to the edge as the network represents latency and potential unreliability – think about how cloud failure when it hit Nest devices and IoT obselescence

    Casio AL-1000 – the nixie tube display and ferrite core memory make it a thing of beauty to behold

    Web of no web

    LegalFling – Get explicit about sexual consent – blockchain start-up WTF

    Wireless

    WSJ City | Mega Chip Deal Alarms Some Chinese Smartphone Makers – OPPO and Vivo can be viewed as one company as they both have common owners and sprang from BBK. They are brands aimed at different segments of the Chinese market

    Huawei’s US market dreams ‘harmed again’ after AT&T walks away from smartphone pact | South China Morning Post  – “We have been harmed again,” Huawei’s consumer business unit chief executive officer Richard Yu said in a text message to the South China Morning Post – you can see from later articles how Huawei progressively got their act together in terms of media response though much of the coverage added a thin veneer of analysis whilst repeating the original WSJ article – China’s Huawei hit by last minute collapse of AT&T phone distribution deal | Reuters – the collapse of the deal with AT&T, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, will mean that Huawei will likely struggle to make a hit of its smartphones there as a U.S. mobile carrier would typically promote the products as well as provide subsidies and special package deals

  • Presidential election beliefs

    Why presidential election beliefs as a topic? The US presidential election happened and Democrats are looking at analysing the fallout.

    While it is easy to blame the qualities of the candidates, I wanted to take a look at the presidential election beliefs that underpinned the campaign. The reason why I am publishing a while after the fact is that I wanted the clarity of slower thinking rather than being wrapped up in the maelstrom of analysis, this then naturally took me to analyse presidential election beliefs rather than other aspects of the campaign such as the qualities of the candidates.

    GSFC_20211105_2022-1529-0_090
    NASA/Taylor Mickal

    I think that their campaign was built on presidential election beliefs that would seem foolish in retrospect.

    • Gen-Z would vote Democrat
    • Substance matters
    • Taking the moral high ground
    • Trust in the mainstream media
    • Vibes over policy

    Gen-Z would vote Democrat 

    I won’t get into the debate over how representative and helpful generations are as a descriptor and assume on good faith that this is just short hand for young adults. Evidence would suggest that this belief was untrue in election performance and underlying research available prior to the election.

    Group cohesion scores

    BBH London looked at  TGI’s Jan-Dec 2019 UK dataset, measuring the size of the average majority viewpoint across 419 lifestyle statements.

    As an entire populace, the UK’s Group Cohesion Score is 48.7%. In other words, the average majority opinion is held by 48.7% of the population. …On average, the generations have a Group Cohesion Score of +1.3, making them only marginally more like-minded than the nation as a whole. For Gen Z, this score falls to +0.2. People born between 1997 and 2013 have no stronger connection to each other than to the rest of the country. 

    This viewpoint was supported by a piece of research conducted by Stanford University researchers back in 1998 and presented to the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The researchers found that the beliefs attributed to young adults at the time in terms of cynicism, bleakness about the future and personal unhappiness were actually increasing across all ages – an empirical demonstration of group cohesion similar to the TGI data cited.

    Criteria affecting progressive political themes

    Oxford Analytica published a paper looking at the criteria affecting progressive political themes on a global basis, which had some lessons at a national level as well:

    • Manipulation of religious divisions will prevent an improvement in religious tolerance.
    • Wealthier economies correlate with better support for proactive measures to support women’s rights.

    A comment by Alexander Stubb at the Norwegian Business School struck me about this concept of wealthier economies. President Stubb was talking about struggling to understand Brexit, he recalled a politician commenting on how the UK benefited in terms of GDP, to be interrupted by and event attendee commented ‘Yeah mate, perhaps your GDP, but not mine’.

    What a wealthier economy is, is as much contextual as nation level quantitative data.

    This would probably explain why less well off women didn’t universally rally behind the Harris over Roe versus Wade when they may have been pre-occupied by the impact of inflation on their households.

    It also may partly explain the progressive / conservative political split between the genders highlighted in the FT. A new global gender divide is emerging – documented the split.

    gender split

    Richard Reeves in his book Of Boys and Men highlighted some of the factors driving it that affect the context of a wealthier economy by gender from the gender split in education attainment to better quality social support networks.

    Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.

    Substance matters

    I was divided over whether I should include this in the next section as substance and taking the moral high ground seem to be closely paired. I think that this is based on a number of factors:

    • In most careers there is a fallacy where we think others think our work matters more than it actually does in the minds of the general public, the same goes for policy wonks.
    • From the Roman satirist Juvenal discussing ‘bread and circuses‘ to Orwell’s description of the ‘proles’ in 1984 it is obvious that their vision of a general public that want to be entertained rather than informed. The higher role for media exemplified by the likes of John Reith at the BBC is at odds with this reality. This goes hand-in-hand with the power that Elon Musk’s voter registration sweepstakes and Joe Rogan’s podcasts seemed to have; despite them being the antithesis of John Reith’s vision.

    Taking the moral high ground

    The Republican campaign threw out a number of ‘dead cat’ tactics that distracted media, outraged their political opponents and entertained their supporters:

    The average member of the public probably doesn’t care about the high ground. We can see this in marketing history. Going back to Christmas 2016, Poundland’s social campaign around its ‘naughty’ elf on a shelf that outraged the ad industry and regulators at the ASA, received positive responses from the general public online. We see this mirrored in the interests and pleasures of the ‘proles’ in George Orwell’s 1984. Elections aren’t a debate class, but entertainment.

    Trust in the mainstream media

    One of the great differences between the campaign run by the Democrats and their Republican counterparts was the role played by the mainstream media. The Harris campaign relied on institutions like Saturday Night Live and interviews with serious journalists.

    By comparison, Donald Trump gave his interviews primarily with podcasters (though some of those podcasters were faces in the mainstream media before becoming podcasters like Sean Hannity) including:

    • Sean Hannity
    • Let’s Go! with Bill Belichick, Maxx Crosby, Peter King & Jim Gray
    • Brian Kilmeade (Fox Radio podcast show)
    • The Joe Rogan Experience
    • Six Feet Under with Mark Calaway
    • The Dan Bongino Show
    • The Glenn Beck Program
    • Bussin’ With The Boys
    • Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant with Akaash Singh
    • The Ben Shapiro Show
    • The Ramsey Show also syndicated in their clips podcast The Ramsey Highlights
    • The Howie Carr Radio Network
    • Lex Fridman Podcast
    • The Dr. Phil Podcast
    • Shawn Ryan Show
    • This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
    • The Adam Carolla Show
    • Impaulsive with Logan Paul

    Altogether Trump appeared on 22 podcasts in 2024 alone. Many of them on multiple occasions. If you discount mainstream media programmes republished in a podcast format, Harris appeared less times in less podcasts than her rival. In terms of absolute reach the Joe Rogan Experience is bigger for US audiences than equivalent shows on Fox News. Progressive-leaning TV networks MSNBC and CNN combined are about only half of Rogan’s reach.

    The problem is that trust in mainstream media has declined, at a faster rate than their newer online media rivals according to research conducted by IPSOS. So the Democrats spent time focusing on ineffective media interactions in comparison to their Republican rivals based on presidential election beliefs about the primacy of mainstream media publishers with regards to politics.

  • Google Drive & more news

    Google Drive privacy

    Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.

    Consumer behaviour

    The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.

    China’s young consumers are snubbing foreign brands amid growing national pride, says Credit Suisse | SCMP – this should share the shit out of MNCs

    Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness

    Ideas

    Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes.  The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)

    Luxury

    Does it Really Matter if James Jebbia is Not a “Fashion Designer”? The Fashion Law – Supreme is an anti-consumerism consumer brand. Its now going into luxury baskets, it doesn’t have much room left in the hype beast space though

    Marketing

    Interpublic Upgrades U.S. Ad Spending Growth To 5.5% This Year – which looks much more like what I would expect the advertising market to be with the Winter Olympics and forthcoming World Cup and an ok global economy

    Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands

    Media

    Restricted By YouTube, Gun Enthusiasts Are Taking Their Videos To Pornhub | NPR – Pornhub is starting to turn into a libertarian YouTube

    Has Marketing Gone Too Digital? | Mediapost – a good read, send it to your clients and your agency folk

    Our mission to buy a fake Rolex on Facebook reveals how the company is playing host to countless criminal enterprises | Business Insider – only a matter of time for this story to be written. You also have a similar problem on Instagram

    Online

    Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers

    Security

    Naughty List – Secured.fyi – Alpha – great simple checklist for n00bs. The answer per platform needs more nuance.

    Justice Dept. Revives Push to Mandate a Way to Unlock Phones – The New York Times – Clipper Chip style bullshit that is bad for consumers and governments since it will be broken and used by criminals and state actors

    Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits

    Why Nothing Is Going To Happen To Facebook Or Mark Zuckerberg | Buzzfeed – consumers don’t care enough

    Cloak and Data: The Real Story Behind Cambridge Analytica’s Rise and Fall – Mother Jones – probably the best account yet by the media

    Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism

    Technology

    China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that  premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed

    The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.

    Google has reportedly acquired Lytro, the Leader in Light Field Imaging Technology for Photography and VR Content – interesting, Apple had a patent licence from them

    Mobike to charge bad riders more | Techinasia – a la eBay, Uber etc