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.
Bob Cringely was writing about the concept of big sky in one of his recent columns and I thought that it was worthwhile sharing here.
Big sky by Whatknot. (The picture was originally taken in Nevada).
Origins of big sky theory in early flight
Big Sky theory came from early aviation. The main problem pilots faced was crashing into the ground rather than a mid-air collision. There was relatively few planes happening compared to the big sky out there. That meant the odds of collision were so low as to be not worth worrying about.
Or as Cringely put it:
Another version of Big Sky is Inshallah, an Arabic language expression meaning “if God wills” or “God willing.” The term is mentioned in the Quran and Muslims often use it when speaking about future events. Climate change or organized crime or the well running dry or uncontrolled instrument flight won’t negatively affect us if we are on the correct side of God, Inshallah.
Bob Cringely
It was only with the increasing air travel of the mid-1950s that the air traffic controller directed traffic we are used to now came into force. This traffic controller directed process is known as positive control.
Data as antidote
The phrase is used in areas such as environmental concerns around climate change, deforestation or peak oil. It makes the most sense when based on individual empirical experience or opinion. It works really well in rhetoric. Often dangerously so. It is usually countered by the use of data. Data provides qualitative risk calculations. Data is now used to conduct planes along airways one after the other. It is the same with shipping lanes.
From economics to pandemic prevention data based regulation has proved it’s worth.
In essence it represents thinking 180 degrees away from Malthusian ideas. More similar content here.
How “God Makes God” is a 1993 CD ROM about probability, game theory, genetic algorithms, and evolutionary strategies | Boing Boing – I remember having my mind blown by this CD ROM at college. It reminded me of Jostein Gaarder’s book Sophie’s World in terms of its approach to making philosophy entertaining and accessible. I remember reading Sophie’s World around the same time as having played How God Makes God. There was something about HyperCard and the CD ROM authoring tools that followed. Amidst all the brochureware there were creators who drove extraordinary media projects, most notably for me was the game Myst, which I don’t think has been bettered. I suspect part of it was the excitement of new ‘hyper-media’, the limitations of the tools (though 640MB storage at the time seemed vast when I was using an Apple PowerBook 165 with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB hard drive at the time) and the media economics of the time. CD-ROM authoring tools were becoming more sophisticated. CD manufacturing plants were proliferating, lowering the cost per CD ROM disk and CD recordable drives were relatively affordable in the price range of $10,000 – $20,000. Still eye wateringly expensive, but this was a vast improvement from just two years before and allowed for better prototyping, small production runs and testing across devices.
Instacart Is a Parasite and a Sham | The New Republic – The gig economy company, like many of its peers, has seen business skyrocket during the pandemic—while exploiting workers and even failing to turn a profit. That last bit reminds me a lot of the first generation dot com companies who tried to break through the wall of economics and succeed by moving at internet speed. This time they seem to have supplemented the usual ‘throw money at it’ approach with a lack of morality
Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng.
China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.
Luxury
From TikTok to Depop: Fashion’s new trend funnel | Vogue Business – trends like leather, feathers, neutrals or hot pinks, were relatively easy to follow: the trend funnel moved from runway to rack, with some help from popular culture along the way. This year, Gen Z users on TikTok and Depop jumpstarted a new trend funnel, quickly giving rise to aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “dark academia”, influencing young shoppers’s purchases. “If one of your favourite [TikTok] creators changes their aesthetic due to a particular trend, a whole style can be born out of it,” says Yazmin How, TikTok’s content lead. “The fashion industry is no longer the only voice directing the new season’s trends. People are tapping into TikTok to see what emerging styles are ‘in’ and what previously popular trends are coming back around.” TikTok trends manifest into purchases on Depop, where 90 per cent of users are Gen Z. In step with the rise of the cottagecore trend on TikTok, search for the term on Depop rose 900 per cent between March to August, when it reached its peak. Greater connectivity and increased time at home has boosted the amount of these consumer-led movements, and brands whose aesthetics fit the trends are benefiting, like LoveShackFancy, who specialises in the prairie dresses and gingham blouses associated with cottagecore’s countryside aesthetic – reminds me a bit of the Harajuku trends from the past 30 years. Culture and the trends that come out of it, are now massively parallel in nature
Why Bella Poarch’s “M to the B” video was the top TikTok of 2020 – Vox – TikTok automates the mix of all these topics, going farther than any other platform to mimic the human editor.” At the same time, he says, it’s also “an eternal channel flip, and the flip is the point: there is no settled point of interes t to land on. Nothing is meant to sustain your attention.” The result, he argues, is what essentially amounts to “soft censorship,” or a feed that becomes as “glossy, appealing, and homogenous as possible rather than the truest reflection of either reality or a user’s desires.” How did a perfectly average competitive dancer become the No. 1 internet celebrity in the world? Why did half a billion people watch Poarch’s face bob up and down? Because these two women are the logical endpoint of the world’s most powerful entertainment algorithm: young people centering their conventional attractiveness in easily repeatable formats
Retailing
Amazon and the Rise of the Retail “Sniffer” Algorithm | The Fashion Law – the “sniffer algorithm” – or better yet, “one or more” sniffer algorithms that not only sniff out topics that a speaker is potentially interested in but that also “attempt to identify trigger words in the voice content, which can indicate a level of interest of the user.” For example, as Amazon’s patent application states, “A keyword that is repeated multiple times in a conversation might be given assigned a higher priority than other keywords, tagged with a priority tag.” At the same time, “a keyword following a ‘strong’ trigger word, such as ‘love’ might be given a higher priority or weighting than for an intermediate trigger word such as ‘purchased.’” – when does assistance become creepy?
Insecure wheels: Police turn to car data to destroy suspects’ alibis | NBC News – investigators have realized that automobiles — particularly newer models — can be treasure troves of digital evidence. Their onboard computers generate and store data that can be used to reconstruct where a vehicle has been and what its passengers were doing. They reveal everything from location, speed and acceleration to when doors were opened and closed, whether texts and calls were made while the cellphone was plugged into the infotainment system, as well as voice commands and web histories. But that boon for forensic investigators creates fear for privacy activists, who warn that the lack of information security baked into vehicles’ computers poses a risk to consumers and who call for safeguards to be put in place
Web of no web
Tencent backs Chinese healthcare portal DXY in $500M round | TechCrunch – China has done a lot of work to move towards telemedicine and technology augmented health. Tencent’s WeChat was used by local governments for their COVID certificates, tracking and tracing applications. More Tencent related content here.
Looking back at 2020 was based on desk research I undertook at the end of March through to the beginning of May this year for 90TEN; with a healthy dollop of hindsight added.
The first thing that I tried to make sense of was all the noise from experts who claimed that everything was going to change. Clearly that wasn’t going to be the case. But what would elements would be most affected? I narrowed it down to a combination of three factors:
Demand side and supply side economic change
Accelerating trends
Behavioural change
Where you have an intersection of all three, then you are more likely to have lasting change.
Behavioural change on its own won’t work. When we had the Spanish flu, there was a similar level of masking and social separation. But what followed was the hedonism of the roaring 20s. But all three factors together would act as a push-and-pull on sustained behaviour change.
Thinking specifically about acceleration, we saw a number of things happen.
Changes in sectors and practices that would have taken years have taken months. Such as the adoption of remote working practices
Things that were on the edge suddenly became mainstream, like mask wearing that was previously only popular in east asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan
The rise of e-commerce and food delivery was a classic edge case to mainstream move.
Looking back 2020, one of the topics is the speed of change in circumstances and the relative lack of change in human behaviour. One academic claimed that it revealed what really mattered to a population. Although this misses out that the competency of a government as a key determining factor.
Canvas8 presented a model of human behaviour during an epidemic, which I shared in looking back at 2020. This shaped a key part of my thinking around human behaviour.
Like the grief process, the pandemic human behaviour model starts with denial.
And then anxiety…
Adjustment is how people have adapted to the circumstances. Society as a whole is still under strain.
Life is reconsidered moving forward, a classic example of this would be the Wuhan EDM pool party held in the autumn.
The new normal where COVID-19 is now under control and will have shaped future consumer behaviour.
Canvas8 also mapped out likely consumer behaviour against the stages.
Consumers had a clear view of what they wanted from brands. Brands often struggled to match the expectations of consumers. Dettol’s UK marketing efforts being an exemplary example of how to get it wrong. Looking back at 2020, we had the opportunity to do fantastic marketing work utilising digital and TV platforms, but very little of that opportunity was utilised.
A couple of organisations deserve for their efforts to be highlighted. My former colleagues at LONDON Advertising used their own marketing during the middle of the crisis to demonstrate the power of marketing. Secondly, the IPA ran a sustained campaign in the FT promoting the power of advertising to the c-suite.
The economic factors that will be a driver in societal change, made up the third factor alongside behavioural aspects and acceleration of existing trends.
The initial economic forecasts were very negative which drove a ‘correction’ in the stock markets.
Past trends indicate that these kind of crises cause an economic decline that countries bounce back from. However a lot of the change happening is non-COVID related or only tangentially related like China’s escalating trade sanctions on Australia.
Post COVID-19 economic impact is like dropping industry sectors in a time machine. The kind of change that would normally have taken years to run its course has happened in months. What is more worrying is the amount of unsustainable debt that has been taken on board by businesses across sectors. Over time this will benefit larger established businesses over smaller, or newer ones.
I put in an extra section into looking back at 2020 about the young because the insights challenge many of marketers holy cows in terms of views on younger members of society.
Telemedicine attitudes and usage shows that the heuristic of young people being technology adopters doesn’t hold up. Which is usually presumed in sentiment around digital natives.
The resisters shatters a stereotype of young people being progressive, purpose driven people. And they are media literate and media savvy by nature. Yet they are exhibiting behaviours that would be more in tune with older people with reactionary views.
I put in the links to the sources that I mention in the presentation. However I formed my views by looking at much more material. Just over a gigabyte of data sources that relate to COVID-19 which I went through is on Google Drive. Everything from consumer behaviour to economic data is available here. The looking back at 2020 presentation is available for download here. (More on issues related consumer behaviour here.)
Creative agency Endeavour sent out the first Christmas card that I received. This year they focused on content rather than design with everything that you need Christmas 2020 – Endeavour.
There was guidance on how to make paper Christmas trees including a green PDF that you can print out if you don’t like the snow white look of unprinted paper and a Spotify playlist.
The Financial Times have put together a series article looking atThe Future of the City. The City in question being the London’s international financial services sector, whose traditional home is the City of London – think Wall Street in New York, or Central in Hong Kong. I found How London grew into a financial powerhouseparticularly informative and all the articles are chock full of charts.
A relatively modern Carroll family Christmas tradition has been my Dad and I watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It will carry extra weight this year due to social distancing and the recent death of John Le Carre. My Dad read his books whilst working shifts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He used to buy books second hand from a florrid looking book dealer in the local market. I in turn, read my Dad’s books (Len Deighton, Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre) as I went through the early years of secondary school. Le Carre was the only one of these authors that I decided to read more than once.
This time, we’ll both be watching them on Blu-Ray whilst keeping the video open on FaceTime to discuss it as we go along.
It doesn’t get more 1990s than this. A skateboarder reading his self-authored poetry. Mike Vallely a professional skateboarder. If my memory serves me right, Vallely rode for Powell Peralta (Bones Brigade) factory team a few separate times during his career. In this video he gives the poetry reading in a LA skate shop back in 1996.
https://youtu.be/QTr2Mvz873c
The Luxury Society held a panel in Shanghai talking about luxury brands and the digital behaviour of the Chinese consumer. More luxury related content here.
Revealed: China suspected of spying on Americans via Caribbean phone networks | US news | The Guardian – China is alleged to have used Caribbean phone networks to conduct its surveillance. I’d imagine that they aren’t the only people to do this – At the heart of the allegations are claims that China, using a state-controlled mobile phone operator, is directing signalling messages to US subscribers, usually while they are travelling abroad. Signalling messages are commands that are sent by a telecoms operators across the global network, unbeknownst to a mobile phone user. They allow operators to locate mobile phones, connect mobile phone users to one another, and assess roaming charges. But some signalling messages can be used for illegitimate purposes, such as tracking, monitoring, or intercepting communications.– always use a VPN when roaming whether it’s Caribbean phone networks or elsewhere. We don’t know which Caribbean phone networks are vulnerable, could it be Digicel? More security related posts here.
LS Keynote Shanghai 2020: The Digital Transformation of International Brands in China – studies by Boston Consulting Group for the luxury sector showed that 93 per cent of purchases in China are influenced by digital touchpoints – which is significantly higher compared to the 60 per cent observed in the global market. This makes developing digital offerings in China more significant for luxury brands. On top of its external transformation, it is also crucial for brands to establish an effective organisational structure and infrastructure internally. When it comes to creating omnichannel experiences, the development of online channels should be done so in tandem with offline touchpoints, opined Liang. Any projects that straddle online and offline must be supported by frontline staff – something he sees as a key challenge for luxury brands today – interesting stuff from Luxury Society
To the moon and back, Chinese R&D is leaving the US behind | Financial Times – Once upon a time, the US government invested heavily in research. US federal R&D spending surged after the Soviets launched Sputnik, peaking in 1965 at 11.7 per cent of federal spending and at 2.2 per cent of gross domestic product. Frontier discoveries from that time led to the internet and GPS, the global navigation system. But in the decades since putting a person on the moon, US government investment in ideas has waned. In constant dollars, Nasa spending had fallen by more than half by the early 1970s; it has been flat ever since. By 2019, total federal R&D spend constituted just 2.8 per cent of all federal spending and just 0.6 per cent of GDP — the lowest since the start of the cold war.
US orders emergency action after huge cyber security breach | Financial Times – Hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world use SolarWinds’ Orion platform. The US department of Homeland Security’s cyber security arm ordered all federal agencies to disconnect from the platform, which is used by IT departments to monitor and manage their networks and systems. FireEye, a leading cyber security company that said it had fallen victim to the hack last week, said it had already found “numerous” other victims including “government, consulting, technology, telecom and extractive entities in North America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East”.
‘This Feels Uncomfortable’: Nike Tackles Racism In Japan – observers criticised Nike for misunderstanding or disrespecting its host country — as if racial prejudice were somehow a component of Japanese culture that should not be challenged. The issue is more complex than both the content and the censure suggest, but the reaction was a reminder that Japan is still less accustomed to ‘purpose-driven’ brand work than many economically advanced markets. It also underscored that extreme right-wing views exist in Japanese society, even if people rarely give voice to them in an offline environment. For some ordinarily bold brands, it is likely to prompt a round of second-guessing before adopting a sensitive social topic as part of their marketing efforts. “People think discrimination isn’t part of Japanese life, but it is,” said one Japanese in-house communications head at a multinational consumer-facing company, who wanted to remain anonymous. She added that she did not see the work as offensive but as helping to raise awareness of unconscious bias. At the same time, she said she would weigh the risks with extra care before embarking on any diversity-oriented campaign
China pulls back from the world: rethinking Xi’s ‘project of the century’ | Financial Times – two Chinese banks lent $462bn, just short of the $467bn extended by the World Bank, according to the Boston University data. In some years, lending by the Chinese policy banks was almost equivalent to that by all six of the world’s multilateral financial institutions — which along with the World Bank include the Asian Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Investment Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the African Development Bank — put together. In global development finance, such a sharp scaling back of lending by the Chinese banks amounts to an earthquake. If it persists, it will exacerbate an infrastructure funding gap that in Asia alone already amounts to $907bn a year, according to Asian Development Bank estimates. In Africa and Latin America — where Chinese credit has also formed a big part of infrastructure financing — the gap between what is required and what is available is also expected to yawn wider. China’s retreat from overseas development finance derives from structural policy shifts, according to Chinese analysts. “China is consolidating, absorbing and digesting the investments made in the past,” says Wang Huiyao, an adviser to China’s state council and president of the Center for China and Globalisation, a think-tank. – there are limits to what even China can do to defy economic laws. Overall the infrastructure costs of the British empire were much higher than is generally realised
