Ged Carroll

Search results for: “open platform”

  • Battle for open platforms + more stuff

    Epic’s battle for open platforms ignores consoles’ massive closed market | Ars Technica – and the majority of games played on Fortnite are played on consoles. Epic’s battle for open platforms rings hollow. More gaming posts here. More on other (more legitimate) battles for open platforms here. Epic’s battle for open platforms is about extra revenue not consumer benefit. They’ve deliberately picked a fight for some reason that won’t become apparent yet. One also has to view Epic’s battle for open platforms through its Chinese ownership as well

    Why marketers should embrace Share of Search as a metric | WARC – “The SoS calculation itself is simple. Calculate a rolling 12-month average of the various brands to be analysed, including your own. Total this. Divide each individual brand’s 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %. This is Share of Search, using Google Trends data.” More here in an interview for Contagious by Les Binet. Why share of search is a vital marketing metric | Contagious – The internet has made it almost impossible to accurately measure brands’ share of voice and the world seems perfectly content with that trade-off, so marketers have been forced to look for a replacement metric fit for the digital age. Share of search, it seems, might just fill the void…. Binet however is tentative on the tantalising prospect that share of search can give marketers an almost immediate insight into how a brand-building ad will perform over the long term. ‘Kind of,’ he says, when asked if share of search could show brands the value of emotional advertising in days instead of years. ‘You can to some extent use it to get a prediction of the long-term effects in the short term,’ he says, ‘but it may not work in every category. It tends to work best in categories with considered purchases.’ What most excites Binet about his research, though, is that when he looked at the effects of advertising on share of search he saw – consistently across all categories – that around 40% of the impact was felt in the short term (the first month) and around 60% of the uplift was delivered over the long term (the following two years). ‘That 60/40 ratio is one I’ve seen before,’ he jokes, alluding to his earlier work with Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, which established a 60/40 rule for brands looking to divvy up their marketing spend between long term brand building ads and short term activations. ‘So the share of search analysis provides a further piece of independent, empirical evidence for the hypothesis we have about how advertising works.

    Brand is a strategy | WARC – Gartner recently announced that, partially at least, in response to the pandemic and its associated uncertainties, CMOs now rank ‘brand strategy’ as their top priority. As with any survey, we should consider the research skeptically — but since CMOs largely direct how they spend their budgets, it’s worth the industry that serves them considering what they might be looking for assistance with.  The survey was interesting beyond the headlines. Last year the same group considered analytics their most vital marketing capability, which highlights both the increased scrutiny that marketing faces to be accountable and the endless pendulum that swings in the industry, between brand and performance. And they are going into prioritisation of brand just at the time when the board will squeeze them on performance

    Google ends direct cooperation with Hong Kong on data requests over national security law – The Washington Post – Google is blocked in mainland China, but accessible in Hong Kong. By refusing to review Hong Kong government requests for data through its normal process, Google seems to be acknowledging the broad reach the law gave China into Hong Kong. – Contrasts with the kind of dance that HSBC and Swire seem to be doing

    Strategist’s Digest: the gulf between corporate values and company culture | Contagious – Over 80% of large companies publish on their websites the values they profess to live by, according to research. Integrity was the most often listed value, claimed by 65% of all companies. Collaboration came second, with 53%, and customer focus was third at 48%. But do these values make a difference to the companies’ culture and how they behave? The researchers used Glassdoor reviews, posted by employees, to find out. After analysing 1.2 million reviews for more than 500 large companies, they found no significant correlation. In some cases there was even a negative relationship between core values and the company culture as reported by employees. And more at the Sloane Review – | When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk? | Sloane Review 

    Jimmy Lai/Hong Kong: buy orders on democracy | Financial Times – Next Digital is a benchmark for resistance to Chinese authoritarianism in other ways. Views on its digital platform double when there are protests, to an average of 80m a day. Next Digital has survived constant mainland pressure, including the withdrawal of its underwriter just before its listing and advertising boycotts by Chinese companies. The shares trade at a just over 0.3 times book value. Investors with ethical policies may have awkward questions for HSBC and Standard Chartered. These UK-listed banks have expressed support for the law under which Mr Lai was detained. The arrest of a chief executive warns foreign multinationals to locate elsewhere.

    How Car Companies Engineer the Sounds of Their Doors to Imply Safety – engineering to design every aspect of the experience

    Anti-mask group in Tokyo slammed for “cluster festival” | SoraNews24 -Japan News – thankfully only a fringe behaviour but interesting that it gloms on to similar patterns as UK protestors, such as concerns about 5G

    Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed – The New York Times – For years, Sternberg had been saying that the fashion industry was a giant bubble heading toward collapse. Now the pandemic was just speeding up the inevitable. In fact, it had already begun. An incredible surplus of clothing was presently sitting in warehouses and in stores, some of which might never reopen. “That whole channel is dead,” Sternberg said. “And there’s no sign of when it’s turning on again.” – well worth reading particular the section about novelties. Novelties is when fashion houses put on additional zips or features just to get into department stores

    Movable wealth｜Ngan Shun-kau – Chinese UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals (100 of them or so) have 78 trillion yuan offshores in Switzerland

    Why share of search is a vital marketing metric | Contagious – share of voice for the digital era

  • Platforms and information war

    Bill Bishop in his excellent newsletter Sinocism (paywall) asked some interesting questions about platforms and information war as part of an opinion piece covering a wider range of issues. It was a particular question that he posed about platforms and information war that got my attention.

    …if you believe that the PRC is engaged in a coordinated global information war to control the narrative about China and delegitimize the US and the West, should the US and other governments targeted in this campaign pay more attention to the use of social media platforms like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter in those efforts? If so how?

    Bill Bishop, Sinocism – Weekly Open Thread 2021 #10: Gratitude; Narrative control; Xinjiang and social media (April 2, 2021)

    I replied to Bill’s question; in his thread and thought I would publish my thoughts here in an expanded and hopefully better written way.

    In my response I decided to deal with the online / social platforms and information war head on. It is a problem that western countries have been wrestling with for a good while. Whether its:

    • State actors like China, North Korea or Russia
    • Political extremists on the right and the left including populism
    • Conspiracies: anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, QAnon, 5G causes COVID-19
    • Non-state actors: jihadist groups, ‘spontaneous’ Chinese Han nationalists

    On platforms

    The main platforms of concern are:

    • Alphabet (Google search, YouTube)
    • Facebook (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram)
    • Twitter
    • Bytedance (TikTok)

    For sake of convenience I am going to refer to Alphabet / Facebook / Twitter / Bytedance as AFTB for the rest of the article.

    All of the platforms are controlled by algorithms, but what does that really mean? The algorithms are created by technologists to:

    Surface content that the audience will want to engage with and make less visible content that is less interesting. Rather like an editor selecting articles in magazine. Algorithms are also used to select and match advertising with content. The algorithms incorporate feedback loops. Whilst they are created by technologists, they are in turn altered by audience behaviour over time. Descriptors like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence are often used to describe the technologies supporting algorithmic selection. Popular media would conjure up images of sentient intelligent computers, but that isn’t really helpful.

    Instead I would like to draw on geography as a metaphor to describe what’s going on. Imagine a fissure in the earth opens up in the side of a lake. The water follows a natural path downhill, over time the water carves out a gulley, that becomes a river. It removes the top soil, taking it down to sea. Stones are tumbled and rubbed together by the flow of the river. They become smooth and lozenge shaped. The landscape directs the flow of the water and is acted upon by the water. The water’s effect becomes more pronounced over time.

    So it is with algorithms. They are created, they interact with the audience. Over time, their behaviour becomes affected by audience behaviour patterns that it experiences over and over again. The reality is that AFTB have power, but are also influenced by audience behaviours.

    Is the audience real?

    Algorithms automate advertising. Online advertising was estimated to be worth 319 billion dollars in 2019 and expected to be 1,089 billion dollars by 2027. To give a frame of reference, in 2019 global advertising spend was roughly equivalent to the GDP of Singapore. By 2027 it will be greater than the GDP of Indonesia, the country with the world’s fourth highest population and largest muslim population. All of that money attracts serious efforts to defraud advertisers and platforms. Statista estimates that advertising fraud will be worth 44 billion dollars by 2022. A lot of that will be created by technology driven ‘fake’ audiences or bots.

    One of the main questions that platforms ask themselves is are their audience members real. A lot of efforts have gone into counteracting fake advertising audiences. Some of these efforts have also taken platforms and information war in the form of fake commenters and automated social accounts.

    This has given rise to mass organised real commenters, from influencers in WhatsApp groups arranging to like and comment on each others posts, to troll farms and self organised groups. State actors like Russia and China are known to have have both troll farms and self organised groups of the politically faithful working for them. A lot of the time, their comments aren’t designed to persuade other people on social media, but distract, drown them out or intimidate others. Their role is also designed to shape the algorithms that surface content.

    YouTuber talks about how his posts are commented on, demonetised and flagged for take down

    Platforms also use algorithms and audience participation as a first line of defence against inappropriate content. Chinese respondents have compiled a great deal of expertise in successfully flagging content for removal or demonetisation. Demonetising a video soon after it has been posted is particularly harmful for video creators as this is when they have their most views and greatest opportunity for ad revenues. Video views over time from posting have a a curve that steeply declines over time. Video channel view distribution roughly follows the long tail model with a a small amount of popular channels having an outsized audience and the bulk of the advertising anyway. This puts demonetised creators in a very precarious situation. It puts aggressors at an advantage in terms of platforms and information war.

    Creators dealing with this process will find the process very wearing even if they are one of the lucky few who has a creator account manager. The platforms can’t fix that without spending a large amount of money on real people, which would impact profitability.

    The exception to the rule would be TikTok which has more aggressive algorithms similar to what would be used on Chinese social platforms and actively filter controversial content. TikTok focuses on light entertainment and a good deal about this approach is because of its Chinese ownership. Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok is even stricter. The algorithms are supplemented by an army of a human censors. The other platforms have a wider remit.

    Content that works

    There have been leaps forward in understanding how to make more effective content and what app designs worked. The secret sauce is variable rewards. An example of this would be content associated with the QAnon conspiracy, each instalment is known as a Q drop. Some Q drops were big claims, others relatively small details.

    Nir Eyal’s Hooked is a book that covers this and is one of the more accessible of the of the advertising / marketing / product design-industrial complex works on this area.

    The difficulty changing platforms

    It is really hard to get platforms to do more than what they’re already doing through non-policy related means. A case in point would be studying Facebook’s recent history. The reason why Facebook was able to withstand large brand boycotts in 2020 was because they make their money from small companies around the world. A good deal of the business is small D2C (direct to consumer), gaming and major brands. Many of which are Chinese. Examples would be

    • wish.com
    • shein.com
    • Oasis games
    • Xiaomi
    • Vivo and OPPO (part of BBK)

    This layer of immunity is likely to be less pronounced but similar on Google advertising as well. As I write this, I can see that Air China is running Google advertising campaigns. They are in both English and simplified Chinese against a range of search terms.

    Secondly, social media platform changes wouldn’t be solved by policy alone. You’d need a reorientation of priorities in the boardroom, call it a higher purpose or patriotism in the broadest terms that hasn’t been seen in the US since the Eisenhower administration.

    You would need a mammoth tech revamp inside the platforms; a huge increase in human account management and intervention. For instance, it would mean YouTube having to shake up the pro-China (or Q-Anon) rabbit holes that are instrumental in attitudinal change.

    Deplatforming

    You would need to deplatform domestic advocates who are either paid, or are fellow travellers with groups using platforms for information warfare. I would imagine that you would have a lot of people baulking at that. In order to inoculate local populations of Russians or Chinese against use of their favoured platforms for information warfare, you would need to completely rebuild their native language media within western countries. In the case of Chinese immigrants and students, you would need to start filtering content on WeChat. That would be a major undertaking for any security service. WeChat could make that job a lot harder if they integrated encryption into the app for overseas users.

    You would need to deplatform foreign media organisations such as Russia Today, Global Times and CGTN.

    Finally, there would need to be eye-watering punitive damage done to corporates who acts as apologists for these countries. This would need to be multilateral. So the US should be prepared to blow up Facebook and Goldman Sachs, the UK HSBC and Germany Daimler-Benz or Deutsche Bank. They would need to pick a side.

    Given the heavy involvement of large corporates in setting policy, that’s quite a conundrum. More related posts here.

  • Qualcomm smart speaker platform + more

    Qualcomm smart speaker platform for AI-enabled devices – Business Insider – will Qualcomm attract the same developer community as Amazon’s Alexa has? The Qualcomm smart speaker platform will find it hard to get audiences wanting high quality audio as Apple found out with the first generation HomePod. It won’t only be Qualcomm chips that boost the cost but the complete component chain

    Google is making antitrust concessions in Europe – Business Insider – reminds me a lot of the European settlement that Microsoft made with the EU that then facilitated the popularity of Firefox (and Chrome)

    The New Zealand shooter finds support in Islamophobic corners of China’s internet — Quartz – many comments reflected the view that the shooting was a by-product of the West’s excessive political correctness, a perspective that has found increasing support on China’s internet in recent years as part of what’s known as the baizuo, or “white left” movement, a derogatory term used to describe Western progressives that is roughly analogous to the term “social justice warrior.”

    Google Stadia is a Net Neutrality Nightmare – Variety – the numerous unknowns and uncertainties of Stadia, from pricing to game library to concerns over internet latency and speed requirements, what’s truly disconcerting is the unspoken assumption that forgoing hardware is a net positive for consumers and creators alike. Ultimately, the adult in all of us is sick of having to repurchase video game boxes just to keep up (at least, I am). But if a PC is like a puppy in how it brings you some kind of joy or entertainment, you have to ask yourself one question. Would you rent a puppy?

    MoviePass co-founder’s new app rewards you with movie tickets for watching ads | BGR – how many ads would you have to watch and what kind of personal information is being used in targeting? Also what kind of incentives does this set up and is that the kind of demographic an advertiser wants to reach?

    APAC accounts for less than 15% of revenue for holding companies, says R3 – really interesting, especially when I remember Sir Martin (Sorrell) saying at Stream Asia a number of years ago that APAC had more WPP employees than Europe in his state of the union type speech

    The 2019 Lincoln Nautilus | Morning Run :60 | Lincoln – YouTube – interesting ad how Ford’s Lincoln brand is trying to associate the in-car information with the utility (in fitness terms at least) with wearable tech

    Why I’m Swapping My iPhone for an Alarm Clock From 1939 – WSJ – focused design rather than convergence (paywall)

    ThoughtfulGiftCards.com – Is It a Scam, or Just Shady Marketing? | JoAnna Wahlund – interesting marketing tactic / social engineering – I respect the thinking, if not the use that it was put to

    Can a Facebook Post Make Your Insurance Cost More? – WSJ – in Wadds book Brand Vandals I warned that this was inevitable. Seven years later and its now an issue

    Swiss Watchmakers Say Slowing Growth in China Won’t Hurt Sales | News & Analysis | BoF – Switzerland’s watch industry is going through a period of profound change, notably in distribution, as brands focus on developing their own boutiques — brick and mortar or online — while reducing their network of third-party retailers

    Amazon Beauty: Who Is Selling What? An Exclusive Analysis of Over 200,000 Beauty and Personal Care Listings on Amazon.com | Coreinsight – interesting read (PDF) particularly in light of Amazon Kicks Off Spring with the Launch of Belei, its First Dedicated Skincare Line | Amazon.com, Inc. – Press Room – 12 products including moisturisers, serums, eye cream, spot treatments and more

    Most Amazon Brands Are Duds, Not Disrupters, Study Finds – Bloomberg – but then most new consumer product launches are duds

    How Baselworld Can Establish its Relevance Once More | Luxury Society – interesting case study from the Digital Luxury Group. More luxury-related posts here.

    Why “Drop” Retail Is the Future of Luxury Sales in China – “Drops have been popular in China because consumers want to feel that brands are making an effort to design or offer product specifically for them and drop retailing gives brands the opportunity to show that they are focused on doing something special specifically for China”

    Luxury Marketers Can no Longer View Chinese Consumers as a Monolith | Luxury Society – they shouldn’t have ever viewed Chinese consumers as a monolith in the first place

    Walmart Builds a Secret Weapon to Battle Amazon for Retail’s Future – WSJ – (paywall)

    US Army applying new areas of math | John D Cook – expect homotopy type theory (HoTT) to be the new machine learning in a few years

    China’s middle class stress over debt payments as unemployment hits two-year high | SCMP – only a matter of time before this happened due to overheated property market and slowing economic growth

  • Platform utility

    Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz put togethers slides that cover platform utility and the role of network effects. The  presentation does a good job at providing a taxonomy on different products. It comes in handy when thinking about channel role / platform utility from a media planning perspective and also evaluating start-up ideas. They define platform in terms of development, but for advertisers we can think of it wider as we are likely to be making API calls in terms of data, targeting and ad placement. It is something that we are building demand or brand equity on.

    Key takeouts from the presentation

    • A network effect occurs when a product or service becomes more valuable to users as more people use it

    Network effect benefits

    • Create barriers to exit for existing users
    • Create barriers to entry for new companies
    • Protect from competitors eating away at margins
    • Creates a winner takes all style market

    Communications networks laws that provide indicators likely platform utility

    • Sarnoff’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the number of viewers
    • Metcalfe’s law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of number of connected users
    • Reed’s law – value of a group forming network is proportional to the number and ease with which groups form within it (subgroups grow faster than sheer number of P2P participants

    If it isn’t clear where they fall within these networks, it’s a warning flag for brands on whether to invest in the platform.

    User modes

    • Single ‘player’ mode – the product has immediate utility for a single user. Examples would be Flickr in the early days for photo storage, Foursquare in the early days to bookmark places you’d been to as a locative memory. Social bookmarking sites like Pinboard, or Delicious would have been in here had it not been retired
    • ‘Multiplayer’ mode – the product has no utility for a single user. This is particularly true for communications products. Examples would be Viber, Skype, Slack, Zoom etc.
    • Products can be both single player and multiplayer. So the community that built around Flickr for example.
    • Single player is more powerful when accompanied by an initial tactic to drive early network growth. Instagram photo filters was a way to post pictures on Twitter before there was enough critical mass. They help with adoption in the early days of a product when network effects aren’t sufficiently strong yet.
    • What’s the initial growth lever or tactic that will get it to scale?

    Case studies

    • Facebook found that connecting a new user to 10 friends within 14 days of sign-up was key to improving retention
    • Focus on daily usage (habit building) to help grow network. Focus on engagement rather than just overall number growth
    • Growth usage, even as user numbers grow is a sure sign of network effects at work
    • Facebook took a clustered approach: Harvard, then Stanford and eventually other universities in the US and abroad. Rather than focusing on growth. The immediate ‘single player’ utility they offered was an online school directory
    • WhatsApp had a different network type to Facebook. Each WhatsApp user had about 20 connections compared to approximately 980 friends on Facebook. Fewer connections also meant clustering around family, close friends of interest based WhatsApp groups with more engagement
    • AirBnB had two sides of their network. More hosts attract more guests and even become guests themselves. More guests means more business and money for hosts
    • Medium found that ‘single player mode’ can help get to ‘multiplayer mode’ through building sufficient critical mass.

  • Pirate friendly platforms + more

    Govt waves stick at pirate friendly Google search • The Register – regulators upset at pirate friendly sites surfaced by the likes of Google. The problem is the momentum it starts towards mass censorship. Which begs the question, rather than just removing pirate friendly sites, why don’t they just go all the way and ask for Chinese style ‘harmonisation’ of the web and be done with it? Why not have one-party rule as well? It’s not about what they’re asking for, it’s the precedent for what might come down the line.

    Interview: Inside Google Brain Founder Andrew Ng’s Plans To Transform Baidu | Forbes – really interesting article on how Baidu is using AI or deep learning. And how Google has lost key talent to go and build these services in China instead.

    Anonymous Analytics: Tianhe Chemicals – interesting Chinese business report, the problem is one of trust and transparency make reports like these seem more credible. Audits of Chinese companies are too opaque, state secrets cover anything that China wants it to cover. It almost looks like a gangster state. More China related posts here.

    Nixon pardons Nu Skin | Bronte Capital – interesting article about network marketing beauty and wellness product company Nu Skin. Disclosure – I had consulted on Nu Skin business problems in China and Hong Kong when I worked out there.

    How China’s Mobile Ecosystem Is Different from the West | TheNextWeb – interesting how WeChat is driving app behaviours in Chinese consumers. The big impact will be felt in terms of operating system differentiation. A mid market phone becomes good enough eroding the premium phone sector.

    A billionaire’s son designs an app to keep nosy parents at bay | Quartz – interesting positioning away from WeChat and LINE, Hike has been around for a good 18 months and is only now getting publicity

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