Ethics: moral principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity. I went to school with people who ended up on the wrong side of the law. I knew more of them when I used to DJ which was my hobby since before I went to college.
I probably still have some post-it notes around the place that I used as bookmarks from when I used to work at a call centre but that was about the extent of my ethical transgressions.
My business experience meant that I dealt with a lot of unpleasant unprofessional clients, but didn’t necessarily see anything unethical in nature. When I started writing this blog I was thinking about culture rather than ethics and the most part still do.
But business and work changed. Ethics became more important:
When I started in social and digital campaigns I didn’t think about ethics as a standalone thing. It was just part of doing a good job. It went without saying.
I don’t think any of us back then would have foreseen slut shaming, trolling, online bullying, dark patterns and misinformation
Now things are different. The lack of ethics is impacting all parts of business life.
How ad tech data is used
How content is created
How services are designed
How products are made
I think that much of the problems with ethics is cultural and generational in nature. The current generation of entrepreneurs have perverted knowledge in the quest of growth hacking and continual improvement and change for its own sake. Its a sickness at the centre of technology
Partly due to Cambridge Analytica, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is going to have a more profound impact on data usage globally. GDPR would have been seen as an extra-legal reach, but Facebook is making it look like a good idea.
I thought I would pull together a few resources that I thought would be of interest around GDPR since there is a lot of snake oil being sold as consultancy around it at the moment. I am not going to pretend that I am an expert, so I thought it would be useful to share some of the GDPR related resources that I have been looking to learn from.
Not only in terms of what the regulation is, but what techniques can be deplored to act in the spirit as well as the letter of regulations. Demonstrating a basic respect for the consumer won’t harm any brand, but might point to badly designed KPIs that direct and digital marketers might be measured from.
Andreessen Horowitz put together a good podcast on it.
The Lifestyle Applications of Dyneema – Core77 – the interesting thing for me is how old Dyneema is and how long it has taken to adopt the product. Back when I first started work before college, I worked briefly for DSM – the maker of Dyneema. Dyneema and Dupont’s Kevlar both required exceptionally pure chemicals in their process. Kevlar reputedly had to scrap a third of the product made. Both were expensive and used in special functions:
Ships ropes
Motorcycle crash helmets and robust composite moulded products
That PR degree courses are often 90+% female graduates
That the industry (like advertising) does really poorly at retaining older (40+ year old) staff.
In the UK PR agencies struggle to attract graduates from working class backgrounds as well as from minority communities
The article is behind a paywall. More related information here
Mark Zuckerberg in Washington DC on machine learning and hate speech. Bringing their security team up to 20,000 people to look at issues like this. Hate speech is hard to compute in comparison to (Islamic) terrorist materials. I am guessing that what constitutes hate speech changes country by country (and its interesting that Facebook is looking at this from a global perspective, rather than placating the US first). Secondly, the language that constitutes hate speech evolves to circumvent restrictions and incorporate memes a la Pepe the Frog.
Streetwear Reigns Supreme, Say Teens | News & Analysis, News Bites | BoF – The growing popularity of streetwear negatively impacted Nike, as their appeal among teenagers dropped from 31% to 23%. In contrast, brands like Vans and Adidas have successfully leveraged an “open-source” approach, allowing pop culture to shape their brand image and consumer perception.
Marketing
Chinese International Students Are the New Brand Champions | Jing Daily – 31 percent of Chinese students in New York and Boston escort friends and family on shopping trips at least once every three months. Thirty-four percent purchased luxury goods to take back to China at a similar frequency
Google’s First Voice Activated Coupon – WPP – Google distributed its first voice-activated coupon offering customers $15 off Target purchases placed on Google Express through Google Assistant –through desktop, mobile or Google Assistant enabled devices – I am surprised that Amazon didn’t introduce the voice activated coupon before Google.
RSS is undead | Techcrunch – no RSS is alive, but Techcrunch haven’t worked out issues the RSS users have already. Much of the issues are solved by using NewsBlur and finding sources is organic rather than an instant end state. More online related topics here.
Security
Could Cambridge Analytica boss be probed for Philippine meddling? | SCMP – This could get interesting. Putting aside arguments about whether Cambridge Analytica’s technology actually works as promised, Philippines law would still have been broken. It forbids all outside parties from participating in its election process.It is alleged that they were supporting Duterte, which would make the foreign reaction to it interesting as well.
This Reid Hoffman video stands in sharp comparison to the Ayn Rand-loving frat-bro culture that seems to infect technology sector companies based in Silicon Valley. However Hoffman in his past has reflected at least some of their libertarian views.
However Reid Hoffman is cut from different cloth and represents a slightly older generation in the technology sector who pioneered the dot.com era.
He grew up in Berkeley, back when the technology sector was more hardware focused and Silicon Valley actually made micro-chips. Back then HP (now Agilent) and Techtronix made measurement equipment in the Valley and it was the centre of the cold war missile technology. The east coast from IBM in New York State to the Boston corridor represented a worthy adversary of Silicon Valley. The technology sector only opted to have Silicon Valley as its home during the move to personal computing.
eWorld
Hoffman worked at Apple on eWorld – an early way of connecting Macs to the nascent public internet. There was interesting ideas that came out of that at the time including work on object orientated programming. Apple later abandoned eWorld when they saw the ‘net taking off and instead collaborated with selected ISPs like ClaraNet and Demon in the UK.
Reid Hoffman later founded a prototype-social network and was part of the PayPal mafia before founding LinkedIn. The irony is that the PayPal mafia were ground zero for the current generation of technology company CEOs.
Reid Hoffman offers a more thoughtful considered viewpoint on the future of the technology sector.
How Technology is Shaping the Future of Human Society was filmed by the Aspen Institute.
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.