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.

  • Sharing economy & more

    Leo Burnett on sharing economy

    Leo Burnett put together this great presentation on the state of the sharing economy (Airbnb, Uber, Lyft etc.) The presentation on the sharing economy is well thought out and handy to keep one side as a reference. More related content here.

    The Sharing Economy: Where We Go From Here from Leo Burnett

    Code Rush

    Code Rush – an amazing documentary on Netscape and its Communicator product: a mix of email client and web browser. Netscape Communicator was the first desktop email client that I used. I remember that we had it at work and then were put through the trauma of moving to Lotus Notes at work. Communicator had been the first email client to support HTML, so going to text only on Lotus Notes as a culture shock.

    At home I switched to Eudora until I eventually moved to mail.app when I set up an Apple services based email account.

    The Hundreds x Reebok

    The Hundreds X Reebok collaboration movie is a great trip back to the early 1990s and some serious sneaker love. The Hundreds may not be the hippest brand, or the one with the most hype. But they don’t just do clothing, instead the publish content that captures the culture of streetwear. Observers as well as originators and creators in the streetwear scene.

    Alan Watts

    The creators of South Park put together some great animation to accompany recordings by the philosopher and buddhist Alan Watts. Don’t worry it isn’t done a South Park style and Alan Watts voice is very soothing. Watts’ work was very influential from the 1950s and again in the 1990s as the interest was rekindled in Zen buddhist philosophy and practice.

    Video game music origins

    Finally, Red Bull put this great documentary together on the origins of video game music. The process that they used to compose the music is amazing. It shows how limitations can enhance creativity.

  • Shenzhen ecosystem

    It is hard to believe that the Shenzhen ecosystem was built over just a few decades. Just over 30 years ago China moved from a period of cultural isolation to gradually opening up to the commercial world beyond its borders. The place to naturally start this was in Guangdong province close to the then British colony of Hong Kong. A small fishing village grew to become the workshop of the world. The growth of Shenzhen was driven by investment from multi-nationals and overseas Chinese. One of the earliest industrial areas was called Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. OCT has changed from manufacturing to retail and offices for the creative industries in the former factory buildings.

    Hong Kong had built up capability and expertise in light manufacturing and clothing from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is still important for supply chain intermediaries. This was the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong. This is how many of the Hong Kong oligarchs made their first fortunes; which they then invested overseas, in China and into the Hong Kong real estate market.

    Globalisation had started after the second world war. But the opening up of China threw it into overdrive. Hong Kong industrials moved manufacturing plants for clothing, shoes, toys, plastic goods and electrical appliances to China.

    They were joined by Taiwanese electronics manufacturers and then multinationals from Europe, America and Japan. Hong Kong clothing manufacturers provided China supply chain expertise to western retailers like Walmart.

    The Shenzhen ecosystem was built on manual production. The deft fingers of Chinese women workers allowed a lot more precision than Japanese pick-and-place machines. Which meant a lot more flexibility in manufacturing using the Shenzhen factories. You wouldn’t have an iPhone if you used pick-and-place robots on the production line.

    Electronics manufacturing

    At first, these companies were used to fatten the wallets of customers who took on the marketing and distribution of electronics in the West. The dirty secret about many PC and laptop designs was they were standard underneath. Then this cost saving was passed on to the customer as people like Dell went for close to lowest price operator based on a direct mail / online direct ordering and cut out the channel.

    Finally that wasn’t enough, and most of the laptop and PC resellers make no money. Instead the main people to profit from these sales were Microsoft which licensed it’s Windows operating system and Intel which provided the majority of compatible micro-processors capable of running Windows-compatiable applications. In the PC industry there is usually just two or three profitable manufacturers and one of them is Apple. Historically it was Dell, then Hewlett-Packard and now it is likely to have be Lenovo.

    Shrinking PC-esque computing power into the palm of one’s hand was inevitable with the rise of flash storage and Moore’s Law facilitating power-efficient processors. The challenge is battery technology, packaging and industrial design.  Apple pushed the envelope with suppliers. Hon Hai and other manufacturers installed hundreds of CNC machines to fabricate thousands of metal phone chassis. These radical changes in manufacturing capability were opened up to lower tier manufacturers raising the standard of fit and finish immeasurably over a few years.

    Now Xiaomi and Lenovo product handsets that have better build quality than many Samsung and HTC handsets. The performance is good enough (again thanks to Moore’s Law) and the handsets run the same applications. Sony, HTC and Samsung handsets look as marooned as Sony’s Vaio PC range in the Windows eco-system.

    Shenzhen’s ecosystem has been a great leveller of manufacturing and industrial design capabilities with Apple at the leading edge of what’s possible from an industrial design and materials technology.

    More information
    Shenzhen Government Online – this loads slow like they are phoning the pages in from 2002, but is informative
    The smartphone value system – An earlier piece I wrote about the challenges of the Android eco-system

  • FES watch + more things

    Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch? – Digits – WSJ – interesting the way Sony has become an internal VC operation. It makes sense since they need disruptive innovation and they still have smart people. they also need to allow their engineering talent to keep having an outlet for their creativity. The FES watch is a classic quirky Sony product that is very clever. The disappointing bit was hearing them working with an external product design agency on the FES watch. Especially given the internal industrial design capability to deliver iconic designs and a wider design language across product ranges. More design related content here.

    Tightening too frightening for UK | HSBC – interest rate increase and lower than expected economic growth

    Oh No They Didn’t: European Parliament Calls For Break Up Of Google | SearchEngineLand – inevitable but not sure it will make an impact, Google must have expected this?

    Maglev elevators are coming that can go up, down, and sideways | Quartz – I love this

    Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos | Dazed – Tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left the company in 2008, but says that Yahoo-ordained plan is “a little shortsighted”. He added: “It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill”. It’s the equivalent of looking for pennies that may have fallen down a crack in the sofa. Flickr photos are already used in the online and offline media. They have also been used to train image recognition algorithms, both of which are allowed by the licensing. The prints seems like a cheap, low value move.

    Supermarket own-brands generate more than half of UK grocery sales | BrandRepublic – bad news for CPG brands. And bad news for brands in general, particularly when one thinks about how Amazon is building its private label lines across several sectors

  • 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