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.

  • Apple retail special Event outtakes

    Key takeouts from the Apple special event with a little bit of analysis on Apple Retail.
     
    Apple Retail
    First presentation by Angela Ahrendts. There is a question of why she hadn’t presented at previous keynotes.  My read on it is that that the revenue per square foot metric beloved of retail analysts will tumble. Apple seems to be taking the mall companies idea of shopping as entertainment and doing it for their individual stores.
    Town hall – what they call the stores internally, bigger focus on engagement rather than transactions – is this an effort to try and recapture cool?
    Store features
      • Plaza – public private spaces outside the store if possible, interesting implications on future store placements – probably less in malls
      • Forum – open plan internal space
      • Boardroom – private space focused on developer relations, was probably the most interesting push. Stores are being given a stronger push as embassies for developer relations. 
      • Creative Pro – Apple genius for the creative apps, probable mix of amateur and professional audiences addressed
      • Today at Apple – driven by Creative Pro staff to focus on creating more usuage of key offerings i.e. photo walks – think Nike Running Club. Also includes teacher outreach
      • Genius grove – the genius bar but with plants presumably to try and break up the overall store noise
    • Avenues  – wider aisles that products are on
    Continued retail expansion in the US including Chicago – interesting that international expansion wasn’t mentioned. 
     
    Apple Watch
      • 50% yearly growth – the series 2 fixed many of the hygiene factors wrong with the first version
    • 97% customer satisfaction – health seems to be driving this
    Health features: focus on heart rate monitor and getting proactive about flagging elevated heart rate. Also focusing on heart rhythm changes as well.
     
    watchOS 4 out September 19 available to all customers. Interesting that they didn’t drill into some of interesting features on watchOS 4 using Siri
     
    Series 3 Apple Watch with cellular built in. Your Dick Tracy fantasies are alive. Apple thinks that people will leave their phones at home and bring their Apple Watch. They also see it as killing the iPod Nano with wireless music playback. I am yet to be convinced.
    Apple added a barometric sensor; usage example was focused on health and fitness rather then locative apps. Not a great surprise given that these sensors have been in premium G-Shocks for a good while. 
     
    Apple used specially designed lower power wifi and Bluetooth silicon. But no news about who is making the cellular modem. The SIM is embedded on the motherboard and presumably a software update? These changes could have interesting implications for future phones?
     
    Interesting carrier partnerships, in particular all three of China’s mobile carriers, but only EE in the UK?
     
    Apple TV
     
      • Apple TV now supports 4K, unsurprising hardware upgrade and includes high dynamic range – Apple is following the TV set industry’s lead
      • More interesting is the amount of content deals Apple has done with studios, in particular keeping the price point of 4K HDR content the same as was previously charged for HD content.
      • Interesting TV partnerships but no major UK TV stations only Mubi
      • Emphasis on easy access to sports on the Apple TV would wind up cable companies further
    • Apple TV was also positioned as the control interface for HomeKit smarthome products. There was no further  update on HomeKit in the presentation 
    iPhone 8 incremental changes
     
      • Wireless charging with glass back. The steel and copper reinforcement of the glass is probably to help with the induction charging
    • Incremental improvements in picture quality. Bigger focus on AR including new sensors.
    iPhone X
     
      • Positioned as future direction for iPhones. Biometric face ID is clever but has issues. I wonder how it will work with facial hair or weight gain – Apple claims that it will adapt. Apple also claims to be able to detect photos and masks. It’s also used for face tracking in AR applications with some SnapChat lens demos.
      • As with Touch ID, there is a PIN code if your face doesn’t work. I have found that Touch ID doesn’t work all the time so you need that PIN back up.
      • The notch at the top poses some UX / design issues and the industrial design implies case free usage which will be a step away from usual iPhone usage.
    • What isn’t immediately apparent to me is the user case for the iPhone X versus the iPhone 8 plus?
    What was lacking in the iPhone presentation was a celebration of all in the changes in iOS 11 under the hood.
    A11 – Bionic chip in the iPhone 8 and X
      • Includes new integrated GPU for machine learning and graphics. This explains why Imagination Technologies are in trouble
    • New image sensor processingThe A11 processor has a hardware neural network on the chip for the iPhone X – unsure if its also usable on the 8
    Apple’s moves to embrace, co-opt Qi wireless charging and build a super-standard on top of it will likely wind up members like Qualcomm and Huawei. How much of this is down to user experience and how much is down to the desire to get Apple IP in the technology stack?
    Apple is left with a large product line of iPhones: SE, 6 series, 7 series, 8 series and the X

  • Marketers: you are not a goldfish and neither is anyone else

    I have grown tired of a ridiculous statistic being used so frequently that it becomes marketing truth. It’s regurgitated in articles, blog posts, social media and presentations. The problem with it is that affects the way marketers view the world and conduct both planning and strategy. The picture below is a goldfish, his name is Diego. If you’ve managed to read this you aren’t Diego.

    Diego

    I realise that sounds a little dramatic, but check out this piece by Mark Jackson, who leads the Hong Kong and Shenzhen offices of Racepoint Global. It’s a good piece on the different elements that represent a good story (predominantly within a PR setting). And it is right that attention in a fragmented media eco-system will be contested more fiercely. But it starts with:

    Over the course of the last 20 years, the average attention span has fallen to around eight seconds; a goldfish has an attention span of nine! The challenge for companies – established and new – is to figure out how to get even a small slice of that attention span when so many other companies are competing for it.

    Mark’s piece is just the latest of a long line of marketing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that repeat this as gospel. The problem is this ‘truth’ is bollocks.

    It fails the common sense test. Given that binge watching of shows like Game of Thrones or sports matches is commonplace, book sales are still happening, they would have to be balanced out with millisecond experiences for this 8-second value to make any sense as an average. The goldfish claim is like something out of a vintage Brass Eye episode.

    To quote DJ Neil ‘Doctor’ Fox:

    Now that is a scientific fact! There’s no real evidence for it; but it is scientific fact

    Let’s say your common sense gets the better of your desire for a pithy soundbite and you decide to delve into the goldfish claim a bit deeper.  If one took a little bit of time to Google around it would become apparent that the goldfish ‘fact’ is dubious. It originally came from research commissioned by Microsoft’s Advertising arm ‘How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?‘. The original link to the research now defaults to the home page of Microsoft Advertising. Once you start digging into it, the goldfish wasn’t actually part of the research, but was supporting desk research and thats when its provenance gets murky.

    PolicyViz in a 2016 blog post The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy called it out and provided links to the research that they did into the the goldfish ‘fact’ in 2016 – go over and check their article out. The BBC did similar detective work a year later and even went and asked an expert:

    “I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.

    “Simply because I don’t think that that’s something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in that way.”

    She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”

    There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture.

    But the idea that there’s a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.

    “How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation,” explains Dr Briggs.

    “We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”

    But don’t feel too bad, publications like Time and the Daily Telegraph were punked by this story back in 2015. The BBC use the ‘fact’ back in 2002, but don’t cite the source.  Fake news doesn’t just win elections, it also makes a fool of marketers.

    This whole thing feels like some marketer (or PR) did as poor a job as many journalists in terms of sourcing claims and this ‘truth’ gradually became reinforcing. Let’s start taking the goldfish out of marketing.

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  • Planable + more news

    Planable

    Planable – Planable is an interesting social preview and scheduling tool, particularly for clients in highly regulated sectors such as pharma clients. I use Buffer rather than Planable

    China

    As many stats as you could possibly want if you have a passing interest in the Chinese internet ecosystem

    Consumer behaviour

    Chinese Prefer the Sound of Silence When Getting Messages From Mom – WSJ – While users take nine seconds on average to read 100 characters, they need 22 seconds to listen to the same 100 characters, excluding pauses, says Liu Xingliang, head of research at Beijing-based analytics firm Data Center of the China Internet. (Paywall)

    Economics

    The Fundamental Surplus by Lars Ljungqvist & Thomas J. Sargent – on why unemployment is hard to fix and why Phillips curves are BS (PDF)

    Luxury

    LVMH Buys Into South Korean Eyewear Brand, Gentle Monster — The Fashion Law – media speculation suggests that it could be worth about 60 billion won ($53.17 million). Per Thakran, the investment will serve to kick-start a strategy to grow the company into a billion-dollar business over the next six to eight years, up from the nearly $200 million it does now. “I believe that across Asia there are only about six to eight brands that can achieve this level of notoriety, with a unique image, that’s differentiated among lifestyle brands,”

    Marketing

    Asian unit of Bell Pottinger separates from London parent | FT – “This has been a difficult time for everyone — especially as so many good, talented and honest people have been caught up in it,” said Mr Turvey. “But I am pleased our offices in Asia now have control of their own destiny.” (paywall)

    Nike is still the king of the sneaker industry, but even great empires can fall | Quartz – much of Nike’s problems are down to poor brand management and over exploitation of assets – just look at all the Air Jordan colour ways that pass through tier zero retailers

    Media

    Facebook is (quietly) looking for an office in Shanghai | Timeout Shanghai – Facebook already sells a substantial amount of advertising to Chinese businesses looking to advertise abroad. Air China is already a marque customer for Facebook and there is a lot of direct e-commerce going on for gadgets and fast fashion

    Online

    Russia’s Facebook Fake News Could Have Reached 70 Million Americans  – $100,000 on Facebook can go a surprisingly long way, if it’s used right. On average, Facebook ads run about $6 for 1,000 impressions. By that number, the Kremlin’s $100,000 buy would get its ads seen nearly 17 million times.
    But that average hides a lot of complexity, and the actual rate can range from $1 to $100 for 1,000 impressions on an ad with pinpoint targeting. Virality matters too. Ads that get more shares, likes, and comments are far cheaper than boring ads that nobody likes, and ads that send users to Facebook posts instead of third-party websites enjoy an additional price break

    There’s something wrong with video advertising and it’s hidden in plain site  – AdNews – too many trackers degrading ad player performance and viewability

    Seniors Realize Their Travel Dreams in This Intel Virtual Reality Project – Video – Creativity Online – it reminded me a bit of Total Recall

    Advertisers bullish over ad budget | Shanghai Daily – bullish on Chinese media market prospects

    City’s telecoms operators look to new iPhone to kick-start handset sales, in long absence of ‘hero’ model | SCMP – is the lack of a hero model an indication of category design maturity?

    Technology

    Feel old? 1990 Sony Trinitron TV now considered ‘historical material’ in Japan | SCMP – it was a thing of beauty, my current TV set still doesn’t do blacks with the same inky depth as my old Trinitron set. Trinitron is also an emblem of how low Japanese consumer electronics have fallen from its pre-Internet highpoint

    Daring Fireball: Samsung’s OLED Display Monopoly – bang goes the market

    Wireless

    Apple Beats Samsung in Smartphone Sales in China and More Importantly in Repeat Sales by a Staggering Margin – Patently Apple – the problem you’ve got is the data, it can’t be trusted

  • The Bell Pottinger Post

    PR firm Bell Pottinger has got entangled in a mess of the South African government and the Gupta family.  More people have written about this in depth, so I will just link to them at the bottom of the post.

    Here’s some thoughts on it all

    There but for the grace of God go I – must have reverberated through the minds of at least some corporate communications and public affairs professionals. There is a tension between finding clients that have needs and are willing to pay for high-powered counsel versus the risk that the world may come down on you.

    That’s the risk you take when you work with businesses that are involved in sensitive areas or at the edge of the law:

    • Businesses looking down the barrel of antitrust regulation like Google or Qualcomm
    • Businesses involved in the ‘carbon economy’ – Edelman had previously worked for coal producers and fracking projects until they came under sustained attack
    • Big food and big agri: McDonalds, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola are all targets. Monsanto has been of concern due to GM crops
    • Mining
    • Multinationals doing business in sensitive countries like Myanmar
    • Defence
    • Questionable regimes: Ketchum’s work with Russia is the stand out example or H+K Strategies arrangement of the deceptive ‘Nayirah’ testimony which played a big part in getting the US government behind the first Gulf War

    Your business is at the mercy of pressure groups and the wider media agenda.

    But that’s also the reason why I think that Bell Pottinger can survive IF they can hunker down and weather the storm. There will always be a demand for organisations and individuals who want to launder their reputation or argue the unpopular side of an argument.

    Even if PR agencies aren’t doing it, organisations that sit at the nexus of business and security will likely step into the breach bringing the necessary PR skills on board.

    As a PR person, is it the kind of work I would like to do? No, but then I am a brand marketer; corporate communications was something I could do, but didn’t particularly enjoy doing.  I could see the attraction of the work as it would be financially very lucrative and there would be the opportunity for business travel and ‘war stories’ from the office to talk about at dinner parties.

    It’s magical thinking if you expect ‘unethical’ clients to suddenly be denied representation. This will be even more the case as the US multilateral world view is challenged by China’s more transactional approach. We’re currently living in a golden age for NGOs and NFPs – it would be unrealistic to think that it will continue this way.

    In the grand scheme of things, the PRCA censure won’t mean that much, its a bigger move for the UK PR industry; showing that it can muck out its own stables. From Bell Pottinger’s longer term perspective it won’t mean much because of the divided nature of PR industry representation. As individuals PRs can sign up to be members of the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations).  The PRCA primarily represents agencies (although it has started to offer individual consultant accreditation). The key benefit is an ISO-9000 type accreditation for agency management systems. It wouldn’t be that hard for a member agency to set-up and get ISO-9000 accreditation and maintain it.  If there are enough practitioners working at Bell Pottinger, they can highlight their staffs professional status as members of the CIPR.

    That Tim Bell interview: if you haven’t seen it, have a good watch. I can see this being used in broadcast media training for a good while. It’s the first time I’d ever seen Sir Tim in anything more casual than formal business wear.

    His mannerisms are odd in places, particularly at the beginning.  His answers are odd. For example, when asked what went wrong he quoted Sir Walter Scott, which made him look literate but arrogant. Given that he went on there for a reason, presumably to put as much distance between himself and the mess – it was an ideal opportunity to land his side of the story in a précis.

    His phone rings, he declines the call and then shows the interviewer his phone screen. Why din’t he mute his phone or shut it down at this point and why did he want the journalist to see who had called? He then gets a message on his phone and a second call. Only on the second ring does he finally silences the phone.

    Chris Geoghegan is the non-executive director of a number of prominent UK companies, an ex-BAE Systems executive and the father of Victoria Geoghegan. Whilst he wouldn’t be best pleased with the current situation, Bell doxes him on the UK’s most prominent news programme. Geoghegan had been mentioned in an op-ed of a South African publication, but had been largely ignored in most of the press coverage surrounding the Bell Pottinger scandal. Whilst it won’t be anything new to a board doing their due diligence it might drive sniggering down the country club. Bell didn’t need to volunteer the information, he chose to do so.

    The smoking gun emails – after Henderson had resigned as CEO of Bell Pottinger, the BBC interviewer questions Bell about two (presumably new) emails that seems to be at odds with his own claim that he recommended they not take the work as Bell Pottinger had a client conflict.  You can see this after 1:15.

    For a piece of business that’s a conflict of interest,  the January correspondence is a very odd email. I can understand him saying that the meeting was successful. But then he goes on to talk about the revenue opportunity and how he will personally oversee the project.

    By April why would Lord Bell be still offering advice on the account if he believed it to be a conflict of interest? His excuse for this was getting back into business after having a stroke.

    Bell puts the blame squarely at the door of James Henderson. UK media coverage implied that the schism between Bell and Henderson went beyond the Gupta business. So Bell might have a bigger axe to grind and Guptagate is just a handy vehicle.

    Lord Bell then talks down the future prospects of Bell Pottinger, it might be an overly pessimistic view. Bell has a new rival business, its in his interest to make Bell Pottinger’s problems even worse.

    Whilst Bell Pottinger have problems in their London office, they have successful branches in Hong Kong and Singapore where this won’t matter as much IF (and its a big IF) they can hunker down and weather the current storm. The business could retrench, rebrand and survive.

    The Guptas needed to be introduced to a good PR agency, after this every dictator, unpopular mega corporation and shady mogul will know where to go. If Bell Pottinger is no longer about, then there are any number of large corporate agencies or boutiques who will take their business.

    More information
    Ketchum (Sort of, Not Really) Ends Its Relationship with Vladimir Putin | AdWeek
    Deception on Capitol Hill – New York Times
    Edelman and Media Zoo PR targeted by anti-fracking protestors | PR Week
    Guptagate: Who Are The Family At The Center Of South Africa’s Political Storm? | Newsweek
    Op-Ed: The Invasion of the Body Snatchers – a weekend edition | Daily Maverick
    Christopher Vincent Geoghegan BA (Hons), FRAES | Bloomberg Research.
    How China Aims to Limit the West’s Global Influence – NYTimes.com
    PR industry reads last rites for scandal-hit Bell Pottinger | FT
    Battle of the spin doctors: Bell Pottinger PR titan quits over race hate dirty tricks campaign despite saying it wasn’t his fault | Mail Online

  • That Trivago poster

    If you’re a Londoner, the end of summer is marked by two things; the Notting Hill Carnival and Trivago’s annual advertising blitz on public transport. In media land there has been some complaints. We need to talk about the Trivago ad – a triumph of media planning over creative execution according to an op-ed written by a creative in Campaign. The article is timely, it taps into a wider existential crisis about the death of creativity as advertising is swallowed up and pooped all over by Google and Facebook.

    Untitled

    Her shirt changes. In some placements she wears a light blue shirt, she also wears one in red plaid. The logo moves placement too from top right to bottom right in the posters.

    A few things about the campaign, some more obvious to marketers than others:

    • Despite Trivago featuring various destinations in a search box, they don’t seem to have done any paid or organic search work around the destination names at all. They are putting advertising behind brand searches through
    • The ads seem to be all about reach and repetition. Using OOH ads as closure and amplify the TV ads. I haven’t noticed this being replicated online

    Why going hard and often? Travel is a mature sector with strong players. If Trivago isn’t top of mind, it isn’t competing. Engagement just doesn’t matter that much in this scenario, hence why the company backed off press releases at the end of May this year for the UK market.

    The absence from online brand advertising is likely down to the comparatively high cost of running this kind of saturation campaign on the likes of Facebook advertising. This is why TV, radio and out of home media haven’t depreciated in the same way as traditional print advertising media.

    The choice of campaign timing is more interesting. Traditional travel companies usually try and target a bit later in the year over the Christmas season in influence holiday shopping decisions.

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