Yōkoso – welcome to the Japan category of this blog. This blog was inspired by my love of Japanese culture and their consumer trends. I was introduced to chambara films thanks to being a fan of Sergio Leone’s dollars trilogy. A Fistful of Dollars was heavily influenced by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.
Getting to watch Akira and Ghost In The Shell for the first time were seminal moments in my life. I was fortunate to have lived in Liverpool when the 051 was an arthouse cinema and later on going to the BFI in London on a regular basis.
Today this is where I share anything that relates to Japan, business issues, the Japanese people or culture. Often posts that appear in this category will appear in other categories as well. So if Lawson launched a new brand collaboration with Nissan to sell a special edition Nissan Skyline GT-R. And that I thought was particularly interesting or noteworthy, that might appear in branding as well as Japan.
There is a lot of Japan-related content here. Japanese culture was one of odd the original inspirations for this blog hence my reference to chambara films in the blog name.
I don’t tend to comment on local politics because I don’t understand it that well, but I am interested when it intersects with business. An example of this would be legal issues affecting the media sector for instance.
If there are any Japanese related subjects that you think would fit with this blog, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment in the ‘Get in touch’ section of this blog here.
I was reluctant to put fingers to keyboards to type up a blog post about ChatGPT for planning. I didn’t want to be THAT person that turns out personal branding content on the latest fad as narcissistic clickbait. There is also a larger question of is it worth using ChatGPT for planning now that it has moved to a subscription model? Finally, while the next evolution of ChatGPT won’t be launched for a while, it propertied abilities seem to be evolving in certain areas the more people use it. Much of what I will cover in ChatGPT for planning also has an application with Bing’s search chat interface, or services like Notion.
Thinking about ChatGPT for planning, came after colleagues working the design team introduced me to their experimental efforts using Midjourney for image creation. Autumn rolled into winter, and ChatGPT started to become more accessible as a tool for the general public.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a class of machine learning platforms known as a large language model. It’s given a huge amount of data and analyses it. It then uses that data to build a probability based model for what might come after a given set of terms. For instance, a user may type:
Tell me about Fenway Park, the baseball stadium in Boston
And it would be highly probable that ChatGPT would talk about how the park is home to the Boston Red Sox major league baseball team because there is so much content out online about the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park.
In this respect, the mechanism of ChatGPT seems to resemble Bayesian inference based on Bayes theorem in output, if not, mode of action.
Bayes Theorem
Named after the mathematician Thomas Bayes, the theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. For example, if the risk of having a car accident is known to decrease with the number of years driving without an accident; Bayes’ theorem allows the risk to an individual based on their prior driving record to be assessed more accurately by conditioning it relative to their driving experience, rather than simply assuming that the individual is typical of the wider population.
Bayesian inference
Bayesian inference is a type of statistical inference where Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available. It works better with dynamically updatable data (like a user correction).
Clear boundaries in using ChatGPT for planning
I could see some obvious risks in ChatGPT in terms of how it works and in how it presents its responses. But, the more that I have looked into ChatGPT, the more that I saw how it could be useful. But that is contingent on having well-defined immutable guard rails are employed in the use of ChatGPT.
A quick story
This isn’t about using ChatGPT for planning, but using ChatGPT to help a friend out in January this year as they worked on their master’s degree. They were studying law and wanted to write an essay on a particular arcane area of law, doing a comparison between how it is implemented in two countries.
We didn’t ask ChatGPT to write the essay, but used it to recommend academic authors who would have written papers on the areas of investigation, with a view to reading their works and incorporating their thinking as citations.
We got names. Some of them wrote about law, but not the specific area that we asked about. Others didn’t seem to exist at all when we looked them up via academic database tools and Google. ChatGPT’s process had somehow conjured them up.
I would not be surprised if these examples that have been called out are just the tip of the iceberg and others have got away with similar practices largely undetected. Also knowledge workers may be reticent to admit whether, or how much they rely on machine learning based tools. Think about that for a moment…
Watchouts of using ChatGPT for planning
ChatGPT can give you an example in terms of writing style. ChatGPT has been used successfully as a church sermon writing tool as an example. But everything needs to be separately fact checked – trust but verify.
Secondly, ChatGPT can be used to ideate around a theme, in a similar way to using a thesaurus. This could be things like language for messaging, inspiration for search terms or even terms to use in the creation of stimuli for mood boards. Again, I would look to check all of this against a thesaurus as well.
Additional inspiration on using ChatGPT for planning
Synclavier Regen Synthesizer Introduction – Synthtopia – the old New England Digital Synclavier was a floor to ceiling rack full of equipment paired with a monitor mouse, computer keyboard and musical keyboard. Synclavier was an early digital synthesiser and then evolved to create the first digital audio workstation, featuring digital tapeless recording, digital effects, sequencing of instruments, sampling and synthesis. By 1980, the Synclavier 2 was launched. Then you started to increased adoption including Michael Jackson for this Thriller album and across the US film industry for sound effects work.
Producer Michael Hoenig circa 1987
The sampling and synthesis of Synclavier helped define the sound of 1980s record production for a wide range of groups from the era including
At the time there was concern that the digital synthesis and sampling of the Synclavier would put live music out of the business, so many concert halls in the US banned the use of the Synclavier.
Mirage FM: how patten created the first LP made entirely from AI sounds | Dazed – Pattern’s album brings synthesis forward to the present day. A mix of crude pads and textures hint at how machine learning can change synthesis over time. At the moment, record labels are looking to restrict the use of machine learning, which they view as a similar threat to the MP3 format of the early 2000s and digital sampling from the early 1990s. Like earlier technologies, they will eventually make their peace with machine learning based synthesis and use the opportunity to further gouge artists and creators
Three years of National Security Law in Hong Kong: Farewell “special status”? | Merics – the NSL has severely reduced the rule of law in Hong Kong by granting the government powers to circumvent the courts and thereby deny defendants a fair trial. The case of media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai illustrates how this presents a risk to businesses and their property rights. The Hong Kong government froze Lai’s majority of shares in his company Next Media, which led to its liquidation and the end of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. The case is highly political and does not reflect the situation of most businesses, but it does show the power the Hong Kong government can wield over business. – German think tank on the NSL
Edelman Cutting Roughly 240 Employees Amid Reorganization | Provoke Media – Edelman is just the canary in the coal mine. Beyond (part of Next Fifteen) is closing down its London office, smaller agencies have been going to the wall and another of my former agency alma mater WE are laying off just under 5 per cent of their headcount. I don’t remember this happening during the 2008 financial crisis. There are likely to be several factors blamed:
Rising interest rates combined with already lean cashflow has driven some agencies to the wall
Declining economic conditions has resulted in declining marketing budgets
Some agencies (Edelman being a case in point) bulked up on talent, expecting a fast exit from COVID driven decline
Brands are getting shaky on the commitment to brand purpose which will hit a lot of below the line agencies particularly hard
More marketing spend is being spent on innovation with an expectation of cost savings down the line (particularly in production and across B2B marketing)
MikroE welcomes back IrDA with Click board | EETimes – IrDA was first introduced in 1994 for consumer equipment but has since been used in areas such as power systems where a light-based system is safer or RF is problematic. It’s slow with data rates up to 115kbit/s at 1 metre. The reality is usually much slower. I used to use IrDA for transferring business cards of a few KB each which would take 30 seconds or more
Plenty have already covered the OceanGate Titan implosion in more detail. I will not repeat that work but wanted to bring to wider attention how marketers have jumped on the bandwagon. The following advert appeared in the print edition of the Financial Times, placed by Omega watches promoting their Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean Ultra Deep series of watches.
‘Seamaster – Precision at every level’ next to a scale going beyond 6,000 metres.
Omega
I personally thought that the advert was too soon after the implosion for good taste. Although the watch community has seen a renewed interest in deep diving capable watches after the OceanGate Titan incident.
Young Japanese are craving fast fashion. What happened? | Vogue Business – it’s the economy stupid, luxury is less accessible. Secondly, much of the youth looks like Gyaru peaked in the early 2000s due to financial issues and things haven’t improved since. Shibuya subcultures were as dependent on the ability to spend as on youth creativity.
The North America semiconductor corridor looks at Mexico, the US and Canada as a potential production capacity eco-system for the semiconductor industry. The North America semiconductor corridor is framed in terms of increasing resilience in security. At the moment the semiconductor industry for reasons of cost and supply chain ecosystem is focused on the US Pacific coast and Asian countries from Singapore to Korea that face on to the Pacific.
In the North America semiconductor corridor also has a political advantage bringing back more high value jobs across Canada, the US and Mexico. There are considerable challenges to the North American semiconductor corridor from talent to energy and water requirements. The US CHIPS and Science Act has looked to catalyse some of the change required.
Ancient monuments to the dead
The summer solstice on Wednesday reminded me of Ireland’s stone monuments. Some like Newgrange have a calendar type element, but most of them are solely monuments to the dead. The megaliths continue to guard their secrets well despite the educated deductive reasoning of archaeologists.
Wilkie Collins radio dramas
Wilkie Collins along with Arthur Conan Doyle invented what we now know as the detective genre. This stream of Wilkie Collins dramas is better than modern productions on BBC Radio 4.
Technics SL-DZ1200
Techmoan did a review of the Technics SL-DZ1200. I am a big fan of the DZ1200 over Pioneer’s CDJ devices and they did a good rundown of the device. Hopefully, the DZ1200 will come back in a new and improved form if Technics relaunch of the SL-1200 is sufficiently successful?
Microsoft Auto PC
Auto PC
Back when I worked agency side on Microsoft I never heard about the Microsoft Auto PC experiment which seems to be Microsoft’s abortive move into in-car entertainment and information systems. This seems to be alongside the more successful personal digital assistant and nascent smartphones. It’s fascinating to see technologies like voice recognition, iRDA, compact flash (but not as a music media) and USB being incorporated because these capabilities were being put into future PDA and smartphone products.
CES launch
It was launched at CES in 1998 according to the Microsoft corporate website. It’s interesting, I still have similar problems with voice recognition.
Directions
The rudimentary directions software was similar to the turn-by-turn direction print outs that I ordered from The AA Route Planner service. during the mid-to-late 1990s for long journeys – but on your stereo screen. A similar approach was also taken by Palm app Vindigo for pedestrians about the same time. Disclosure: I worked agency side on the launch of the Vindigo London guide alongside the work I was doing on Palm PDAs at the time.
(The AA Route Planner service still exists, but it is now online rather than something you ordered over the phone and received via the mail. However you can still print out turn-by-turn directions. It’s also likely to not send you on some of the interesting routes that modern navigation apps seem to manage.)
Clarion
I feel sorry for Clarion who were Microsoft’s only hardware partner. Clarion is now owned by Faurecia SE, a French headquartered auto parts manufacturer with Chinese car manufacturer DongFeng Motor Corporation who were the local partner to Peugeot, Nissan and Honda’s efforts in the Chinese market as a key minority shareholder.
I was sparked to lead this post based on footage that I watched about a priest in South India with regards a robotic elephant. Robots in religion have taken off in both Shinto and Hindu ceremonies.
Japan
Academics have widely talked about how the Shinto-based belief system have aided Japanese societal acceptance of robots, in comparison to western society. Secondly, Japanese authors have been exploring what it means to be human and what kind of dilemmas and opportunities do robots and AI bring in a future society. Robots in religion are a natural extension of robots in society.
Buddhism leads the way
What’s less commented on is that Japan’s buddhist temples have been leading robots in religion. The reality is that many Japanese see Shinto and Buddhism as complementary in nature and get involved in both beliefs.
Japan has some unique religious challenges that are interlinked. Temples are struggling as less people are active in their religious practice, the factors for this decline is multi-factorial in nature.
A second challenge that as the population shrinks roles need to be automated. What started in factories is now impacting the food and beverage sector (vending machines and restaurant robo-serving staff), so it was only a matter of time that robots in religion would supplement the clergy.
India
In India robots in religion is about kindness and de-risking religious ceremonies. In South India elephants take part in religious ceremonies. However the conditions that elephants are kept in can be cruel in nature and even result in death. Secondly, elephants can unintentionally kill or injure people involved in a religious celebration. This report on NHK World shows how robots in religion have been adapted to Hindu needs.
Finally, the elephant robot is used in celebrations over a large geographic area and is easily transported around. Robots in religion are likely to make even more sense as India urbanises even further, as the benefits are amplified in the denser environment.
How confucianism, communism (in particular Stalin’s take on Leninism) and an accident of history has led to the nationalistic, fragile, insecure Chinese state with imperial ambitions we know today.
China’s ‘trinket town’ at heart of push for renminbi trade | Financial Times – Yiwu was one of the first cities in China to allow individual merchants to settle larger cross-border deals in renminbi. Most cities have an annual cap of $50,000. Given Yiwu’s reputation for cheap goods and flexible terms, helped by the fact that wholesalers do not pay either corporate tax or market rent, exporters have sufficient bargaining power to request settlement in renminbi. “When you have only one place to go to purchase something, the seller sets the terms on how transactions are settled,” said James Wu, a Yiwu-based furniture exporter who began demanding renminbi payments from Middle Eastern clients last year – the last quote is a great example of
Interesting video from NHK World on how temples are adapting to a lack of new attendees and priests. I am not sure whether this is down to demographic change or the secularisation of society
A Pokémon-Card Crime Spree Jolts Japan – WSJ – Japan has been staggered by a Pokémon crime spree. Stores are now paying for banklike security to ward off villains who go to extraordinary lengths, even rappelling down the side of buildings, to plunder Pokémon. Hosaka was working in senior care when he had the idea of opening a cozy card shop in the suburb of Machida where customers could mingle at tables. Instead, he says, the little cards, “have become like Rolex watches, gold, silver, platinum or used cars.” – It makes sense when you think of the cards being ‘real life NFTs’
Criminal Rolex Gangs and Traveling with Watches, Part I – WOE – crime affecting luxury consumption. Interesting that London is a crime centre is prominently name checked alongside Johannesburg, South Africa. This will impact luxury retailers, luxury travel and hospitality and auction houses
Luxury
Bay Area Lawsuit Alleges Man Spent $220,000 To Get A Watch He Never Got – there’s also the added complexity of Shreve recently losing its status as a Patek AD. The lawsuit brings some ten causes of action against Shreve, including breach of contract, intentional and negligent misrepresentation, fraudulent concealment, false promise, and unfair business practices, pursuant to California’s Unfair Competition Law – this was only a matter of time. Its the same in the UK
Ad agencies and clients clash: tension over transparency in fees, services | Ad Age – a talent shortage has left agencies without enough senior executives to service accounts. Combined, such factors contribute to what marketers see as an increasing lack of transparency. One executive who leads procurement across marketing and content for a major consumer goods company said the discounts and rebates that media agencies, in particular, get from a media buy have always been “murky,” but one area agencies have always been transparent in is breaking down their fees. The brand executive said auditors, working on behalf of the marketers, have previously been able to get agencies to disclose their margins, overheads and salaries without protest—it’s standard practice and allows clients to know they are being charged a fair price. But that’s starting to change, they said, having run into issues with getting shops to break down their fees in the recent agency review their company underwent
Media
This Year Next Year: 2023 Global Mid-Year Forecast – GroupM – calls the end of radio’s global growth story. Even taking into account streaming, WPP says that, globally, ad-supported audio has peaked. It will grow just 0.3% this year, says GroupM then “remain roughly flat over the next five years”. It’s about to join newspapers, magazines and broadcast television in a downward trajectory. GroupM also tackles the impact of AI on the industry. It reckons that within five years, the portion of “AI-enabled” advertising revenue globally will be worth $800bn. What is impossible to quantify is whether any of that is new money. Most likely, none of it. What is also impossible to quantify is just how dramatic the AI-driven reductions in cost of production will be. That sounds a relatively benign question until one realises that all those reduced costs are human jobs. GroupM identifies five key themes: Regulation (particularly around data privacy); connected TV (and an annualised 10%+ growth in the segment)’; AI “is likely to inform, or touch in some way, at least half of all advertising revenue by the end of 2023”; retail media to overtake TV by 2028; and “new business growth” (which sounds like the sort of thing an agency person would put in their predictions). Most importantly though, the GroupM outlook points to a more more significant factor. We’re at the end of a cycle that was defined by shifts between advertising channels, and then the disruption of Covid. “We are at an inflection point where the secular drivers of advertising growth above and beyond GDP growth are maturing, the pandemic upheaval is receding and the dynamic rise of digital advertising has slowed. This is the basis of our underlying forecast of mid-single-digit advertising growth over the next five years. However, the pervasive impact of AI on the world of advertising could change that.”
AI at Work: What People Are Saying | BCG – leaders love it, workers don’t. Businesses have only addressed the needs of leaders, which probably dialled up the anxiety with a sense that AI is something that happens to you and your career rather like a bad car accident
Beeper — All your chats in one app. Yes, really. – clients like Adium became less useful as Google and other services went away from common protocols and the IM giants AOL, MSN and Yahoo! disappeared. Beeper are trying to address this
