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

  • Millennials are people too

    Smart funny video by Adam Conover on the marketing obsession of millennials as a form of segmentation.

    Show this to as many marketers as you can.

    Having been involved in youth marketing and even spoken at conferences about it, many of the challenges and insights that ‘millennials’ as a cohort face aren’t unique insights per se.

    You hear the same things over-and-over again. Being young presents its own set of challenges, these are tweaked accelerated by environmental conditions such as economy and housing. You feel the injustices of the world, adulting is hard. Responsibilities have a weight to them. Education has a cost.

    Getting your first home is hard. Finding the right partner is stressful. Since the baby boomers the concept of youth has become elongated. The whole of society hasn’t been drafted into fighting a war and benefited from the rise of the industrial society.

    But that doesn’t mean that it makes much sense for marketers to talk about millennials in such a broad brush way. At least gen-X whilst been written off as slackers were realised to have various different sub-cultures or tribes.

    That level of nuance seems to have disappeared in ‘our’ collective understanding of millennials and gen-Z.

    While we’re on about nuance, since when do adverts aimed at baby boomers appreciate that they don’t all look like Helen Mirren or Joanna Lumley. Or that they like going to rock concerts and festivals? Or that they might run for health and leisure?

    Marketers are increasingly looking at big data, but lacking granularity in terms of segmentation and factors that might influence brand relevance.

    My hypothesis is that the fetishisation of millennials as a single cohort is down to a deeper seated fear of disruption ambushing the marketers. Millennials aren’t an alien invasion, but people just like we’re used to. This fetishisation will end up as a feedback loop distorting their own view of what they expect to be and how they expect to be seen.

    More on millennial related topics here.

  • Chinese industrial decline + more

    Chinese industrial decline – It is hard to explain to people the diversity of China. If you’ve followed China as a subject area you’re used to discussions around tier one to six cities. We tend to buy into ‘Blade Runner’ China because its the tier one and two cities that you end up visiting. Its pretty much the same with the media. I really like this New York Times documentary that deals with the slowdown of heavy industry in Northern China and apparel manufacturing in Guangzhou province in the South.

    Chinese industrial decline in this documentary shows off it’s rust belt and left behind areas. This city’s mayor and is project is a microcosm of the efforts going on.

    China has been in a constant state of reinvention. I worked out of old electronics factories in Shenzhen that had been turned into offices and creative studios, with Shoreditch style retail attached. Whilst, Shenzhen is famous for manufacturing, the reality now is more complex. It has a thriving finance sector that China hopes will eclipse Hong Kong.

    Further up the Pearl river delta cities like Dongguan were industrialised by Hong Kong entrepreneurs and became crucial parts of the global fashion supply chain. Here too changes is happening, areas of Dongguan are being repurposed as tech campuses. Huawei built their ‘European theme park’ campus there. Of course, the unskilled workers get replaced. They move further inland along with some of the industry.

    Some of the industry, has moved abroad. China has become too expensive and onerous to deal with. In the North, heavy industry was built at break neck speed relatively close to coal fields, rather like the UK during the industrial revolution. During this go-go time China could use or export all the steel old. After the 2008 Olympics China started aiming for more sustainable growth and heroic efforts became surplus production.

    A Brazilian flavoured tune as a free download Oya’ Indebure feat. Laudir de Oliveira | DJ Nu-Mark. However, don’t mistake free, for low quality, this is an amazing tune. More on DJ Nu-Mark here.

    Maybe a team up with Scanner would have been more appropriate but liking Jean-Michel Jarre + Edward Snowden – ‘Exit’

    May the 4th aka Star Wars day saw geeks dominate the web, I did really like Japanese airline ANA’s rendition of the Star Wars theme purely from aircraft related found sounds

    TBWA in Amsterdam pulled together these clever DJ controller place mats for McDonalds. It shows how much is now possible with printed circuits. I love the combination of material smarts and  creativity.

  • Predict ISIS attacks + more news

    How Traffic to This YouTube Video Could Predict ISIS Attacks – Defense One interesting, but is it actionable intelligence? This reminds me a lot of the term ‘chatter’ as used in the series ’24’. Or prediction markets, which may be better for financiers investing in related areas rather than providing something that the military and law enforcement can use effectively. For instance it would affect your stance on Insurance stocks and oil futures if you were able to predict ISIS attacks. More security related posts here.

    You can now hang out with Totoro and explore Studio Ghibli worlds in virtual reality | Rocket News 24 – indicates an interesting interplay between linear media and VR. Linear media storytelling sets the scene; VR allows you to explore it. I feel that we don’t ‘get’ storytelling in VR yet, having worked on a project for New Balance. This work by Studio Ghibli offers a complementary option that media companies could get onboard with

    Lenovo and Apple are fastest growing among India’s top 10 smart phone vendors | TelecomTV Insights – we’ll see how long this lasts, India like China is focused on domestic smartphone makers. I could see Apple appealing to elites like their peers globally, but the great bulk of handsets is going to come in at the bottom.

    brandchannel: The Language Of Now: Pepsi Kicks Off Global PepsiMoji Campaign – please millennials engage with our brand! To be fair PepsiCo have tried innovations for a good while. They were one of the first brands to use QRCodes for western consumers. Western consumer usage is only now starting to catch up with it a decade or more later.

    [Podcast] Tencent And QQ With Eva Xiao | Technode – great interview as a primer on Tencent. Tencent is one of the BAT of China. BAT stands for Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The BAT are a set of companies with a similar position to what GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) have in the west.

  • China tech data slides

    I have been pulling together China tech data slides for me that were useful for some work that I have been doing. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these slides with a wider audience.

    This month, I have selected a few slides that shed a light on advertising and consumer behaviour in China.
    May online marketing
    Looking at platforms it is hard to over play the importance of Tencent in the Chinese internet which is show at the heart of the China tech data I have collated. Looking at mobile behaviour Tencent is responsible for at least four of the top ten properties: WeChat, QQ, QQ Browser and Tencent Video.
    May online marketing
    If we look at two Chinese internet companies Tencent and Netease we can see how the companies have massively increased the number of non-game apps that they provide to keep consumers in their eco-system for their digital lives.
    May online marketing
    (Microsoft’s high number is driven by a number experimental project apps and enterprise apps). What this means is that the mobile OS becomes less important, which is one of the reasons why western brands from Samsung to Apple have been hit in the market. Their platforms give them less leverage.

    Tencent’s WeChat is one of the most popular methods of payment in China
    May online marketing

    If we look at advertising spend in the Chinese market we can see that digital and radio advertising spend over-indexes. In some ways this is surprising. Online content is huge and historically the government controlled traditional media much more tightly than online media – to the detriment of watchable content on the television. More recently, government regulation has tightened across platforms.
    May online marketing
    Print advertising only slightly over-indexes in comparison to digital or radio. On the face of it there looks to be a massive opportunity in television advertising.

    If we look at the media market consumption habits two things immediately stand out. Television and radio are largely holding their own in the face of rapidly growing digital consumption. The rapid growth in digital consumption is being driven by non-PC devices.
    May online marketing

    If you want to know why Huawei has partnered with Leica to boost the perception of its smartphone camera function, one of the factors involved is the massive growth of photography in Chinese mobile behaviour. This is especially interesting when one compares it to messaging and social – WeChat the largest mobile social platform is all encompassing in its functionality and place in modern Chinese life. A second factor is the way manufacturers are trying redefine the premium smartphone sector, at a time when innovation and experiential difference have become incremental.
    May online marketing
    May online marketing


    You can see the full presentation here. More posts on China and technology related subjects.

  • QQ themed KFC + more news

    First QQ themed KFC opens in Shenzhen | Marketing Interactive – interesting brand collaboration. KFC has always made a point of being more local and closer to the Chinese consumer than rivals. This has paid off over time. It is no surprise that there is a QQ themed KFC, but what’s next in terms of media-dining experiences? What could be the content tie-ins that would bring a QQ themed KFC concept to life? Is it the China market answer to Chuck E. Cheese?

    Here’s How Snapchat Might Be Beating Facebook | TIME – relative engagement rates and popularity with millennials desirable for marketers. But it has easily copied features and might end up being the beta tester for Instagram’s new features.

    Pentax K-1 Hands-on First Impressions – Bokeh by DigitalRev – I really like the look of it. Pentax has had a rough ride with change in owners but they are still a great DSLR camera platform. One of the key reasons for this is the cheap but good quality lens available for it.

    Google takes aim at Microsoft and IBM’s enterprise clients (GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, IBM) | BusinessInsider – probably not what IBM needs at the moment. I think that Microsoft would have much less worried simply because it has better client relationships. IBM Global Services have had issues for years documented by Robert X. Cringely in The Decline And Fall Of IBM

    Is Apple starting to rot in China? Top level thoughts – SocialBrandWatch – It is less about ‘what the phone projects externally’, and more about “does the phone allow me connect digitally, if so, I am open to what fits me best” – interesting cross platform commoditisation as app layer becomes OS. WeChat is doing what Netscape thought that they could do with the browser and the web in the late 1990s. Also smartphones in trough part of innovation. The big gains between models are no more.

    How Facebook’s Stock Split Lets Mark Zuckerberg Keep Control | Fast Company – getting out ahead of things to prevent a future Yahoo! situation with activist investors and slowing growth ending up in tortious tech death

    Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network | Digiday – ok, but where’s the revenue and user growth? Twitter has a lot of things going for it except the ability to effectively

    Google just pissed off the entire TV industry | TheNextWeb – hahahahahaha really, lets see reach curve data across different consumer groups and CPMs. Technology companies don’t get marketing and branding. They do get sales, but they’re lame on brand and really understanding the consumer. More posts on advertising here.

    The Guardian bets big on VR: ‘We’ve jumped in the deep end of the pool’ | Digiday – feels more like an experiment or a PR stunt rather than a meaningful media exercise. I guess it could be an interesting way to explore storytelling in VR. Film doesn’t work as well as an analogue as it has in video gaming. VR seems to be more about experiences and emoting

    Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek – My own take is Mayer had a nearly impossible job as a turnaround, but a manageable job as an optimise and shred. The products launched just weren’t up to standard and those that were aren’t monetised well. How on earth could Tumblr be worthless. We’re talking not just about underachieving a la Twitter, but literally having no value. When Yahoo! bought Flickr it was breaking even and they managed to ruin that as well

    This is one big example of the market conditions that are holding Apple down (AAPL) – lengthening upgrade cycles. You’ll see an emphasis on services. It also means that the first Apple device is a pre-owned Apple device

    Kaiser Kuo on Baidu, Foreign Reportage, and the ‘Paradoxes’ of China | Asia Society – great interview. Kaiser is one of the best ‘translators’ of China out there.

    The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium – interesting vision thing on the IoT by Tom Coates.

    Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds | Reuters – The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period. 

    Penney’s results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools. – I am not terribly surprised as an Irish child growing up in the UK during the Troubles I saw the community around me self-censor so they couldn’t be accused of anything.

    Apple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster | NYTimes.com – “None of the brands do really great,” he said. “But while I might sell one or two Huawei phones in 10 days, I may not even sell one iPhone 6s.” (paywall)

    The rise of China’s millionaire research scientists | South China Morning Post – A total 1.4 trillion yuan was spent on the sector last year, according to the government, more than the entire GDP of New Zealand