Ged Carroll

Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

  • Joyous Music School

    The Joyous Music School  string quartet have been playing together for  four years, they started when the lead cellist was four years old and they are awesome

    After the Joyous Music School its time to move on to another set of musical genius’ Frankie Knuckles’ loss continues to be felt. Underworld and the Junior Boys Own people have put together a cover of Baby Wants to Ride in tribute to the iconic DJ

    At the time when I got my copy of ‘Baby Wants to Ride’ it came with a tale of intrigue and skulduggery. Did Knuckles copy Principle’s track and then compromise and call it ‘Frankie Knuckles presents Jamie Principle’ or was he hard done by? A quick glance at Discogs shows how Frankie Knuckles is slowly written into the history of Baby Wants to Ride – the original FFRR pressing credits Jamie Principle but by the mid noughties we see it as Frankie Knuckles presents Jamie Principle. Although Knuckles is remembered fondly for being the godfather of house, it makes good sense not to gloss over some of the politicking and infighting that occurred back in the day.

    Nike Football have put together a beautifully made movie about football fans in Mexico City. It avoids using stars or technical features of their products to show a grassroots love of the beautiful game. I suspect that the football moves were choreographed but the film is none-the-worse for it

    Ogilvy and Mather Singapore have played a blinder with this video highlighting the workload and contribution of domestic helpers in Singapore. The clip looks to get Singaporean parents to give maids their legal minimum one day a week off.

    Finally Funny or Die annihilate Dove’s latest campaign, its almost like it was done for a prank by the Axe (Lynx to UK readers) marketing team

    And here is the original…

    Whilst the Dove programme is interesting because it is trying to ‘deprogramme’ women from the media messages about beauty and the marketing messages put out (including other brands in the Unilever portfolio), it starts to sound like Lake Wobegon (from Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion).

    Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. – Garrison Keillor

    The Lake Wobegon Effect is described in Wikipedia

    The Lake Wobegon effect, where all or nearly all of a group claim to be above average, has been observed in high school students’ appraisal of their leadership, drivers’ assessments of their driving skill, and cancer patients’ expectations of survival.

    Is it wise for brands to replace one kind of delusion with another? More on branding related issues here.

  • Blade Runner & other things

    Watching Blade Runner after it had been re-released into the cinema. I have watched Blade Runner numerous times on TV, VHS, LaserDisc, DVD and Blu Ray but there is something magical about watching it on the big screen

    The cinema and Blu Ray versions of Blade Runner have a level of clarity and detail that is amazing. But watching on VHS had a softness that provided an artistic quality to the film. The lower resolution and noise felt more ‘cyber punk’.

    Hack-A-Day pointed me in the direction of this old industrial film about a Workington, Cumbria Bessemer steel plant that made railway tracks. At the time of filming the plant had been working for 102 years. More related content here.

    Google had an interesting interview with former BP chairman Lord John Browne on discrimination against gay people in their careers.

    I am a big fan of Miroslav Sasek’s work, from his This is… series of children’s travel books in the 1960s. My personal favourites are This is Hong Kong and This Is The Way To The Moon – which covered NASA’s Project Apollo space programme and Cape Canaveral. Art Republic have some amazing prints derived from his illustrations.

    Criteo has a really good presentation on m-commerce outside China

  • RSS dead nonsense + more

    RSS dead nonsense

    Is RSS Dead? A Look At The Numbers | MakeUseOf – interesting stats on RSS – a very-much alive format. RSS dead is nonsense, I use it everyday. It is invisible plumbing. Reports of RSS dead is due to the demise of Google Reader. I can’t recommend RSS reader Newsblur enough. More related content here

    Business

    Adidas Group Forecasts 15 Percent Annual EPS Growth Through 2020 | Team Business – interesting definition of open source

    China

    China Focus: Top political advisor highlights CPC leadership, “Four Comprehensives” | Xinhua – comprehensively building a moderately prosperous society, deepening reform, advancing the rule of law and strictly governing the Party

    Culture

    ‘We Came to Sweat’ Tells the Story of New York City’s Oldest Black-Owned Gay Club | VICE – interesting artefact of club culture

    Economics

    Chinas slowdown has suddenly become a “fiscal shock” | Quartz – interesting economic data, the property price change doesn’t surprise me, Chinas slowdown is likely to be temporary

    FMCG

    Kraft and Heinz Merger a Cost Cutting Story | Euromonitor International – cost cutting could also be from a marketing perspective

    Innovation

    Venture investor Bill Gurley predicts startup failure – Fortune – we may not be in a tech bubble, the venture capitalist said, but we’re in a risk bubble

    Luxury

    “Dressing down” is only a status symbol for the elite – Quartz – flagged up by our Becky

    Online

    Facebook Unveils Immersive 360-Degree Video for News Feeds | WIRED – interesting moves to come up with immersive (non game) content

    Philippines

    Homegrown smartphone brand beats Samsung in the Philippines | Techinasia – part of a wider story about how Samsung is getting rolled back out of high growth markets in smartphones

    Security

    Ex-NSA director: China has hacked ‘every major corporation’ in U.S. – CNN Money – strident allegations, I wouldn’t be surprised if the 5Is have also done the same thing

    Software

    Messaging Apps Offer Do-It-All Services in Bid for Higher Profits – NYTimes.com – interesting article on how WeChat and LINE are blazing the trail for western OTT messaging platforms in terms of innovation and business models (paywall)

    WeChat is how content goes viral in China | Resonance China – from a marketing perspective this confirms the decline in Weibo as a platform. It also provides challenges due to the lack of visibility for brands in comparison to Weibo

    What’s missing from this 13-year-old girl’s iPhone home screen? – Quartz – interesting but not necessarily scientific. It does make me wonder why color coding doesn’t happen in app groupings UI specs

    Technology

    No, Really, the PC Is Dying and It’s Not Coming Back | WIRED – dramatic title, 5 per cent drop in PC sales numbers. It ignores the role of the personal computer as a business workhorse and as a creative tool

  • That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis)

    It isn’t often that my thoughts turn to Jeremy Clarkson. This is mainly because being a car-less resident of London (and late of Hong Kong); I don’t really have much reason to pay attention to Top Gear. Secondly, there is only one Stig and that’s my childhood sporting hero – rally driver (and probably Sweden’s fastest pensioner) Stig Blomqvist.
    Stig Blomqvist - Lada VFTS 1600cc
    But I couldn’t avoid the fracas when it exploded as a story across the media.

    I was particularly struck by PR Week’s coverage of the story: Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’. Yeah, right! The problem with stories like this is about how you slice the data and interpret it.

    Social media conversation as a mode of popular measure

    The very nature of a conversation is the ebb-and-flow. Mr Clarkson would need to be more worried if he no longer was a topic of conversation as it would indicate that his celebrity had run its course. If everyone was unified in agreement when the volume of conversation would be lower, but it doesn’t necessarily measure popularity, but polarity of sentiment.

    Sentiment analysis

    Sentiment analysis is worthy of a post in of itself. Machine sentiment analysis is generally no more than 65% accurate. That sounds pretty good until you see the results. When done properly it is usually supplemented by manual analysis, to pick up on colloquial language, sarcasm or complex sentence construction – all of which can fool the smartest systems. So any argument built on sentiment as a key indicator is built on a foundation of sand.

    Social following

    If we look at the amount of followers on Jeremy Clarkson’s Twitter account using social media monitoring tool Sysomos MAP; we see numbers that suggest his popularity on social has surged rather than declined as he became embroiled in controversy.
    clarkson
    The story we are actually seeing is a polarisation of opinion with detractors becoming increasingly vocal and fans becoming firmer in their support. As a brand marketer, having a client that stands for something is the jumping off point for great creative. You are not constrained by having to please everyone and so great marketing can happen:

    • Red Bull – Gives You Wings
    • Hooters – Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined
    • Mid-1980s – 90s Guinness – Pure Genius
    • Audi – Vorsprung durch Technik

    At the moment, Jeremy Clarkson probably doesn’t have a lot to worry about in terms of his social popularity; so long as the lawyers don’t get too involved his popularity is likely to sustain him in media work of some sort for a while yet. More online related content here.

    More information
    Jeremy Clarkson’s popularity on social media plummets after BBC ‘fracas’ | PR Week
    Stig Blomqvist

  • rc is 11

    rc is 11. Well its 11 years since started under it’s own name. The first post under the rc moniker was ‘Are we too complex’ which was a brief cross post that pointed to a longer piece I wrote at The AlwaysOn Network on Dan Geer. Dan Geer is a computer security and risk management expert who did a lot of work around the economics of security and how this all relates to technological complexity. The AlwaysOn Network had been newly formed by Tony Perkins, a founder of dot.com cheerleading magazine Red Herring. At the time it was a kind of proto-social network and Huffington Post for digital thinkers. I met my good friend Ian Wood on it. The fact that rc is 11 has had me reflect on 11 years of writing, cultural and technological change.
    Apollo 11 Launch
    I had got into blogging mainly because I had Aljazeera as a client for a while. George W. Bush was about to send the US forces into Iraq after weapons of mass destruction and Aljazeera was a lot less respected in the west as a media outlet. I found it hard to get media coverage so decided to go directly to the prospective audience that we wanted to reach. We were seeding content on forums related to finance, currency and oil futures trading. I’d heard about this thing called blogging, which made sense exploring further while I was at it. The rest as they say is history.

    Some 11 years later, Always On is a more prosiac seller of networking events and op-eds, but less of salon style community compared to what it was back in the day. At the time it was built on a proprietary CMS by a company NetModular that has since disappeared into the ether of technology as other off-the-shelf social platforms came along.

    The blog went from exploration with a specific client end in mind to become an aide memoire and scratchpad for ideas. This exploration through writing inspired the name: renaissance chambara:

    • renaissance – as in renaissance man to indicate that the blog would cover a lot of different ideas
    • chambara – after my love of Japanese samurai films, in particular Akira Kurosawa’s work with Toshiro Mifune – I was curious about East Asian culture, the nascent Hallyu movement in Korea, Hong Kong and Chinese cinema and pretty much anything coming out of Japan

    Over the subsequent decade I got invited to contribute to two books and got at least two of my roles because of the content and prominence of this blog. Even though I never monetised it, it always seemed to contribute and pay me back in some way or another.

    Things have changed, social platforms, tools and gurus have come and gone. Media spend has risen in prominence and brand marketing has declined. What surprised me was the slow rate of change within the PR industry and time it took for media and ad agencies to gain the whip hand. I had expected that mobile and desktop experiences would be less divergent in nature as screens grew (I had been using a Nokia Communicator E90 in the late noughties) which meant that Google’s lead in search was much sharper than I expected.

    I never had a plan for the blog, it has always been in the moment. Blogging isn’t dead, this one now sits in a spiders web of social properties rather than front-and-centre. It is no longer a conversation but a contributor to dialogue that usually happens on Twitter. The posts are collated alongside other people’s work on my feed. The process has taken on a life of its own. I have note books were ideas germinate, tens of thousands of bookmarks of reference material and look at the RSS feeds from 954 blogs or websites for inspiration.

    This process forces me to be continually curious about my field-of-work.

    I have posted from three continents and some 11 or so countries. I got to explore my interest in East Asia by living in Hong Kong for a while as well as visiting surrounding countries. Looking at rc is 11 I don’t know if I will be writing the post ‘rc is 18’ or even ‘rc is 21’ in ten years time, but I don’t currently see any reason why I won’t.

    More information
    Are we too complex (hosted on Blogspot)
    AlwaysOn Network
    NetModular