Ged Carroll

Category: marketing | 營銷 | 마케팅 | マーケティング

According to the AMA – Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. This has contained a wide range of content as a section over the years including

  • Super Bowl advertising
  • Spanx
  • Content marketing
  • Fake product reviews on Amazon
  • Fear of finding out
  • Genesis the Korean luxury car brand
  • Guo chao – Chinese national pride
  • Harmony Korine’s creative work for 7-Eleven
  • Advertising legend Bill Bernbach
  • Japanese consumer insights
  • Chinese New Year adverts from China, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore
  • Doughnutism
  • Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
  • Influencer promotions
  • A media diary
  • Luxe streetwear
  • Consumerology by marketing behaviour expert Phil Graves
  • Payola
  • Dettol’s back to work advertising campaign
  • Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders
  • Dove #washtocare advertising campaign
  • The fallacy of generations such as gen-z
  • Cultural marketing with Stüssy
  • How Brands Grow Part 2 by Jenni Romaniuk and Byron Sharp
  • Facebook’s misleading ad metrics
  • The role of salience in advertising
  • SAS – What is truly Scandinavian? advertising campaign
  • Brand winter
  • Treasure hunt as defined by NPD is the process of consumers bargain hunting
  • Lovemarks
  • How Louis Vuitton has re-engineered its business to handle the modern luxury consumer’s needs and tastes
  • Korean TV shopping celebrity Choi Hyun woo
  • qCPM
  • Planning and communications
  • The Jeremy Renner store
  • Cashierless stores
  • BMW NEXTGen
  • Creativity in data event that I spoke at
  • Beauty marketing trends
  • Kraft Mothers Day marketing
  • RESIST – counter disinformation tool
  • Facebook pivots to WeChat’s business model
  • Smartphone launches

  • Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Microsoft in Yahoo! saga

    Re/code has an interesting article on how the Microsoft in Yahoo! saga continues to influence the sell off of Yahoo! assets by investing money in whichever bid coalition wins. This feels like a riff on Yahoo!’s history over the past six years.

    Careful balancing act for Microsoft

    The 2010 aggressive bid for Yahoo! was one of the factors in the departure of Steve Ballmer as CEO. A Microsoft-owned Yahoo! made almost as little financial sense as the Nokia handset acquisition.

    A later deal via active investor Carl Icahn gave Microsoft everything it wanted. Access to Yahoo! search inventory with no upfront payments. Under the Microsoft deal Yahoo! lost search market share and ad money. Microsoft’s AdCenter was not able to monetise Yahoo!’s search traffic as well as Yahoo! did. Search used to be responsible for half of Yahoo!’s revenue.

    Whilst Yahoo! now represents a smaller proportion of search traffic it is still lucrative for Microsoft. Microsoft’s advances in cloud services are still not as lucrative as search advertising.

    Microsoft will want to defend a position that on a rational analysis shouldn’t last. By loaning money, it gains leverage over a new management team.

    Cheap money to structure deal would be attractive for private equity groups. But it will be bad for the management team put in place and Yahoo!’s future prospects. The Microsoft in Yahoo! saga was at best a spoiling move.

    All just a little bit of history repeating

    Microsoft provided financial support for Icahn’s run at Yahoo! which saw the departure of Jerry Yang – and the sale of his position in the company. At the time of his overthrow, Yang was the largest single shareholder in Yahoo!.

    Six years later we can all see how successful that was.

    Problems that it won’t solve

    Yahoo! morale. There will be a right-sizing of  the workforce, private equity will be ill-prepared to retain the talent required to maintain and evolve Yahoo!’s services. They will also find it impossible to bring in talent in key areas (beyond senior executives). Yahoo!’s former chief product offer Blake Irving is a case in point of this. Expect Facebook, Amazon, Google and others hoover up the key technical talent Yahoo! needs to retain.

    Yahoo!’s international business seems to be a point-of-failure. Yahoo! has withdrawn from markets, particularly in Asia where market conditions should be much better. It has wound up businesses that it had recently acquired in the Middle East. Yahoo! Europe seems to have gone from bad-to-worse.  Expect Yahoo! to shutter more businesses and consolidate its business in North America.

    A highly leveraged Yahoo! still won’t have a mobile advertising solution beyond Flurry. Yahoo!’s own mobile apps consistently under-perform in app marketplaces. The mobile talent Yahoo! has gained will head for the door.

    Yahoo! still won’t work out how to sell millennial advertising. Tumblr is a good property, yet Yahoo! can currently monetise 15 per cent of advertising inventory on the platform. How will private equity solve this? Or will someone else pick it up at a fire sale? Microsoft is likely to try and stop any sale to Google (which would be a natural home).

    Yahoo! still won’t have an effective play in social platforms. Flickr will still be a niche rather than mainstream product.

    A key goal for Microsoft would be to obtain search traffic from Yahoo! Japan. Since Yahoo! Japan is a joint venture with SoftBank, this won’t happen. Yahoo! Japan has already gone to court to keep Microsoft out of its business. The new relationship with a divested core won’t change this.

    Getting Yahoo! on Microsoft’s cloud would be a major coup, but would require major coding, something that private equity owners probably wouldn’t want to do.

    Yahoo!’s IP including core patents for paid search offer little opportunity for additional revenue. They can’t be used against Google and would be unattractive to sell on. Yahoo!’s contributions to open source software would be missed – PHP, Hadoop and the Debian distribution of Linux have all benefited.

    History as an indicator of failure

    This would represent the second activist shareholder owned board. The current one has been responsible for a catastrophic destruction of value. None of the acquirers have articulated a reason why advertisers should believe in them. Whilst a deal needs to maximise value for Yahoo! shareholders; if it doesn’t offer a plan that pleases customers – it will fail.

    A highly leveraged business will not be in a good place to cope with programmatic advertising which will likely reduce the cost of Yahoo!’s over-priced display ad inventory. The likely leverage also means that Yahoo! would make an unattractive long term partner for the major marketing groups. More on Yahoo! here.

    More information
    Microsoft Tells Possible Yahoo Buyers It Would Consider Backing Bids | Re/code
    Yahoo! – how did we get here? | renaissance chambara
    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation | renaissance chambara
    Facebook: the Yahoo! patents case | renaissance chambara
    Why I am sunsetting Yahoo! | renaissance chambara
    The trouble with Yahoo!’s M&A scuttlebutt | renaissance chambara
    Thoughts on the Microsoft and Yahoo! search deal | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo! Japan and The Gordian Knot | renaissance chambara
    Yahoo!: some things I am worried about | renaissance chambara
    Barbarians in the valley | renaissance chambara
    The Steve Ballmer Post | renaissance chambara
    The Wall Street Journal Online bounced my comment | renaissance chambara
    A quick primer re @blakei @yahoo #delicious | renaissance chambara
    2010 MICROSOFT BID FOR YAHOO | NY TIMES

  • Woz + more things

    Woz

    Reddit have interviewed geek heroes. In each interview they discuss their formative moments for a series of videos on YouTube. The complete playlist is below. Steve Wozniak aka Woz is one of the geek heroes highlighted . It’s a a quality interview with the Woz on form on various topics. You can read more about Woz here.

  • Anti smoking + more news

    Why Is Vice Ditching Its Anti Smoking Past To Work For Philip Morris? | Co.Create – Vice has big marketing and media groups as shareholders including WPP. More tobacco related posts here. It will be interesting to see how the anti-smoking lobby reacts to it. There is something larger going on in the tobacco industry as it tried to push into vaping and heated tobacco products.

    Nielsen COO Steve Hasker on Total Audience Measurement and Snapchat Deal | Adweek – interesting article on TV measurement

    Vice Media Web Traffic Plunges 17% in February, Sunk by Risky Strategy | Variety – one month’s of comScore’s data doesn’t make a trend

    Vice CEO Shane Smith to agencies: ‘We like you.’ | Digiday – might have something to do with their dramatic drop in website traffic… Vice has lost its outsider positioning and become part of the mainstream that it kicked against for so long. Still Shane Smith has done well out of it

    More valuable brands in China | Shanghai Daily – Huawei ranks highly. Huawei is a client of WPP who own the company that created the brand ranking. As with many of things your mileage will vary considerably.

    The Laughing Cow explores the true value of family time | Marketing Interactive – interesting positioning of the Laughing Cow brand. It’s classic FMCG thinking but with a twist

    Gamasutra – Now’s the time to get into VR – but be realistic about its returns, says Palmer Luckey – the thing to keep an eye on is if e-sports athletes find an advantage in VR within a gaming environment. It will be interesting to see how various technology hurdles are handled. Making true VR content requires news processes, new approaches to narrative and storytelling. Will the cost of non-gaming content in VR be worthwhile? Lastly, lean back content is tremendously important as well, expect headsets to be used as ‘virtual screens’ for traditional content as a killer app. Not all that computing power will be needed. It will also work with small single person households were a 65 inch TV isn’t practical

  • Tools part of my process – part two

    I posted part one in this two-part series of ‘part of my process’ posts on my blog. Part one covered Hemingway, Pinboard, Terminal and IFTTT. In this post I will cover tools that I use for content discovery and publication.

    Right Relevance

    Right Relevance is a web service that recommends content from social channels. It is based on areas of interest. Klout provides a similar function as part of its social measurement service. I could write a whole blog post about what’s wrong with Klout’s measurement approach. But their content recommendation function is alright. I have found from experience that Right Relevance tends to provide better quality recommendations.
    Right Relevance
    For specific subject areas there are ‘subreddit’ threads at Reddit. Certain subject areas like technology have special purpose sites: for instance techmeme and Slashdot. I have included some more geek orientated options at the bottom of this post

    Newsblur

    The way I explain RSS to my non-tech forward friends is by an analogy. RSS is the web’s analog of a ticker tape machine. In Western’s that is the machine which put incoming messages on a strip of paper. While outgoing messages went out in Morse code on a telegraph key. In the stock exchange or newsroom; continuous computer paper replaced the thin strip of paper. A teletype machine or computer printer would print messages as they came in.

    RSS sends updates from websites in a way that applications can collect the content up. Different services present it in different formats like an email type interface or digital magazine. Most people were familar with RSS from its use with Google Reader. When Google Reader shut down, it didn’t kill RSS. Instead a cottage industry of RSS readers sprang up to replace it.
    News blur - intelligent RSS reader
    My RSS reader of choice is Newsblur. Newsblur has several benefits. You can train it to filter your feeds based on author or key words over time. The unread posts can be uncovered with one click and read if you still need to.

    It provides three different views

    • Feed – the information as its provided in the the RSS feed. Depending on the feed this may contain images
    • Text – text only. Handy for when you need speed as it filters out formating and images
    • Story – what it looks like on the original site. This helps understand the context where other content is on a page alongside the main story

    Newsblur has a good in-browser interface. It provides integration with both Pinboard and Buffer. It also supports Reeder, a popular desktop RSS reader for OSX.

    Newsblur has a native application for both iOS and Android. A third party wrote a free native application for Windows phone. In the past there was also support on Symbian, Maemo and BlackBerry. You get a lot for your $24/year subscription.

    Buffer

    Buffer is the social publishing tool that I use. It provides similar benefits to Hootsuite, but is much more user friendly. Buffer also has a transparent pricing model compared to Hootsuite. It integrates in my process via IFTTT. Buffer has a native app for iOS and an in-browser interface. It integrates into sharing functionality within iOS and Newsblur. It is the end point in my automated plumbing for social content publication.
    Buffer social channel publishing and analytics
    It has good basic analytics built in. I use ‘The Awesome Plan’ which costs $102/year.

    Weiyun

    Weiyun is a cloud file storage and sychronisation service like Dropbox. The key differences being, it is only available in Chinese and it provides 1TB of storage for free.
    Weiyun - cloud storage and synchronisation
    Weiyun has Android, iOS, Windows and OSX applications.

    Here is a presentation hosted on Slideshare that highlights the tools discussed in today’s ‘part of my process’ post.

    More everyday tools in part three.

    More information

    Right Relevance website
    Klout – ignore the measurement, but stay for the content recommendations

    Reddit
    techmeme – curated by a mix of algorithms and an editorial team
    Hacker News – based on a community who find interesting geeky stuff around the web

    Newsblur (once you subscribe it provides you links to the different mobile apps)
    Reeder – a third party RSS reader for OSX which supports Newsblur

    Buffer

    Weiyun English interface
    How to use Weiyun

  • Hemingway + process

    I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.

    Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.

    Hemingway

    I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:
    Hemingway - editing mode
    Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:

    • It looks at readability providing a reading age score. (Grade six is equates to 11-12 years old). The lower the reading age, the clearer the writing is. It has also aids in SEO
    • It examines sentence structure, the harder a sentence is to read, the more ambiguous it may be.
    • Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives to phases
    • It looks at adverbs and use of the passive voice

    Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.
    Hemingway - writing mode
    Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.

    You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.

    The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.

    Pinboard

    Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.
    Pinboard - home screen
    Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.
    Pinboard - bookmark screen
    I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.

    • URL – I only change the link if it is a temporary link such as ‘feedproxy.google.com’. I expand the link or change it to any permalink that is on the page
    • Title – I edit this as necessary to reflect the article title and the website name
    • Description – this is a quick explanation of why I thought the page was significant. It might be an article quote or top statistics mentioned
    • Tags – categories or labels that I assign to an article which allows me to find it based on a relevance. Tags are used by other applications as well

    I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.

    Terminal

    The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.
    Terminal app - introduction
    There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking  differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.
    Terminal app - check the weather forecast
    Terminal app - ping a website
    I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper  syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.

    IFTTT

    At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.
    IFTTT
    Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.

    More in part two.

    I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.

    More related content can be found here.

    More information

    Hemingway OSX application

    Pinboard

    Pinner app for iOS

    IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)

    Books

    Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor

    UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins