Consumers don’t believe use of personal data leads to more relevant ads, report finds | Campaign Asia – The report also found that consumers still trust TV ads over their digital counterparts. On average, consumers are twice as likely to say TV ads provide a more positive impression of brands than common digital formats. The top concern about digital platforms amongst those polled was fake news on social media (53 percent), followed by cyberbullying, online predators, child endangerment online and children’s data privacy. “While consumers embrace the technology, there remains a multitude of concerns regarding advertising on the technology. These concerns are a significant reason why TV actually still remains the medium most likely to provide a positive impression of brands,” Juhl said. – So why would you recommend digital for brand building activity??? Supports Gartner’s position that businesses will move away from personal data. More on personal data targeted online ads and ad blocking here.
Facebook eyes multibillion-dollar stake in Reliance Jio | Financial Times – if the board game Risk was about global telecoms infrastructure instead of military conquest, the truism ‘never fight a land war in Asia’ would change to ‘never buy a carrier in India’. I can’t see how Facebook is going to do any better with its holding than Vodafone etc
Singtel-backed OTT service Hooq enters liquidation | Advertising | Campaign Asia – “Global and local content providers are increasingly going direct, the cost of content remains high, and emerging-market consumers’ willingness to pay has increased only gradually amid an increasing array of choices,” a Singtel statement said. “Because of these changes, a viable business model for an independent, OTT distribution platform has become increasingly challenged. As a result, HOOQ has not been able to grow sufficiently to provide sustainable returns nor cover escalating content costs and the continuous operating costs of an independent OTT distribution platform.” – it will be interesting to see how people like MUBI and NowTV do moving forwards
Recession pushes Hong Kong shoppers to sell their luxury goods | Financial Times – interesting article however the speculation on mainland Chinese trading in secondhand luxury might be impeded a bit. A mix of fakes and and a desire for new things. They would need to have strong trustworthy authentication. And might want to vent that market abroad as well as Japanese players like Brand-Off have managed
How to Beat Science and Influence People: Policymakers and Propaganda in Epistemic Networks | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Oxford Academic – weak or subtle interventions are often most effective for the would-be propagandist. In particular, outright scientific fraud—intentional publication of incorrect, fabricated, or purposely misleading results—is not only unnecessary to influence public opinion on topics of scientific inquiry, it is also riskier and often less effective than other forms of manipulation. Biased production, which does not involve fabricating results, is a successful strategy for misleading the public. And in many cases, biased production is itself less effective than selective sharing – HT Ian Wood
“Krisenmarketing”: Warum Werbungtreibende nun ihre Etats nicht einfrieren sollten › Meedia – yes its in German but it comes out fine in Google Translate: Financial, insurance or telecommunications companies in particular should instead rely on customer-centered communication and pick people up instead. They would have to show existing customers that they are there for them during the crisis and offer solutions. For example, Deutsche Telekom is doing exemplary with its campaign “We connect Germany” and the specific services. Banks could also help with liquidity shortages.
London has the highest productivity levels in UK PwC – without productivity improvements levelling up isn’t going to work. Interesting that London performed this high, yet was lower on females in employment with a higher female unemployment rate
Mark Ritson: Coronavirus won’t hurt Corona, it will actually boost sales – differentiation, particularly at the symbolic level, was overstated. Any evidence that people perceived Brand A as vastly different from Brand B could be largely explained by its size and prior purchase experiences. Purchase caused brand image, not vice versa. Ergo building a brand image was waste of marketing effort. The big job of brand was to create salience, so a brand came to mind in buying situations.
Terabytes Of Stolen Adult Content From OnlyFans Have Leaked – There are communities on Reddit and Telegram dedicated to cracking performers’ accounts and sharing the content without their consent. Many of those videos eventually make their way to various tube sites. A similarly large, though different, OnlyFans leak was posted last Saturday to forums dedicated to cracking and leaking pirated content – that is one of the bleakest things that I’ve read in a good while
IBM and Microsoft sign Vatican pledge for ethical AI | Financial Times – the pledge, called the “Rome Call for AI Ethics”, will be presented on Friday morning to Pope Francis by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and John Kelly, IBM’s executive vice-president, as well as Vatican officials and Qu Dongyu, the Chinese director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation – so it wasn’t a Vatican driven initiative after all but a public affairs exercise
Baidu/tech groups: traffic warning | Financial Times – But higher traffic does not equate to higher income for search platforms. The contrast is with gaming, where more time playing means surging in-game purchases. For Baidu, which makes about three-quarters of total revenue from advertising, that is bad news. Even before the outbreak, a slowdown in China had trimmed the advertising budgets of clients. Marketing campaigns have now been cut further. Cancelled events and concerts contribute to the malaise. Baidu’s biggest clients, which include online gaming companies, real estate developers and plastic surgery clinics, have little incentive to advertise. A surge in new sign-ups for online games means fewer game ads are needed. Demand for homes has plunged and some cities have banned home sales altogether. Plastic surgery clinics, a lucrative source of core ad revenues, are taking a hit.
Otl Aicher: The Olympic Designer Who Shaped Your Journey To The Toilet – Flashbak – Like a paperclip, we don’t think of Aicher’s pictograms as designed objects per se, but rather as the objects themselves. The chairs we own are someone’s take on a chair. That’s not the case with the average, everyday paperclip. It is what it is, a paperclip. That’s it. Objects at this level of comprehension are simply there. They feel as though they have always been there, and did so from the moment they were presented to the masses. In every country, in every city, they are simply there. In the case of Aicher’s icons they’ve become shorthand that everyone can understand, a set of simple shapes that successfully tells us where to go when we need to use a bathroom. – pretty much sums it up
LinkedIn | Balenciaga Summer 2020 collection video – Jay Owens – This is a genius bit of media buying for a collection themed around power and power dressing. The catwalk show saw private equity associates, architects & engineers stalk an EU-blue stage set like a parliamentary building. Advertising on LinkedIn now is just 👌– nails context
Featured Customer – Oscar the Grouch – Squarespace – I used to hate writing case studies for technology companies at the start of my career, but I do like this one that Squarespace did for Oscar the Grouch
How Japan’s family businesses use sons-in-law to bring in new blood | Financial Times – For hundreds of years, owners of Japanese companies have been adopting their sons-in-law as a way to recruit talent — a practice known as mukoyoshi — giving rise to the saying “You can’t choose your sons, but you can choose your sons-in-law”. The histories of zaibatsu (conglomerate) families such as Sumitomo, Mitsui and Iwasaki (of the Mitsubishi group) are studded with adopted relatives and sons-in-law
The Sun posts £68m loss as it pays out £27m in legal costs over phone-hacking scandal – However, revenue at News Group Newspapers for the 52 weeks ending 30 June 2019 were up, with total turnover growing to £420m in 2019 from £401.4m in 2018. Circulation of The Sun was down to 1.38 million last year from 1.51 million in 2018, and fell to 1.16 million from 1.28 million for The Sun on Sunday. – so despite revenue increasing losses were up. You also have to wonder how sustainable revenue increases can be with a declining audience
How Adidas is using WhatsApp as a direct marketing channel – Digiday – The most recent example of the strategy was the “100% Unfair Predator” campaign. Earlier this month, Adidas opened up a hotline on WhatsApp for people in need of a footballer to cover for unreliable teammates on their team. Adidas-sponsored players were made available for games last week once fans had shared some basic information with the hotline such as the game they need the player for. The company’s marketers would notify fans on the morning of their game if their request was successful. The rented players turned up dressed in Adidas’ new Predator20 Mutator footwear. “We know our audience use it to share fixture info, team selection — and team-mates messaging to find last-minute replacements,” said Coveney. “WhatsApp was perfect for the more functional elements of the ‘Rent-a-Pred’ hotline as it allowed consumers to share private information one-to-one with us for review, before being allocated a Predator player near them.”
Regulating AI in health and care – NHS Digital – no privacy expert on this panel – which is a bit concerning given they are talking about the business opportunity and regulating AI. More machine learning related posts here.
Dutch army Maj. Christiaan Hoff, left, and Royal Australian Navy Lt. Cmdr. John McHugh, right, perform oral surgery to remove a tumor from a Filipino woman aboard Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) June 27, 2012, in Samar, Philippines
Coronavirus response benefits Watsons: YouGov | Campaign Asia – Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka Shing, who’s majority-ownership of the Watsons franchise is well-known, pledged HKD$100 million (US$13 million) to combat the coronavirus. All of these responses appear to have been met with popular approval for the brand. Since the start of the year, Watsons’ Current Customer score has risen from 20.2 to 29.0, a rise of +8.8 points. Its Recommend score has risen from 9.9 to 16.9 , an increase of +7 points. Finally, its score on YouGov’s Buzz index has jumped from 8.6 to 25.4, a significant increase of +16.8 points. – Li Ka Shing always comes out of a crisis better than he went in
Coronavirus Test Kits Sent to States Are Flawed, C.D.C. Says – The New York Times – the failure of the kits means that states still have to depend on the C.D.C., which will mean several days’ delay in getting results. The C.D.C. announced last week that it had begun shipping about 200 kits to laboratories in the United States and roughly 200 more to labs in other countries. Each kit can test about 700 to 800 specimens from patients, the agency said. – this is frightening (paywall)
I started thinking about ‘brand winter’ when I read about TBWA Hong Kong and their ‘Brave Bear Pack’ offering. Campaign Asia describes as a new product focusing on growth hacking and cost efficient tools for surviving the financial winter brought on by Hong Kong’s anti-ELAB protests.
I thought financial winter was an interesting metaphor to use in Hong Kong. I get the analogue of the ‘bear market’. But the winter in Hong Kong is very dry (rather than humid), cool and exceptionally pleasant for the most part.
They probably feel that the ‘Brave Bear Pack’ opportunity has been amplified by the late 2019 novel Corona Virus outbreak.
According to TBWA the services they are bundling in this are:
Demand mapping – which seems to be database / CRM / social marketing data. Looking at market size and going after niches or pockets of the market not previously addressed? A B2B analogue would be ABM (account based planning)
Acquisition System Architecture – seems to be marketing automation based on the descriptor
Efficient Content Production – presumably to provide the content for the Acquisition System Architecture?
Affordable Big Format Film Production – crowdsourced film a la Mofilm, with what I presume is a TBWA mark-up. Again I suspect that the primary role of this is to provide content for the Acquisition System Architecture?
Chatbot marketing (on Facebook and WeChat respectively) which is so two years ago
Crisis management – TBWA seem to be white labelling Ketchum to do planning and execution- pretty standard stuff in the PR world. A quick look at LinkedIn indicates that Ketchum’s Hong Kong office has a very small, junior team to handle any crisis that might come up
I found it a depressing read. The tactics focus on the bare minimum to harvest sales from existing brand equity and and realised that we’re entering a brand winter. This is down to two factors acting as a catalyst: technology and economic decline.
What do I mean by a brand winter? It’s a time when marketers focus on performance marketing exclusively. The most obvious influence in terminology was the financial winter analogue used in media coverage. I guess it also resonated past discussions I’d had about the circular funding cycle that artificial intelligence has gone through. Decades like now of massive investment, followed by funding droughts or ‘AI winters’.
Technology factors for a brand winter
During the last couple of economic recessions, after the dot com bust and the 2008 bank crisis new performance marketing platforms have come to the fore.
The dot com bust heralded the rise of Google’s search advertising. The 2008 bank crisis saw Facebook and YouTube shake up online display advertising.
What all of them had in common is their ability to drive an action (like a sale), but weren’t so good in building distinctive memorable brands.
The second aspect, was that they could be very targeted using data. The idea is that the more targeted the message and the audience that its shown to; the more effective that it would be. Sounds like common sense doesn’t it? The actual results are counterintuitive. TakeMahabis the slipper brand that tried to build itself just on online media went into administration. Uber has tried to build a brand on price and online growth hacking still hasn’t made a profit.
But this pivot has resulted in the creative side of the advertising industry being gutted.
This presents four problems for marketers:
Effective marketing campaigns have found by research to consist of roughly 70 percent brand building and 30 percent performance marketing across both B2B and B2C marketing. Brand building’s full impact can be measured over decades or longer. According to qualitative research by Kings College London on China; Swiss and Japanese watch brands were sought after by post cultural revolution consumers. Brand equity endured despite the worst excesses of Chairman Mao and his red guards.
Digital marketing isn’t as effective as one would believe. Digital marketing is only as good as its data and its measures have been defined largely by the media platforms themselves. TV advertising is several orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of reach. Ad fraud is rampant and major brands pushed for better standards led by P&G and Unilever.
The plethora of channels has meant that many brands have spread their creative like a thin smear of peanut butter across toast. Again research indicates that this approach is counter-productive. Yet brands have adopted big production capability in-house to feed social channels and online advertising formats. This work is often done at the expense of creativity and ideas
Over targeting is counter productive according to research done by the Ehrensberg Bass Institute and captured in Sharp’s How Brands Grow. Instead the authors recommend a ‘smart mass approach’
Marketers have given digital a greater amount of latitude than it deserves due to C-suite level concerns about digital disruption, stoked by their management consultants. When economic head-winds are met shorttermist thinking fit nicely with this performance marketing bias despite the issues outlined.
Economic factors for a brand winter
I won’t go into the background of the 2019 Hong Kong protests as that has been well-documented elsewhere. What I am interested for this post in is the economic impact.
Studio Incendo: P1088698
The 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests seemed to impact a number of sectors:
The FT talked about the serious downturn in life insurance policy sales. Life insurance policies are used by mainland Chinese to build up assets outside of China in dollar-denominated investments
Data released last year indicated that for the month of October 2019, retail sales were down 24%
Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group is looking to close 15 out of 91 stores in Hong Kong
The leisure sector is down on earnings and Ocean Park is in serious financial trouble
Occupancy levels in Mandarin Oriental hotels went from 71% to 49%
Products and services that are aimed at the mainland Chinese market have taken the brunt of the damage.
Learning from the successes of the past
I wanted to draw lessons from two events.
The first was the Great Depression and how it profoundly affected FMCG brand marketing
The second event is the 1967 Hong Kong riots
The Great Depression
The Great Depression has slipped from popular consciousness as the silent generation that lived through it have left us. The Wall Street Crash, the New Deal and the Jarrow march are far away from our collective experience.
You may as well be talking about the Wild West or Victorian child labourers climbing up chimneys to clean them.
In reality the Great Depression lasted from 1929 until World War 2. Global GDP dropped by 15 percent. Many countries looked to austerity policies to see themselves through. It didn’t work out that well as it depressed demand. And it was a similar case for companies, they cut back on marketing and a demand drop followed.
By comparison Procter & Gamble (P&G) took a contrarian approach. P&G had been founded almost a century earlier. It hit its stride during the late 1850s as the American civil war raged. By 1911 its Crisco vegetable based shortening was launched. P&G were quick to realise the potential of the nescient radio stations springing up in the US and around the world.
They were instrumental in coming up with a new brand marketing format of sponsored programming based around a long running drama called soap operas. Consumers may have been struggling to make ends meet; but soap operas allowed them to develop increased brand affinity.
P&G also used the Great Depression to expand internationally by buying a UK-based soap maker. Because of this contra-cycle investment and spending in brand, P&G became one of the world’s largest companies with operations pretty much everywhere apart from Cuba and North Korea.
In a mirror of this strategy, P&G are now investing in creating content for streaming television services which have emerged over the past few years, in a similar manner to the way radio grew a century earlier.
The takeaway from P&G is that contra-cyclical investing for larger brands can pay dividends as the media landscape has less competition in terms of brand building communications. Secondly, adoption of technology makes sense IF the media can aid long term brand building activities.
1967 Hong Kong riots
In 1967, Hong Kong was a British colony on the edge of China. China had just entered the cultural revolution and ideological fervour was in full swing.
Hong Kong was a hodge podge of identities, and that’s not even including ethnic minorities (Nepalis, caucasian people of different nationalities and south Asians who came across the British Empire).
Native Hong Kongers
Middle class, business owners and entertainers who fled places Shanghai towards the end of the civil war
Former nationalist soldiers who settled in Hong Kong (like their compatriots who ended up in Taiwan and Burma)
Mainland Chinese who left China during the hardships and famine due to the Great Leap Forwards. They entered the territory illegally, often swimming across the Sham Chun river or even the Hau Hoi Wan estuary.
Roger W: Communists and Police, Hong Kong 1967.
Hong Kong was a tinder box. Work was plentiful but life was hard for the blue collar workers who struggled to make ends meet. What happened next depends on who you believe.
Trouble was brewing, there had been unrest across a number of sectors:
Shipping
Taxi drivers
Textiles
Building materials
The previous year there had been riots protesting a rise in ticket prices on the Star Ferry.
At the time Hong Kong was a centre of plastics production, textiles and light industry. Much of the light industry started off literally as cottage industries. Plastic flowers were assembled from parts at home and workers were paid by piece work. In the 1950s, the government got rid of these low rise low quality housing. They built high-rise public housing and multi-storey public factories that rented units to light industries.
The start of the riots was down to an industrial dispute at a plastic flower manufacturer based at the San Po Kong Factory Estate in Kowloon. The factory was owned by a local industrialist called Duncan Tong (唐鼎康). Tong had a number of manufacturing businesses including the Playart die cast car brand which competed with Hot Wheels and is still popular with collectors.
On May 6, picketing workers clashed with members of the management. It got sufficiently violent that the riot police were called. When the police arrived they were pelted with cans and glass bottles by picketing workers and their peers in other neighbouring factory units. The police arrested 21 demonstrators who were represented by the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (HKFTU). The HKFTU is a Beijing-aligned group of trade unions.
Many more were injured in the violence. Local union officials went to the police stations to protest the arrests and ended up being arrested themselves.
Leftist protestors with strong sympathies towards Beijing protested in solidarity with the arrested workers the following day.
Over 100 protestors were arrested and a curfew was imposed by the authorities. This then sparked a low level insurgency. Over 1,100 bombs were planted, 51 people were killed, over 800 people were injured. Almost 5,000 people were arrested and over 1,900 of them were successfully prosecuted. It was only the intervention of the Chinese premier who finally put an end to the violence in December that year.
Business leaders like Li Ka-shing and Harilela invested in property when the 1967 riots depressed prices. They then went on to replace British taipans as the main drivers of Hong Kong commerce.
The takeaway is that chaos has consistently provided opportunities for businesses with enough capital to take advantage of them. But what’s needed more than money is the eye for opportunity.
What does the solution for a brand winter look like?
In the case of Hong Kong, if we look at FMCG brands, there has never been a better time to build a local brand. Advertising inventory in out of home spaces or on streaming media are going to be cheaper due to the lack of demand.
Both ‘yellow and blue’ orientated media offer opportunities if handled in an even handed way. Investing during the contra-cycle in brand offers businesses an opportunity to capture long term profits rather than short term sales.
More information
There didn’t seem to be anything on the TBWA Hong Kong website, but they had this post on their Facebook page.
和 Virgil 一同「压轴登场」的 Arc’Teryx，是怎样的户外品牌？ – Chinese fashion show people trying to work out why Virgil Aboha wore Arc’Teryx goretex shell. Interesting that they don’t go to the obvious answer – technical outdoor wear is streetwear
Wristwatches (手表) | Mao Era in Objects – interesting read and gives a lot of food for thought on brand and perceived luxury products in the Chinese market
Study: Men who own luxury cars are often jerks – what types of people own these cars. Sure enough, he found that less cooperative, less kind, and less considerate men often drive high-status cars. “The same traits also explain why such people break traffic regulations more frequently than others,” says Lönnqvist. He found no connection between female self-centeredness and luxury cars. Before you start flashing the bird at passing luxury vehicles, know that not all classy car owners suck. In fact, some are quite dependable: The study also found that conscientious men and women—people who are organized, ambitious, respectable, and often high-performing—are also frequent owners of high-status cars, which Lönnqvist says likely reflects an appreciation for quality and an urge to present a self-image of classy reliability. – a bit more nuance to this than the title suggests
A new year marks a new phase of Hong Kong protests | Financial Times – some are calling on taxpayers to pay more. The aim of the so-called “$1 more” campaign is to cripple the tax authorities’ operations by forcing them to handle possibly millions of rebate payments, tying them up in bureaucracy and bringing the system to a grinding halt
