Ged Carroll

Category: innovation | 革新 | 독창성 | 改変

Innovation, alongside disruption are two of the most overused words in business at the moment. Like obscenity, many people have their own idea of what innovation is.

Judy Estrin wrote one of the best books about the subject and describes it in terms of hard and soft innovation.

  • Hard innovation is companies like Intel or Qualcomm at the cutting edge of computer science, materials science and physics
  • Soft innovation would be companies like Facebook or Yahoo!. Companies that might create new software but didn’t really add to the corpus of innovation

Silicon Valley has moved from hard to soft innovation as it moved away from actually making things. Santa Clara country no longer deserves its Silicon Valley appellation any more than it deserved the previous ‘garden of delights’ as the apricot orchards turned into factories, office campus buildings and suburbs. It’s probably no coincidence that that expertise has moved east to Taiwan due to globalisation.

It can also be more process orientated shaking up an industry. Years ago I worked at an agency at the time of writing is now called WE Worldwide. At the time the client base was predominantly in business technology, consumer technology and pharmaceutical clients.

The company was looking to build a dedicated presence in consumer marketing. One of the business executives brings along a new business opportunity. The company made fancy crisps (chips in the American parlance). They did so using a virtual model. Having private label manufacturers make to the snacks to their recipe and specification. This went down badly with one of the agency’s founders saying ‘I don’t see what’s innovative about that’. She’d worked exclusively in the IT space and thought any software widget was an innovation. She couldn’t appreciate how this start-ups approach challenged the likes of P&G or Kraft Foods.

  • Saudi Arabia & things that caught my eye this week

    Saudi Arabia

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

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

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

    https://flic.kr/p/2ix6UaC
    Riyadh, Saudi Arabia by Andrey Filippov

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

    The Disk

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

    The Telegraph

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

    Right Up Our Alley

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

    Stop Asian Hate

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

    https://flic.kr/p/2kMB4UL

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

    More on what you can do here.

    Do Not Split

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

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

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

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

  • Declare ads & things that caught my eye this week

    Declare ads

    YouTuber Tom Scott delves into the marketing industry and laws that force influencers to declare ads. It is worthwhile watching regardless of how involved you are in marketing. Scott points out what he considers to be inconsistencies in the principles of when to declare ads. In particular, he focuses on the role of product placement in film and TV programmes and the way that is handled.

    Future of

    Wired contributor and author of What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly has spent the COVID lockdown putting together some great talks on YouTube on the future of different aspects of technological progress.

    Kelly’s opinions are usually well thought out and the videos are better than sitting through a few conferences; especially TED conferences.

    SolarWinds

    World Affairs put together a great panel to discuss the recent SolarWinds hack and the impact it has had across both enterprises and governments.

    Celebrity Zoom Bombing

    I was listening to a podcast about a University of Sydney research paper on Zoom based culture building. TL;DR – it doesn’t work unless participation is truly voluntary. Most of them are painful. Lights and Shadows were commissioned to help help promote fun in a company corporate culture. Usually did creative events, but for COVID-19 they had to get creative in Zoom.

    Somehow they managed to get celebrities, or convincing deep fakes to bomb existing Zoom calls.

    Strong Enemy

    The strong enemy is Chinese Communist Party-speak for the United States. China increasingly sees its relationship with the US to lead to eventual war. Xi Jingping has been talking more about the strong enemy in speeches aimed at the PLA to get them ready for inevitable conflict with the US. Sinocism has this great essay on it all.

  • Stott on Hong Kong + more things

    Clifford Stott did a call with the Hong Kong Democrat Party on the Hong Kong protests. His responses also cover issues around COVID-19 and how western nations handle crises. Stott believes that China will be a malign authoritarian influence beyond Hong Kong.

    https://youtu.be/-yr41blUudU

    Clifford Stoff is an expert on deescalation and riot prevention. He came to prominence when he was one of a number of international experts who stepped aside from the Hong Kong government IPCC enquiry. Instead he cowrote Patterns of ‘Disorder’ During the 2019 Protests in Hong Kong: Policing, Social Identity, Intergroup Dynamics, and Radicalization

    Probably one of the darkest aspects of the video is when Stott points out that he visited Hong Kong at the invitation of the Hong Kong Police and wouldn’t be able to go back due to the National Security Law. More security related content here.

    DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time | ZDNet 

    Safari 14 added WebExtensions support. So where are the extensions? – Six Colors – extensions offer the kind of functionality that push apps used to provide

    How Social Media’s Obsession with Scale Supercharged Disinformation | HBR 

    The Opposite of Mercedes’ Hyperscreen: The Heavily Analog Dashboards of Rally Cars – Core77 – in criticism of convergence in product design

    Where’s the spark? How lockdown caused a creativity crisis | Financial Times – “I don’t look back on the past year and think the collaborations I’ve been involved in are any less creative than before. But I don’t know what I’ve missed.”

    Tory rebels seek to block trade deal with China over Uighurs | Financial Times – Boris Johnson faces a rebellion by about 30 Tory MPs on Tuesday who are seeking to block a potential post-Brexit trade deal with China over its human rights record. The amendment to the trade deal — promoting a UK trade policy that upholds human rights — is co-sponsored by one-time Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith and former minister Nusrat Ghani. It would stop ministers from cutting trade deals with countries found guilty of genocide by the High Court. It is backed by all the opposition parties as well as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Board of Deputies of British Jews

    Beijing spying fears as it emerges airframes of new MoD spy planes were previously used by Chinese airlines – and what was the MoD procurement people doing?

    We don’t need strategists, we need planners – good op-ed by Dave Trott

    Making Sense of the Facebook Menace | The New Republic – interesting but flawed analysis of Facebook

    Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook – The New York Times 

    As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China – Tuesday’s chaos arose after China Railway Shenyang failed to deactivate Flash in time, leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province. Staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules and arrange shunting plans.Authorities fixed the issue by installing a pirated version of Flash at 4:30 a.m. the following day.

  • CES 2021

    CES 2021 – the Consumer Electronics Show usually sets the tone at the start of the year for consumer-oriented technology. It usually fills up Las Vegas’ hotels and conference facilities.

    CES 2021 went online only. Like attending online conferencing the experience was lacking. Networking and informal conversations aren’t something that technology has managed to solve.

    Consumer electronics manufacturers didn’t let the virtual nature of CES 2021 put them off though. LG and Samsung went gangbusters rolling out new products. One can understand their enthusiasm based on CTA research for US TV sales in 2020:

    Televisions: Households channeled discretionary dollars into upgrading TVs in a record-setting year for shipments in 2020. CTA expects steady demand for displays in 2021 as TVs remain the centerpiece for entertainment in homes. Television shipments will drop 8% to 43 million units in 2021, the second-highest volume on record, while revenues will decline just 1% to $22 billion. Growth areas for TVs in 2021 include sets over 70-inches (3.3 million units, up 6%) and 8K Ultra High-Definition TVs (1.7 million units, up 300%).

    U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA

    According Parks Associates, smart TVs were the most popular devices for streaming content. This has been on the rise since 2018. This offers a business opportunity for TV manufacturers and also a potential point of differentiation.

    https://flic.kr/p/2ktAvL4
    Based on research by Park Associates

    TV vendors were looking at differentiating their products from the increasing amount of competition.

    Looking at the change in TV design; where there is less distinction from the display technology, cabinet or frame design, even OS (with Android) has become commoditised – new sources of differentiation become important.

    LG has been soldiering on with with version 6 of webOS, originally derived from Palm’s attempt to meld HTML 5 web service based apps on top of Linux during the mid to late noughties. (It was also interesting that Samsung didn’t do a similar thing with their Tizen OS; which is derived work done by Intel and Nokia on Linux for mobile and consumer electronics applications.)

    Google Duo tried to get a jump on Zoom by having support in smart TVs. TVs were found to be supporting multiple voice assistants which implies that there has been a stalemate amongst the major players. Whether or not that will result in voice service customer us promiscuity in the home is an interesting question.

    On the hardware front, Japanese manufacturers Sony & Panasonic were promoting the use of onboard machine learning to optimise image processing in real time.

    SWAS – screen with a subscription

    LG expanded its support of content streaming services to include streaming games platforms. Looking at the Parks Associates data, one can understand why they think that the games console market is ripe for disruption.

    Samsung looked to get into the digital art market, with subscription based imagery available on its Lifestyle TV line, which look like a picture frame when off. This is only three decades after Bill Gates Xanadu 2.0 home was filled with digital art. He patented the e-picture hanging in 2003.

    Samsung has gone into coopetition with Peloton with new functionality within the Samsung Health function on its TVs. But also integrating with the fitness training service. The camera and machine learning provides guidance and advice on form for exercisers. This mirrors where Apple has gone with its fitness offerings that are included in the Apple One subscription.

    Sony doubled down on its content business with the Bravia CORE streaming service for its top of the range TVs. A few things with this announcement:

    • CORE uses up to 118Mbits/sec for ‘IMAX enhanced’ content
    • It is initially only a 2-year project, which implies that it might be a reaction to COVID limited box office numbers rather than an ongoing Netflix killer

    It is also interesting that Sony is still hamstrung by its different lines of business and hasn’t launched a streaming games service in its TVs for fear of cannibalising PlayStation sales.

    Other revenue streams on screen

    LG Shop Time 2.0 built on the Shop Time app launched late last year. ShopTime allows you to buy what you see on screen with 1-click in partnership with the Home Shopping Network. Korea has a large TV shopping culture, with mobile commerce and TV experience integration, so this move seems to be a logical progression.

    https://flic.kr/p/bqU2gb
    Picture I took on a trip to Ulsan in 2012, TV home shopping integrated with mobile commerce by scanning QRcode to buy item currently being sold on the show.

    However the launch of Shop Time 2.0 is a decade on from the pioneering work by Japanese media house Girlwalker; that mixed live and streamed entertainment with 1-click shopping. Their Tokyo Girls Collection and Shibuya Girls Collection events set the standard in this kind of retail experience.

    Samsung TV Plus focused on new targeted advertising capabilities with its own DSP and DMP solution. Ad tracking provides a record of everything that you watch on TV for better ad targeting.

    SWAS and the other revenue streams change the game for TV manufacturers at CES 2021. Previously, a TV was once in a decade purchase. Now manufacturers have the opportunity in the upfront purchase and in multiple recurring revenue streams. The increased amount of technology in the devices, implies an expectation of faster upgrade cycles. However device security and data privacy still don’t seem to be issues on the radar of TV manufacturers.

    AIoT – artificial intelligence of things

    In the same way that fuzzy logic made its way into consumer electronics from rice cookers and cameras to lifts, connected machine learning is now taking a similar path with variable results. Machine learning seemed to feature in CTA Innovation Award Honorees across categories at CES 2021.

    The COVID-19 factor

    CES 2021 itself went virtual because of the pandemic. And two trends became apparent. Machines replaced service staff with devices like an autonomous shopping trolley that would follow the consumer around a supermarket. The second was disinfection, with UV light used as a the go-to germ-killing technique. LG had a number of robots for aiding in hotel room service functions such as delivering items including food packages. There was also a bot for sterilising empty rooms with UV. Accessories company Targus won an award for its UV-C desktop disinfection lamp.

    More information

    U.S. Tech Industry Revenue to Jump 4.3% in 2021 After Record Year in 2020, Says CTA

    CES 2021: TV Brands Seek Differentiation Amid Competition – Park Associates

    Technology autopsies – renaissance chambara – on the long suffering webOS

    Gates patents e-picture hanging | ZDNet

    Sony’s new Bravia CORE streaming service goes big on IMAX Enhanced movies – What HiFi

    Use Your LG TV to Make Purchases Directly From Popular Video Retailers QVC, HSN and Others – Yahoo! Finance

    Tokyo Girls collection: shopping with a Japanese mobile twist – renaissance chambara

    A few thoughts on innovation – renaissance chambara – primer on fuzzy logic

    CES Innovation Awards

  • Traditional Chinese clothes & things that caught my eye this week

    Making traditional Chinese clothes cool has been something attempted by multiple groups over the years. Shanghai Tang was founded by the former businessman, restauranteur and columnist Sir David Tang. More recently, there have been Han nationalists or fantasists that wanted to roll back the clock to before the Qing dynasty.

    https://youtu.be/zybHeViiMXg
    Shanghai Tang S/S 2007 ‘look book’ film
    South China Morning Post on the Hanfu movement. Trumpism with Chinese characteristics?

    This effort by a couple of Hong Kong based fashion designers is one of the more interesting efforts that I’ve seen making traditional Chinese clothes cool. They definitely have a Hong Kong aesthetic in their approach and the Hanfu movement members would complain about the Manchu elements. but I think they do make traditional Chinese clothes cool.

    In China, you’ve had cities that became well known for their role in the global supply chain. Shenzhen became the electronics capital, Dongguan was the centre of shoe manufacturing and the eastern city of Yiwu focused on Christmas decorations. This all became more complex over time. Shenzhen still has factories and corporate headquarters for technology companies. But its also now the second largest stock market in China.

    An old television factory complex has been redeveloped into a creative, startup and retail space called OCT-LOFT. The best analogue I can think for it is the Tea Building on Shoreditch High Street or the Truman Brewery at the back of Spitalfields.

    Dongguan saw much of its shoe and clothing production move inland to poorer provinces, or abroad to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh. Former factory sites were redeveloped, Huawei moved much of their workforce out of Shenzhen to a campus in Dongguan.

    Yiwu still focuses on Christmas decorations (and Chinese new year decorations). Much of the work is done a piecemeal basis rather than in sophisticated automated factory lines. (This concentration of light industry also explains why China managed to close down the city to handle this winter’s power outages, since you can’t do that with heavy industry safely.) This documentary trailer by a Serbian film maker gives you a feel for the city.

    There is is so much in the film, the aspirations of young people and what work that they are prepared to do. The Chinese version of the American dream and the demographic time bomb of an ageing population.

    I read a number of China related email newsletters, the latest one that I started reading is the Trivium China Tip Sheet. I’ve been reading it for a few weeks now and can recommend it. You can sign up to it here.

    Recent work by 72&Sunny Amsterdam for Coca-Cola.

    72&Sunny Amsterdam for Coca-Cola

    There was a consensus that restarting advertising after media spend was pulled at the onset of COVID-19 was a pivotal moment for the brand. Coca-Cola had put in place a three months of advertising pause and on the back of a social media embargo. The idea was that the brand’s voice should shine through – the message in culture, not the can. We decided to double down on Coke’s core value of optimism, which as been at the centre of Coke brand advertising for a long, long time: hilltop, the Christmas ads, joy machine activations etc.

    At the time when Coca-Cola pulled their advertising there were (rightly) serious questions about the wisdom of the move. There is a large swathe of data to show that advertisers who spend through a recession come out with enhanced market share. The problem faced by marketers is what to say in the adverts beyond the brand. Also what happens if you promote a product and customers can’t buy it due to shortages (like 3M masks or Charmin toilet roll)? I understand the calculus that drove some of Coke’s decision making at the time. Given Coke’s move; when they came back, they HAD to get it right.

    Clever digital out of home media buy by a Chinese property developer. The video is designed to make use of the digital screen that comes in from the left of the screen, goes around the corner of the building and above the second retail unit. The creative uses the buildings design and illusions of perspective to provide the immersive experience.

    The illusion works best when going across the cross walk in front of the camera, so the design incorporated a lot of thinking not only about the amount of footfall, but likely direction of footfall in front of the advertisement.

    I discovered it on LinkedIn, but would guess that it has been shared by multiple people across several platforms.