Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

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.

 

  • Dieter Rams

    I was watching the Dieter Rams documentary – Rams: Principles of Good Design by film maker Gary Hustwit and a small section jumped out at me.

    I immediately thought of how Spotify and other streaming services have dramatically changed our relationship with music. Music is as good a place to start as any, Dieter Rams first sprang to prominence due to a stereo dubbed Snow White’s coffin. Streamed music is not something that is actively listened to. The music disappears without leaving a trace.

    Digitisation diminishes our experience of things.

    Pictures appear and disappear one after the other without leaving a trace up here (pointing to his head).

    This goes insanely fast. 

    And maybe that’s why we can or want to, consume so much. 

    The world that can be perceived through the senses exudes an aura that I believe cannot be digitised. 

    We have to be careful now, that we rule over the digital world, and are not ruled by it. 

    Dieter Rams – Rams: Principles of Good Design

    Of course, consumerism took off at a rate of knots way before the cellphone became mainstream let alone the smartphone. But his comments about content being ephemeral in nature, lacking in memorability or substance rang through. Rams maybe right, we’re at a time where consumer interest in analogue media formats such as the vinyl record and the cassette tape is on the rise.

    There are even niche record labels that put out recordings on reel-to-reel tape for well-heeled and committed listener. As for the digital medium, the playlist is more important than the album or single, let alone the artist name. Even well established acts fail to make significant returns from streamed music. In some respects it goes back to era of the Rediffusion radio set that piped music into the consumers home, rather than ‘owned media’ from the LP to the iPod.

    Dieter Rams

    We’re seeing a move away from DAW (digital audio workstation) based instruments in music that Dieter Rams would likely approve of. And a move to hardware that would have been familiar to the 1970s version of Brian Eno. Despite the best efforts of Pearson Education and Amazon; consumers still love printed books.

    Continued love of Dieter Rams’ and his team’s own designs at Braun and Vistoe are an illustration of that championing of the real over virtual. More on design here.

  • Celine + more things

    Work & Co.’s clean looking website for Celine. Its a beautiful piece of luxury orientated user experience for Celine. It was founded in 1945 by Céline Vipiana. Celine was originally a made-to-measure children’s shoe business. In 1960, the brand decided to pivot, focusing its business on a ready-to-wear fashion brand for women with a sportswear approach. The brand offered a range of leather goods such as bags, loafers, gloves and clothes. By the 1970s Celine had boutiques in Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the US, Canada and Hong Kong. They were bought by Bernard Arnault in 1987 or 1988 around about the time that he took over at LVMH to build it into the world’s largest luxury conglomerate. More luxury related content here.

    I have deliberately ignored a lot of the brands trying to cling on to the proverbial vapour trail of the Apollo space programme; but this video caught my eye because it showed the amazing engineering chops of Sony. Just look at the detail-orientated design. You can understand why Sony was held in such high esteem as a brand when you watch this video.

    Dentsu (the agency network formerly known as the Dentsu Aegis Network) released its CMO survey (registration wall). From the almost 40 pages of content, one paragraph struck me as being the single most important take out:

    CMOs are often simply not incentivised to deliver long-term change. In terms of performance metrics, they’re primarily accountable for growing the customer base (see Figure 3), while medium/ long-term brand health and digital transformation are way down the pecking order. Coupled with the fact that, in many markets, CMOs often ‘enjoy’ the shortest average tenure of anyone in the C-suite (around three and a half years in the United States, for example) there is little reason for many CMOs to look beyond the near-term.

    2019 Dentsu Aegis Network CMO survey (sample size 1,000 CMOs)

    If you take into account the relatively short tenure of CMOs, it looks like a toxic brew for businesses in the medium to long term.

    It’s like as if this opinion piece was written with marketing in mind…. Watermelons vs. Sesame Seeds | World Bank.

    Interesting academic research paper that reflected on the triad actions against Hong Kong’s civil society and democracy movement in 2014, which seems sensible to revisit. Resurgent Triads? Democratic mobilization and organized crime in Hong Kong – Federico Varese, Rebecca WY Wong, 2018  

  • A fierce head cold & other aspects of my week

    My week had been truncated somewhat by a fierce head cold and am cranking this post out with less deliberation than normal due to a backlog of household chores that aren’t going to take care of themselves. Add to that a Lemsip induced haze to try and combat the fierce head cold and you see how the rest of this post will go

    Paul Armstrong shared this AR/VR example with me: Swedish creative agency Warpin posted a video of a H&M-commissioned experience for Magic Leap glasses. The concept looks like everything my cyberpunk fan brain would want; like being inside Max Headroom’s mind. I’d also imagine that it would be hellish for any length of time. More related content here.

    Warpin Media for H&M

    BBH came up with this campaign for Carabao energy drink. The ad is aimed at the Chinese market and asks the question ‘What fuels your fighting spirit?’. In western English – this would be closer to ‘what makes you resilient, or what gets you through?’. It’s pretty much the same question that any ad planner or creative in an agency has asked as they chug their energy drink of choice whilst working on a client pitch, or particularly tough creative brief.

    BBH Shanghai for Carabao

    ‘Dear young people don’t vote’ by Shokasonjuku is a great video highlighting the need for younger Japanese to get involved in the electoral process, if they want issues that they care about to be heard. Shokasonjuku is a production company set up by Nana Takamatsu – a Japanese comedian. Young people in Japan aren’t educated or engaged by the political process, something that Takamatsu wants to change.

    Shokasonjuku

    Martin Lindstrom on how data separates businesses from consumers and how ethnography can bridge the gap. It’s also interesting how he talks about small data; or what you and I would call qualitative data that leads to insight based on a human truth.

    Smart cart guides the visually-impaired around grocery stores | Trendwatching – so a beer brand comes up with a smart shopping cart, but is the marketing benefit to the beer brand anything other than ambient marketing? There’s nothing wrong in that of course, but the linkage that will be made with social purpose looks spurious at best. If you want to help people and you sell alcohol. Stop. Don’t enable drunk drivers, wife beaters and alcoholics.

  • Web services I use

    Web services I use everyday has evolved over time. I thought I’d explore what I use now, compared to my essential services nine years ago.

    Bloglines –  I have an eclectic and wide range of online reading material that I like to keep up with. Whilst I have a Google Reader account, it is set up as insurance against IAC shutting down Bloglines. I find Google Reader intrusive and not as productive as Bloglines. In addition, Bloglines works better on a mobile phone and power my blogroll

    Delicious – is my memory. I am a web pack rat and it comes in handy for research or pulling together case studies for presentations. I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks on my computer, mostly bookmarklets to take advantage of Google Translate, subscribe to a blog and pull up the local weather

    Google – as well as it being my default search engine, Google is also my currency converter, calculator, spell checker and timezone checker. The site has a surprising amount of shortcuts that make my life a lot easier. They don’t require any technical skill, more details here

    Teoma – one of the best kept secrets of the web, Teoma is my back-up search engine if Google isn’t giving me the kind of results that I want. If anything Teoma is more relevant than Google is on its search responses. It naturally doesn’t trawl as much of the web as Google and it isn’t as good for real-time or semi real-time content like the latest blog posts. But it does have a clean interface reminiscent of Google previously. If you hit the ‘Google found approximately 150,000 results’ and you can’t find what you are looking for in the first page (which you should have set to 100 results per page) then give Teoma a go

    Email – my primary personal email account is an Apple IMAP account (now sold as MobileMe), but I’m old school so I have a .mac address. I also have a couple of other IMAP accounts with a more limited circulation. IMAP is great as it allows you to sync your account across multiple devices and not pay a fortune for Microsoft Exchange

    iDisk – I know lots of people swear that Dropbox is the best, but I still like to use iDisk for large file transfers like presentations. Apple has progressively improved the product and I know it inside out

    Flickr – if Delicious is my memory of facts and figures then Flickr is my visual memory I use it as an aide memoire, image storage for my blog and as a kind of photo scrapbook

    Twitter – is the new IM. Instant messaging on my iPhone and on corporate networks can be a bit haphazard. Twitter gives you the direct message capability of IM but also allows for broadcast messages and syndication of content

    Skype – whilst all the fuss is happening in the iPhone world about Facetime I am more interested in Skype. Its combination of reasonably-priced VoIP calls and free Skype calling together with robust file transfer and chat messaging has made it ideal for business communications and keeping in touch with friends in far flung places

    LinkedIn – I’ve got business out of LinkedIn, polled opinions on the best content management system for a particular purpose and received recommendations on a web hosting company in Hong Kong. LinkedIn is an invaluable business tool

    Ten Web Services I Can’t Do Without | renaissance chambara

    Lets have a look this in terms of numbers. In the space of nine years:

    • 3/10 services no longer exist in a meaningful way
    • 4/10 services I no longer use
    • 3/10 services I still use, but are just not important to me anymore

    The key lessons to take away from these are:

    • The importance of data portability. Which is one of the reasons why I am minimally invested in Facebook
    • Always be looking out for new services that serve as a plan B
    • Steady but niche beats aspirational mass services every time. Ok so services like del.icio.us had a mass expectation pushed on them by large corporates post acquisition
    • It’s easier to make a service less useful than more useful – Skype definitely had a tipping point into the second tier for me following a user experience redesign around about the time of the Microsoft acquisition

    What does my list look like now?

    • Newsblur is my RSS reader of choice. Bloglines was shut down by IAC, so I had a choice of moving to Google Reader or FastLadder. FastLadder was an English language version of their iconic Japanese RSS reader. Livedoor got wrapped up in a financial scandal. The English language service was a distraction and eventually got shut down. Thankfully, RSS readers have a standard format to export your list of sites that you want to read called OPML files. The downside is that it has become fashionable for web designers to turn off RSS feeds on websites
    • Pinboard is my social bookmark platform of choice. Yahoo! started stripping the delicious team of its developers and they eventually transitioned their personal accounts to Pinboard. That was enough of a recommendation for me
    • Duck.com is now my first string search engine. Google is bumped to second tier. The key reason for Duck.com is privacy. It’s search quality is good enough, the search engine results page has a clean design rather like Google used to. Google still has handy vertical search options like Google Scholar and Google Translate are still top class.
    • Email – my use of email hasn’t changed at all. It has been a constant in a sea of change.
    • WeTransfer – Apple’s move from iDisk as a file system on the web to more of a tight integration with the company’s productivity apps (Keynote, Numbers, Pages)
    • Flickr is still my visual memory. It’s just an awful lot more web friendly than Instagram or Pinterest. It’s longevity is remarkable given all its been through with Yahoo!
    • Messaging got a lot more fragmented. I work with friends in China so WeChat is needed, as is KakaoTalk, Messages, WhatsApp and Slack. None of which offer a perfect fit
    • Skype has been replaced by a bridging conference call number and some people that I work with use Zoom. Skype still has some uses but my use has declined
    • LinkedIn is still an important business tool. Despite constant fiddling with the format, the spam on the platform and declining candidate functionality

    Listing these web services out it makes depressing reading. Declining functionality, good products (almost) sunk by large corporate shenanigans and corporate investors. In many respects things have stood still rather than moved forward with web services. More related content here.

  • Politics of history + more things

    The Politics of History: Why Anniversaries Matter in China | Macro Polo – great reading

    Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds | The New Yorker – interesting reading material about China and the US. Read this in concert with the Macro Polo article on the politics of history

    On the Mac Pro, the G4 Cube and Their Shared Vent Design – 512 Pixels – interesting breakdown on details. I expect the difference is down to the explosion in CNC capability unleashed by the iPhone

    Why PMI is doubling down on wooing Cannes | Marketing | Campaign Asia – feels like snake oil, disappointed to see Cindy Gallop participating in this, given her role in steering the moral compass of the ad industry

    Report: Chinese spend nearly 5 hours on entertainment apps daily | TechCrunch – Chinese internet users now spend an average of 4.7 hours on their handsets a day just for entertainment purposes, according to new data (in Chinese) collected by research firm QuestMobile. The number is up from the 4.1-hour average from a year ago. By ‘entertainment’, QuestMobile is counting services like e-reading, music streaming, online karaoke, video streaming, mobile gaming, live streaming, and of course, short videos that are taking the world by storm. The total screen time could be much higher given the country now prefers taking QR code payments instead of cash, not to mention eyeball time contributed by children using smartphones to do their homework and housewives searching for the best deals on ecommerce platforms

    Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles | Motor Authority – really interesting from a UX perspective, I was surprised car companies hadn’t got to this conclusion faster

    100 Radical Innovation Breakthroughs for the future | European Commission – where the EU is likely to be placing big bets, a good read, better than the latest Mary Meaker analysis (PDF)

    “Six Stories of GORE-TEX Products Vol. 2”: ACRONYM | GORE-TEX Brand – interesting interview tie Errolson Hugh

    Huawei Testing Russia’s Aurora OS As Complete Android Replacement, Report Claims – this makes more sense than Huawei’s home brewed OS

    242 Year Old Birkenstock is Not Interested in Being on Fashion’s “Trendy Punch List” — The Fashion Law – Birkenstock also turned down a collaboration with Supreme, which could very well be the buzziest streetwear brand in the world, with its bouncer-flanked stores and incessantly sold-out wares. “It was never about function for them, just logos,” Klaus Baumann, Birkenstock’s chief sales officer, speaking about Supreme, which regularly draws long lines of consumers outside of its store every week on Thursday when it “drops” new products, including collaborations. “These were not product people.” Birkenstock’s management is seemingly unimpressed by such antics.  Not mincing words Baumann states, “If I put a bouncer outside our doors on Saturday and regulate letting people in, I too could have a queue outside.” – more on luxury here.

    HOW TO PISS OFF A CREATIVE – BBH – epic