Ged Carroll

Category: fmcg | 雜貨業務 | 소비재 | 食料品事業

FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.

Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.

They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.

The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.

I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.

  • BMW brand crisis + more things

    BMW brand and business crisis

    I haven’t driven a BMW in well over 20 years, so Doug DeMuro’ update on the BMW brand was fascinating.

    BMW brand twitter account OK boomer
    BMW Twitter account

    The BMW brand issue hadn’t been on my radar until Doug DeMuro talked about it. A number of things seem to be happening with BMW.

    The company’s customer base is predominantly gen-x and baby boomers; because their cars are expensive. For decade these people have been told that the BMW brand represents the ultimate driving machine.

    An important part of the visual BMW brand: the design language that it is implementing on is problematic. In particular the ugly ‘beaver teeth grill. This is ironic given that an electric car doesn’t need a grill for its engine.

    It didn’t help things that from a certain angle the rear of the BMW iX has a resemblance to the Nissan Juke.

    Nissan Juke 1.6 Advance 2017
    Nissan Juke 1.6 Advance 2017 by RLGNZLZ

    It has at least an internal perception that it has lost its BMW brand mojo as there is a slow steady move away from the internal combustion engine.

    If you look at other YouTube automotive channels, BMW seems to be having reliability issues with its current cars and the repairs are expensive to do. Back in the early 1970s the BMW brand was tarnished with negative perceptions about the cars being rust buckets and the company managed to lick that. The current engineering problems sound more complex.

    All of this makes the BMW brand sound more difficult to fix than being on the socials and being up to date with their yoofspeak.

    China

    Sharp Power and Democratic Resilience Series | China’s Global Media Footprint – interesting report by the National Endowment for Democracy, especially given how UK regulator Ofcom revoked the TV licence for CGTN – Ofcom revokes CGTN’s licence to broadcast in the UK – Ofcom 

    Huawei official speaks out after “Uighur alarm” report – The Washington Post – Huawei’s Denmark country manager resigns and then briefs against the company on its AI system that identifies Uighurs

    China’s Luckin Coffee files for bankruptcy in US | Financial Times 

    Canada concerned as Hong Kong starts to force dual citizens to choose status – The Globe and Mail – individuals who declare themselves Canadian could now lose their residency rights to live in Hong Kong.“It’s the beginning of the end for people in Hong Kong with Canadian status,” said Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland. The policy on dual citizenship stems from a 1980 law in mainland China that was then applied to Hong Kong when the United Kingdom handed over the city to Beijing in 1997. “The law was on the books for years but it wasn’t always enforced,” Mr. Kurland said. – interesting move

    The Longer Telegram: Toward a new American China strategy – Atlantic Council – single most important challenge facing the United States and the democratic world in the twenty-first century is the rise of an increasingly authoritarian and aggressive China under Xi Jinping. China has long had an integrated, operational strategy for dealing with the United States. The United States has so far had no such strategy with regard to China. This is a dereliction of national responsibility – interesting read. Right on with its diagnostics, but off base with its proposed solution. The west thought that Xi was a moderate when he came into power. He has extended his loyalists in every aspect of the party. The Jiang Zemin faction of the party, which would be an alternative aren’t liberal; they used the army to put down student protests in 1989.

    Hong Kong to impose ‘national security’ schools curriculum | Financial Times – interesting that it impacts expat kids as well. A powerful message that China is prepared to burn Hong Kong to the ground to get alignment

    Taiwan

    China and the Fate of Taiwan | Yale University Press Blog 

    National security law prompts record number of Hongkongers to move to Taiwan: report ｜ Apple Daily – numbers over double from 2019 to 2020

    Media, brand and marketing

    Commission chief tells charities not to be ‘captured’ for politics | Charities | The Guardian – Charities that support politically or culturally contentious causes should expect their charitable status to come under regulatory scrutiny even if they are acting within the law, according to the outgoing chair of the Charity Commission. The Tory peer Tina Stowell, who is stepping down after three years in the post, warned charities against being “captured” by unnamed people who wish to push a partial view of the world and use charity platforms to wage war on “political enemies”. – this is going to be interesting

    Looking downstream – Tortoise – as a long time netizen I am less certain that regulating platforms for content will work and worry about the precedent it would set for authoritarian regimes. Should OTT platforms such as Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime carry news? Here my first question is how do you define news? Should they do real time news reporting, probably not even if they could. Should they do current affairs analysis – they already do if you look at the kind of documentaries that they have. I think that there should be real questions about those documentaries in terms of quality and bias? While we’re on about documentary making, surely the BBC could be doing more work with Adam Curtis or Bellingcat and have those people training the documentary film makers of tomorrow

    Higher Brothers’ Masiwei to Perform Live on McDonald’s App | Radii China – this is a really smart move by McDonald’s China to drive downloads and reward customers

    Liu Yifei Announced as Face of Louis Vuitton China | Radii China – LVMH betting on woke western liberals not being their customer base and choosing polarising star. It also shows how far Fan Bingbing’s star has fallen since her tax troubles. Crystal Liu was the protagonist in the car crash live action version of Mulan. She’s also not as beautiful as Fan Bingbing

    Bagging bargains: the unexpected rise of the discount megastore | Financial Times – not terribly surprising when one thinks about how recessions increased the market share of discount food retailers like Lidl, Aldi & Netto

    How did rich millennials become the voice of generation rent? | Young people | The Guardian – what’s missing from this is the sense of being precarious with freelancing and contract work in middle class professions now. This also seemed related: Why do so many professional, middle-class Brits insist they’re working class? | Class issues | The Guardian 

    GroupM, Unilever launch tool to measure ethics of data decision-making | Ad Age – is GroupM (or any media agency) the right partner from a credibility point-of-view?

    Technology

    How Europe Became a Model for the 21st Century – DER SPIEGEL – Despite its long list of crises in recent years – including the most recent vaccine snafu – the European Union has become a global pacesetter. Its laws and regulations have established global norms. This has made the bloc a 21st century model. – I agree with the direction of this article, even if some of the examples could be debated

    Meet the Chinese-Made Social Voice Chat App That Came Before Clubhouse- PingWest – Dizhua 递爪 (literally translated as sticking out one’s paws, a meme-phrase for raising hands) went live, offering the same kind of voice-based experience that connects people, nearly a year ahead of Clubhouse.

    Silicon Valley’s iron grip on venture capital is slipping — Quartz – the shift to smaller tech hubs that’s been going on for years is set to move even faster, according to Stanford. “The pandemic has thrust the VC ecosystem into new territory where Zoom meetings and alternative deal sourcing methods reign supreme,” he wrote in an analyst note. “This shift has, at least somewhat, leveled the playing field for investor attention…Over Zoom, it doesn’t matter if the company is in the same building, city, state, or country.” – no credit given for the dissipation technology start-ups to places like Singapore and Shenzhen. For instance, social darling Clubhouse is based on Chinese voice technology. But there’s also a bigger issue about the decline in hard innovation which is easier to do in a tight cluster. Since its no longer happening, the cluster makes less sense. More on innovation here.

    Information security

    Clearview AI’s Facial Recognition App Called Illegal in Canada – The New York Times 

    McKinsey fires investment bank researchers after policy breaches 

    Bases for Trust in a Supply Chain – Lawfare – With a supply chain attack, there is a potentially long delay between the introduction of a vulnerability and its exploitation. In addition, infiltrating a supplier generally requires a well-resourced adversary and interaction with that supplier. So compared to the alternatives, preparations for a supply chain attack take longer and have a higher risk of discovery. The risks of discovery can be reduced, however, if inserted vulnerabilities resemble ordinary flaws and, thus, the malicious intent is disguised. The digital systems on which individuals and nations increasingly depend are large and complex, so today they are likely to be rife with vulnerabilities. Many of those vulnerabilities will be known, some unpatched, and others easily discovered by analysis. In short, such systems are easy to compromise.

    Russian hack brings changes, uncertainty to US court system – new rules for filing sensitive documents are one of the clearest ways the hack has affected the court system. But the full impact remains unknown. Hackers probably gained access to the vast trove of confidential information hidden in sealed documents, including trade secrets, espionage targets, whistleblower reports and arrest warrants. It could take years to learn what information was obtained and what hackers are doing with it – you can’t hack paper

    Suspected Russian Hack Extends Far Beyond SolarWinds Software, Investigators Say – WSJ 

  • Fractured tech lobby + more things

    The fractured tech lobby’s uphill battles – Axios – The fractured tech lobby is a sign of too many firms working at cross purposes. – The Internet Association was founded almost a decade ago to be Silicon Valley’s voice in Washington. But now its biggest members — companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon — increasingly bump heads as they each seek to channel policymakers’ fury away from themselves, and they can have wildly different goals from smaller members. Facebook, for instance, has signaled that it’s open to new federal laws introducing privacy regulations and modest updates to Section 230, tech’s liability shield. Smaller companies worry giants could handle the burden of complying while they’d struggle to survive. – The fractured tech lobby is going to offer a bounty for law firms and K Street lobbyists. It will also open up investigations around the world from the EU to Seoul, Korea. China won’t be involved since it blocks most of the key members of the Internet Association – the fractured tech lobby in question.

    The Kremlin’s Anti-Western (and Remarkably Successful) Middle East Media Project | Interpreter magazine – Dr. Naila Hamdy, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo, noted how “RT may have filled up that gap” left in Egypt and the wider region following the Arab Spring, when an increasing number of viewers began to see Al-Jazeera as closely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties. This increasing regional polarization erupted in the summer of 2017 with the Saudi-led embargo of Qatar, with Saudi and its Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) partners demanding the closure of Al Jazeera as punishment for Qatar’s alleged support for the Brotherhood, as well as Iran and its regional Shiite proxies

    The Radicalization of Kevin Greeson — ProPublica – interesting article and an under-covered subject. The flpside of this article is how the Democrats have lost their base in these communities and it reminds me a lot of how Labour lost its base outside the major cities in that respect. They no longer represent working people, but are instead considered to be playing identity politics, the economics of new-liberalism is largely universal

    China’s rich spent US$54 billion at home on luxury goods last year with coronavirus halting overseas trips | South China Morning Post 

    From Dialect to Grapholect: Written Cantonese from a folkloristic Viewpoint by Chin Wan-kan Hong Kong Policy Research Institute Ltd. – fascinating white paper on Cantonese culture and language. What becomes apparent is that Beijing’s adoption of Mandarin demonstrates its inability to decolonise its culture, by taking the language of the Manchu people who conquered the Han people and others. (PDF) More China related content here.

    Sony takes wraps off secret Unreal Engine project, unveils new subsidiary: Sony Immersive Music Studios – Music Business Worldwide 

    Unilever workers will never return to desks full-time, says boss | Working from home | The Guardian – to be honest with you, this was the way Unilever operated with its hot desking policies way before COVID-19. Global headquarters 100VE had way less seats, phones, desk space and meeting rooms than were needed

    Xi encourages Starbucks to help promote China-U.S. ties – Xinhua | English.news.cn – one has to ask where is the line that executives from businesses like Starbucks and Goldman Sachs cross to be viewed as foreign agents in the US due to their relationship with the Chinese government

    Sheryl Sandberg downplayed Facebook’s blame for Capitol riot, but evidence points to role – The Washington Post – Fliers and hashtags promoting the pro-Trump rally circulated on Facebook and Instagram in the days and weeks beforehand

    Ad Aged: Standing up for truth. (Haha.) – For a society or an industry to function it needs to have a set of common facts. It’s really that simple. If you hear an assertion, ask for evidence. Whether or not you agree with it. If you make an assertion, be prepared to back it up with a piece of paper.

    WhatsApp fights back as users flee to Signal and Telegram | Financial Times – The encrypted messaging app, which has more than 2bn users globally, and several of its senior executives spent Tuesday trying to clarify forthcoming privacy policy changes covering the data that can be shared between WhatsApp and its parent now that it is deepening its push into ecommerce. Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before, according to data from Sensor Tower. The app also got a boost when Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, tweeted “Use Signal” on January 7.  By contrast, WhatsApp recorded 9.7m downloads in the week after the announcement, compared with 11.3m before, a 14 per cent decrease

    Detained US lawyer urges Hong Kong to look to Ireland for inspiration | Financial Times – Look at Irish history . . . They were completely hopeless for so long, but eventually they got part of Ireland — they got a republic,” Mr Clancey told the Financial Times. “In a difficult situation we shouldn’t just give up and have no hope for the future.” Mr Clancey was still asleep when police arrived to detain him last Wednesday. After his arrest, police escorted Mr Clancey, a Hong Kong permanent resident, to his office to conduct a search. His firm, headed by veteran lawyer Albert Ho, is known for representing anti-government activists. His arrest has stirred fears authorities will target lawyers in Hong Kong who represent opposition figures in political cases — a tactic common in mainland China

    Chinese freight platform to raise more cash on huge investor demand | Financial Times – investor frenzy bidding seven times the amount that Didi Chuxing was looking for when doing a capital round for its freight business

  • Traditional Chinese clothes & things that caught my eye this week

    Making traditional Chinese clothes cool has been something attempted by multiple groups over the years. Shanghai Tang was founded by the former businessman, restauranteur and columnist Sir David Tang. More recently, there have been Han nationalists or fantasists that wanted to roll back the clock to before the Qing dynasty.

    Shanghai Tang S/S 2007 ‘look book’ film
    South China Morning Post on the Hanfu movement. Trumpism with Chinese characteristics?

    This effort by a couple of Hong Kong based fashion designers is one of the more interesting efforts that I’ve seen making traditional Chinese clothes cool. They definitely have a Hong Kong aesthetic in their approach and the Hanfu movement members would complain about the Manchu elements. but I think they do make traditional Chinese clothes cool.

    In China, you’ve had cities that became well known for their role in the global supply chain. Shenzhen became the electronics capital, Dongguan was the centre of shoe manufacturing and the eastern city of Yiwu focused on Christmas decorations. This all became more complex over time. Shenzhen still has factories and corporate headquarters for technology companies. But its also now the second largest stock market in China.

    An old television factory complex has been redeveloped into a creative, startup and retail space called OCT-LOFT. The best analogue I can think for it is the Tea Building on Shoreditch High Street or the Truman Brewery at the back of Spitalfields.

    Dongguan saw much of its shoe and clothing production move inland to poorer provinces, or abroad to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Former factory sites were redeveloped, Huawei moved much of their workforce out of Shenzhen to a campus in Dongguan.

    Yiwu still focuses on Christmas decorations (and Chinese new year decorations). Much of the work is done a piecemeal basis rather than in sophisticated automated factory lines. (This concentration of light industry also explains why China managed to close down the city to handle this winter’s power outages, since you can’t do that with heavy industry safely.) This documentary trailer by a Serbian film maker gives you a feel for the city.

    There is is so much in the film, the aspirations of young people and what work that they are prepared to do. The Chinese version of the American dream and the demographic time bomb of an ageing population.

    I read a number of China related email newsletters, the latest one that I started reading is the Trivium China Tip Sheet. I’ve been reading it for a few weeks now and can recommend it. You can sign up to it here.

    Recent work by 72&Sunny Amsterdam for Coca-Cola.

    72&Sunny Amsterdam for Coca-Cola

    There was a consensus that restarting advertising after media spend was pulled at the onset of COVID-19 was a pivotal moment for the brand. Coca-Cola had put in place a three months of advertising pause and on the back of a social media embargo. The idea was that the brand’s voice should shine through – the message in culture, not the can. We decided to double down on Coke’s core value of optimism, which as been at the centre of Coke brand advertising for a long, long time: hilltop, the Christmas ads, joy machine activations etc.

    At the time when Coca-Cola pulled their advertising there were (rightly) serious questions about the wisdom of the move. There is a large swathe of data to show that advertisers who spend through a recession come out with enhanced market share. The problem faced by marketers is what to say in the adverts beyond the brand. Also what happens if you promote a product and customers can’t buy it due to shortages (like 3M masks or Charmin toilet roll)? I understand the calculus that drove some of Coke’s decision making at the time. Given Coke’s move; when they came back, they HAD to get it right.

    Clever digital out of home media buy by a Chinese property developer. The video is designed to make use of the digital screen that comes in from the left of the screen, goes around the corner of the building and above the second retail unit. The creative uses the buildings design and illusions of perspective to provide the immersive experience.

    The illusion works best when going across the cross walk in front of the camera, so the design incorporated a lot of thinking not only about the amount of footfall, but likely direction of footfall in front of the advertisement.

    I discovered it on LinkedIn, but would guess that it has been shared by multiple people across several platforms.

  • Frys Electronics + more things

    The disappearing history of the Bay Area’s themed Frys Electronics stores | SF Gate – there couldn’t have been hardware startups without Frys electronics stores. As Frys goes, so does Silicon Valley and I don’t think that loss of hardware hacking is a good thing. Frys is odd and idiosyncratic, but that’s part of the charm in it. Silicon Valley is now the home of media companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter) rather than technology companies which seems like the end state outlined by Judy Estrin in her book Closing The Innovation Gap

    Court Rules Deliveroo Used ‘Discriminatory’ Algorithm – according to the ordinance, if a rider failed to cancel a shift pre-booked through the app at least 24 hours before its start, their “reliability index” would be negatively affected. Since riders deemed more reliable by the algorithm were first to be offered shifts in busier timeblocks, this effectively meant that riders who can’t make their shifts—even if it’s because of a serious emergency or illness—would have fewer job opportunities in the future.According to the court, the algorithm’s failure to take into account the reasons behind a cancellation amounts to discrimation and unjustly penalizes riders with legally legitimate reasons for not working. Deliveroo was ordered to pay €50,000 (~$61,400) to the suing parties. 

    Unilever taps seaweed to create self-cleaning surfaces | Financial Times 

    Schaudenfreude Alert: Bezos-Buffet-Dimon Health Care Industry Disruptor Haven Makes Faceplant, Announces Closure | naked capitalism – The press is now curiously awash with experts commenting on the Haven closure, saying they knew it would never work. Although some may be able to produce press clips to substantiate their claims, health care industry investors and incumbents were freaked out enough by the prospect of squillionaires swooping in to squeeze their margins that health care company stock prices fell sharply and broadly upon the announcement. And remember, this was 2018, close to Peak Unicorn. Even if the three lords of lucre couldn’t necessarily come up with a health care “innovation” concept that made money, Uber and Lyft had demonstrated that was no obstacle to getting oodles of funding. The play could wind up being like the building of the railroads, where the profit in the enterprise wasn’t in moving stock but selling shares. And only now are tech writers finally admitting that self-driving cars are not only not coming any time soon, but when they do, they will likely have narrow uses, including requiring dedicated lanes

    ‘We need a real policy for China’: Germany ponders post-Merkel shift | Financial Times – Ms Merkel personifies old ideals of western rapprochement with China — the principle that ever deepening economic ties with the west would encourage political change in Beijing, and a shift to liberalism and western values. “Wandel durch Handel” — change through trade — was for years a key precept of German policy – and this was written before the Hong Kong 53 and China blocking WHO yet again. And more here Greens accuse Merkel of forcing pact with China | The Times 

    Streaming Tutorial – or how Kpop fans can do a better job of hacking the YouTube algorithm

    194: Historic Ad Fraud at Uber with Kevin Frisch – Marketing Today with Alan B. Hart – if you’ve watched this presentation by Frisch’s peer (Simon Peel) at adidas, you’ll start to notice a pattern

    Inside the Whale: An Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian – we make it easy to migrate and difficult to leave. If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don’t want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data

    Forget actors, footballers are the new fashion icons | Vogue Business – a lot of this is down to Roc Nation UK

    ‘Peak hype’: why the driverless car revolution has stalled | Technology | The Guardian – is this the sign of a wider AI winter?

  • Creatives outputs + more things

    Different times | Campaign magazine – It’s tempting to look at the best of today’s creatives and compare them with the greats: David Abbott, John Webster, Helmut Krone, George Lois, Ed McCabe, Mary Wells, Bill Bernbach, Paul Arden, Sir John Hegarty. And to think there’s no-one around who could hold a candle to any of them. But is it a fair comparison? They were working with account men like Frank Lowe, Tim Bell and Nigel Bogle, they were working with media guys like Mike Yershon, directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson, and planning hadn’t even been invented then. Of course it was easier to do great work, everyone wanted great work. There weren’t hundreds of TV channels and big data and micro-targeting, and ad tech, and dozens of different platforms, and five campaigns shown at creative pitches. What was wanted was quality not quantity, one fantastic ad not a dozen space-fillers. It was, in fact, much easier in those days to do great work. Sure the competition was tougher, but everyone was agreed on what they wanted, ads that made the public sit up and take notice. I know the people working today may not have stood up against the greats. But I’m not sure that if any of the greats had been working today, they would have been able to produce great work either. – Dave Trott on the futility of comparisons that relate to now, versus then and changing ad environment for creatives (and everyone else for that matter). The contrast in creatives and their output is very striking. One cannot ignore the nature of the medium in the creative process. The move to social seems to have kneecapped creatives and creativity. By comparison earlier media revolutions like television enhanced creativity. Creatives were constantly learning new ways of creativity within the medium. The copywriters seems to have reduced their standing in creatives even more than visual designers. How can platforms provide creatives with a similar range that legacy media did? What can creatives do to recover their own mojo as a profession? More marketing related content here.

    Pop Mart/Asian IPOs: go figure | Financial Times – Pop Mart, which sells $8 boxes of figurines, has taken advantage of its newfound popularity to join the listing boom in Hong Kong. Shares nearly doubled in value on the first day of trading on Friday. As with other recent Asian listings, a redirection of money previously set aside for the postponed Ant Group listing appears to have fuelled the frenzy. Demand has also been boosted by the approaching holiday shopping season.

    Coca-Cola Launches Global Creative and Media Agency Reviews –Coca-Cola is launching a full global review of its media buying and planning services. The creative portion of the review encompasses creative, experiential marketing, production management and shopper marketing. “We are on a journey to fundamentally transform and dramatically improve the effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing investments,” a Coca-Cola spokesperson told Adweek. “By improving our processes, eliminating duplication and optimizing spend, we will generate significant savings to fuel reinvestment in our brands. “Media and creative agency services require significant investment from our brands. They are also a crucial component of our ongoing digital transformation journey to drive our business. With that in mind, we have decided to undergo a complete redesign of our media and creative agency models in an effort to align the strategic, operational, and commercial needs of our new, networked organization,” the spokesperson added. “This will necessitate a full review of our media and creative planning and buying practices, as well as our media and creative agency appointments and commercial relationships around the world. We expect this process will be completed by the end of 2021.”

    Pompeo shames MIT, calls Chinese authorities ‘jackbooted thugs’ in remarks about academic freedom | South China Morning Post – “A Fulbright student coming in from some country ought not be returned to their home country and to suffer from the jackbooted thugs that now want to take the information that they got, send them back into the United States only to have them just take a little bit more information that they’re going to hand off to the Chinese [Ministry of State Security] … or the People’s Liberation Army”, he said. “MIT wasn’t interested in having me to their campus to give this exact set of remarks,” Pompeo said in his opening address. The school’s president, L. Rafael Reif, he added, “implied that my arguments might insult their ethnic Chinese students and professors”. – interesting, if true, that US universities are no platforming politicians to avoid offending Beijing

    The Hottest Campaign Ads on Twitter Didn’t Really Work: Study – The PAC, Priorities USA, spent a good chunk of the cycle testing the effectiveness of ads, some 500 in all. And, along the way, they decided to conduct an experiment that could have potentially saved them tons of money. They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden. A control group saw no ad at all. Five different treatment groups, each made up of 683 respondents, saw one of the five ads. Afterwards they were asked the same post-treatment questions measuring the likelihood that they would vote and who they would vote for. The idea wasn’t to be petty or adversarial towards the Lincoln Project, which drew both fans and detractors for the scorched-earth spots it ran imploring fellow Republicans to abandon Trump. It was, instead, to see if Twitter virality could be used as a substitute for actual ad testing, which took funds and time. If it turned out that what the Lincoln Project was doing was proving persuasive, the thinking went, then Priorities USA could use Twitter as a quasi-barometer for seeing how strong their own ads were. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. According to Nick Ahamed, Priorities’ analytics director, the correlation of Twitter metrics—likes and retweets—and persuasion was -0.3, “meaning that the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.” The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested. – I think that there a lot of lessons for creatives and strategists in this piece of research in terms of eliciting behaviour change, beyond politics

    China shadows the rise of Hong Kong’s next tycoons – Nikkei Asia – Avoid politics, build trust: One dynasty heir speaks on a generation’s dilemma

    How The 1985 Downturn Set The Silicon Wafer Industry On A Path To Consolidation That Continues Today – Semiconductor Digest – a great read

    A transatlantic effort to take on Big Tech | Financial Times – Companies are counting on the incoming Biden administration, which will include a number of tech-friendly officials from Barack Obama’s time in the White House, to help them stand up to Europe. It shouldn’t. One of the huge risks for the new administration is that it will be seen as too cosy with concentrated corporate power. Witness the cries already coming from the left about some of Mr Biden’s appointees who have backgrounds in private equity. Individual appointees should be judged on their own merits. If we didn’t let anyone from either the finance or the technology industries into the new administration, we would be the poorer for it. Take Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, who is now Mr Biden’s chief markets adviser. He cleaned up derivatives trading while at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission during the Obama years – grab the popcorn

    About Google’s approach to research publication – Google Docs – A cross functional team then reviewed the paper as part of our regular process and the authors were informed that it didn’t meet our bar for publication and were given feedback about why. It ignored too much relevant research — for example, it talked about the environmental impact of large models, but disregarded subsequent research showing much greater efficiencies. Similarly, it raised concerns about bias in language models, but didn’t take into account recent research to mitigate these issues. We acknowledge that the authors were extremely disappointed with the decision that Megan and I ultimately made, especially as they’d already submitted the paper. Timnit responded with an email requiring that a number of conditions be met in order for her to continue working at Google, including revealing the identities of every person who Megan and I had spoken to and consulted as part of the review of the paper and the exact feedback. Timnit wrote that if we didn’t meet these demands, she would leave Google and work on an end date

    Pioneer DJ reports 82 per cent rise in the sale of entry-level DJ controllers during lockdown – Tech – Mixmag 

    Hong Kong’s Civil Servants Under Siege – The Diplomat – I think the oath taking is a big deal. If you don’t sign it, they will immediately assume you will be against the government one day. Most of us don’t agree with this practice. Those who are almost retired and are older think it’s quite normal. They stress that Hong Kong is a part of China, and civil servants have the responsibility to uphold the policies issued by the government and support it no matter what we think. But most of the newer recruits, what we care about is that freedom of speech is protected. The Basic Law guarantees our freedom of speech. No matter what career we have, we should enjoy this right.

    RTOS port to RISC-V core for high reliability designs | EE News Europe – opportunities that previously would have gone to ARM

    Wikipedia Matters by Hinnosaar, Hinnosaar, Kummer and Slivko – we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’ choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia in- creases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities. The impact is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on Wikipedia (PDF)