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Out and About: Yunchul Kim – Dawns Mine Crystal

Dawns Mine Crystal is an exhibition on at the Korean Cultural Centre between now and November 3, 2018. I was invited to a preview of it. The title Dawns Mine Crystals a reference to the material world and its intersection with symbols and metaphors.

Thanks to Korean Cultural Centre @kccuk in London for invite to preview Dawns Mine Crystal exhibition by Yunchul Kim #contemporaryart #londonart

It is well worth going to see, Mr Kim merges the world of art and science together in a way that is mesmerising and entertaining. It is unsurprising, given the works link to Arts at CERN, that the art pieces have a very scientific bent to them. The works will be part of a bigger exhibition that will tour venues in France during 2019 and 2020.

Be sure to catch it at the Korean Cultural Centre before it finishes.

Mr Kim is a Seoul-based artist, composer and founder of Studio Locus Solus in Seoul. He’s exhibited in German, Spain, China and the United States.

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Marvel’s Korean Infinity War Problem

The Korean screenings of Infinity War (part one) went horribly wrong. The film did really well in the Korean box office, partly due to a huge amount of pre-sold tickets. But the subtitles were so poorly done that criticism has outshadowed other aspects of the film within the country.

Asian Boss did a good straw poll of Korean citizens on it.

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Five for Friday | 五日（星期五) | 금요일에 다섯 가지

Things that made my week:

Sir Martin Sorrell’s departure from WPP. I decided not to write a post on his retirement because there were more questions than answers. A couple of things saddened me:

  • His departure was assumed by some outsiders to be part of the #metoo movement. This seems to be a default setting for many now
  • Headlines like the Globe & Mail that talked about Sorrell’s departure as the end of the Mad Man era. You have journalists and the sub-editors that they work with having no understanding of the industry that they cover. Sir Martin was a major factor in the end of the Mad Man era; moving advertising from being the closest thing in business to art, to something that delivers a commercial value. One could argue that technology has moved the bar too far in terms of removing the craftsmanship all together, but that’s a discussion for another day about Google and Facebook rather than about WPP

More information on Sir Martin’s departure from WPP
Why WPP’s Cryptic Handling of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation Is the Wrong Move | AdWeek
WPP Claims It First Learned of Martin Sorrell’s Resignation From His Own Internal Memo on Saturday Night | AdWeek
With Martin Sorrell’s resignation at WPP, the Mad Men era truly seems over | Globe & Mail – (paywall)

Wetherspoons walking away from social media. Again the whys and wherefores of this seems to have as many questions as it does answers. As an outsider, their digital strategy and execution on social channels was patchy at best. It wasn’t something that Tim Martin was that committed to anyway. It probably won’t make that much difference to their business.

Whilst as a marketer I can point to high street brands to who do social really well (Paddy Power, Poundland or Tesco Mobile a number of years ago); there are a lot of mediocre brand accounts.  I can see the argument for going all-in, or not at all.

This week I have been listening to:

Tim Westwood recording of De La Soul freestyle throwback – never heard before! – YouTube – this was apparently done for the Westwood Rap Show sometime in the early 1990s.

This Sould Out tune seems to bridge the gap between disco and the late 1980s / early 1990s Italian house sound popular in the North of England.

Lastly, here’s one of them ads that never got approved by the client. Shinsegae Food is the food manufacturing arm of Samsung in Korea. Samsung is completely vertically integrated with these food products often sold in Samsung owned restaurants and Shinsegae department stores which can be paid for with a Samsung credit card. Mamee is a Malaysian manufacturer of instant noodles. The video is a satirical take on a usual Korean drama trope.

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App constellations 2018 research

I initially looked at app constellations back in 2014, when Fred Wilson put a name to the the phenomena. And every two years or so I have gone back and looked at a number of major internet companies to see how many different types of apps that they had in play.

I originally selected the companies back in 2014 because I felt that they represented the largest and best of their ilk. It skews Asian because the west can be viewed as one eco-system represented by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

China is an enclosed eco-system; though Microsoft is actively engaged in the app eco-system there. I chose Tencent and NetEase as being my Chinese bellwethers. DaumKakao and Naver were representative of the Korean eco-system which blends highly-used domestic services with western platforms. Finally LINE of Japan (a subsidiary of Korean company Naver) provided a similar bellwether of the hybrid Japanese eco-system which mirrors Korea.

App constellations survey methodology

For the sake of convenience I have compared the contents of Apple’s mobile app store for each of the companies. While most of the internet companies have some Android-only or iOS-only apps; the iOS app store is still a good indicator of their app activity.

I stayed true to the definition of app constellations in terms of deciding what kind of app should go in.

App constellation definition

I manually assessed each app, rather than relying on the category that the app had been submitted into. Tencent and Netease, had a number of mobile utilities that aided discussion and kept players updated on their favourite game. These didn’t fit within the definition.

Changes in the environment

Since 2016, a couple of things have changed:

  • Apple had a purge of apps that didn’t support 64 bit processing
  • They moved away from supporting the app store within iTunes application and on the web; to within the app store on the device

2018 marks over a decade of mobile apps in the Apple store. Many of the major players have delisted almost as many Android and iOS apps as they currently have in the store. This happens for a number of reasons:

  • The app was serving a purpose for a fixed time
  • It is an application that has fallen so far out of favour that it is no longer worth maintaining
  • The code base no longer meets Apple’s or Google’s minimum standards
Data analysis

I started off by looking at the number of apps. In terms of app constellations:  Tencent, Microsoft and Google were clear winners.

Number of apps

Both Microsoft and Google’s growth has been driven by ‘experimental’ apps that they have put out in the public for their own reasons and enterprise focused apps.

compound annual growth in app number

But it was quickly apparent to me that the number of apps developed were only part of the story. What about the rate of change in numbers of apps developed? This would be indicative of the rate of change in moving to mobile. Here both Facebook and Microsoft’s pivot became immediately apparent. The Asian companies looked less impressive as they had been able to keep steady in their focus on mobile.

All of this growth in the number of apps developed by major internet companies is all the more remarkable when you consider the following:

  • In mature markets consumers are not really downloading new apps
  • They are sticking with a few in terms of regular usage. Many of the apps on their phones don’t get used
Notes on a few of the companies in terms of their app constellations
  • Daum Kakao – notable for being the only company who I looked at who had a decline in the number of applications versus 2016. A lot of this seems to be in service consolidation of both Daum and Kakao to remove duplications or non-core services. It is the Daum brand that has taken the biggest impact. This is understandable, since Daum struggled on the move to smartphones and Kakao is a mobile-first brand.
  • Dropbox – the growth in apps has been down to the larger business acquisition strategy at Dropbox. I don’t expect further growth like what we have seen with  Facebook’s pivot to mobile
  • Facebook – Facebook’s pivot to mobile was one of the reason why I decided to look at compound annual growth rate as well as the size of app constellation in terms of app numbers. In terms of raw app ‘SKUs’ Facebook is dwarfed by most of the other companies that I have looked at. It is only by looking at the growth in apps developed where one can really see their move to mobile
  • Netease – was interesting for its focus in a couple of areas. Like other Asian internet companies, education was a big target area, but Netease went into it with major commitment. Both NetEase and Tencent were big in magazine and book apps as well. I think this is down to the fact that ‘traditional’ web surfing is harder to do with (at the moment) when URLs are written in western script and numbers.
  • Tencent – the raw app numbers beggars belief. There are a number of reasons for this. Like NetEase, Tencent has a lot of apps solely optimised for the iPad and a separate iPhone app. There are free and paid-for product variants. Lastly Tencent will have four or five apps competing in a given category like streaming music which seems insane. Only time will tell if Tencent is spreading itself too thin; like when Yahoo! was described Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto
More information

Jargon watch: app constellation – back in 2014 when I wrote this post, it still took me the best part of a week to research and describe each of the apps in the main eco-systems. It would take me much longer today due to the growth in apps

Peanut Buttergate – analysis of Garlinghouse’s original memo about Yahoo! from back in 2006

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ICYMI | 万一你错过了| 당신이 그것을 놓친 경우

After Anbang Takeover, China’s Deal Money, Already Ebbing, Could Slow Further – The New York Times

Hello, mobile operators? This is your age of disruption calling | McKinsey & Company – lots of buzz words, diagnosis but not a glimpse of a way forward

Edelman Revenue Up 2.1% In 2018 To $894m | Holmes Report – given that all the global PR groups have had exceptionally low growth or even declines

How Douyin became China’s top short-video App in 500 days – WalktheChat

Nokia on 5G at MWC, what struck me is the sales pitch was more like an enterprise software company like IBM or Oracle than a telecoms vendor. There is lots of tech in the networks but there isn’t a recognisable killer app. His warnings about 5G upgradeable products ring true though.

Asian Boss do some really nice street interviews in different Asian cities and this one about Apple iPhones in Korea is particularly instructive. Samsung is seen as the default as they assemble phones (mostly for Asian markets) in Korea. Whereas in Europe all of the are made in China.

The iPhone seems to have won out on product design amongst younger people.