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.

  • Tencent annual staff meeting + more

    Notes From Tencent Annual Staff Meeting – China Channel – some interesting insights on how they are looking at the online world

    Key takeouts from the Tencent Annual Staff Meeting:

    • They made a big issue of treating customers honestly, which made me think that might not be in the culture up to now. There was also a call to focus on users rather than competitors
    • More on user focus – WeChat is a tool, not a platform. Only tools are the most friendly and meaningful to users. WeChat has been trying to do one thing, to treat every user as a friend
    • They wanted mini games become a platform for ordinary people to show their creativity. If this goal is not achieved, then they were happy if the mini games on the platform died
    • A recognition of the cognitive dissonance on social platforms where people show their best lives on Douyin and the unhealthy nature of it
    • Tencent launched the most stringent youth anti-addiction system in history. This is a long-term initiative that is very beneficial to the entire industry and a responsibility we must assume as an industry leader

    2018 Year in Review – Pornhub Insights – I wish that I’d this quality of data when I was cranking out press releases for Yahoo! Search. The review is as much about cultural change as it is about trends in smut. More on adult entertainment industry related content here.

    The Last Independent Mobile OS – Motherboard – interesting write-up on Sailfish and yet more reasons why you shouldn’t trust Google at all

    Pioneer’s woes echo those of earlier Japanese audio legends – Nikkei Asian Review – for someone like myself this is heartbreaking

    1967 Mustang meets Tesla: Aviar Motors all-electric muscle car – Electrek – this fits in with Aston Martin’s announcement last week about retro fitting vintage cars with electric automation

    Interesting video that’s as much an illustration of collective delusion that drives VC thinking in a very wasteful manner and where they are likely to be putting their focus moving forwards

    Nobel economist Paul Romer

  • On the sofa: The Man from Mo’Wax

    The documentary The Man from Mo’Wax was something that I’d been looking forward to watching for a while. James Lavelle made his name as the guy at Honest Johns who was the go to guy for Major Force Records releases. Major Force was a Japanese hip hop label that featured the likes of

    • Hiroshi Fujiwara
    • Takagi Kan
    • Masayuki Kudo
    • Milo Johnson (who was part of the pre-Massive Attack group The Wild Bunch)
    • “Tycoon” Toshio Nakanishi
    • Scha Dara Parr
    • Ishida Yoshinori

    These were the people who influenced 

    • Bomb The Bass’s first album Into The Dragon
    • The subsequent trip hop movement
    • Japan’s streetwear scene (Goodenough, Fragment) which has a continuing impact on the global streetwear scene

    Lavelle’s impact before Mo’Wax was huge. His column that had the Mo’Wax name and identity was huge. Mo’Wax the record label in its tunes and championing the designs of Swifty and Futura’s art have been hugely influential. Lavelle was the tastemaker that drove BAPE before the Americans like Pharrell Williams got hold of it. He did things in collectable figures and fashion that other labels still haven’t done. Surrender was a great streetwear label. The first UNKLE album was brilliant. 

    But he lost it; drugs and self indulgent projects that burned money and credibility. He was sufficiently narcissistic to document his life two decades before social media, which is the reason why you have a lot of warts and all material that has elements of Spinal Tap. Lavelle lacked the introspection and self examination in the documentary to make a real turn around. It ends up coming across as a two-hour pitch video for James to take part in a pop star re-invention on VH-1 a la Remaking Taylor Dane. The Guardian’s review summed up Lavelle and The Man From Mo’Wax really well. 

    …from superstar DJ to rock bore

    Cath Clarke, The Guardian (August 30, 2018)

  • New Yorks information for Amazon + more

    New Yorks information for Amazon – crazy number of data points and a must see for any planner looking at campaigns targeting New Yorkers (PDF). From a more sinister point of view about New Yorks information for Amazon – it shows a corporate culture that’s out of control.

    Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing – The New York Times – The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances – (paywall)

    ‘Agencies are shitting themselves’: SCA dean Marc Lewis on tutoring for today’s ad world | The Drum One of the biggest pitfalls in the industry is “worshipping at the altar of wanky new tech”

    Just who is Huawei listening to? | Business | The Sunday Times – “In the event of an international crisis — say, if the Chinese were to invade Taiwan — if you own a fleet of thousands and thousands of routers, you can launch service-denial attacks on a massive scale,” said Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University. “You can potentially make the internet unavailable for days or weeks.”

    A bunch of millennials explained in a survey why they despise phone calls – BGR – basically poor social skills

    Researchers Found a Way to Shrink a Supercomputer to the Size of a Laptop | Futurism – interesting, though parallelism presents problems for software

    Honda, CalTech and NASA’s JPL might have a real alternative to Li-ion batteries – Roadshow – great opportunity in terms of energy density but copper and more particularly lanthanum are a materials supply chain bottle neck. One can see how China disrupted Japan’s access to rare metals years ago which affected the use of magnets in high-technology products

    The Chinese Social Network – Hacker Noon – the story of Pony Ma

    Jack Poulson, ex Google, says management obsessed with stopping leaks – Business Insider – indicating a crisis in culture and leadership. The way Google is dealing with it is by stopping people knowing about the issues

    More technology related content here.

  • Most popular blog posts of 2018

    It’s that time of year again when I reflect on the things that I’ve done and what I can learn from the year. I wanted to get this out there whilst I still have a bit of respite from the holiday cheer. 

    In reverse order

    Reuse, re-edit and remix – the quality and impact of creative is a key question that is being asked at the moment. Marketers have finally woken up to the power of brand building as well as performance media. Which then begs the question what’s the minimum viable creative tweaks to effective creative that can be used?

    Apple – special event (September 2018) – trying to cut through the formulaic delivery of the company’s new products to understand what where the key salient points. I was surprised that this generated far more interest than a similar keynote at Apple WWDC which was much more interesting. 

    Enron and the net in 2000 – pre-Facebook the net was a much more decentralised place. Enron failed in their vision of a real time market for broadband, so I decided to work out what happened to some of their ‘partners’ at the time.

    Ramblings on consumption – this started off as a collection of disjointed notes I made whilst travelling to see the family in Ireland 

    Recommendations for a marketers bookshelf – you can’t dismiss the power of a good listicle. 

    This wasn’t the internet we envisaged – looking at the media of the 1990s we were promised an immersive visually stimulating interactive experience. Unfortunately we ended up with Instagramers and Facebook

    Throwback gadget: Bose Wave system – I still use a Bose Wave stereo due to the big sound that you get from a compact size. Its modular nature meant that it has weathered the iPod, DAB broadcast radio and internet streaming extremely well

    Jargon watch: zhuang bi (装b) – an exploration into Chinese l33tspeak. 

    Oprah time: Operation Elop – Nokia accounted for 25% of the Finnish economy at one stage and then spectacularly fell from grace, with the iconic phone business being sold to Microsoft. Yet the definitive history of what happened has never been licensed and translated by business publishers. I got to read a crowdsourced translation instead. 

    Things I’d like to see in 2018 – included in this list was innovation in smartphone experience (which we don’t have at the moment), a leaner web and critical thinking around the hype of crypto currencies. 

    My web toolbox – some of the tools that I was using in early July this year. 

    How to use RSS – with so many people now getting algorithmically selected, part of the solution is by going back to RSS and Atom feeds from trusted sites. So I threw together a guide to getting started with Newsblur

    The advertising industry post prompted by WPP’s 2017 financial results – how much of WPP’s difficulties are due to changes in the client and media environment versus WPP’s business?

    Social networks 10 years ago – 2018 will be looked back on in internet history as when the elites finally woke up to the dominance (ex-China) of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple. Looking back at 2008, it is hard to believe how much the social network eco-system changed

    Mercedes Benz China Syndrome – Chinese netizens are still jumping the Great Firewall to vilify western brands who reflect views that ‘offend the Chinese people’ – even when this content is aimed at non-Chinese audiences. Mercedes’ offence was an Instagram image with one of their cars and a quote from the exiled Dalai Lama. Dolce & Gabbana didn’t learn from the Mercedes experience. Mercedes and other brands saw the Chinese government get involved in what would be considered to be extra-territorial exceptionism. This mirrors and contrasts with the Chinese reaction to the Canadian arrest of Meng Wanzhou. The Chinese foreign ministry accused the US and Canadian governments of overreach. 

    Oprah time: Directorate S by Steve Coll – book review of Directorate S which discusses the complex relationship between the US war on terror and Pakistan

    Personal online brand – the perennial debate of should you own your own site or build your reputation on someone else’s platform?

    Out and about: Sicario 2: Soldado – I was so looking to this film and felt so disappointed when I got to watch it and was presented with a grand vision at the start that quickly fizzles out to a mediocre homage of the original, with one eye on building a franchise. 

    Dawns Mine Crystal by Yunchul Kim at Korean Cultural Centre – amazing art installation that I was fortunate to see. It moulded art and science as part of the Art @CERN project. 

    The influencers post – a post on the irrational exuberance associated with influencer marketing. I suspect that we’re close to peak influence.

    Chinese smartphone eco-system for beginners – I presume that its very Googleable – this post was inspired and featured a video on smartphones in China by Winston Sterzel earlier in the year. I then put accompanying background information to give it more context for marketers. China is changing a lot, one consequence of this is that Winston is looking to move to the US and visit China occasionally rather than live there, like he has been for the past decade.

    The long and the BBH of it – Binet’s The Long and the Short of it has been a strategists go to reference for a while. BBH pointed out the benefits of expanding the data set. However its easier to snipe from the sidelines rather than doing something meaningful about it.

    App constellations 2018 research – this built on research that I had done in 2014 and 2016. It was the most trafficked post for the first half of the year. It was also the post that took me the longest to research and I managed to lose my archive data file soon afterwards. I will revisit it, but will have to try and pull the data from these images for the basic numbers!

    Innovation: a few thoughts – this post came from the coalescence of many things that were kicking around in August and early September. My friend Nigel Scott had come up with some interesting research on venture capitalists; disabusing any illusion of science in their investment selection. You had ‘struggle porn’ being championed on LinkedIn; which made the wrong correlation between effort and innovation. Finally you have big technology companies with an inflated sense of their manifest destiny a la ‘software is eating the world’ and the hubris of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and Apple. I pulled ideas from across the board, borrowing a lot from Kevin Kelly’s concept of The Technium. 

    What if stories are brain code – storytelling is treated as a science within the creative  sector. The reality is that its based a pretty shaky base. Whilst the formulation of storytelling is suspect; psychological research indicates that stories are even more powerful than we previously realised. 

    Some data points

    30 percent of the top posts from the first half of the year made the cut through the whole of the year, which surprised me as I thought that they would benefit from additional ‘evergreen’ search traffic.  

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    Lessons learned

    • There is still an interest in long form content and research
    • There was less of an interest this year in purely social platform based subject matter materials
    • Evergreen content doesn’t seem to work as well as previously

  • iPhone X production + more things

    Apple reportedly resumes iPhone X production to recover from dismal sales | The Next Web – altering iPhone X production numbers would affect margins, so its a complex algebraic problem and then there is the question about differentiation between XS and X models. It is worthwhile probably looking at an SE model to the 8 and 8 plus due to many people being wedded to the home button and better battery life. The design still has a respectable margin to it, but probably not as much as iPhone X production or XS production for that matter. The cynical would view iPhone X production as gouging their loyal consumers.

    Designing for Gen Z: How to connect with the next generation of influencers | Netimperative – latest digital marketing news – reminds me a lot of stuff that was written about gen-y at the beginning

    Mark Ritson: The threat of direct-to-consumer disruption is overblown | Marketing Week the likes of private label at Ocado and Amazon pose a bigger threat

    Mark Ritson: Don’t just look at the long term, look at the long, long term | Marketing Week – so much here. Ritson is right, but so many agendas against this:

    • The disruption trope beloved of management consultants and management boards
    • Digital assets tend not to be as memorable because they are focused no short term effectiveness and that’s where sexy is in marketing. But digital was used to support the Old Spice man and Cadburys gorilla ads for instance when it has been done
    • Senior marketers tend to not last long in a role, so there are perverse incentives to think purely about short term gains

    Korea’s Wireless Carriers Rev Up their War against Apple’s Promotions Policy with Threats of Legal Action and more – Patently Apple – this is kicking off as Samsung is bleeding, Korea doesn’t have an effective way to go after Huawei and other Chinese vendors eroding its business

    A Chinese Research Firm Turns the Tables on Apple Claiming that iPhones Appeal to China’s ‘Invisible Poor’ not Middle Class – Patently Apple – interesting reading. This is more subtle than the data appears. Apple seems to have much more of a secondary market for its refurbed / secondhand handsets that is skewing the data. You have to wonder about the motives of the research company. Apple gets this due to desirability perception compared to a Huawei, HTC or Samsung

    Not So Big in Japan: Apple Cuts Price of iPhone XR to Boost Sales – WSJ – Major wireless carriers in Japan plan to cut iPhone XR prices as early as next week, people with direct knowledge of the plan said, without giving details of the extent of the cut. Japan is one of the most lucrative markets for Apple, which has a dominant 46.7% share of the smartphone market, according to a survey conducted by MMD Labo from July 31 to Aug. 1.

    The XR is available in Apple stores in Japan from about $750, but carriers’ pricing is more opaque as phones are bundled with data plans. (paywall)

    Elliot Schrage on Definers | Facebook Newsroom – not exactly the smoking gun for the New York Times article, but also shows how public affairs is well out of step with societal norms

    What Chinese women want from men nowadays | HKEJ Insight – when I was in college, and I wanted to be a journalist or writer. [In those days], we could easily attract girls if we could write a poem or play guitar. But now the world has changed. Girls want something else. Women change the way men look at this world.

    Bringing the Android kernel back to the mainline [LWN.net] – this is explains why Google had been looking at Fuschia for a long time rather than following with updating Android radically

    Know Your Chinese Social Media – The New York Times – (paywall) goes beyond the big platforms to cover some of the emerging ones that I don’t know well

    How China Walled Off the Internet – The New York Times – DNS poisoning (paywall)

    Valve discontinues the Steam Link, the best wireless HDMI gadget ever made – The Verge – interesting how PC gamers rejected the device

    If you want to understand Silicon Valley, watch Silicon Valley | Bill Gates – Bill Gates on why he likes Silicon Valley

    Nine of every 10 Silicon Valley jobs pays less than in 1997 – big technology companies like Google and Facebook are so dominant in their respective markets that they have been able to direct a larger share of revenues to investors and some top employees.

    At the same time, the region’s increasing cost of living is leading to some of the highest poverty rates in the country, he said. Adjusted for living costs, California has the second-highest poverty rate in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau

    Shortlist axe proves how hostile the men’s mag market is today – but all hope is not lost | The Drum – With the male market being so fragmented, it’s difficult to connect with men in the same way as Stylist has created a connection with a young, professional female audience. Shortlist may have had compelling, world-class editorial, but it didn’t connect as a brand in the same way Stylist does

    Instagram kills off fake followers, threatens accounts that keep using apps to get them | TechCrunch – well that’s a lot of influencers dead in the water right there

    Dolce & Gabbana’s New Ad Campaign Sparks Uproar in China | Jing Daily – ok. So the model meets western rather than Chinese beauty norms, don’t get me wrong she is very pretty but she isn’t the kind of face you’d see as a famous actress. Look at Fan Bingbing, Angelababy or Zhang Ziyi. Beautification photo apps tend to make the eyes wider and almond shaped, the skin uniformly pale and smooth. The face shape more heart-shaped. So that’s one aspect of ignorance that builds up a picture of ‘racism’.

    Showing Chinese people how to use chopsticks overshot the cross cultural humour D&G were looking for. In this particular case the outrage. It was a hackneyed attempt to copy the kind of physical humour popular on Chinese social media channels. The dialogue is full of double entrendres making is excruciating to sit through. Think dialogue from a Carry On film ‘Ewww errr matron what a big thermometer you have’ with Benny Hill style physical comedy.

    Finally nationalism and the constant viewpoint that foreign brands are just itching to insult the Motherland and; or the Party which are largely one and the same.These nationalists jump the Great Firewall and attack western social profiles like what happened to Mercedes.  Interesting that western social platforms don’t bother blocking or filtering these mainland groups at all. Many use a Facebook group as a rallying point which I expect happened here. Western brands should be demanding more from Zuckerberg and Co.

    What’s interesting is that the advert hasn’t been carved up from a feminist perspective; helpless squirming, awkwardly giggling embarrassed woman has #metoo moment with douche bag commentator.

    Potential Policy Proposals for Regulation of Social Media and Technology Firms by US Senator Mark R Warner – requiring bots / bot ran accounts to be clearly labeled as such. Making tech companies liable for defamation under state tort laws, building wider media literacy, GDPR type legislation. Audit of algorithms by government, requiring data portability between services (PDF)

    RIP Apple networking, Time Capsule and AirPort no longer available from Apple – 9to5Mac – 9to5mac.com – interesting comments from Apple customers, particularly with providing an alternative to Google networking products and the Apple’s permission to play in the smart home space with no networking product in place

    Digitisation is key to upgrading Asia’s fashion factories. Just do it responsibly, says Fung Group’s director of sustainability | Apparel Industry Interview | just-style – a fiend of mine has a family firm in Sri Lanka where they automated things like embroidery well over a decade ago. It is the more manual tasks that when digitised will cause most social disturbance – an example of this would be Frontline Clothing’s innovative process in distressing denim using lasers; which had previously been a manual process

    A Japanese detergent maker’s first steps towards personalisation | Analysis | Campaign Asia – personalised fragrances