Ged Carroll

Category: hong kong | 香港 | 홍콩 | 香港

哈囉 – here you’ll find posts related to Hong Kong. That includes the territory, the culture, business, creativity and history. I lived and travelled to Hong Kong a number of times, so sometimes the content can be quite random.

In addition, I have long loved Cantonese culture and cuisine, so these might make more appearances on this category. I am saddened by the decline in the film and music production sectors.

I tend to avoid discussing local politics, and the external influence of China’s interference in said politics beyond how it relates to business and consumer behaviour in its broadest context.

Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Apple Daily launched a new ad format that I thought was particularly notable that might appear in branding as well as Hong Kong.

If there are subjects that you think would fit with this category of the blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.

  • Lee Dunne + more things

    Lee Dunne

    How Lee Dunne challenged the depiction of working-class mothers | RTÉ – I originally didn’t know Lee Dunne as a novelist. Instead he was part of my childhood. Lunchtime listening when I wasn’t at school was Harbour Hotel, a radio soap opera written by Lee Dunne that gave a good sense of everyday life. The graininess of listening to the show on medium wave added to the experience. Dunne wrote each episode a bit like Roshomon, with each character talking about an event (like an argument) from their perspective. RTÉ’s obituary also focuses on Dunne’s social commentary literature that was banned by the Irish government in the 1960s through to the mid-1970s. Lee Dunne like James Plunkett wrote about the everyman. Plunkett’s work differed from Lee Dunne in that it had more of a socialist tenor to the content. Lee Dunne had particular success with his 1969 novel Goodbye To The Hill, more Ireland related content here.

    Beauty

    Shu Uemura to Exit Korean Market | BoF – Shu Uemura, a Japanese beauty brand owned by L’Oréal, is exiting the South Korean market in September after 16 years. While some speculate this is due to Korean consumer boycotts of Japanese products that began in 2019, L’Oréal states the withdrawal is part of a strategy to optimise its brand portfolio and respond to local market demand. Another contributing factor is likely the intense competition within the Korean beauty market. Shu Uemura currently operates over 70 outlets in the country.

    Five China market strategies that domestic brands do better than foreign brands | Daxue Consulting – I would add western brands rather than all foreign brands

    Consumer behaviour

    NewNew™ on the App Store – god this dark. In th sage words of Matt Muir – how else do you describe a new app, with significant VC funding, whose main purpose seems to be to allow ‘creators’ (we’ll come back to that word) to earn money from their ‘fans’ in exchange for letting said ‘fans’ determine the course of their life, in some sort of modern, ersatz version of The Diceman?

    How China’s online hate campaigns work – Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech – In today’s China, a nationalist campaign involves something far more complex than paying people to post scripted messages parroting Beijing’s line. The government has mastered the craft of influencing people’s genuine emotions and having these ordinary users do the trolling and doxxing — for free. Oftentimes, this means appealing to misogyny or chauvinism, something that virtually guarantees more clicks. Many videos and articles attacking Xu have tried to paint her personal life as promiscuous and delinquent. Web users have frequently called Xu a “female Han traitor,” a dog whistle that conflates concepts of chastity and national loyalty

    Europe

    Why Can’t Europe Cope With the Coronavirus? – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – EU states are too integrated to manage the crisis separately and not integrated enough to do so collectively, an inability to make rapid decisions, and a breakdown of trust between governments and the governed

    Ethics

    P&G reportedly testing Chinese workaround to Apple’s privacy changes | Marketing Dive – I find it hard to believe. if they’re seriously considering this, P&G have their head up their ass on ethics. They don’t need to do highly targeted marketing because Byron Sharp. This just looks like a waste of money

    Finance

    How China structures loans to become Africa’s “preferred” lender — Quartz Africa – Chinese contracts contain broad confidentiality clauses that stop borrowers from sharing details about the contracts, or sometimes even the fact that they exist. And with a confidentiality clause in every contract in the dataset since 2014, the contracts had become more secretive over time. Most of the clauses commit the borrowing countries not to disclose any of the contract terms or related information, unless required by law.

    Hong Kong

    The Rise and Decline of Hong Kong – From the British Colonial Era to the Chinese Communist Takeover | The Greater China Journal 

    Hong Kong’s electoral changes: the Communist Party is taking over | Hong Kong Free Press HKFP – good summary of the different structures and challenges in the new Hong Kong ‘electoral’ system

    Hong Kong’s elites should think about an exit strategy – Nikkei Asia – The most serious concern for Hong Kong’s elites is the impact on their interests if China’s economic integration plan is fully implemented. Hong Kong’s tycoons may see this plan as a great opportunity and believe that their connections on the mainland will help them. But they may be in for a rude shock. Beijing wants to integrate Hong Kong’s economy not to enrich its tycoons, but to make the city’s economic future even more dependent on the motherland. In this process, Beijing would understandably give preference to mainland players, in particular state-owned enterprises, at the expense of Hong Kong’s businesses. – this covers all the reasons why I think Jardine’s pivot to Indonesia is smarter than Swire doubling down on mainland China

    Ideas

    Zhang Baijia: Reflections on China’s Research on Frontiers and Relations with Neighboring States | 高大伟 David Cowhig’s Translation Blog – Hard intelligence is specific information; soft intelligence is the understanding that makes possible the interpretation of hard intelligence. I found this differentiation fascinating delineating information and knowledge

    Information security

    Israel Reportedly Behind Cyberattack That Caused Blackout at Iran Nuclear Facility – reminds me of the Tehran show on Apple+ about Israeli spec ops and hackers in Iran

    Apple Mail Zero-Click Security Vulnerability Allows Email Snooping | Threatpost 

    Media

    Cannabis streaming service sets debut date, program slate – The Third M – MM+M – Medical Marketing and Media – High Times meets NBC. What’s next Crypto News Network for the bitcoin and NFT fans?

    Retailing

    The great British retail reopening | Vogue Business – The 12 April reopening of all physical stores in the UK is an occasion for optimism, but it’s heavily laced with caution. “The big question is how much of the massive increase in total share of spend will online retain?” says Richard Hyman, veteran UK retail analyst. His rough estimate, he says, is about 85 per cent. “If online hangs on to a material portion of spend, then the cost of selling something in a shop will have gone up significantly.”

    Covid’s effect on Rodeo Dr, Oxford St, and Russell St retail closures — Quartz – worthwhile looking at for its retail information and its beautiful interactive design

    Technology

    Job search | Amazon.jobs – interesting job ads. Amazon is looking for a lot of product designers and software engineers to work on visual search and augmented reality as part of the ‘next generation of shopping innovation’ – I found this via the ex-Yahoo! employees groups on LinkedIn. Yahoo! had a large contingent of people working in areas such as image and video search that would be of interest to Amazon now. The team is based just down the road from Sunnyvale in Palo Alto

  • Adult male virginity + more news

    Adult male virginity

    Adult male virginity soars | Boing Boing – There are far more merciless forces in play, not least dating and hookup success being forced onto the same algorithmic curve as everything else on social media; the increasingly hypnotic impulse to live lives online; and the generally hopeless economic circumstances of young people who are getting very little out of life, but haven’t yet decided to burn it all down – interesting disparity between men and women in the data. I think the reasons behind adult male virginity soaring are multi-causal. I can see how adult male virginity trends will be be endlessly kicked around by a football to suit one viewpoint or another

    China

    How much will China grow as an export market? | Hinrich Foundation – Policy makers are currently in a conundrum over how best to engage economically with China. Underlying much of the debate is the assumption that China is a huge and rapidly growing market. While that has historically been true, the falling import intensity of China’s economic growth suggests a more limited market than foreign exporters assume

    A number of Hong Kong oligarchs brought up in mainland China, initially made their money on smuggling materials into China. This was back when the country was closed off. This included luxury goods, oil, truck tyres, machine parts or antibiotics. For instance, casino magnate Stanley Ho made his first fortune during world war II and the aftermath smuggling luxury goods from Macau into China. So it didn’t surprise me to see Fujianese Chinese connections involved in smuggling crude oil into North Korea.

    New York Times YouTube channel

    The New York Times Visual Investigations team used a mixture of old school investigative journalism and open source intelligence techniques championed by Bellingcat to blow open the story.

    What The West Misses About China – Persuasion – the move from soft to hard authoritarianism and how consumerism compensates for it

    Consumer behaviour

    The Complex Legacy of China’s Cinematic Pirates 

    Economics

    A Brief History of Semiconductors: How The US Cut Costs and Lost the Leading Edge | by Employ America | Mar, 2021 | Medium – As the industry matured and the competitive environment changed, the policy framework shifted as well. Since the 1970s, industrial policy has been incrementally replaced by a capital-light “science policy” strategy, while mammoth “champion firms” and asset-light innovators have replaced a robust ecosystem of small and large production-focused firms. While this strategy was initially successful, it has created a fragile system. Today, the industry is constrained on one side by fragile supply chains narrowly tailored to the needs of a few firms with enormous investment moats, and on the other side by the many asset-light design firms who are unable to generate or capture process improvements – this going into reversal is going to offer a bonanza for semiconductor manufacturing equipment vendors

    FMCG

    George Weston to sell Weston Foods » strategy – reorientation of the business towards retail and pharmacies

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong Cantopop singer Eason Chan cuts ties with Adidas after brands reject forced labour – probably one of the odder celebrity backlashes against western companies not wanting to use forced labour in its supply chains. Chan is a Cantopop singer, he has low to no exposure to the mainland. His fan base is in Hong Kong and amongst the Hong Kong diaspora. On balance, give the age profile most of his fans will be ‘yellow’ in terms of their viewpoint. He is doing himself no favours by putting his head over the parapet. His fan base will shrink because of his hyper ‘blue’ alignment. I wonder what brought about his performative outrage. It carried more weight than Hong Kong politician promising not to wear another Burberry scarf until the brand backtracked on using Uighur picked cotton.

    Luxury

    Luxury groups warn £1bn in investment at risk from VAT relief cut | Financial Times – I know not a lot of people will be shedding tears and a lot of the tourists would be more interested in a Schengen area visa allowing freer travel. This might be less of a story than the industry makes it out to be because of Brexit.

    Luxury Brands Are Moving Into Online Stealth Mode. But How Can They Measure Success? – At the beginning of this year, Italian fashion house Bottega Veneta signed off its social media accounts not with a bang, but with silence. The move, which was followed by the removal of its content on its Weibo account, was praised by many and marked a decided shift in the wider luxury market between brands that choose to be more inclusive in mindset, and those that are taking a more exclusive approach with their customers – I was surprised when many luxury brands went on to social media in the first place. On the flipside it makes complete sense for premium streetwear brands like Moncler.

    TikTok For Business – Moncler using TikTok for brand awareness

    Marketing

    What do consumers actually think of ads? – GWI 

    Media

    Apologist op-ed for disgusting racist tweets by African American editor against Asian Americans – Teen Vogue Editor’s Tweets Aren’t the Whole Story | The New Republic 

    Retailing

    H&M boycott in China intensifies over Xinjiang supply issue | Marketing | Campaign Asia – The statement surfaced on social media yesterday and sparked an online storm of opinions. Comments on Weibo included “get out of Chinese market”, “the company’s clothes sucks, and I will no longer buy”, and “I heard that you are boycotting Chinese cotton, then I will boycott your products”. Chinese actor Huang Xuan has also terminated his relationship with the brand, according to reports. On his Weibo account, he posted a statement that said he was “firmly opposed to any attempt to discredit the country”. Those calling for a boycott claim that international sanctions against China are unjustified and based on “biased reports in foreign media and from international human rights campaigners”. – its a day with a ‘y’ in it, which means that China will be waging war by other means. The most recent high profile example would be the way Lotte was run out of China. The sooner the west start boycotting the Chinese market and supply chain the better. More at the FT – H&M and Nike face China backlash over Xinjiang stance | Financial Times 

    Technology

    Molson-Coors Discloses Cybersecurity Incident that Affected Production in 8-K Filing | Data Privacy + Cybersecurity Insider – Molson Coors Beverage Company (the “Company”) announced that it experienced a systems outage that was caused by a cybersecurity incident. The Company has engaged leading forensic information technology firms and legal counsel to assist the Company’s investigation into the incident and the Company is working around the clock to get its systems back up as quickly as possible.

    Inside the NSA’s War on Internet Security – DER SPIEGEL 

    Hacking Weapons Systems – Schneier on Security – there is no reason to believe that software in weapons systems is any more vulnerability free than any other software. I was reminded of ‘Windows for Warships‘.

    Alba Party supporters’ details hacked from website – STV News 

  • Saudi Arabia & things that caught my eye this week

    Saudi Arabia

    I spent a good deal of this week listening marketing research interviews including respondents from Saudi Arabia. What became apparent in the interviews is that Saudi Arabia and its society is changing. What would be expected to be minimum standards and norms acceptable in ad imagery is changing. The same phrases kept coming up:

    • It’s different now
    • Its not like it was
    • Saudi Arabia has changed

    I was wondering why I was surprised. I knew that big bands like BTS and top EDM DJs had played in the country and that it had developed a nascent coffee house culture.

    Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
    Riyadh, Saudi Arabia by Andrey Filippov

    But we all have engrained preconceptions and this week I was confronted by one. I won’t deny that it had a good deal to do with experiences friends had living the ex-pat oil worker compound life and the Jamal Khashoggi execution.

    The Disk

    The Disk: the real story of MP’s expenses is a documentary film by The Telegraph. Back in 2009; The Telegraph wrote a series of stories on MP expenses claims. Ten years later the newspaper is still making hay from the story with a podcast series going over how the story broke Serial style and a feature-length documentary film. It was a big story, but The Telegraph journalists have slightly inflated view of its importance.

    The Telegraph

    It raises some questions about changing news media economics. The old British adage that ‘today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper’ – meaning news is time-dependent is no longer true. This is the kind of film that I would have expected on Netflix or Amazon Prime; instead its a trailer for the podcast series. Any money that The Telegraph is making from YouTube advertising must be very small compared to how they are monetising the podcast series.

    Right Up Our Alley

    Right Up Our Alley is a promotional film for a company that specialises in operating drones for filming. The bowling alley featured is a classic slice of mid-century Americana design straight out of American Graffiti. The shots in one take are amazing.

    Stop Asian Hate

    Things came to a head this week with the shooting of eight people, of which six were Asian Americans. It was an inciting incident that ignited a push back in the east and southeast Asian community.

    This week

    The truth of it is that there has been a lot of prejudice in society that bubbles to the surface. East Asians are seen as ‘rich soft marks’ by petty criminals in London. Things that normally remain under the surface have emerged with COVID-19. The asian identity has been conflated with the Chinese communist party and its handling of the situation. If you’re part of the problem you probably wouldn’t even know what conflated meant and are unlikely to be reading this blog.

    More on what you can do here.

    Do Not Split

    Do Not Split is an Academy Award nominated documentary short film on the Hong Kong protests. It was shot by Norwegian director Anders Hammer for Field of Vision. It also featured in Vimeo’s picks of the day. It gave me goose bumps watching it, because of the familiarity of the areas in the film to me.

    This reinforced opinions I have formed about the resilience and professionalism of the police force that the protestors confronted, listening to research by Clifford Stott. I suspect that the Hong Kong Police would struggle to operate in Northern Ireland or even London during protests. At they’re confronted with at worst; is still exceptionally mild compared to marching season in Derry post-Good Friday agreement, let alone during the Troubles.

    There is a certain irony in this. The UK crowd control / riot policing model in the mainland and Northern Ireland was based on experiences shared by colonial police officers who’d served in Malaya, Aden, Kenya and formal knowledge sharing by the Hong Kong Police in the early 1980s.

    Secondly, the self-initiated implementation by the Hong Kong people shows up the Hong Kong governments early inaction on COVID-19.

  • UK China relations + more things

    UK China relations

    What to know about UK China relations in 2021 — Quartz – interesting that the author frames UK China relations in terms of Brexification. The reality is much more nuanced

    Culture

    The Gen X Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up | The New Republic – interesting take on things, though I disagree with a good deal of it

    Design

    Jeff Bezos and Amazon: A complicated design legacy – A major part of design’s value proposition is the process. Designers identify problems to create solutions. Amazon, on the other hand, has often identified solutions before naming the problem. Sometimes that approach worked. But often, it didn’t. And it created an ecosystem with a surprising number of hidden costs. “Amazon will never be a design-led company. It’s evident in the quality of the products they ship. And although the design is still thriving there, I don’t believe it’s fundamental to the core DNA of the company,” says a former Amazon designer who worked closely with Bezos on several products. “Just because there’s ‘customer obsession’ doesn’t mean there’s an investment in quality and design rigor.”

    Right to repair’ law to come in this summer – BBC News 

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong’s UA Cinemas lowers curtain for final time amid ‘devastating pressure’ of coronavirus pandemic; theatre chain had operated in city since 1985 | South China Morning Post – this felt big to me. Hong Kong has cinema attendance per head of population far over what you’d get in Europe which makes a city with the population of Denmark being historically the fourth largest cinema market. Some of the best times I had in Hong Kong revolved around trips to the cinema

    Japan’s SBI plans Hong Kong pullout on concerns over security law | Financial Times – I was surprised Yoshitaka Kitao came out so unequivocally against the national security law with the statement that ‘without freedom, there is no financial business’ – most companies have pussyfooted around the issue, like they have done around Brexit. SBI are also reviewing their presence in London

    StanChart tries to navigate moral minefield | Financial Times – really interesting read about he challenges that Standard Chartered is facing and how they are trying to manage them. It provides an unfavourable contrast for HSBC though both are a right mess

    Luxury

    Are Supercars a Good Investment? Experts Say Vintage Cars Are Risky – Bloomberg – interesting article

    Why No Other Luxury Company Compares To LVMH | Jing Daily 

    Dior Names Blackpink’s Jisoo New Global Fashion and Beauty Ambassador | Business of Fashion 

    Marketing

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – new agency conglomerate is financially engineered

    Media

    Netflix Begins Test to Crack Down on Password Sharing Outside Your Household – The Streamable – Netflix‘s next stage of growth

    Security

    The UK is secretly testing a controversial web snooping tool | WIRED UK – police and internet companies across the UK have been quietly building and testing surveillance technology that could log and store the web browsing of every single person in the country. The tests, which are being run by two unnamed internet service providers, the Home Office and the National Crime Agency, are being conducted under controversial surveillance laws introduced at the end of 2016. If successful, data collection systems could be rolled out nationally, creating one of the most powerful and controversial surveillance tools used by any democratic nation

    Technology

    Why I was wrong to be optimistic about robots | Financial Times – really interesting piece on the state of robotics in warehouse environments

    How Line built fact-checking into its encrypted messaging app – Rest of World 

    iCloud allegedly locked out a user over her last name | Engadget – I wonder if this affects other Oracle mail server instances

  • Ben Liebrand & things that caught my eye this week

    Ben Liebrand

    Ben Liebrand has been a name for as long as I have been buying records. According to Discogs; he has remixes that have appeared on over 800 albums, compilations and singles. This tells you a lot about the quality and longevity of his remixes. Dutch YouTuber Twan scored an interview with Ben Liebrand where he talks about his career.

    Lunar new year adverts

    WPP showcased work that had been done across their network for Chinese new year 2021. There was a mix of work there, some of it felt like WPP was having to do the creative equivalent of looking under the sofa cushions for change. For instance, Superunion showcased a browser game that they had built as a corporate greetings card for lunar new year. WaveMaker did a transport media buy branding a train interior for a hard candy brand. This could have been executed better. Yes it makes sense to drive awareness in high footfall areas, but shopping for lunar new year presents is usually done before travelling. Secondly, COVID meant that travelling home was discouraged; what was WaveMaker’s plan B for this scenario. Finally, the dressing of the train could have been done more creatively and involved more of a festive feeling.

    The highlight was a Mercedes Benz advert by Ogilvy shot by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar wai – the film taps into the emotion that surrounds Chinese New Year. This mirrors the emotive brief that Mercedes Benz pursued in their US Christmas ad campaigns over the past few years.

    Ogilvy’s work for KFC China taps into the increasing interest in winter sports that is driven by the forthcoming winter olympics in Beijing.

    I was surprised that there was no Ogilvy work showcased from outside China, for instance Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong.

    Machine learning stagnation

    Despite all the technology hype around deep learning, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors that conceals what innovation is happening in the field. The essay shows current machine learning development culture. The original essay is here and a video review of the Machine Learning Stagnation essay. Despite the title its a bit more uplifting than it implies.

    Retro Japan footage

    Yet more great stock footage from Japan in the 1980s. The first one is set to ambient music and shows everyday live in the town and country, alongside TV and film footage. Some of the footage seems to be near a US base. The significance of US cars in the footage is that they used to be popular with the yakuza – Japan’s native organised crime families.

    Fremantle Media have Thames TV’s complete archives including this b-roll of Japanese signage. They claim its Tokyo but some of it looks more like Osaka. It is a symphony of neon that Japan still does the best. It is worthwhile going through Fremantle’s b-roll archive if you’re an art director because of the variety of material that they have.