I have a relatively small amount of health related posts on this blog at the moment. But it’s becoming an area that’s impossible to ignore. Health and wellness is becoming central to mainstream culture.
Anxiety and loneliness have sparked what is considered by many to be a mental health epidemic and a corresponding reduction in societal resilience.
High income countries were spending as much as 14 percent of government spending on health before the COVID pandemic. The number is likely to be even higher now.
According to an article in medical journal The Lancet, poor mental health cost the global economy approximately 2.5 trillion US dollars per year and this was expected to rise to 6 trillion by 2030.
It’s an area that can’t be ignored, because of the financial burden and size of market that the sector represents.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic a UN report said the following:
Psychological distress in populations is widespread. Many people are distressed due to the immediate health impacts of the virus and the consequences of physical isolation. Many are afraid of infection, dying, and losing family members. Individuals have been physically distanced from loved ones and peers. Millions of people are facing economic turmoil having lost or being at risk of losing their income and livelihoods.
The report went on to recommend solutions such as:
Crafting communications to be not only effective but sensitive to their impact on the mental state of the populous
Community events looking at cementing social cohesion
Extending tele-medicine to include tele-counselling for frontline health-care workers and people at home with depression and anxiety.
I started to look at trends in March 2020 and there was a singularity developing around innovation and technology in the area, together with some interesting cossumer behaviour trends. Young adults made up a sizeable chunk of telemedicine non-users and as resistors to public health initiatives. Their much vaunted ‘online literacy’ saw them fall for the same tropes and older audiences considered more gullible like pensioners and retirees in Facebook groups
TikTok quacks is a bit of a harsh label for TikTok content. The reality is that similar content to that turned out by various TikTok quacks appear on YouTube, Instagram and other social media channels. Quack and quackery are synonyms for medical false claims or a ‘snake oil salesperson’.
Social media not only spreads misinformation and false hope across a range of medical conditions, it allows the perpetrators to profit directly from their work. The rise of dodgy health businesses with commerce integrated into their social posts by the likes of TikTok (and Instagram) facilitates TikTok quacks.
Below are just some of the content currently exposing this intersection between health, wellness, beauty and dishonestly obtained profits.
Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades – not entirely unexpected and a great opportunity for Singapore
Digital materials look to use different geometry of materials to replace other materials with special properties like foams. It does this through 3d printed lattices.
Sweden Is Not Staying Neutral in Russia’s Information War | New York Times – The Psychological Defense Agency also raised political concerns when it was proposed, but its leaders have emphasized that mandate allows it to address only foreign sources of disinformation, not content generated in Sweden. The challenge is one facing all democracies that, as a matter of principle, decline to enforce official ideologies, allowing divergent points of view of what is true or false. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the founder of Earhart Business Protection Agency, a cybersecurity firm in Stockholm, and an adviser to the International Telecommunication Union, part of the United Nations. “The government can’t control the truth if it’s going to be a democracy,” said Hanna Linderstål, the senior cybersecurity adviser of Earhart Business Protection Agency.
ChatGPT In Trouble: OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024, AI bot costs company $700,000 every day – not terribly surprising, it’s computationally intensive and hard to monetise. Look at how Google and Facebook have looked to squeeze computing power per watt out of their data centres, along with squeezing cost per server right down as well – they did this to reduce operating costs versus income. ChatGPT hadn’t gone there on design and instead uses 10,000 plus servers based around power-hungry top-of-the-range Nvidia graphics processors
I wish gatekeeping was a thing back in 2005 and 2006 when I was working on the international launch of Yahoo! Answers. The problem that we had was getting people to contribute answers to questions. Gatekeeping and the exhortation to not gate keep is about sharing knowledge and opinions freely – an in real life version of what we saw in early social publishing. Ironically gatekeeping stands in sharp contrast to oversharing as a social faux pas. The kind of knowledge that concerns about gatekeeping is particularly opposed to is opinion based knowledge or NORA.
Now ‘your jam’ is no longer your jam, but instead offered up to be other people’s jam instead. Your individuality ready to be cloned at a moments notice. Will everything descend to being ‘basic’ or mainstream? Does it disincentivise possessing good taste?
What the Internet’s Use of ‘Gatekeeping’ Says About Power – The rise of “Don’t gatekeep” has reframed keeping things to yourself as a selfish act. But not everything is for everyone! And sometimes the act of sharing does more harm than good. I’m thinking of how Anthony Bourdain felt conflicted about sending droves of tourists to mom-and-pop restaurants. I’m thinking of gentrification and what happens when certain neighborhoods are positioned as hidden gems.
Study Times op-ed shoots down new policy options | Pekingology – translation from an article from the Study Times. Comments on infrastructure are particularly instructive in terms of the view point that they reflect: To debunk views such as “infrastructure overcapacity is wasteful,” “promoting infrastructure equates to taking the old path that’s inconsistent with high-quality development,” and “limited space,” it’s crucial to fully understand the role of infrastructure investment from a holistic perspective of national economic development. Infrastructure investment doesn’t only interact with the expansion of aggregate demand to stabilize economic operations, but also enhances macroeconomic efficiency, improves people’s living standards, and robustly supports high-quality development. Overall, there’s no issue of excessive infrastructure. On the contrary, there are areas that hinder the efficiency of the national economy and the improvement of people’s living standards. China’s per capita infrastructure capital stock only accounts for 20% to 30% of the developed countries, and public facility investments per rural resident are only about a fifth of an urban dweller, indicating potential for investment
McDonald’s Hong Kong and Kevin Poon “Coach McNugget Art World” Exhibition | Hypebeast – via Ian at Deft. This was to celebrate 40 years of the McNugget. McDonald’s have always done some smart cultural marketing work in Hong Kong (such as an McDonalds Big Mac themed issue of Milk magazine). Hong Kong seems like a natural home for these things, I remember activating a Coke Zero x Neighborhood collab while there.) But it isn’t only a Hong Kong thing, McDonalds has done some strong cultural marketing internationally as well: from the Cactus Jack happy meal to a bounty programme for rappers that namedropped McDonalds on their mixtape over the years. As my friend Ian observed this is at odds with their current UK positioning ‘ McDonalds is the perfect place for estranged parents to meet their kids for awkward conversations’. The implication in that McDonalds restaurants are a lower rent third space (than Starbucks or Costa) positioning. I have welcomed their value-priced coffee and breakfasts at the end of an all-nighter on a pitch or a long drive. But the UK’s the third space aspect loses all the joy that McDonalds manages to imbue in their children experiences – the treat, the birthday party, the expectation of picking up a much wanted toy in a happy meal. The child to adult disconnect in the experience is something cultural marketing like this can help bridge if done in the UK.
Hong Kong’s corporate lawyers test boundaries as Beijing’s influence grows | Financial Times – legal practitioners, including corporate lawyers, are concerned the broadening scope of a sweeping national security law could jeopardise the independence of the city’s legal system, a legacy of British administration, as Beijing tightens its grip. “There is general concern . . . that people are not fully understanding where the boundaries lie,” said a senior corporate lawyer with a global firm who has worked in Hong Kong for more than two decades
Daring Fireball: ‘Changes to U.K. Surveillance Regime May Violate International Law’ – As I see it, the most likely outcome is that the U.K. passes the law, thinking that the grave concerns conveyed to them by the messaging services are overblown. That the platform providers are saying they can’t comply but they really just mean they don’t want to comply because it’s just difficult, not impossible. And when it becomes law, the platforms will hand it off to the nerds, the nerds will nerd harder, and boom, the platforms will fall into compliance with this law. That’s what they think will happen. What will actually happen, I believe, is that E2EE messaging platforms like WhatsApp (overwhelmingly popular in the U.K.), Signal, and iMessage will stop working and be pulled from app stores in the U.K., full stop. The U.K. seems to think it’s a bluff; I don’t
Singapore
Money Laundering Bust Puts Foreign Wealth in Singapore on Notice | Asia Sentinel – if that occurred at the behest of the China then we’re likely to see flight overseas from Singapore. It’s also interesting that these raids have come soon after China arrested a Shanghai immigration consultant to get hold of their database of UHNWI overseas (predominantly in the US). They second question I had would be why Singapore would cooperate with China on this?
Software
Now is the time for grimoires – by Ethan Mollick – With the rise of a new form of AI, the Large Language Model, organizations continue to think that whoever controls the data is going to win. But at least in the near future, I not only think they are wrong, but also that this approach blinds them to the most useful thing that they (and all of us), can be doing in this AI-haunted moment: creating grimoires, spellbooks full of prompts that encode expertise. The largest Large Language Models, like GPT-4, already have trained on tons of data. They “know” many things, which is why they beat Stanford Medical School students when evaluating new medical cases and Harvard students at essay writing, despite their tendency to hallucinate wrong answers. It may well be that more data is indeed widely useful — companies are training their own LLMs, and going through substantial effort to fine-tune existing models on their data based on this assumption — but we don’t actually know that, yet. In the meantime, there is something that is clearly important, and that is the prompts of experts.
Trybals is a YouTube channel that features people from the less developed parts of Pakistan and asks their reactions about different aspects of the modern world. It’s an interesting bit of anthropology. In this episode the panel gets to try a VR experience.
The August 2023 newsletter was inspired by LinkedIn’s in-built newsletter function. It’s almost the bank holiday so I thought I would spend some time to try out the newsletter function in LinkedIn.
If you’re reading this, you’re a pioneer! If this goes well I will put one out each month. You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
LK99 & room temperature superconductors – why it was a big deal, what it would have meant if it were true and the damage likely to have been caused given it’s likely to be false.
Chip War by Chris Miller. You can read my full review here.
Things I have been inspired by.
How left wing politics inspired Prada’s clothing designs.
Encouraging empathy for people with dementia in Japan with the restaurant of mistaken orders (scoll to the end here to find out more).
Things I have watched.
Three Body Problem. Chinese adaption by Tencent Video and made available for FREE on their YouTube channel. Don’t worry it has English subtitles. This is based on the blockbuster novel The Three Body Problem by Chinese science fiction author du jour Cixin Liu. The three books in the series are all fantastic and there is soon to be a Netflix adaption as well.
The Peripheral on Amazon Prime Video. An ambitious adaption of William Gibson’s novel of the same name. Amazon Studios recently cancelled the next season of this drama, which is a real shame as its one of the stand out series amongst the content on Prime Video.
Un Flic and Le Samourai – the magical formula of French new wave director Jean-Pierre Melville and actor Alain Delon created some iconic crime films that inspired directors in Hollywood, Hong Kong and Japan.
The sales pitch.
Available for strategic engagements in the autumn. Contact me here.
The End.
Congratulations, you’re reached the end of the August 2023 newsletter. Until next month: be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
What prompted me to write about Geico advertising was a stream of news from marketing services companies about the state of technology company advertising. At the time of writing Stagwell are just the latest marketing services firm after S4, IPG, Omnicom and WPP have pinned declining profits on a reduction in technology company advertising spend. Then this story broke about Geico advertising: Insurer Geico made more money after benching its famous gecko | Quartz – and my first reaction was that the wrong lessons might be taken away from this.
Geico advertising – a primer
Geico îs an unfamiliar name to most people outside of the US. If you’ve read American magazines chances are there was a print ad or two in there with their iconic Gecko spokesperson. It’s a similar case on American television.
Geico advertising and their Gecko are as familiar to Americans as the meerkats of Comparethemarket.com are to your average Brits.
The truth about technology marketers vs. Geico advertising
Having worked with technology brands on and off for the past three decades, I have enough experience to know that generally, they aren’t great marketing organisations.
Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad drove traffic to a site that fell over.
Geico reinforced brand equity in the insurance space and pointed out their 24-hour claims hotline (I imagine that this isn’t an exclusive feature, but you wouldn’t know it from the advert).
Growth mindset ≠ marketing mindset
As organisations, they have a growth mindset, but not a marketing mindset. Before the internet, this meant a powerful field sales force organisation and marketing meant a bit of branding / design work coupled with case studies for the sales people. With the internet came constant iterative ‘growth hacking’ on digital channels, that mirrors agile software development rather than the best practices of marketing science.
There is a good reason why organisations like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science are supported by FMCG manufacturers, luxury goods makers, media companies, marketing services firms and pharmaceutical companies, BUT has no technology company sponsors.
The reasons are cultural in nature:
Engineering – if I haven’t heard of it or invented it then it’s not valid and you’re just a suit. At best great product is the marketing – and that’s great if you have a clearly differentiated great product which is self evident. The engineering mindset is also why they trust adtech and marketing automation services which outsource your marketing communications approach to a black box
Sales – marketing is just support. Which is the reason why my early clients (like old school Silicon Valley royalty LSI Logic) promoted long serving secretaries and administration staff into marketing roles
Even if they had a marketer who knew about Ehrenberg-Bass they wouldn’t be able to get in buy-in from the wider organisation to participate and they’d likely be fighting other dumpster fires elsewhere
Secondly, their laser focus on data affects their outlook. To paraphrase the comedian Bill Hicks: they know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Because they are only looking at short term data. Great marketing and advertising also has long term effects that both screws with the short term marketing data focus.
Marketing and growth hacking are considered synonymous. It would seem ridiculous for me to to claim in any large marketing orientated organisation that sales and marketing are synonymous. The differences and complementary aspects of both would be well known. Yet in technology companies, this isn’t the case.
By contrast Geico as a brand is an organisation who understood marketing. You make your car or house insurance decision at best once a year (though there is friction in making a change).
The technology sector approach would be for Geico to bid on search ads and aggregators to acquire customers and then do direct mail or email when it comes to renewal times. But Geico advertising does something different. Geico advertising builds mental framework, so that Geico means car insurance and will be one of the brands that you consider.
This achieves a few things:
You are less likely to move away from Geico, you may not love them, but searching for an alternative might be too much of a hassle.
You may be reassured that you have chosen ‘the’ car insurance
It helps new customers get over the ‘which car insurance company to choose’ decision
It helps with upsell on the products due to the reassurance of the brand
Technology companies deal with these problems in a slightly different way:
Certification of engineering staff. If you are Microsoft certified or Cisco certified, you are less likely to use open source software or Juniper Networks products respectively. It would be against your self interest and the investment in terms of time and money that you have made in your self development
Contractual lock-in – self explanatory
Technology lock-in. You can put your data or programming code into a particular system, but its much harder and more expensive to move on to another system
Owning the entire technology stack. This is the approach that Adobe Systems have taken, gradually acquiring over the years the entire marketing, workflow and creative systems used by ad agencies, media agencies and their clients
So why was Geico advertising spend cut?
This is the crux of my point about how the wrong lessons might be taken away from the Geico advertising spend cut, with no ‘apparent’ impact.
There are a number of good reasons why Geico made the cut in advertising spend:
There was a cut in insurance sector advertising overall, so that Geico maintained or even grew its relative share of voice while spending less. This should see it emerge with improved economic performance over time. Procter and Gamble became the behemoth it now is by INCREASING advertising during the great depression of the 1920s. So the idea of relative share of voice and its relationship to market share is older than I am. Further more research by the IPA has found that holding or increasing relative share of voice during a downturn has a positive impact for business performance over a five year period
Geico may have managed to make some efficiency gains, this is most likely to occur in brand activating activities
There is also a bad reason: saving money in the short term. Kraft Heinz cut marketing to the bone under the guise of zero based budgeting (ZBB) – which made a mockery of ZBB as a concept. Kraft Heinz shares massively underperformed and were down 60% in the last 5 years, compared to the S&P 500 having gone up 69%. If Geico is following this route then it bodes ill for the long term performance of the business.
Without us knowing the real reasons and focusing on the short term measure, it reinforces a growth hacking mindset.
Hard times mean no sustainability premium in North America | WARC | The Feed – every single economic recession this comes around and marketers are surprised. Time to pay attention to what the longitudinal research data says. I really like the work that Gallup have done on macro trends and the American consumer, in particular their work on attitudes to the environment.
‘Pokémon Sleep’ Review: Sleep-Tracking Game Made Me Into Snorlax – gamifying sleep. Pokemon Sleep has surged to 3.2M global downloads and an estimated $130k in daily revenue according to SensorTower data. The app ranked in the top 5 in the U.S. Games charts. It’s even more popular in Japan (the home of Pokemon), where it’s number 1 across the App Store categories
Using attention to scale creative excellence at Mars | WARC – Sales, distinctive assets, and attention to advertising are the go-to metrics to guide marketing decisions at Mars. Mars use Attention as a pre-testing tool, to inform creative choices in digital and also proxy in TV. Mars believe that an execution with a better attention score will travel across media channels better and will be a safer bet for you when you need to make a choice. Measuring Attention is a key element in helping us improve the creative hit rate. Advertisers should question how they measure consumer responses and focus on measures of real consumer behavior.
MLM or multi-level marketing is where people who need to make money buy product from a company like Avon, Amway, Herbalife, Nu-Skin or Tupperware. Usually the franchisee doesn’t buy directly but through a contact. They may be a long way down in a chain of sellers, which means you end up with a pyramid scheme. Some have described the onboarding and seller communications as a cult. (Disclosure, I did a bit of agency work on Nu-Skin when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to see products, but not how they were sold).
Financial freedom
The real product of MLM seems to be hope. Discussing the downside of MLM at this time is important. Financial freedom is going to sound particularly appealing to struggling middle class households wrestling with the cost of living crisis and rising mortgage interest rates.
These videos by Sean Munger give a really good insight into Amway.
Ponzinomics
Robert Fitzpatrick’s self-published Ponzinomics seems to be the most cited book talking about the underbelly of MLM. Here’s an interview with him.
Soviet space programme
Enough time has gone buy for us to know how innovative the Soviet space programme was. Some of the innovations were dictated to them by limitations in production campacity. I came across these films about it.
And how Russian closed cycle rocket engines surprised NASA after the cold war.
I, Claudius
Robert Graves period drama novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God were remade in 1976 as a 13 part TV series. (The first two episodes are called 1a and 1b, presumably to avoid an episode 13, given that theatre as a whole is superstitious). In 1965, the BBC had done a documentary about the unfinished 1937 film version and had found bringing their version to television difficult due to production rights still tied into the 1937 production.
I, Claudius was considered to be a high water mark from point of view of audience viewership of more high brow material and latterly critics consider it to be one of the best TV programmes ever on British TV.
Hello Hong Kong
I received post from friends in Hong Kong and the package had a large sticker highlighting the Hello Hong Kong campaign which the government has been using to paper over the cracks left by its authoritarian pivot.
Hello Hong Kong mandatory sticker.
One part of me thought that ambient media such as the sticker might be a good side hustle for mail services everywhere. As I dug into it, I found out that the staff ‘had to’ put these stickers on the packaging and at least some of them were doing so reluctantly. At least some customers were reluctant for their packages to be ‘propaganda banners’ for the Beijing backed regime. Meanwhile 7/21 alleged government backed triad actions are still fresh in the mind of locals.
YKK
You don’t think about how YKK clothes zips work effortlessly, but this Asianometry documentary gives you insight into the Japanese zip manufacturer.
Starbucks Rewards as massive bank
I used to use the Starbucks pre-payment system back when I could use it in both the UK and Hong Kong, but a rupture came in when Starbucks removed its rewards scheme from stored value cards to an app. So I found this video by ColdFusion reframing the Rewards scheme as a large bank like pool of money more akin to PayPal’s float than Avios loyalty points.
Apollo project astronauts off the record
On everything from the context of Project Apollo through to their views on climate change.
Restaurant of mistaken orders
A Japanese pop-up retail project with restaurant servers who are suffering from dementia. I was sent the link by a friend of mine from Japan – the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders really brings the impact home.
