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.
Walmart has built over 100 Walmart store of the future designs. Some of the elements seek emulate the best bits of Target with seasonal low priced items close to the door and a more experiential approach to merchandising.
Mike Mozart
Some of the other changes in the Walmart store of the future include QRcodes on signage and a Walmart smartphone app for self-checkout show a blending of real world and digital, or as we like to call it here, the web of no web.
CIA director William Burns
CIA William Burns gave this wide ranging talk in February 2023. It seems apropos to share it here. Burns was involved in the Middle East before and through much of GWoT (global war on terror). Burns commentary on the Middle East at the time is very much worthwhile about thinking about now. Burns’ book The Back Channel was frank about his failings as well as successes when it was published back in 2021.
Burns handled the Ukraine conflict particularly well in the early stages. His comments on Israel and Palestine look particularly prophetic now, even though western intelligence agencies were shocked by what happened on October 7, 2023.
I’m sorry to be so uplifting today about the international landscape, and I also have to say that, you know, in the conversations I had with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, you know, I think it left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Palestinians as well. You know, I was, as Barbara mentioned, a senior U.S. Diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned, as are my colleagues in the intelligence community, the lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too.
William J Burns
Operation Shady RAT
How an experimental honey pot simulating computerised industrial systems reveal the long term hacking programme done by APT 1 for the Chinese government. The RAT in question was a ‘remote access trojan’ piece of malware.
Irish radio broadcasting
RTÉ, the Irish public broadcaster started broadcasting radio programmes in 1926. At the time it was called 2RN, it became by Radio Athlone, which was eventually called Radio Éireann in 1938. The ‘T’ came in after to the first television broadcasts in 1961.
RTÉ was central to my identity as an Irishman spending a good deal of my childhood in Britain – my culture, language and literature came through the speakers. The programmes now conveyed online offer my parents an information lifeline to everything happening at home since the long wave and medium wave radio services were shut down. This documentary from 2001 reflects one the first 75 years of Irish radio broadcasting.
Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind
Talk at the Churchill Club of California about their book The Cancelling of the American Mind. It is interesting hear Rikki Schlott reference The Coddling of The American Mind, which Lukianoff co-wrote with Jonathan Haidt. In Cancelling the authors look to document some of the failings in how cancel culture works on campus and in the workplace. It is much more of a partisan work than Coddling, mainly because it driven by Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. The comparison to the red scare of the 1950s are interesting.
Omakase is a Japanese term that has become popular in Korea. Omakase as a phrase comes from the term ‘makaseru’ meaning to entrust. In a sushi restaurant omakase meant the customer turned over responsibility for choosing their menu to the sushi chef. The chef would choose the type of fish and the cut. They would assemble the sushi in front of the customer, tell them what it was and choose the next piece, based on what they think the customer should try next. It is likely to have developed sometime in the last two centuries when nigiri sushi became popular. This was sushi that could be quickly assembled in front of the customer – which is essential for the way omakase operates.
Omakase experience
The personalised nature of the experience and the choice of ingredients by the chef rather than the customer means that omakase is an expensive experience. The ingredients will be seasonal in nature and the chef will select the finest ingredients available.
A short trip across the Sea of Japan (or what the Koreans call the East Sea) is South Korea. And it was inevitable that this particular type of sushi experience would cross the waters as well, given that it has already made it the best sushi restaurants in the US and Europe.
Gangnam at night by laurabl
Expansion of Omakase
In Korea omakase took off some time before 2020. At first it was in upscale sushi restaurants. Then it extended itself into tempura in the Japanese restaurants of high end hotels in Seoul, you see this in some restaurants in Japan as well.
It started to spread throughout the country beyond Seoul and as it grew geographically within Korea, it was extended beyond Japanese cuisine.
Western dessert tasting menu as an omakase experience
Coffee tasting with your own barista. Coffee fuels Korean work life and is immensely popular.
Champagne tasting with a personalised experience from a sommelier.
It has been even extended to grilled pork belly – a stable dish of Korean neighbourhood restaurants. Rather than barbecuing it yourself, pieces are selected and grilled for you by a personal chef.
Why ‘Korean omakase’ happened?
In Korea you have a confluence of factors affecting young consumers.
Korea is known for its luxury consumption. On a per capita basis, Koreans spend more on luxury personal goods than any other country. Harrods has been surpassed as the number one retailer in luxury goods by the Shinsegae department store branch in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea with $2 billion dollars of sale in 2021.
Like young consumers in many developed markets, young Koreans have money in their pocket but are unlikely to be able to afford to buy their own home. Korea’s ultra-wealthy have a good deal of their wealth in buy to let property.
The Jeonse system of home rental exasperates the home ownership problem. A Jeonse tenancy begins with the initial security deposit of a single amount which is usually about 40% to as much as 80% of the current market value of the property. Unlike in most of Europe, the interest yield on the deposit will not be paid to the tenant, but the landlord can keep this as income. No additional monthly rent is paid. On expiry of the contract period, the original deposit will be refunded in full.
This leaves young (and not so young) Koreans heavily indebted and makes it hard to plan for the future.
Live for today, the future is lost anyway
So young Koreans spend on luxury consumption now, rather than save for a future that they believe is unaffordable. While Korean is a developed economy with successful industries, one in ten of young Koreans are unemployed. When they look at the generation of Koreans who built the country over from the post-war years into the developed economy it is today; 45% of these elderly live in poverty.
Omakase as social standing
Luxury consumption is used to reflect a higher social standing. Korea is known for a high degree of conformity, which creates big fashion winners. Once a trend picks up, it goes everywhere, but then also has a finite life as brands like The North Face have found to its cost in the past as consumers move with the crowd.
But Korea is also a Confucian society which means that social standing matters, and this is where the luxury consumption comes in. The quest has moved into online channels as well, with these channels showing to your peers your social standing.
Jeong
The social platforms act as a pressure point in modern Korean life. Because of social, luxury experiences like omakase become as important as having luxury goods.
In Korea, the power of social is amplified by jeong (정) – can be considered to be a sense of social responsibility. Jeong is a positive force for conformity and community in a collectivist society. Historically, jeong is built through shared experiences, such as eating together and a sense of community bond is formed.
Aspects of jeong include
Scheduling quality time with loved ones.
Create meaningful shared experiences.
Expand and engage with your community.
Modern urban and digital life has disrupted Korean society which has meant that values like jeong manifest themselves in new ways.
Mukbang aside
The principles of jeong is where mukbang videos originally came from. Mukbang started as streaming videos where the host would share a virtual meal with the viewers and interact with them. Korean meals are designed to be shared, yet a third of Koreans live in single person households. Mukbang provided the lonely with shared experiences that had a degree of meaning in their lives – creating a kind of virtual jeong between the host and the audience. Now they are genre of video content that’s carefully edited and removed from the original social context that they came from.
Getting back to jeong, think about your Instagram feed for a moment, think about how you might feel if you have had a mediocre day and your feed is filled with people you know living their best lives. Now dial that up to 11.
Sharing content is engaging with your wider community and growing your community and sharing experiences with them. There is a corresponding pressure to share experiences back within your feeds. This has driven a demand for luxury products and experiences including omakase.
Omakase is a rational economic response. There are only so many times that you can share a new bag or watch costing thousands of pounds. But you can share omakase each time you go, with the price being in the hundreds of pounds instead.
So where does the money come from?
Omakase experiences aren’t an everyday thing for young Koreans; they would think its perfectly fine most days to eat a lunch bargain meal from a convenience store and then do an omakase experience every so often that they can document it on social media.
Korean households have the highest amount of debt in the world, and over 21% of young Koreans have personal debt that at least three times their salary. A decade earlier, the rate was 8.2%.
So what?
Korea today is a cultural powerhouse. Trends that start here go worldwide. Korea is involved in all aspects of global culture:
Cinema.
Television series.
Beauty.
Fashion.
FMCG products.
Food.
Korea’s role as a global trendsetter has not gone unnoticed, Christian Dior opened its flagship store in Seoul and held its collection debut in Korea over China or France.
Luxury businesses already realise that consumers want status experiences as well as status goods. LVMH has been actively exploring the hotel and restaurant business, as has Kering. But these businesses have lower margins than their existing businesses. The way to increase these margins would be to address less customers and charge even more.
Luxury is being redefined into highly personalised experiences by consumers and it makes commercial sense for luxury businesses to meet their needs.
While luxury groups are looking at cutting edge technology like generative AI, NFTs and metaverse experiences, the future of luxury might be more human, as well as more technology.
Jeremy Deller is famous for examining 1980s events from the MIner’s strike to rave culture. Most notably his work Acid Brass, working with the William Fairey Brass Band on cover versions of early house and techno music. In this documentary he walks a group of sixth formers through the context that rave culture began in.
Jeremy Deller has hosted a reenactment of the Battle Of Orgreave and made an inflatable version of Stonehenge in a piece called Sacrilege.
Jacobs cream crackers
As a child, I would have eaten several cream crackers manufactured on this line. In more recent times the production of Jacobs products were moved abroad for cost cutting reasons. There is something mesmerising about watching the process of production.
Cyberpunk
Quinn’s Ideas exploration of Neuromancer pointed out some links that I hadn’t realised in the formation of cyberpunk as a genre and cultural force.
LA Noir
Why film noir happened when it did, and why it is so synonymous with the city of Los Angeles is explained in this documentary which features an interview with author James Eilroy.
EDC
Everyday Carry (EDC) – whilst having evolved as an online cultural phenomenon has been around for as along as men and boys have had pockets. My childhood friend Nigel was obsessing about Swiss Army knives and really small Leica binoculars back when I was in primary school. His Dad was a well-to-do dentist and Nigel fulfilled his EDC goals before coming a teen. It was only natural that it eventually became a thing when the internet came around. Kevin Kelly had been talking about cool tools on the the web for the past quarter of a century; Drop.com when it was founded over 12 years ago covered products that would be considered EDC today.
All of which leaves me more puzzled why EDC has sudden become the focus of media attention in the quality newspapers.
I was reminded by an article in an old copy of the FT’s HTSI (How To Spend It) magazine about the diversity of what listening pleasure means to different people.
My own pre-amp / power amp combo
Aural wallpaper
For many of us, the personal equivalent of muzak masks distracting sounds in the neighbourhood or the odd sounds emanating from the heating pipes. It is a listening pleasure of sorts, masking things that might otherwise side track or agitate us while we carry on our own lives. Prior to COVID this meant an office or coffee shop full of workers with Bose noise cancelling headsets on, now its more likely to be Apple AirPods firmly implanted, although they struggle to hold up to the demands of a days worth of Microsoft Teams calls.
In the home it can be: your smartphone, your computer, BlueTooth speaker, the radio, an old boombox or the TV set. I have a ritual in hotel rooms where after dropping my bags, the 24 hour TV news channel goes on low volume, ideally CNN. If I can’t get that, then I connect up my laptop and stream Bloomberg Live or podcasts.
Dedicated listening
If you derive listening pleasure by focusing more on what you are listening to then a higher quality system makes sense. Digital and analogue media can both provide a high quality audio experience. There are some fantastic vintage systems out there, it’s worthwhile educating yourself on products and setting up those eBay searches. Some streaming services now claim better than CD quality audio too, but more on that later.
Good quality speakers can be inexpensive, though brands and models which were bargains just five years ago are now expensive as purchasers have educated themselves. A good deal of the listening pleasure from these kind of systems is the hunt and building the system as much as what you have playing through it.
Space is the place
Good quality audio performance is dependent on the source, the hi-fi, the speakers and the room that the hi-fi is set up in. A room can enormously impact speaker performance. When I used to DJ, I found this out to my cost. Perfectly parallel walls create reverb meaning you can have multiple versions of a recording coming back to you. Furniture and people are great at absorbing bass.
Despite what you might see in hi-fi shows held in hotels, few of us have a room that would do a pair of B&W Nautilus justice, nor do we need a top of the range Mark Levinson amplifier.
Instead it makes sense to look at good quality headphones, I use AKG K872 headphones. But this also means that you can get supporting hardware by the likes of Schiit Audio for a much more reasonable price.
What sounds good is subjective and different equipment lends itself to different use cases. Do you want to listen to music, films or games? What genres will you be listening too?
If you like fuzzbox-driven rock music, you probably wouldn’t like my audio system. My tastes vary from Vladimir Cosma and Manuel Göttsching to The Reflex, Jeff Mills and even a bit of Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash. I spent a good deal of my youth in friends bedroom recording studios and DJing in night clubs. All of which affected what sounds good to me. My own listening pleasure leans to a more analytical, transparent sound.
The source
Finally, there is the fidelity of recordings themselves, in the late 1990s and 2000s we saw what some musicians would call the ‘Loudness’ wars. Recordings were overly compressed by mastering engineers and we now have a generation of engineers who think that this is how things are done and genuinely believe that they are addressing the listening pleasure of the general public. Veteran audio engineers and hi-fi enthusiasts have noticed a 10+dB difference in recording sound levels. In reality each dB a doubling in volume as you hear it, so 10dB is a 1,204 times louder. Why did the over-compression happen? There are a number of hypotheses:
Digital signal processors and digital audio workstation software made it easier to tweak everything and so people did.
Older recordings get digitally remastered with an expectation that these recordings will be played on BlueTooth speakers and smartphones.
I have heard the remastering is also for car stereos as well, but the reality is that many car stereos have been better than the average persons home audio system for decades – because they are designed for the vehicle cabin.
The decline of consumers actively listening to music, using it as aural wallpaper, so looking for a constant volume.
The rise of nascent streaming services like Real Networks and Yahoo! Music.
How do you know what is the best level of compression? This is a matter of personal taste. It depends on the genres of the music you like, does it have highs and lows? Are there quiet segments or pauses before a breakdown? Does it makes use of stereo spacing to move its sweeping sound around you?
Audio spacing is important not only for listening to music but gaming and the home cinema experience.
The problem with modern streaming services that look to provide ‘better than CD quality audio’ is as much on the original source as it is about the quality of streaming. Apple has tried to address this with its ‘Mastered for iTunes’ tools optimising for its platform, but that doesn’t have universal adoption in terms of remastering.
The reality might be closer to what I saw at Yahoo! Music in the mid-2000s where ‘mastering’ for the service meant ripping retail compact disc using a HP desktop PC and uploading the song to the servers. Nothing particularly special was involved in the process.
You’re still reading? Great! Welcome to my November 2023 newsletter which marks my 4th issue.
I am not excessively superstitious – but living in Hong Kong rubbed off a bit on me.
I developed a love of milk tea, found the ‘hit women’ cathartic and am still leery of the number 4.
The number 4 is considered unlucky. In Hong Kong buildings, there is no fourth floor – in a similar way to their being no 13th floor in the UK high rise and office blocks. So I hope that this fourth issue doesn’t bring misfortune.
The clocks have gone back and the sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing earlier each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. And it will be Christmas before you know it.
New reader?
If is your first time reading, welcome to my November 2023 newsletter! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Dimensions of Luxury based on a mix of stuff that I have read from Sense Worldwide, Horizon Catalyst and books on luxury trends.
Every wondered why its dot com rather than full-stop com? So did I.
Analysis on IPSOS research on the value to brands of reputation.
MCN – multi-channel networks. A business type popular in China and Japan is taking a record label approach to a stable of influencers.
Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway. Prior to working in advertising, I had a background in manufacturing and consider myself reasonably well read, but some of the material in Conway’s book was completely new to me. Its narrative approach reminds me of the vintage TV documentary series Connections presented by James Burke, that can be found on YouTube.
Beyond Disruption by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This book looked at non-disruptive innovation. This is diametrically opposed to the way innovation is discussed in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media. More on my view of it here.
The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley. In the advertising industry, we have an acute perception that we might not understand life outside the M25 as we think we do. I thankfully have friends and family in the North to keep me somewhat grounded from the metropolitan elite lifestyle that I lead. Until I read this book, I didn’t realise how grounded the advertising industry was compared to our counterparts in national politics. That this book had to be written is a damning indictment of how out of touch politicos actually are.
Things I have been inspired by.
Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook project – Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s open-access collection of e-books. Via Matt’s Webcurios newsletter.
IPSOS research video seminar on Unlocking The Value of Reputation. This is the closest I have seen to making the case for earned media activities. The full whitepaper is available here. Thanks to Stuart Bruce for the link!
My friend Ian recommended the Honest Brokernewsletter to me and I have found it to be a great read alongside my long time subscription to Bill Bishop’s Sinocism.
DDB Remedy’s meta analysis of marketing science work and academic scientific research on how emotion work for effective campaigns. How The Unexpected and Emotion Work to Influence Behaviour Change – focuses on how surprise when paired with emotion led creative had an increased impact. It all makes sense when you think about the power of salience and distinctiveness in communications; but it’s great to see that someone has drawn the multi-disciplinary research together in a cogent argument.
SEMRush have published a report for 2024 trends in social media platforms: The Vision in a Social Era that is worth downloading and pillaging for ideas that can be sold into clients.
I don’t know if inspired was the right term to use but I noticed 2023 Girlguiding Girl’s Attitudes survey thanks to a former colleague of mine from the start of my agency career. This is a survey that the Girlguiding movement has run over 15 years. Having freelanced on Dove’s ‘Real Beauty‘ campaign back in the day, this one statistic stood out to me.
DeBeers is returning to its ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ campaign. The print campaign image is beautiful with a great use of negative space. DeBeers is spending 20 million dollars on media in the US in China. In the US, I think this makes total sense.
DeBeers
I don’t know how well it will work in China? There isn’t the mental model built up in west over decades around the campaign theme. While the wealthy in China realise that diamonds are recognised as a store of wealth – the guo chao mindset may see gold (and possibly jade) jewellery favoured by at least some younger consumers.
This has been exacerbated by a decline in the number of marriages by just under 11% and a trend to prefer gold has an 18% reduction in diamonds sold in China over the past 12 months. In the meantime the sale of gold has risen by 12%.
I look forward to seeing how the campaign goes.
According to Numerator, online retail platforms will be the big winners from Christmas shopping. The news for the food and beverage services sector isn’t so great.
Finally ‘Knowledge is Power with Kidney Disease took me back to 1988. Rob Base has remade It Takes Two for Bohringer Ingelheim in the US to highlight the linkage between kidney disease and type two diabetes. The message is poignant as Base’s creative partner DJ EZ Rock died in 2014 and suffered from diabetes.
Producer DJ EZ Rock was responsible for the hype backing track based around Lynn Collins ‘Think (about it)’ and backing vocals from Rhonda Parris. (Parris has a short-lived recording career, releasing just one solo single No, No Love – a bit of a proto-House banger heavily influenced by freestyle if you like that kind of thing). Those that knew also had the Derek B remix of It Takes Two, with a heavy kick drum underpinning from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.
Things I have watched.
It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions. I do have some standards through and got material for this November 2023 newsletter.
Zerozerozero – follows a single drug deal between the Mexican cartel and the ’Ndrangheta. However things don’t go according to plan, so as the conspiracy unfolds we get a walk through the international drug trafficking trade across Latin America, Africa and Europe. This was done as a limited series, but I watched it as a boxset. It is directed by Stefano Sollima who did the Sicariofilms and Subarra.
Novembre – A French fictional dramatisation of the government response to coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris at Stade de France and the Bataclan concert venue through to the Saint Dennis raid that resulted in the death of police dog Diesel, which trended on social media with the #jesuisdiesel hashtag. Jean Dujardin shows the range of his ability as an actor from the comedy of his OSS117film series, to the deadly seriousness of this film.
Diva – I originally watched Diva as part of the Moviedrome series of curated films introduced by Alex Cox. At the time Cox personally disliked the film due to it being ‘a film of style’ rather than narrative. I loved it and revisited it on Blu-Ray. It was sharper and I got to appreciate the Vladimir Cosma soundtrack with its mix of opera, classical music and avant-garde compositions.
Alex Cox’s introduction to Diva for the much missed Moviedrome film seasons that used to run on BBC 2.
The Continental – Amazon Prime Video has some great tentpole content and The Continental adds to this. It’s a prequel of sorts to the John Wick universe and starts with a beautifully made feature length pilot. The action would find it hard to live up to the John Wick films, but the impeccable soundtrack manages to surpass them. The alternative past New York of the film has similar vibes to shows like Pennyworth and Gotham.
Useful tools
Better Miro, Mural or Figjam alternative
I have started using Milanote as an alternative to Miro for personal projects. Like Miro it has a mix of templates to get you started. There is an iPhone app and a native Mac app, so you don’t have to rely on running resource hungry pages in your internet browser of choice. It might even replace Omnigraffle in my personal software stack for some of the tasks that I do.
The sales pitch.
It was great to collaborate this month with my Hong Kong and Shanghai-based friends at Craft Associates on a prospective exciting new project. Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
The End.
Ok this is the end of my November 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
