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.

 

  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

    I took the opportunity in June to re-read Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow. Kahneman uses storytelling from key points in his career to take the audience on a journey through biases and better decision-making. From a book that is obviously aimed at a consumer audience it has an outsized impact on marketers.

    After Thinking Fast and Slow presentations now talk about behavioural economics. What this meant in practice was revisiting the interface of psychological cues and marketing communications to encourage a desired behavioural change – like a purchase. It brought a renewed focus on A/B testing of call to action copy and images based around known consumer biases. The concept of system 1 and system 2 thinking is a useful way of understanding our own decision-making processes.

    It also forces us to think about how we market to consumers. Political campaigns often deliberately look to short-circuit deliberative system 2 thinking and tap straight into the raw emotion in system 1 thinking. It is automatic and can be ugly.

    Thinking Fast & Slow

    This isn’t necessarily a marketing handbook however, it is designed to make the average person more aware of their decision making process. It reminded me of Dan Ariel’s Predictably Irrational.

    The key difference is that Kahneman’s work provides more of a learning structure in the book. Ariel is closer to the ‘ain’t it cool’ style of Malcolm Gladwell (though more rigorously researched).

    I’d recommend that marketers start on Thinking Fast and Slow at the back. There is  summary of the book and then some supporting white papers. Once you have them read then go to the front and work your way through. The reason why I suggest this approach is that marketers use case is different to that of the man in the street (who buys his books from the non-fiction section of the New York Times bestseller list). More book reviews here.

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  • North Korea + more news

    North Korea

    North Korean Restaurants in China Close Amid Regional Tensions | Radio Free Asia – quality of food or China – North Korea politics? While both North Korea and China claim a close political kinship

    Business

    Nestle Targeted by Dan Loeb in Activist’s Biggest-Ever Bet – Bloomberg – Third Point up to its usual tricks, or something more?

    Consumer behaviour

    We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned (New Research) | Buzzsumo – probably the most depressing post on data driven content strategy in a while. (Rocks with head in hands whilst having no respect for audience)

    Culture

    The Vault Of The Atomic Space Age – amazing 20th century tech photography

    Design

    The Beautiful, Impossible Dream of a Simpler Smartphone | WIRED – The Apple Watch’s purpose (at least at first) was to quieten the demands of the iPhone

    FMCG

    Coffee Ripples – Home of the Ripple Maker – there is something soul destroying about this product

    Hong Kong

    Activist investor calls Hong Kong market rout | Reuters – network of mainland business people running a ‘pump and dump’ scheme on Hong Kong small caps market

    Ideas

    The iPhone Was Inevitable – The Atlantic – interesting how much testing of concepts went into the iPhone. It also emphasises the idea of the technium

    Legal

    Ends, Means, and Antitrust – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – worthwhile reading with regards Google’s EU antitrust trouble

    Luxury

    London Luxury Home Values Fall 6.8% in Year Since Brexit Vote – Bloomberg – by the looks of this the luxury home market is splitting. The track funded by banking and related professions is in decline. But luxury homes funded by inward foreign property investment seems to have suffered less, if at all

    Media

    Facebook video ad viewability rates are as low as 20 percent, agencies say | Digiday

    Security

    Internal Memo: Sir Martin Assures WPP Staff That Everything Is Fine in Wake of Cyberattack | AdWeek – WPP’s love of Windows left so many people exposed. Insistance on proprietary encrypted USB sticks would make working from home harder

    The global ransomware attack weaponized software updates – The Verge – this is epic

    China’s New Cybersecurity Law: The 101 | China Law Blog – interesting requirements laid down for data protection including use of encryption

    Software

    WeChat Developer Error Codes | Grata – so handy for English-speaking  developers

    Twist is Slack without the annoying distractions | TechCrunch – more of a feature that Slack can replicate rather than an alternative app?

    Tencent OS Ceases Services This Week | ChinaTechNews – Tencent finally wrapping up its distribution of Android. With WeChat’s dominance the OS has become a burden rather than an asset

    Where Technology Meets Culture: Week 1 of Living in Beijing – not news to readers of this blog, but a great summary of the WeChat economy in action

    Technology

    Apple Should Buy IBM | Forrester Blogs – Forrester seems to have a far higher opinion of Watson than many people I know in the industry. This comment from Max Pucher shreds Colony’s argument: As an ex-IBMer, Apple afficionado and Machine Learning expert I could not diisagree more. Apart from the immense cultural clash there is no need to buy IBM to get Watson. Watson is a marketing stunt that sells a consulting package to create a custom ML setup. What won Jeopardy was a glorified full text search engine that can’t be used for anything else. Siri is not grand but a lot more powerful than Watson.

    With ML-Kit in the next Apple software releases it will empower the Apple ecosystem to use machine learning extensively and widely. With Watson ML needs 50 IBM experts to do some pattern recognition application. At Apple a million creative developers will jump at the opportunity to use the embedded power of audio, image and video recognition in the platform.

    Apple’s GPUs will play a significant role in that.

    IBM is all AI hype and no substance snd while buying IBM would possibly be good for current IBM customers, Apple would not gain anything. But it shows how good IBM is in that form of marketing. IBM did the same stunt with Deep Blue when Joel Benjamin won against Kasparov with the help of a machine … that wasn’t AI either …

    Moore’s Law’s End Reboots Industry | EE Times – really interesting analysis of slowing process in semiconductors affects other industries

    American Chipmakers Had a Toxic Problem. So They Outsourced It – Bloomberg – technology’s tabacco moment is already upon us

  • Thinking about Marcel

    Publicis Groupe announced two things in the past week that caught the attention of the industry:

    • Withdrawing for 12 months from all promotional activity spend including the Cannes Lions awards
    • A Groupe-wide 12-month digital transformation fronted by a personal assistant app

    You can’t look at either in  isolation, they are both linked together.

    Why the withdrawal from promotional activities?

    There are various speculative takes on this:

    • Other groups doing better at Cannes Lions this year had caused them to ‘take their toys to go home and sulk’. I hadn’t looked at the Lion awards scores, but I wouldn’t think that this is the reason. Clients would react negatively to it. Clients have egos too
    • Cannes Lions have gotten too expensive. Running events on the Côte d’Azur has never been cheap. The hotels can charge premium rates, due to demand being greater than supply. The GSMA World Congress moved to Barcelona in 2006 for this reason. Cannes can still run a good event and the infrastructure is ideal for advertisers. Other groups like WPP have pared back their spend but not cut it completely
    • It’s designed to focus spend on the things that matter for the next 12 months. This was one reason articulated by Publicis. The spend involved isn’t going to make a significant difference. At least, not on a project of the scale outlined by Publicis
    • It’s designed to focus staff on the things that matter over the next 12 months. I think that this is a key factor. Marcel is a software layer for a wider culture change the ‘Power of One’. Forcing the agencies to work together to provide a full deep offering for the client. This creates an internal market for services, skills and knowledge. There is no use having a development team if you can tap into Sapient. This also leads to a de-duplication of capability, increase in efficiency (% billable time).  It also reduces duplication of knowledge creation – tap into it wherever it is. You would need to balance this against client confidentiality
    • It’s a PR stunt. If handled well Publicis could gain a lot of positive coverage from this. It’s a classic example of what Sun Tzu called ‘The Void’. It’s also a bloody expensive PR stunt – so one would have to presume this is a collateral benefit. What happens if Sapient doesn’t match what’s in the concept video 12 months from now? If it does succeed then Publicis ends up with a solution would help market their business – business eating its own dog food, as advertisement

    Let’s move on to Marcel itself

    It’s hard to deconstruct a corporate video to get a firm idea what the underlying form might be. The truth is that the underlying form may not even exist yet as a product brief. It takes time to coalesce an offering from high concepts to prototyping these concepts with a sampling of users. From then on you go to mapping out the functional requirements of the product and build it in a series of short sprints. Once you have a minimum viable product and tested it, you may want to tweak your project direction further.

    However, when you dig into it, Marcel isn’t only about an app, but re-engineering most of the IT infrastructure as well in order to support the machine learning capability. Marcel will find it harder to learn if the data is fragmented in drives with different permissions, online services or even offline.

    Carla Serrano describes Marcel as:

    A professional assistant that uses AI machine learning technology across our 80,000 people in 130 countries to connect, co-create and share in new and different ways.

    This won’t be like Alexa Home managing your calendar and your Spotify playlist.

    AI is put in there for audience members who wouldn’t know what machine learning is. A nice succinct definition below via TechTarget:

    Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. … The process of machine learning is similar to that of data mining.

    Let’s tease out the functions

    • Connect – could be anything from an intranet directory to a social network a la Facebook Work. The key element for success would be to get people to complete their profile and for the content to be validated. From personal experience, it is best if you get people to do this right at the point that you are on-boarding them. Getting a mass-push on employees doing this would be a campaign of attrition since there is always a client call to do, pitch to write or creative concept to develop. The information could be pulled across from HR systems, business planning, time-tracking / accounting systems and scraping LinkedIn profiles but all the data will be sub-optimal. How do you ensure consistent quality data on staff expertise? The key benefit of machine learning would be pulling information capacity and personnel career ambitions alongside mining the profiles.  What I’ve talked about in this paragraph is a major undertaking of data integration in itself

    I’ve ignored messaging as a function as most agencies use multiple channels for messaging including Slack, email, Skype/Lync or SMS. A messaging service might be built in, some of the interfaces could be ‘call-and-response’ chat bot style interactions.

    • Co-create – Co-creation could just be building a virtual team through the connection functionality, if its a platform in its own right what would that mean? Google co-creation platforms and you get 14,900,000 results. There are lots of options, opinions and descriptions of how to implement a platform to do it. Publicis could use some of these commercial off-the-self platforms. Decisions would have to be made if the co-creation would facilitate synchronous or asynchronous co-creation. Where do you want to have it involved in the process? Discovery, strategy, creative briefing, ideation, concept development? Is bolting Box.net accounts, Basecamp or Jira co-creation and where would the co-creation process benefit from machine learning?
    • Sharing – Back in the mid to lated 1990s knowledge management was a thing for technology marketers selling into enterprises. The idea was that a mix of data mining software (Autonomy or SAS Institute) would allow you to tap into the written knowledge across your company. Of course, it didn’t work out that well. Google tried a similar thing with its own Search Appliance hardware sold to enterprises. For a business like Publicis whose product is data, insights and ideas, the potential implications are huge

    Based on Google’s Return on Information: Improving your ROI with Google Enterprise Search white paper here are some rough numbers that I came up with.

    1706 - Marcel

    The notional productivity gain is worth well over $400,000,000 in additional billable time, or like having almost 1,600 additional staff at little additional cost. The key word in all this is ‘notional’.

    So what’s the downside to the factors outlined in the top-level view of Marcel?

    • Client confidentiality – imagine if you’re a client and you realise that your documentation within an agency can be searched for beyond the account team and could be used in ways that you don’t know about? This isn’t an unsurmountable problem, but it is something that I am sure Publicis would be thinking about
    • Changing working habits and culture – the most valuable files will be spread across Dropbox-like services, in email exchanges, on file servers, personal computers (Mac and Windows), USB sticks and optical media.  Software can look at unstructured data to try and make sense of it. But it needs access to the files first. As a manager how would you feel that you lose control over work assigned to your staff. How would you assess their work for their appraisals?
    • A marathon of sprints – this a huge IT undertaking across hardware infrastructure, networks and access. That’s before you’ve considered software development. On its own it would weighty task – in reality it will be a large amount of iterative tasks, any number of whom could delay or damage Marcel

    Understanding the context for Marcel

    The second half of the video is concept film of how Marcel would work in practice. It was likely put together to give voice to functionality rather than also thinking about tone. I would not be surprised if this was reused from an internal presentation to showcase the vision of Marcel to key stakeholders. The film has tonality in it is a bit concerning, I suspect it’s unintentional. If Marcel works as promised we would be in new territory for corporate culture however.

    Having watched it reinforced to me:

    • The technical scale and ambition Marcel represents. It is a huge undertaking from a technical point-of-view
    • Marcel is just the start of the hard work for Publicis.

    How do you ensure a culture that continues to attract and retain the top talent as the organisation gets Marcel operational?

    • What does it say to women (or men) who might want certain amount of work life balance due to family commitments or a desire to upskill?
    • How would it handle organisational politics?
    • Lesley might be requesting talent for his energy client but how would his demands be balanced against those of their line managers or other people in the business?
    • How might it redefine the role that line managers play for colleagues?

    The partial removal of client services as a gate keeper between Jamie the client and Publicis talent was interesting. It would make client services job to get their arms around all the business opportunities in the client much harder. It would also be more attractive to certain clients who would feel more in control of their account.

    Themes in the film:

    • Marcel is being used at night or in the twilight – usage massively extending the working day. Agencies aren’t really a 9 – 5 lifestyle at the best of times, but this video implies even less work-life balance as standard working practice. The introductory dialogue is shot at twilight and Alex the Asian American strategist, sits in an empty office at night time. Lesley is in the artificial time of an subway station and even the Arc de Triomphe dropped in is shot in twilight
    • Marcel is mobile – and being used out-of-the office in most of the film. This implies that the work day has no boundaries. Does it imply that mobile devices are no longer for reacting to urgent emails, has the balance of work expectations changed to zero-downtime always on proactive working? How would an agency team be able to keep their thinking fresh over the medium and longer term?
    • Marcel is desktop – Alex uses Marcel on a desktop computer and the web service provides a Statista like set of visualisations for data. The implication being a large amount of research source integration (social insights, market data, Kantar media data???). This would also affect third party licenses as information is pooled
    • The dialogue implies a ‘Siri’-like experience on the mobile app, except that it understands what you’re saying. Marcel is far more articulate conversationalist than Siri, Google, Alexa or my banks interactive voice system. He’d probably score highly on Tinder due having a personality. I suspect most of this is a plot device for storytelling. Alex gives voice to his key strokes and Marcel is manifested as a search box rather like Bing using a desktop computer. Lesley the South African client service person is not talking to his phone as he moves up the escalator – he is literally giving voice to his thoughts. He sounds stressed.
    • Jamie the client from a bank is an interesting vignette. She has direct access to Marcel as a client facing tool and it is suggesting Publicis contacts to her, normally you would expect a client services person to be that interface.
    • Ines, the copy writer in Brazil has the most positive experience portrayed. Marcel understands her complex career aspirations and offers her opportunities to work on an Indian project. It looks as if she is doing this work at home, again reinforcing ambiguous message on work / life balance?
    • All of the people are alone, Marcel is not shown being used in a normal office environment. Marcel becomes your team?

    TL;DR

    Marcel is the business equivalent of playing high stakes poker. If it is pulled off successfully it would put Publicis in an excellent position versus it’s competitors. However there is a lot that can go wrong from a technological and organisation perspective.

    I don’t know how much of this can be realistically achieved in the 12 months that Publicis seems to have given itself? It strikes me that this is likely to be a transformation that would require much more time in order to fully match the vision outlined.  From a cultural perspective the challenge of ‘break, build, bond’ hides the level of complexity and change going on.

    The biggest risk is what happens if Publicis doesn’t meet the wider industry expectations of success with Marcel? How will that affect client perceptions of them, or their ability to hire talent? How would it affect Sapient’s standing as a technology company?

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  • Cinema in China + more news

    Cinema in China

    China’s total number of cinema screens now exceeds the US | Marketing Interactive – why Hollywood makes odd casting and big spectacle films. That also doesn’t mean that Hollywood is making the same revenue per screen either. Anecdotally, I heard of cinemas in China, running a ticket up as a local film and then crossing the cinema screen number off and changing it for a Marvel film. The customer gets to see the film that they want and the revenue goes to the local film instead. Hollywood already has a very limited access to the Chinese cinema market. The Communist Party of China is looking to grow domestic soft power, that means further limiting Hollywood’s access to cinema in China

    Business

    Macron wants limits on Chinese investments, takeovers in Europe’s strategic industries – smart move, there is a strong case for a ‘China reciprocity law’ forcing technology transfer to the EU and restricting investment in strategic industries

    It’s business, and it’s personal: How Amazon Web Services decides to enforce non-compete contracts – GeekWire – sounds like most non-compete clauses

    China

    China’s Biggest Gaming ‘Whales’ Are Werewolves — The Information – I was introduced to Werewolf in the early noughties by some of my geekier friends

    Consumer behaviour

    Americans won’t wait more than four minutes for a slightly less disgusting hamburger | Quartz – which funnily enough was the time that the McDonald’s restaurant I worked in for six weeks at the start of my working career aimed to surpass

    Design

    Owl Labs Meeting Owl – cute product design for… – I am reminded of the wood cut faces on the beneath the facias of old Nokia 5110 handsets

    Design in the Era of the Algorithm | Big Medium

    Economics

    The Political Kindling of the Grenfell Fire – The Atlantic – Britain has slipped to sixth in the economic rankings. Yet either position, fifth or sixth, is misleading: Broadly speaking, Britain is an economically average country, with one exceptionally rich region—London, which is reportedly home to more multimillionaires and billionaires than any other city in the world, and serves as the country’s economic engine. Of the EU’s 15 strongest economies, none rely as heavily on one area as the U.K. does: London’s per capita GDP is almost two and a half times Britain’s national average. But London’s enviable self-confidence, its robust financial services sector, and glittering facade, obscure the devastating inequality that plagues the U.K. While the city is Britain’s lone representative among the 10 richest regions in northern Europe, the country also includes a stunning nine of northern Europe’s 10 poorest regions. – One paragraph deflation of British hubris that underpins the likes of the Leave campaign and a great argument for London becoming a city state.

    The Car Was Repossessed, but the Debt Remains – The New York Times – For low-income Americans, the fallout could, in some ways, be worse than the mortgage crisis. With mortgages, people could turn in the keys to their house and walk away. But with auto debt, there is increasingly no exit. Repossession, rather than being the end, is just the beginning. “Low-income earners are shackled to this debt,” said Shanna Tallarico, a consumer lawyer with the New York Legal Assistance Group

    Finance

    Investors step in to play risky role of lender | WSJ City – at what point does this become similar to China’s shadow banking practices?

    FMCG

    Unstoppable at home, Ramdev’s Patanjali gets a reality check in Nepal | Quartz – Ramdev’s products have given the likes of Unilever a scare in India, interesting to see his brand has limits

    Ideas

    Targeting and the F3EAD Process | Havok Journal – interesting perspective with key focus of reducing time to insight and action

    Japan

    WATANABE KATSUMI: “GANGS OF KABUKICHO” | #ASX – amazing portrait images

    Why is Japanese customer service so amazing? Because in Japan it’s one strike and you’re out | SoraNews24

    Luxury

    Brands are learning millennials’ language for luxury: “organic,” “sustainable,” “ethical” — Quartz – oh god sounds awful. More related posts here

    Cathay Pacific still ranks among top five airlines in the world, with other Hong Kong carriers also taking home accolades | South China Morning Post – despite all the problems

    Marketing

    Harbin beer and Starcom join hands to push China’s e-Sports | Marketing Interactive

    P&G Malaysia goes on LINE to grow online following | Marketing Interactive – probably very big in Thailand for this as well

    Media

    WPP folds Neo@Ogilvy into Mindshare | Campaign Asia – interesting move to bring all paid media inside GroupM

    Group M downgrades UK ad growth forecast in part due to brand safety fears | Campaign Live – Advertisers are increasingly taking a more measured view toward digital as they grapple with developing data strategies; setting more coherent objectives; attribution considerations; increased brand safety and accountability expectations and the appreciating trade-off between risk, price and performance

    Security

    Tim Cook was right to fight the FBI | TheNextWeb

    Software

    Inside Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence Comeback | WIRED – interesting article on two levels. Firstly, Microsoft’s approach and direction on AI, secondly the classic approach to storytelling from a PR perspective. Not surprisingly they are focused on Facebook and Google

    Minecraft’s New 4K Textures Don’t Even Look Like Minecraft | Extreme Tech

    Technology

    Apple Culture After Ten Years of iPhone – Monday Note – The First Trillion Dollars is Always the Hardest

    Robots are doing the work of $326,000-a-year Goldman Sachs employees – Axios

    Wireless

    Roam like at home? Not so fast – POLITICO – interesting exceptions

    Sunrise preps 2G switch-off | total telecom – interesting move by the Swiss carrier. Greater focus on in-building and long distance performance of LTE

  • Global activation, local amplification

    “Global activation local amplification” – four words that make a process sound easy.  Yet it is amazing how many established successful multi-nationals struggle with this process.

    I was talking to  friend the other week who talked about a project that they were asked to pitch for. A global multinational asked them to come and workshop the company’s digital global activation strategy for local teams – so that they could then work out how to localise it.

    The implication was that a global activation strategy had been decided upon that didn’t take into account who it could be scaled for markets with low budgets (small countries) or atypical digital usage.

    Global activation, local amplification

    I’ve used the words atypical here for good reason. These markets may not have gone through widespread desktop online usages. They may be transitioning between feature phones and SMS to low specification smartphones on lean data plans. However, in the likes of Kenya, their use of mobile payments with services like mPesa are far ahead of the west.

    You also can’t assume that usage is one phone, one person. In the likes of rural India the phone may be used by other family members with SIMs being the individual’s own.

    How much of their media consumption is side loaded on to mobile devices?

    A global activation approach requires extensive discussions with local company stakeholders BEFORE it’s sufficiently baked. I worked on web properties at Unilever and we thought about how could graphical assets be leveraged, a common social publishing platform (Percolate) and common measurement (Adobe Analytics) as a primary focus. We recognised that markets may want to build leaner, smaller websites or roll out changes when they had marketing budget.

    Bringing key stakeholders gives them ownership of the strategy, so they are much more likely to give a decent effort in local amplification. More related content here.

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