Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.
I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.
Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.
I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.
I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.
Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.
I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.
I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.
Technonationalism as a term has started to spring up in Chinese policy discussions regarding technology trade with the US and China.
Technonationalism origins
Technonationalism is a term used by economist Robert Reich in 1987 to describe the relationship between technology and national security. Reich used the term in an article that he wrote for The Atlantic. It originally referred to the intervention of the Reagan administration in the United States to prevent the acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor by Japan’s Fujitsu. Reich felt that the Reagan administration mis-understood the the technology problems faced by the US and blocking the Fujitsu-Fairchild deal was the wrong thing to do.
Elkor Labs photo of Fairchild Semiconductor exhibition stand.
The China effect
In English language usage, it started to be mentioned in publications as far back as 1969 and seems to have had two distinct peaks. The first was from the Brezhnev-era Soviet Union through to 1990. The second peak coincides with China’s rise.
From a Chinese perspective, strategic conflicts between major powers have revitalised the concept in the international political arena. Of course, this ignores China’s own actions and their perceptions by other countries:
Chinese government policies to promote economic independence and induce strategic dependence of other states across all infrastructure technologies – or as the FT calls it ‘Fortress China‘
Today, the competition between China and western democracies is focused on critical materials like pharmaceuticals and a range of strategically important advanced technologies.
These sectors include:
Electric vehicles (or as they are called in China new energy vehicles)
Drones, virtual reality,
Various type of machine learning ‘artificial intelligence’
Big data and data mining
Robotics and automation
5G networks
The Internet of Things (IoT),
Synthetic biology
This conflict is considered more severe than the US – Japanese semiconductor trade friction of the 1980s. But Japan and the US were largely aligned from a political, defence and economic perspectives during this time.
The technology related to disputed sectors are seen as key to the next generation of defense systems, industrial capabilities and information power China and western democracies.
Neo-liberalism & technonationalism
This implies that economics is an extension of defence rather than completely separate, as implied by the western neo-liberal laissez-faire approach to globalisation. This places company leadership dead set against the wider interest of their own western countries. During the cold war with the Soviet bloc western companies were much better aligned with their country’s interests.
Palmer Luckey’s Anduril represents a notable exception in Silicon Valley and its attitude is remarkably different to the likes of Apple or Microsoft.
Post-war Asian miracle model
While technonationalism as a term was given voice in the mid-1980s, one could consider the directed economy efforts by the likes of MITI in Japan and its counterparts in Taiwan and South Korea as being technonationalist in nature.
From this perspective, technonationalism played a crucial role in post-World War II economic and industrial policies, fostering domestic industries, promoting scientific and technological innovation. These polices propelled Japan to become a global technological power. Korea took a similar tack with Park Chung Hee’s compact with the chaebols and the Taiwan government was crucial in the roots of Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors.
Back to the present
The current increase in technonationalism by China and western democracies means that international trade in many fields will continue to change due to national security concerns evolve. This is often masked in language such as de-risking, de-coupling and de-globalisation.
The inspiration for this post on every old idea is new again came from my opening up Rakuten‘s Viber messaging app on my iPhone. Viber is a messaging platform and also does voice over IP, including out to the phone network. It is a hybrid of Skype and WhatsApp in terms of functionality. Viber is popular in parts of Asia, much of central and Eastern Europe, Greece and Russia – often as a second string to Telegram or Zalo.
Scratchcards, giveaways
I saw the following image in Viber.
Viber’s scratch card giveaway promotion.
Which took me right back to roughly the same time of the year back in 2012, when I worked at Ruder Finn and did a similar digital scratch card execution to promote The National Lottery scratch cards in the run up to Christmas.
I was fortunate to work with a great creative and technology team: Stephen Holmes and Dru Riches-Magnier on the project. The promotion was executed within a high security environment because Camelot’s IT standards were way beyond what we usually worked with.
Here’s the case study that I wrote up about the scratch card project in my portfolio.
This was the most stressful time I had during my time working at Ruder Finn and one of two high points in terms of the work that we did.
So when I saw the Rakuten Viber execution, I had a deja-vu moment and the epiphany that every old idea is new again.
Strawberry fields forever & the square mile
So how do we get to a point where every idea is new again? Years ago I used to DJ in bars, clubs and parties. A couple of young lads on a music production course saw a record label release one of their assignments to tap into the psychedelia and dance-indie hybrid sound. The record was a cover version of a Beatles track with a Soul II Soul type break beat underneath. It became successful and topped the charts.
There were a surprising number of people who didn’t realise that it was artfully created cover version of The Beatles, I even heard the original described as a poor version of Candy Flip.
Newness is a matter of perspective. This was brought home to me at a talk that Damien McCrystal gave years ago. This was about the time that he was a business columnist at The Observer. I can’t remember the context but McCrystal said that the memory of ‘the square mile’ (think Wall Street in US parlance) was about eight years.
Which was the reason why the 2008 mortgage crash looked eerily like the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s. And that is despite most of the people in investment banks having a passing familiarity of Michael Lewis’ insider account Liar’s Poker which outlined how derivatives fuelled much of the 1980s Savings & Loans crisis.
I got to read it in college, despite having no interest in entering the world of finance. By and large I managed to stay clear of finance aside from being an in-house marketer early on in my career at what’s now HBOS and credit card provider MBNA. I also had a bit of early luck in my career timing, as I left MBNA before the payment protection insurance scandal hit the sector.
This was the classic example of every old idea is new again, but with the added wrinkle that a bad set of ideas can suddenly turn into good ones over time.
But as a strategist, this taught me to be careful on interventions pointing out a given concept is an old idea, given that every old idea is new again at some point.
The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.
Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.
There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.
Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.
The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.
What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture
Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether
Culture
Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended
Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.
Health
China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire
Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.
This post on loneliness came about from an insight journey I took for a prospective project aimed at generation Z. Don’t get me started on defining an audience by generation, or I will go off-topic and not be back for a while while I rant about how life stages are a superior lens. But we digress. So the approach I took was looking at the problems and challenges faced by the target cohort. From reading academic papers, I came across things like anxiety, climate anxiety and loneliness. Loneliness stuck out as interesting, as it was something that small community moments could be fostered around and a brand would help in an authentic low key way without being parasitic.
What is loneliness?
First of all it makes sense to define what loneliness actually is?
loneliness, distressing experience that occurs when a person’s social relationships are perceived by that person to be less in quantity, and especially in quality, than desired. The experience of loneliness is highly subjective; an individual can be alone without feeling lonely and can feel lonely even when with other people. Psychologists generally consider loneliness to be a stable trait, meaning that individuals have different set-points for feeling loneliness, and they fluctuate around these set-points depending on the circumstances in their lives.
The UK government commissioned a report in 2019 by Simetrica Jacobs that quantified the economic cost of loneliness for businesses in terms of ill health and lost work productivity as £9,900 per year, per person. Commentary in The Lancet associated loneliness with a 26 percent increase in premature mortality.
Loneliness hits youth harder
In my initial research I found that we had high levels of loneliness and young adults experienced this in a more acute way.
83% of generation-z survey respondents said that they experience loneliness, compared to 68% of the UK population as a whole. I found this fascinating as if you look at the TGI data around the UK overall group cohesion score, you tend to get much smaller variances from the mean.
Nor is loneliness just a UK phenomenon. Studies have indicated that it is prevalent from multiple countries with different levels of cultural commonalities: from the US, Israel, Japan and the Philippines.
This seems to go hand-in-hand with other conditions such as anxiety and depression. There are plenty of other causes for anxiety and depression: but loneliness certainly feeds into their severity. This can be seen by the increasing incidence of mental health on US student campuses over the years according to research by The Health Minds Network.
Some experts hypothesise that the normalisation and embedding of therapy in modern culture and the popular lexicon may well be exasperating the loneliness problem, rather than helping.
The idea of being alone, but not feeling lonely has become a rich vein of content inspiration for influencers.
Loneliness is a longitudinal trend
COVID-19 isolation brought ideas of loneliness to the forefront, but it has been a rising issue for a long time.
Going back over a century of data from 1919 – 2019, we can see that mentions of loneliness had a peak during the great depression. It then dropped through the second world war and started to pick up again. There was a rapid increase from the late 1960s through to the mid-1980s and then an notable increase from the mid-2000s through to 2019 – which is the latest year that we currently have data for.
There seems to be a correlation between mentions of loneliness and times of economic hardship. One also has to remember that during the second world war, publications were widely censored. Printing paper was in limited supply due to the war effort.
The BBC conducted conducted research with the Wellcome Foundation in 2018 with 55,000 respondents. At the time it was the largest survey that had been conducted on the subject. The research found that a higher number of younger survey respondents felt lonely and that having online-only friends correlated with higher degrees of lonely feelings.
At the time, the BBC came up with a few hypotheses about the possible high incidence of loneliness among 16 – 24 year olds:
They have less experience of regulating their emotions, so everything is felt more intensely
This might be only the first or second time they’ve felt lonely in their lives and they haven’t had the chance to learn that loneliness often passes
16-24 is an age when identity is changing. Young people are working out how they relate to others and where they stand in society. That process is naturally isolating to some extent, so feeling lonely during this time may be quite normal
BBC Anatomy of Loneliness
The view that this might be a phase was supported by qualitative responses of older respondents who said that young adulthood was the time when they had felt loneliest. Loneliness might be something that we can’t blame completely on social media.
Social capital
Public policy academic Robert D Puttnam warned about the decline in social capital across American society back in 2000 with his book Bowling Alone. Social capital is the reward from communal activity and sharing. Shrinking social capital impacts both civic and personal health according Puttnam.
Based on survey data outlining American social activities over the decades, Puttnam outlined how the population had become more disconnected from family, friends, neighbours, and social structures. This makes sense given the pivot that western society went through during the 1960s and 1970s towards existentialism, or even go further back as far as the post war period where Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care realigned parenting around the child as an individual. For various factors including long work days, both men and women working, increasing personal distractions meant that there was less participation with local organisations like:
The PTA (parent teacher association involved with a school).
Church (going to services, community bonding and related social work activities).
Clubs.
Political party related grassroots activities.
Organised sports such as bowling leagues.
In the revised edition of Bowling Alone, Puttnam explored the omnipresent fabric of social media and the internet which represented an opportunity for new types of social connections, as well as the threat of even higher levels of alienation and isolation.
Loneliness solutions
The World Health Organisation (WHO) considers social isolation / loneliness as one of the key social determinators of health. Over this decade, they have been focusing on loneliness in aging populations. Society has already been evolving various point solutions to help combat loneliness with varying degrees of success. There have been some attempts to use healthcare’s tool de jour -behavioural economics.
Mukbang
Mukbang (or meokbang) is a type of online streaming programming that started in Korea. It crossed the cultural barrier to western audiences where it lost its meaning as it became a platform for eating feats or stunts. In its original form, it addressed the loneliness felt by many Korean single-person households.
Korean cooking is designed to be shared. You have lots of side dishes, the best known of which is kimchi.
Mukbang streamers ate and interacted with people watching their stream, giving the impression of a virtual dinner table. The watchers may be only eating an instant ramen, a convenience store meal, take-out pizza or a Cafe de Paris baguette. But they had a parasocial experience more akin to when they lived with family members.
Elder care
WHO is most focused on the impact that loneliness has on the elderly in society. Governments and the health sector have looked to address this in a systematic way. In Hong Kong, there is a disco to bring elderly together and visits from therapy dogs are two of the ways local government have looked to stave off the worst effects of isolation.
Japan pioneered the use of robotics with the PARO therapeutic robot. It looks like a baby seal and provides a similar experience to a therapy lap dog. Sony’s Aibo has been adapted for a similar role.
Inclusivity
In Ireland, the Roman Catholic church has been weakened as the organisation at the centre of social fabric due modern Ireland gradually becoming more secular.
Clips from the Late Late Show hosted by Gay Byrne from the 1962 to 1999 showing how Irish society changed. Byrne was both a chronicle of change and a catalyst for it because of the discussions his show facilitated.
This was then exasperated by a seriesofscandals coming to light.
The GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) is Ireland’s largest sporting organisation and is made up of local amateur clubs playing indigenous Irish sports including camogie, hurling, Gaelic football, handball and rounders. The local GAA (Gaelic Athletics Association) clubs have gone some way to pick up the slack with the GAA Social Initative.
The GAA Social Initiative continues to grow in its capacity to enrich the lives of all older members of our communities while specifically reaching out to isolated older men across the 32 counties.
From its genesis in the observations of then President Mary McAleese of a dearth of older men at events she attended across the island of Ireland, it has grown from a small pilot project involving GAA clubs across four counties to one of the Association’s flagship community outreach projects.
Breakin was a 1984 film which brought hip hop culture around the world. You can criticise the plot and awkward dialogue, but the break dancing and body popping was amazing. The film was a sufficiently successful commercial success that a sequel was made to the original film.
The broom sweeping scene
The broom sweeping scene in Breakin was inspirational drawing from mime, body popping and breaking sparked the imagination of people around the world. It made the dancer Michael “Turbo” Boogaloo Shrimp Chambers a global celebrity. Chambers himself credited stop motion animation of films like Ray Harryhausen’s works as being a key influence. He went on to teach Michael Jackson the ‘moonwalk’.
The broom sweeping scene from Breakin was shot at 4323 Melrose Avenue, which in turn has turned into a pilgrimage for fans. So a camera crew and Chambers went back to the site and reshot the scene over one night. The production team had wrapped the building to resemble the original in 1984.
Despite Chambers recovering from knee surgery, he still has the skills some 34 years later.
Caterham Project V
Caterham are famous in the car world for their evolution of Colin Chapman’s Lotus 7 design, which was the purest manifestation of Chapman’s design philosophy to make light, great handling cars. Caterham has been looking at making the jump from internal combustion engine powered vehicles to electric power. Like previous Caterham cars, much of the design process is about curating parts from other manufacturers parts bins with their own chassis and suspension design to come up with a perfect handling chimera.
‘Military Magic’
The role of innovation and military development has on each other is a subject that is often discussed. Our modern online world is down to cold war thinking about resilient data and telecommunications network. But Kuo’s research has found that innovation can also hurt combat effectiveness and highlights the kind of factors where this might occur. Innovation isn’t bad, but can be done badly. More on related content here.
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
In the US, Keurig k-cup capsules are the default home brewed coffee standard, rather like Nespresso in Europe and much of Asia. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters worked with Kevin Costner to create signature roast varieties for him. The subsequent ad lampoons how brand partnerships often move from the authentic to the ridiculous.
7-Select
7-Eleven Hong Kong is a standby for workers wanting a grab-and-go breakfast, lunch or dinner at their desk. They have a range of foods called 7-Select. They promoted it online and via TV advertising this year using local celebrity Dee Gor and generative AI-based artwork.
The 7-Select range features many Hong Kong stables that merge western dishes like sandwiches in a local way that is emblematic of Hong Kong cuisine. Below is a video on the making of the advertisements including green screens and wire work – usually a staple of Hong Kong’s fantastical martial arts film industry.
