Ged Carroll

Category: business | 商業 | 상업 | ビジネス

My interest in business or commercial activity first started when a work friend of my Mum visited our family. She brought a book on commerce which is what business studies would have been called decades earlier. I read the book and that piqued my interest.

At the end of your third year in secondary school you are allowed to pick optional classes that you will take exams in. this is supposed to be something that you’re free to chose.

I was interested in business studies (partly because my friend Joe was doing it). But the school decided that they wanted me to do physics and chemistry instead and they did the same for my advanced level exams because I had done well in the normal level ones. School had a lot to answer for, but fortunately I managed to get back on track with college.

Eventually I finally managed to do pass a foundational course at night school whilst working in industry. I used that to then help me go and study for a degree in marketing.

I work in advertising now. And had previously worked in petrochemicals, plastics and optical fibre manfacture. All of which revolve around business. That’s why you find a business section here on my blog.

Business tends to cover a wide range of sectors that catch my eye over time. Business usually covers sectors that I don’t write about that much, but that have an outside impact on wider economics. So real estate would have been on my radar during the 2008 recession.

  • Wasted investment + more things

    China has ‘wasted’ $6.8tn in investment, warn Beijing researchers – FT.com – define wasted. The ghost cities may fill slowly as rural policies move people into the cities. I would be more worried about monies wasted on systemic corruption

    The click-through rate is not dead, it’s morphed into a zombie | Marketing Magazine – interesting that this has been associated with CTR rather than impressions which is a better analogue of cost per hour from the FT’s point-of-view

    Edelman, TransCanada to split after Greenpeace strategy document leak | PR Week – “The conversation about Energy East has turned into a debate about our choice of agency partner,” the statement continued. “We need to get back to a conversation about the project itself, and as a result we have agreed that it is in the best interests of the project that we do not extend our contract with Edelman.” I would have thought that move won’t have been good for Greenpeace either in terms of moving the conversation away from the environment

    European Identity: Strength or Weakness? | INSEAD – interesting question to pose, as an Irish national my perspective is that it is a definite strength. We are young nation unencumbered the baggage of former glories; having stepped out from having been colonised. Whilst we had corrupt bankers this doesn’t invalidate the idea of Europe. More consumer behaviour related content here.

    Tumblr Is Now The Fastest Growing Social Media Platform, Edging Out Instagram and Pinterest by @mattsouthern – blogging by another name

    MI6 oversight report on Lee Rigby murder: US web giants offer ‘safe haven for TERRORISM’ • The Register – I feel uneasy about this. How would you feel if the Royal Mail or Fedex was responsible for reading your mail?

    How Technology Is Changing Media | Buzzfeed – a media pack masquerading as interactive post but lacking in subtlety

    2014: The year Facebook organic reach died | The Drum  – made its point clearly

    Drone Flights Face FAA Hit – WSJ – increased regulation in the US on commercial usage likely to cramp marketplace in short term, but provide clear framework in the medium-to-long term

    Sony Predicts Electronics Recovery | Variety – components rather than finished products

    「TOYOTA FUN CHAIN」| DRIVING KIDS with TOYOTA – interesting Toyota effort to make driving relevant for young people

    Uber removed blog post from data science team that examined link between prostitution and rides – the gift that keeps on giving for communications professionals

    Regin: Top-tier espionage tool enables stealthy surveillance | Symantec Security Response – interesting whitepaper outlining a spying tool. Might it be a UK one? It’s possible given that 9% of the targets were Irish and none where in the US. But Ireland is also a financial centre and has one interesting defence company Timoney Technologies so it would depend who the Irish targets are

    Grilled: the Daily Mirror’s deputy 3am editor Hannah Hope | PR Week – interesting traditional media planning cycle (paywall)

    White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering – Defense One – very similar to the kind of points made back in the early days of online cryptography

    The Grumpy Economist: Dusty corners of the market – anomalies exist in hard to trade paper presumably if they were easy to trade the opportunity would be capitalised upon as it appears

  • Is PR dead?

    Before I get into the question of is PR dead, I need to make a disclosure: I am a ‘non-PR’ person working in what was until recently a PR agency, but now describes itself as an ‘integrated marketing communications agency that offers influencer identification, mapping and engagement, social and traditional media strategy and execution programmes, digital marketing and creative capabilities.‘
    Press Conference with Rt Rev Kieran Conry

    Executive summary of is PR dead?

    Is PR dead? It depends on how you define PR as to whether you think it is dead or not. There is a role for PR thinking and PR skill sets.

    Main post on is PR dead?

    It depends by what you define as PR. I consider PR to be the managed interface between an organisation and its publics. It can manifest itself in many ways:

      • The way it does customer service. Wong Kei restaurant in Soho was known and loved for its rude customer service. For the likes of BT or Vodafone, customer service is front line reputation management
      • It is the user experience: paper bills that are clear, correspondence that doesn’t try to bully the recipient, a website that doesn’t try to gouge charges (like Ryanair used to), architecture that adds to an area (like the glass cube of Apple’s famous New York store)
      • It is wrangling regulatory, government and investor relationships
      • There will always be a place for that interface. The people involved lubricate business and help drive growth. PR practitioners have a lot to bring to these areas. They are guardians of brand value.

    Many people consider PR to be a generator of earned media be it a parliamentary question, a broadcast interview, product placement or article.  To this has also been added earned media: corporate reports, press releases, blog posts, social content etc. This area in aggregate looks much less healthy to me.  The work that is safest in this area is where the interface is the critical part of the product: the relationships with the MPs or the key financial journalists and equity analysts and positive coverage is a secondary attribute.

    The problem with is with media being the product that the relationship with a organisation is mediated through. I usually give a Johnny Rottenesque sneer when someone name drops the attention economy. In this particular explanation, having attention and economy together in a term is useful. It is probably the most proper use of ‘attention economy’. There are so many publishers delivering messages (paid and unpaid). It is becoming much harder for the audience to to come across, find, discover and retain messages from media. There is an over-supply of content in comparison to an inelastic number of viewers. Much of the content published is of poor quality.

    The internet is only a part of the phenomena, digital has only accelerated the process.  Media fragmentation and the corresponding over-supply of content in comparison to the amount of available attention has been on us for a while:

        • Multi-channel TV – back in 1992 Bruce Springsteen wrote 57 Channels (and Nothin’ On) – hardly an academic study but it only feels more relevant now.
        • Racks of magazines – going into a WHSmith or through the Gorkana database confronts you with a sea of publications you have no idea would have existed. And I suspect the amount of magazines and other media that have gone out of publication would dwarf the number of those currently in publication
        • Record label back catalogues – before the iTunes catalogue and Amazon the total sum of records available to order from a record shop was contained in about 3  desk busting directories from the main record distributors. These books were like a few phone books put together in terms of thickness. Items regularly got deleted from circulation. With each change of format: vinyl, cassette and CD different back catalogue content didn’t make the transfer. Bit torrent was popular among people I knew because they could get ripped recordings that weren’t available in digital formats elsewhere. And yet new content keeps coming out
        • Free newspapers – my Dad loves the two free newspapers that come through the door of my parents house each week. They protect the carpet when he is painting, wrap apples from the garden that he puts into storage around about this time of year and act as packing material for the parcels that are sent back to the family in Ireland. But he doesn’t read them. The Tower Hamlets council-published paper I receive goes straight into recycling unless I have something to sell on eBay
        • Film archives: a quick glance at iMDB shows the amount of content that was created and wasn’t transferred on to laser disc, DVD, Blu-Ray or digital video files. It is a similar pattern to music libraries, yet YouTube has some 100 hours per minute being uploaded

    Psychologists have found that even small decisions around consumer choices require energy and add to fatigue. The content surplus only exasperates that psychological process.

    When we look at social platforms we see the decline in reach for a mixture of reasons:

        • Maximising revenue by encouraging brands to use advertising to put content in front of their communities
        • The sheer volume of content driving brand content out of feeds as a ‘firehouse’

    When I started in PR I often heard Elvis Costello paraphrased that ‘yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’. But now that flow is generally much shorter. This means that there is less of a chance to get a return on investment on a given piece of PR activity. It will reach less people and relevant for a shorter time.

    There are extreme effects at the end of the bell curve. Google ‘BP rig disaster’; there are about 2,400,ooo results related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Look up ‘Kryptonite lock’, and on the first page you find a video about opening the lock with a Bic pen. This is some ten years after Benjamin Running’s famous video demonstration. Both brands still have their reputational crises.

    A secondary aspect of the content over-supply is the effect is had had on the media industry. Many ‘traditional’ media brands have struggled to make a profit. The Guardian is one of the most progressive publications, in terms of the future of media. The Guardian has been at the forefront of technological development and still doesn’t make a profit. It has tried to improve by getting bigger with its US online edition.

    Other publishers like News International experimented with varying degrees of success around paywall models. At the time of writing, The New Yorker has introduced a metered paywall, which is watched eagerly as the media industry still can’t agree on a successful business model. Economics have disrupted the influencers that PRs most cared about.

    The reach issue now means that we consider using advertising to gain more traffic to the best pieces of coverage that we get for some of our clients. From a marketers perspective, PR starts to look less attractive. It also means that including PR in their bag of tricks makes more sense for other marketing disciplines.

    I went to the IAB’s session during Social Media Week London. Advertising and media agencies presented back PR campaigns. These were done using social channels, promoted with varying degrees of advertising on social platforms. This PR activity was described as social media marketing or content marketing. PR becomes a small increment on the existing advertising spend. When PR agencies branch into other areas they look like a riskier risk as this often represents multiples on their previous budget.

    Chipotle and post modernism

    Finally there is the business of PR and that’s where I think it gets a bit post modern. How many PR agencies are really PR agencies any more? Richard Edelman talks about his company still being a PR agency. Yet how many clients who would think that, given the company’s flagship work for clients like the Chipotle?

    The scarecrow film was done in conjunction with Creative Artists Agency. Work like this positions Edelman much more like an advertising agency.


    In my own agency, I have colleagues that do a lot of media and blogger relations. I support their work through insights but the the bulk of my work is around media buying. From straight-up search pay-per-click ad campaigns to promoted social accounts.

    I have just finished a new business pitch, a key tenet of our big idea was for the brand to publish their own sector media outlet with a light touch of branding. This was because there was a void in their sector.

    Harmful labeling

    As you can see on the introduction to this post, we don’t even bother calling ourselves a PR agency. We have done this because that is the business reality that we have to live with. So in some respects even the PR business has given credence to supporting a viewpoint towards PR less future as an answer to the question of is PR dead?

    And I am ok with this. In some cultures, you have a ‘true’ name that you never use or give out widely. There also have a given name that used during their everyday interactions. The true name has power, a magic of its own, that can be used to harm the person. For the PR business; the true name has a negative power and many of use will shrug it off despite what professional bodies may want.

    Is it PR any more?

    Others may stumble into doing PR work and not even realise that they is the case, are they then part of the PR business? I am happy for my industry to become post-modern, for PR to become it’s secret ‘true’ name as a marketing singularity pushes agencies towards a mix of paid, earned and owned media. I am even happy with the ‘white’ lie that PR is dead because then I can just get on with what I do for a living. I can move between agencies without silos and advance my career further. Give me a shovel and I will help bury the PR business.

    More information

    The media is dying, does PR have cancer? | renaissance chambara – an old post of mine from 2009, much of what I said in it I still consider to be valid, but it now has an added sense of urgency
    YouTube Statistics
    PR isn’t dying, but PR agencies might… | Jed Hallam
    The future of PR starts with you | Stephen Waddington on LinkedIn
    The public relations industry’s confidence problem | Stephen Waddington

  • Chinas massive foreign reserves + more

    No easy fix for Chinas massive foreign reserves | SCMP – Chinas massive foreign reserves surplus presents a similar challenge to what Japan faced in the 1970s and 1980s. China massive foreign reserves will likely be used to try and reinforce its existing hegemony. We are already seeing state banks giving mobile network providers negative interest loans to buy Huawei equipment, software and services. Funds will be made available for sovereign debt capture, strategic technology acquisitions and undermining the US dollar as a defacto word reserve currency. This means that US treasury bonds will be less attractive to China. It also explains why it has laid the foundation for a ‘Euroyuan’ market alongside the ‘Eurodollar’ market in the financial district of London.  (paywall)

    Richemont H1 profits down 23pc – Luxury Daily – looking at this they were hit by a slowdown in APAC and the increase in Japanese sales tax

    China’s 24-hour online shopfest explodes into life with $2 billion spent in first hour | Techinasia – 11/11 is remembrance day in many western countries but in China it is singles day, a made up festival to drive online sales

    Foreigners buying from Japan get free stuff?! But not all buyers are impressed | Rocketnews – the UK is too cynical and jaded

    Michael Douglas | Canali – I love this content that Canali have done with Michael Douglas

    Masque Attack: All Your iOS Apps Belong to Us | FireEye Blog – iPhone users, enterprises are a security weak spot for you

    Obama says FCC should reclassify the internet’s regulatory status – Vox – this is huge. Seriously.

    Meet Shingy, AOL’s “Digital Prophet” | The New Yorker – how the fuck haven’t I managed to blag a job like that?

    Uber is recruiting 50,000 veterans as drivers | The Verge – the sub header is ‘are they being taken for a ride’ as sub prime Uber driver debt mounts

    HKTV eyes second test after problems in first round | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – reading this gives you an appreciation of how much of an achievement the likes of RTE Player and BBC iPlayer achieve

    A major misconception about Facebook visibility – Campaign Asia – tips: mirror audience language and semantics, have opinions

    We’re seeing a very different Microsoft — Gigaom Research – a very different Microsoft: one that is willing to partner, willing to accept the new economics of mobile, and learning how to coax customers to its web services with premium features instead of absolutist tactics.

    Juniper shrinks its MX monster router onto a USB stick • The Register – really interesting development, I wonder what’s the minimum hardware it could run on?

    Tech giants who encrypt comms are unwittingly aiding terrorists’, claims ex-Home Sec Blunkett – odd the way this is a consistent message from politicians, it feels like softening up for regulation in the UK that will look more like China’s harmonising the internet. It could be good for PRs involved in reputation management – only a matter of time before censorship is a service purchased like media relations. Expect innovation and digital competitiveness to suffer as the UK loses out to other EU countries. Google HQ in Germany or Ireland anyone?

    prosthetic knowledge — ABB Robots Katana Fight – we’ll look back on this clip as history when we’re all cut down to size by katana wielding terminators

    Adidas China Social Campaign Report | Resonance China – interesting work done including trying to encourage behavioural change amongst groups of young women’s social interactions in the real word – positioning sport as a competitor activity to spa treatments, eating out or shopping

    ‘Smart factories’ could revolutionize production | Shanghai Daily – interesting move as China tries to move up the value chain and deal with the demographic time bomb

    Parallel car imports | Shanghai Daily – interesting action. This will be competition for imported and made-in-country but foreign brands of cars like Mercedes. Will the parallel cars be looked after by the dealer networks? I remember in the UK, BMW disliked servicing parallel imported cars from Belgium and other countries

    Middle East authorities are cracking down on audio that gets you “high” | Quartz – like something straight out of a William Gibson novel

    GT Bankruptcy Provides Rare Look at Apple’s Relationship With Suppliers | Re/code – can imagine ‘put on your big boy pants’ being quoted in business schools for years to come

    CBSN – Live Streaming Video News Channel – CBS News – interesting direct from TV to online transfer of news, I wonder if the ad revenues will stack up? More media related content here.

  • Silicon Valley corporate raiders

    The origins of Silicon Valley are new, even by American standards. Over the space of one life time the area below San Francisco around the Santa Clara valley went from apricot farms and orchards to urban development based around hardware (the silicon in silicon valley) and then on to campus design sites preferred by software companies.

    At the time of the PC revolution was kicking in, Silicon Valley rose to prominence in the public consciousness. This gave use the consumer side of consumer technology we live with today like iPhones and the MacBook Pro this post is written on.

    Over the space of this time, it wasn’t only the landscape that changed but the way we work and how entrepreneurship was rewarded. There were decades of unparalleled economic growth driven by companies firstly in hardware, then software and finally in networking and communications – the internet.
    Reagan_et_Thatcher
    During the early 1980s, America had Ronald Reagan as president. The manufacturing industry that had driven post-war prosperity in the country was suffering from global competition and businesses were under attack. This was the golden age of the corporate raider who destroyed businesses in the name of shareholder value. For example corporate raider Carl Icahn was considered responsible for the bankruptcy of Trans-World Airlines (TWA).

    By comparison Silicon Valley was in a spate of explosive growth. Computers and software were changing the way business operated. Spreadsheet software enabled the kind of models required for corporate raids on main street. Apple, Adobe and Aldus came up with the different components required for desktop publishing revolutionising design in the process.
    The fall of the Berlin Wall - November 1989
    The cold war ended and the Berlin Wall came down, corporate raiding ran out of steam as corporate lawyers began to construct effective barriers on behalf of besieged companies. Silicon Valley started a move away from ‘hard’ innovation to the soft innovation of gadgets, software and services. But that was fine, there where other places in the world who wanted to make the hardware components because of the jobs and wealth it created. The modern internet started to be built on Sun and Silicon Graphics servers connected with Cisco routers. The web was designed on the same Apple Macs that designed brochures.  Technology companies became media companies, retailers and super-fast courier companies. Wired magazine talked about the ‘new economy’.

    The industry was also riding on a one-time offer. Older computers that now ran the modern world had a ‘millennium’ or Y2K bug, which was a bonanza for business IT companies. A dot com bust dampened enthusiasm, cleared out some of the more egregious business models.  Out of the fire sales of Aeron chairs and Cisco Catalyst series routers paired with cheaper broadband came web 2.0 – where the web became a platform rather than just a catalogue.

    For many of the previous businesses in Silicon Valley growth slowed. Most business software looked like a solution looking for a problem. High-performance hardware could be cheaply replaced with more commodity priced boxes. Eventually for many people’s needs, hardware became a service that could be rented according to need. Business models were disrupted, sales dried up, licences weren’t renewed and advertising sales dried up.

    Enterprise software companies were hoovered up by private equity firms eager to leverage their steady cashflows to service debt from further transactions.

    Businesses like IBM and Nokia look like the TWA or Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in the 1980s. The story of Yahoo! over the past six years looks like one corporate raider greenmail scam after another. Jerry Yang who has recently started to see his reputation rehabilitated was turned out of the company he founded by shareholders influenced by Microsoft and Carl Icahn. The subsequent replacement Carol Bartz supervised over a spectacular destruction in value at the company. Current CEO Marissa Mayer, like her peers at Apple and IBM faces constant corporate raideresque behaviour to leverage up and return money to shareholders as part of a share buyback.

    Microsoft who seemed to have used corporate raiders against its foes like Yahoo! now has activist shareholders on its board and is being forced to rejig its own business.

    Just what is going on?

    I think it it down to a confluence of different factors:

    • Technology has had a spectacular growth spurt in Silicon Valley but the growth has spread beyond the valley. Huawei is arguably one of the most important companies in telecommunications and internet infrastructure now. Just over two decades ago it was a small business selling secondhand company switchboards to the new businesses springing up in Shenzhen. Zhengfei Ren moved from selling equipment he sourced in Hong Kong to manufacturing it himself. Now the company makes everything from core network switches and submarine cables to smartphones, tablets and wearables. Shenzhen is full of companies like Huawei – some more successful than others. The most powerful names in silicon are also Asian companies TSMC and Samsung Electronics play a key role in the manufacture of non-PC style computers: phones, tablets and even televisions. It is often easier to name products that aren’t becoming ‘smart’ in some way
    • There isn’t the same willingness in the US to fund start-ups looking at smart innovation, instead the focus is on areas like social applications. Technology industry veteran Judy Estrin identified this as a key problem in her 2008 book Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy. There are serious technology challenges available that need to be addressed: the break down of Moore’s Law in semiconductor manufacture, commercially viable nuclear power and quantum computing to name but three
    • The technology has been demystified and is yet another industry. There isn’t that much difference between LVMH and Apple or Caterpillar and Oracle. Software as a service moved the buying decision on a number of products from the IT manager to the marketing manager or department head. Cheaper smartphones saw the rise of bring your own device (BYOD) policies. I sat in an old warehouse turned conference centre last week when Will.i.am announced off the stage that ‘Designing hardware isn’t hard, filling Wembley stadium, that’s hard’. Eco-systems from OEMs to Kickstarter have democratised and demystified technology businesses. And with this familiarity has come at least some contempt

    More information
    Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy
    Finding Alibaba: How Jerry Yang Made The Most Lucrative Bet In Silicon Valley History | Forbes
    Yahoo Stock Crashes As Alibaba IPOs – Business Insider
    Marissa Mayer’s day of reckoning at Yahoo is rapidly approaching | Quartz
    BlockBuster: Lyme Regis Sues Icahn, Accuses Sabotage – Barrons.com
    Carl Icahn 2.0: an icon of ’80s greed is back to shake up Silicon Valley | The Verge – 2 words: TWA, Yahoo!

  • Turnaround plan at Yahoo! + more

    Yahoo CEO Set to Refresh Turnaround Plan – WSJ – the turnaround plan sounds like desperate cost cutting. Yahoo! leadership have burned through a lot of runway and not made the best use of the company’s media assets. Mayer’s turnaround plan looked very much like Ross Levinsohn’s turnaround plan. The Levinsohn turnaround plan was in turn similar to pilot projects done when Terry Semel was CEO of Yahoo!

    Qatar to buy stake in HK department store operator | RTHK – interesting move getting them to buy a chunk of Sogo, probably because Macau is likely to pick up much of the growth in luxury sales

    LVMH: It May be Time for a Smartwatch – WSJ – not so sure that this is a good move, unless it is a fashion watch rather than a luxury item it could damage brands rather like the quartz lines did to luxury watches

    ISPs told to block fake luxury goods sales – FT.com – sounds like an inefficient game of whack-a-mole; they should go after the payments providers instead. That’s where the weak spot is

    App enables Chinese women to take selfies with sanitary pads – Mumbrella Asia  – uses the packs to activate an AR app allowing photos with the company mascot, but still WTF

    MediaTek, Acer working on smart surveillance solutions | WantChinaTimes – story about internet of things but the headline is telling…

    Sony’s plans to pull out of Chinese market an ‘open secret’ | WantChinaTimes – the big issue is that China is likely to be a good market for Sony’s high end consumer electronics products

    Uber fired a driver for tweeting mean stuff about them – douced

    Behold the awesome power of the spreadsheet, destroyer of worlds | Quartz – rather reminds me of the introduction to ‘Accidental Empires’ by Bob Cringely

    Old Technopanic in New iBottles | Cato @ Liberty – or why the government arguments for weak crypto are as much use as a chocolate teapot