Legal is defined as everything connected with the system of law within a country or area. The definition Law is a system of rules created and enforced to regulate behaviour, usually it belongs to a country or an area.
Online and innovation have often evolved way in advance of laws and the legal system’s ability to cope.
The emphasis that different systems have produces a number of challenges. China’s systems are locked down under their view of cyber sovereignty to avoid a contagion of western ideas. Yet they and other authoritarian regimes treat the open western systems as a battle space to destabilise other countries and attack their critics.
The US system favours free speech over privacy, which directly clashes with European values. Much of these European values were shaped in the aftermath of having lived under Warsaw Pact era authoritarian regimes.
There is a clash of the ages undertaken over ethics and power and what’s legal. The law offers up more questions and ethical traps than answers. It’s into this legal morass that my posts tend to land, usually at the point of intersection between ethics, the law and technology.
When I started using the web I believed that it was a unique extra-legal space similar to what John Perry Barlow outlined at the start of the ‘web’ as we now know it. The reality is that the net has already been staked out by businesses that look rather similar to the robber barons of the gilded age. Authoritarian regimes found it surprisingly easy to bend to their will and now sell their expertise around the world.
What the Heck Does Luxury Mean Now? | GQ – a new and enticing definition of the word emerged with flawless-diamond clarity: big European houses hired a swath of truly cool designers who rewrote the rules of exclusivity and quality, breaking brands free from its tiresome cliches about who and what was indulgent, beautiful, and elegant. Figures like A$AP Rocky and Frank Ocean became the new doyennes of style and taste; Alessandro Michele, Virgil Abloh, and Kim Jones became worldwide superstars; and Supreme convinced a new generation that you could make inexpensive stuff with the rigorous sensibility of a fashion house. Things that were once secret became matters of global pop-cultural importance—a lot of people now follow the haute couture and menswear shows like others follow football
PopSockets, Sonos, and Tile Ask Congress to Rein in Big Tech | WIRED – it wasn’t until PopSockets agreed to spend $2 million on retail marketing that Amazon finally clamped down on the fakes and knockoffs. Amazon denies this, and says that worked “with PopSockets to address our shared concerns about counterfeit.”But there were still other problems: Barnett says Amazon frequently lowered the price of PopSockets products, and then expected his company to make up the difference—even though that was never part of their contract. Amazon would “dress up requests as demands, using language that a parent uses with a child, or more generally, that someone in a position of power uses with someone of inferior power,” Barnett wrote in testimony sent to Congress. Am I shocked that Amazon is playing hard ball in the way that everyone from Tesco to Wal-Mart have done? No. But the problem isn’t the tactics per se, but the scale at which Amazon operates. Also Tesco and Wal-Mart might try and tear your face off with look-a-like private label products, but they won’t intentionally cross the line into selling counterfeit products
Facebook apologises after Xi Jinping name translated as an obscenity – While China does not allow its citizens to access Facebook freely, the country is the company’s largest source of revenue after the US. Facebook is setting up an engineering team at its Asia-Pacific office in Singapore to focus on the lucrative Chinese advertising market, Reuters reported this month.
The Mercedes Benz 500E gets profiled by Doug DeMuro. It is the ultimate sleeper car with only mildly flared wheel arches give a hint for the vehicles performance. At the time of launch Mercedes called it the velvet hammer, the hammer bit of the sobriquet stuck with car fans. And the 500E and Hammer are used interchangeably. Even now, almost 30 years later, the performance is phenomenal, especially from a car with such understated looks.
Great talk by Shafi Goldwasser from the University of California, Berkeley on the relationship between algorithms and the law. It is a fascinating lecture. I believe that it was given in Tel Aviv
Algorithms have enormous power over our lives from health and finance to credit ratings or the ability to get criminal bail.
Academic Jack Goldsmith on the complex relationship between Jimmy Hoffa, the US trade union movement and the mob including its rise and fall. This is a good hour long interview but worth while having on in the background.
Ogilvy took over the reins from Mother a couple of years ago – Boots didn’t want to move but its owners did a Davos WPP deal – since when it’s been a bit iffy.
More About Advertising blog
Hair Love is an animated short that addresses the complex nature of Afro American hair. But its got as much attention for its sponsorship by Unilever brand Dove as its craft. Stylewise I was reminded a bit of some of Disney’s animation from the 1990s and 1990s. The Dove sponsored film is a move to try and change the relationship between art and advertising. Though that still won’t stop them doing lots of formulaic product marketing. I was reminded by Guinness Nigeria development of action films for the African market in the past.
Google acquires Pointy, a startup to help brick-and-mortar retailers list products online, for $163M | TechCrunch – built hardware and software technology to help physical retailers — specifically those that might not already have an extensive e-commerce storefront detailing in-store inventory — get their products discoverable online without any extra work – reminds me of the kind of thing you’d expect Tencent or Alibaba to do as China has led in O2O e-tailing. Pointy also fits into Google’s mission to organising all the worlds information. Over time, I can only see Pointy as being bad for retail margins.
The problem with the idea of Pointy is that it treats all stock as equal, in reality the cost of an item isn’t only its price. A point that Pointy misses. There are also transport costs, time and convenience costs involved. For a real world story indexed by Pointy, the consideration of being able to drive to a nearby story and get something immediately isn’t a factor. How does Pointy know about the hassle of that same trip if one has to walk there and back instead? Does Pointy consider how heavy or bulky a product might be?
Mediatel: Newsline: How the UK is quietly importing a sinister political phenomenon – “I have read so many predictions and trends about journalism in the past few weeks. The most significant trend, mostly unacknowledged, is that of politicians realizing they do not need to provide access or engagement with journalists, or even tell the truth, to be electable.” – where is this going?
Make your China marketing pop with these pop culture tips – POP MART: the designer toy market in China is booming. Not that surprising given historic popularity in Hong Kong and Japan – in many respects culturally China is a laggard
Framed — Pixel Envy – three paragraphs in and it is already setting up the idea that personal privacy and public safety are two opposing ends of a gradient. That’s simply not true. A society that has less personal privacy does not inherently have better public safety; Russia and Saudi Arabia are countries with respectable HDI scores, brutal censorship and surveillance, and higher murder rates than Australia, Denmark, France, and the United Kingdom
Sugar Bear’s Don’t Scandalize Mine was a go to record for me, but I’ve never seen a music video of it until now
What Does Taiwan’s Public Think About Election Interference From China? – The Diplomat – hyper-polarization in views between DPP and KMT supporters highlights the difficulty in addressing cybersecurity and China more broadly. To reach a consensus requires first acknowledging and disrupting the echo chambers in which disinformation campaigns thrive, then the government must implement election transparency policies to more easily expose disinformation efforts. However, with increasing animosity between parties, this consensus may be hard to reach. Citizens may also be concerned that any steps the government takes are limiting their freedom of speech or other rights (paywall)
Try as It Might, Germany Isn’t Warming to Huawei – The Diplomat – Highest on their list of concerns has been the risk of exposing the future German 5G network to large-scale espionage and data theft on behalf of corporate and political actors in China. In recent years, Germany’s intelligence agencies have reported a steady increase in Chinese government-directed espionage and hacking activities against German targets, primarily with the aim of acquiring corporate secrets. China is now considered the source of the majority of cyberattacks against Germany. In 2019, some of the largest German companies confirmed that they had been targeted by a new wave of cyberattacks that likely originated with the Chinese government. During a parliamentary hearing on the issue of Huawei in October, Thomas Haldenwang, the president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (Bundesverfassungsschutz), claimed that Chinese espionage and cyberattacks have been expanding into more and more sectors of the economy and the state. According to Haldenwang, while Chinese cyberattacks in Germany were previously focused primarily on private corporations and technology
China Manufacturing:”Elvis Has Left the Building” | China Law Blog – “China’s rising costs, tricky regulations and increasingly unstable geopolitical situation are forcing more manufacturers to move production elsewhere” and we should expect this exodus to gain speed in 2020, “despite the prospect of a minor US-China trade truce.”
Bose and HERE Fuel AR Experience Innovation By Combining Location and Audio Technologies – Semiconductor Digest – HERE Technologies, a global leader in mapping and location platform services, today announced a collaboration with Bose Corporation to jointly enable their respective developer communities to deploy augmented reality (AR) location applications and services. This collaboration gives HERE developers access to the Bose AR platform and spatial-audio capabilities, and extends the HERE platform, positioning and mobile SDK location technologies to developers building audio AR applications and experiences. – ok so turn by turn direction or tourist style apps probably. The most interesting thing for me was that Bose AR isn’t just the audio enabled frames but recent noise cancelling headsets as well
SPH print newspaper ad sales dive 20% on year | Media | Campaign Asia – Singapore Press Holdings, the parent company of The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, and other news publications, saw overall revenue drop 3.8% in the first quarter of fiscal 2020 – interesting acceleration. Part of which is down to media agencies making more money from digital and some due to changing consumer habits. I’ve started taking a print newspaper subscription again as I value the juxtaposition good print design can bring
NYT: Russian hackers successfully targeted Ukrainian gas company Burisma – Axios – Public awareness of the Burisma hack cuts both ways politically. For former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign, it means document dumps could happen at any time, with accompanying media frenzy and potentially damaging revelations. For the Trump campaign, it means that any such revelations will come pre-tainted with a Russian label
John Lewis marketing boss Paula Nickolds departs before starting | The Drum – Anusha Couttigane, principal fashion analyst at Kantar, said that whoever takes the lead will need to rethink its long-running, and arguably tired, festive advertising strategy which has relied on blockbuster, tear-jerker creative to encourage shoppers into stores. “John Lewis needs to continue evolving its digital marketing efforts. While the company’s Christmas mascot, the accident-prone dragon Excitable Edgar, was warmly received, the debut of the brand’s Christmas advert is simply not the event it once was,” – quite a burn right there.
Sonos hits Google with lawsuit over wireless speaker patents – “Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology” for years. Sonos and Google collaborated in 2013 to add the Play Music service to Sonos speakers, and more recently, the two worked to bring Google’s digital assistant to Sonos speakers, alongside Amazon’s counterpart, Alexa. “Despite our repeated and extensive efforts over the last few years,” Spence told the Times, “Google has not shown any willingness to work with us on a mutually beneficial solution. We’re left with no choice but to litigate,”
With nothing to lose, loners build future in China’s hollowed-out north – Reuters – “Social classes are fixed,” Li said. “The poor can never achieve anything. When you encounter problems, if you can solve it, great. There’s not much you can do otherwise.” – interesting consumer comments that explain the slow down in China’s economic growth
Dark Patterns after the GDPR: Scraping Consent Pop-ups and Demonstrating their Influence by Nouns, Liccardi, Veal, Karger and Kagal – The results of our empirical survey of CMPs today illustrates the extent to which illegal practices prevail, with vendors of CMPs turning a blind eye to — or worse, incentivising —- clearly illegal configurations of their systems. Enforcement in this area is sorely lacking. Data protection authorities should make use of automated tools like the one we have designed to expedite discovery and enforcement. Designers might help here to design tools for regulators, rather than just for users or for websites. Reg- ulators should also work further upstream and consider placing requirements on the vendors of CMPs to only allow compliant designs to be placed on the market. (PDF)
Apple Captures 66% of the Smartphone Industry’s Profits in Q3 leaving all of their Competitors Combined in the Dust – Patently Apple – it is becoming a challenge for Chinese smartphone brands to increase their smartphone ASPs and margins due to a combination of longer consumer holding periods and Apple lowering pricing on some key SKUs, which has limited the headroom that Chinese vendors had used to increase their ASPs – in the long term Huawei having to be vertically integrated all the way up the stack could be to their benefit
Gildo Zegna: tailoring masculinity for changing tastes | Financial Times – luxury goods industry is feeling the heat of technological disruption, social upheaval and identity politics. Furthermore, within the high end fashion industry few items of clothing are facing more pressure from falling consumer demand than the one that made the Zegna family rich: the traditional men’s suit. “The big challenge we face is a rethinking of masculinity,” he says. – I think streetwear is interesting because of the reassurance it provides on masculinity. The basics of streetwear go back to the mid-century sports basics. The hooded top, jeans, t-shirts, plaid shirts, Letterman jacket, track jacket etc
A Surveillance Net Blankets China’s Cities, Giving Police Vast Powers – The New York Times – Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private databases examined by The New York Times. Once combined and fully operational, the tools can help police grab the identities of people as they walk down the street, find out who they are meeting with and identify who does and doesn’t belong to the Communist Party. The United States and other countries use some of the same techniques to track terrorists or drug lords. Chinese cities want to use them to track everybody.
Is LVMH’s Digital Transformation Working? | Luxury Society – “Over the last few years our market has become highly fragmented,” it added. “Customer journeys and purchasing habits have become more complex. Now, in addition to magazines and other traditional media, our customers – especially young people – use a range of digital options to stay informed, communicate with friends and shop. Brand awareness and customer engagement are built on these many different touchpoints.”
Mariah Carey, media changes in 2020, coming shortages on rare earth metals, China and Russia’s threat to the west and the power of China.
Mariah Carey @ SingaporeGP 2010 by KWSW
I found it relatively easy this year to avoid a lot of the Christmas ads. Maybe because there are much bigger things to think about like the new UK government, protests from Chile to Hong Kong and the soap opera that is the Trump presidency.
My old colleague Andy at New York creative agency Praytell have pulled together a US centric set of ideas on media changes to expect in 2020. The anticipated changes to the NCAA and Instagram are very interesting. The NCAA is a very lucrative franchise and yet the players get so poorly rewarded for their efforts.
I’ve been negative about the focus of lithium ion battery power for everything and this talk gives compelling economic and environmental arguments to look at alternatives like hydrogen fuel cells. This presentation on the coming shortages in rare earth metals should be a call to action.
Great panel at The New Enlightenment Conference held in Edinburgh looking at Russia and China and what it means for the west and the threat they present.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies produced this video on the power of China
