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

  • My 10 most popular (trafficked) blog posts of 2015

    These are the ten most trafficked posts of 2015, in reverse order:

    Throwback gadget: Nokia N900 – I tried Nokia’s first Maemo-based phone. It was amazing how useless it was as one forgets how linked the modern smartphone is to web services. Despite these problems one could see the now lost potential of the phone. More on the Nokia N900 at GSMarena.

    Generational user experience effects – a meditation on user experience from the analogue era to the present

    2015: just where is it all going? – I had a think about where digital and technology would go over the next 12 months or so. You can see how I did here.

    Reflecting on Yahoo!’s Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation – by June this year, the product rationalisation that Yahoo! underwent provided ample opportunity to show that it’s core offering was collapsing in many international markets. Rather than it being a market wide condition, the data pointed to Yahoo! specific issues.

    Traackr – beyond the buzzword event – a post about how a diverse range of organisations from Coca-Cola to a luxury jeweller were thinking about influencer marketing.

    Throwback gadget: Made 2 Fade (by KAM) GM-25 Mk II phono pre-amp and mixer – a review of a mixer that has been lost in dance music culture history, yet was responsible for much of its popularity outside the super clubs.

    That Jeremy Clarkson post (or lies, damn lies and sentiment analysis) – or why everyone from the mainstream media to PR Week got the story so wrong about Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

    An experiment on fake Twitter followers – I spent some of my hard-earned cash to see what difference if any buying fake followers had. I chose Twitter as a channel mainly because it would be easier to measure any impact, otherwise it could have just as easily been Facebook followers, Pinterest subscribers or Instagram followers. My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system.

    O2O (online to offline) or what we can learn from the Chinese – East Asia is way ahead of marketers in the west in terms of multi-channel marketing particularly the integration of of online with offline aspects.

    48 hours with the Apple Watch – hands down the most popular post of this year on my blog was my short experience living with the Apple Watch. I felt that it was a nicely designed, but un-Apple experience. It also convinced me that the use case for wearables wasn’t here yet.

    That’s the end of my posts of 2015.

  • Zoetrope + other things

    Zoetrope based on a number sequence

    Amazing zoetrope based on Fibonacci sequence made using 3d-printing – just mesmerising. The strobing effect reminded me of the strobe edge on the Technics SL-1200 turntable. The zoetrope were moving images before film or television existed. This embedded the zoetrope in a wider steam punk aesthetic that harked back to the Victorian and Edwardian age. John Baird used some of the visual effects that a zoetrope has in the electro-mechanical mechanism of his original television system.

    Road readers programme

    Honda Turns Car Time Into Story Time With ‘Road Readers’ Program – Print (video) – Creativity Online – smart work by Honda. It deals with the ‘are we there yet’ yet problem that emanates from the back seat during medium to long journeys. It is a world away from the focus on driving experience that car marketing usually does.

    Zegna

    Zegna celebrates family togetherness with multi-generation gift guide – Luxury Daily – really nice idea that ensures your family gets presents that you’d actually like. It deals with the awkwardness of intergenerational gift giving exemplified by Bart Simpson socks and Old Spice gift guides. For Zegna’s perspective it also allows the brand to build a relationship with the children and grandchildren of current customers. Its an interesting approach to building those mental models for the brand. More luxury-related content here.

    Bizarre Tinder ads

    Amazon Looks To Recruit Engineers With Bizarre Tinder Ad | Motherboard – this looks at first glance an attempt to target brogrammers. I wonder what was the insight that drove this whole campaign? The whole thing feels so odd and out of context. Alongside the nazi branded tube train to promote Man In The High Castle this feels one of Amazon’s odder marketing decisions.

    Vogue China

    It is interesting hearing about the role that Vogue China played in ‘building’ the fashion industry in China including getting Chinese models on the world stage. Why had they been ignored previously?

  • Cullinan SUV + more things

    Sneak Peek at Rolls-Royce Project Cullinan “SUV” – Luxury Insider – the approach to teasing the Cullinan is more like the way (Android) smartphones are marketed. It is interesting that car makers now leak this photography. As a teenager I remember that there was quite an industry in photographers taking pictures of engineering mules and models being tested in disguise. Hans G. Lehmann’s photography in Car magazine of the late 1980s were legendary. More on luxury here.

    Discogs Relaunch Record Store Database ‘VinylHub’ – hyponik – good to see that Discogs is not sitting on their laurels. Independent record stores are using Discogs to reach customers around the world. It makes sense for Discogs to build a database about real world record stores that make up its seller backbone.

    New proposal for Yahoo’s turnaround: get rid of Marissa Mayer, 75% of staff, and lavish perks – Quartz – they would struggle to keep the other 25% of the staff left. It is the antithesis of the Silicon Valley culture. You couldn’t run a business like Yahoo! in the same way as you can run tired enterprise technology companies using the private equity or Computer Associates formula. Despite what you might think Yahoo! relies on innovation. PHP and Hadoop are just two of the technologies that have come out of Yahoo!. If you don’t have talent, you go from having a profitable business with an older client base; to a loss making business with even less of a client base. Websites go downhill a lot faster than milking enterprise software users for maintenance contracts.

    Michael Tsai – Blog – Apple Pushes iPhone 6s Pop-up Ads to App Store – which indicates that Apple’s customer upgrade cycle might be too long for Apple’s finance department. It also suggests that Apple might be moving away from the pre-owned market being an on-ramp to iPhone usage.

  • WHITEvoid + more things

    WHITEvoid

    OrbitalInstallation by WHITEvoid is a large circular flip-dot installation for Volkswagen, find out more at Prosthetic Knowledge.

    It is really interesting to see that projects the one that they’ve done with WHITEvoid are funded by Volkswagen. I was reminded of teamLab and Troika.

    Pornhub

    Pornhub does consumer marketing with a suitable for work (SFW) advert for its gift card service providing subscriptions to its content. I can’t work out whether this is:

    • Trolling, just to build fame similar to much of Larry Flynt’s legal cases during the rise of the Hustler media empire
    • They genuinely believe that porn has become mainstream in a similar way to the 1970s when the great and the good would watch Behind The Green Door and other works from the industry’s ‘golden age’
    • They are aiming for ‘prank presents’ a la office secret Santa or a ‘bro’s’ birthday

    Its a ballsy move, they’re sticking their head above the parapet despite having issues around revenge porn on the platform and possible under-age content.

    Returning to space

    Helen Sharman, The First British Astronaut, Narrates an Animated Story of Her Recurring Dream of Returning to Space – feels very Kubrickesque phenomenon, on Vimeo so may not be visible to all viewers

    Porsche 935

    1977 Porsche 935 & Transporter | Uncrate – I love that Porsche designed their own transporters so that their cars were looked after in the right way. The transporter is based on a Magrius-Deutz truck, not a Mercedes truck like the article claims. It is interesting that it wasn’t a MAN truck given Porsche’s association with Volkswagen.

    Kartograph

    Kartograph – Drawing new geographic data over the infrastructure of old – really interesting technology meets art project. It reminds me of the locative art that appears in the speculative fiction of William Gibson, particularly his pattern recognition trilogy. More on where 2.0 here.

  • Creative Labs + more things

    Facebook shuts down Creative Labs, apps – CNET – interesting that they are reining this stuff in, probably cheaper to buy success than make it at the moment. Creative Labs participation would probably have been a key attraction in attracting rockstar talent as well

    Why Brands Are Ditching Twitter’s 6-Second Vine App | Adweek – One of the main reasons brands are turning away from Vine is because unlike its competitors, Vine doesn’t have an advertising model, although brands often buy Twitter ads to promote their clips, noted Topher Burns, group director of distribution at Deep Focus

    How Corporations Profit From Black Teens’ Viral Content | The FADER – there is a whole Public Enemy album worth of material in here about social media being a 21st century version of the antebellum cotton plantation

    Just why are Louis Vuitton and other high-end retailers abandoning China? | South China Morning Post – although Chinese shoppers consumed 46 per cent of luxury goods around the world, their purchases in their home market accounted for only 10 per cent of global sales, falling from 11 per cent in 2012 and 13 per cent in 2013 – more luxury sector related posts here.

    Losses point to bleak future for music streaming services – FT.com – also bad news for streaming infrastructure companies like 7Digital (paywall).

    With ‘Mr. Robot,’ ‘Silicon Valley,’ and ‘Halt and Catch Fire,’ Hollywood Is Finally Starting to Get Hacking Right – The Atlantic – and inspire new generations of developers in the same way that Star Trek inspired new generations of engineers

    Making AK-47 Magazines – Matra in Bosnia – interesting minimalism in both form and production with extensive use of stamping

    The Dude Cardigan Abides. | Pendleton Woolen Mills – nice history of the cardigan made famous by Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski

    iPad Pro: Wrong | Monday Note – interesting reflection on user behaviours

    Panic in iOS Land | Monday Note – interesting critique of Windows Phone apps