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

  • Mac vs PC + more news

    Microsoft and partners revive Mac vs PC ads — without mentioning Mac – CNET – This is all a bit odd. If you’re going to do a competitive comparison you have to mention the competition. That and the humour was why the Mac vs PC ads worked. Not mentioning them looks like Voldemort like fear in this context. Yet the ads seem to be run more like a PR campaign where you don’t mention the competitor. More Microsoft related content here.

    Taking Stock With Teens – Fall 2015 – US only research, OTT video increase is no surprise, what is how far Hulu has fallen

    The subprime ‘unicorns’ that do not look a billion dollars – FT.com – Michael Moritz calling out unicorn businesses due to their risks, negative sentiment to Silicon Valley boom. No big deal except that Moritz is a former journalist who knew the likes of Steve Jobs well. He then moved to Sequoia Capital and funded businesses like Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and Zappos (paywall)

    Is Tencent leading the way or lagging behind Facebook? | Walk the Chat

    The CEO of one of South Africa’s largest mobile networks thinks Whatsapp is a freeloader | Quartz – interesting that WeChat clocks in at 7% usage for South Africans

    HKMA warns banks about security loopholes with NFC credit cards – the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) ordered banks Monday to conduct a thorough review of the security of their credit cards

    Hong Kong Luxury Stores See Worst “Golden Week” Ever – overly dramatic but interesting

    New-media firms shift attention to TV  – online a training ground for media mainstream?

    The DraftKings Crash | Slate – Nevada gaming laws may make Overseas expansion a ‘do or die’ requirement

    Lenovo nixed idea of selling Microsoft’s Surface Pro tablet – CNET – interesting that HP and Dell will sell it

    Why mass market VR won’t come soon | GigaOM – assuming you have to run at 4K, HD would be good enough and the content could be immersive but passive like film rather than games. More on web of no web experiences here.

    WSJ: NX could launch in 2016, will be Nintendo’s most powerful console ever – this is a high risk play given how the last console did

    IBM Allows Chinese Government to Review Source Code | WSJ – (paywall)

  • Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition, 180 Strand, London

    Having been involved in a number of events over the past couple of years where creative digital work intersected with experiential marketing I was keen to look at Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition before it closed.

    Burberry tends to get the plaudits for digital experiences in the luxury sector and they do a lot of interesting work. Louis Vuitton’s initiatives like an online service that allows ladies to personalise their bag a la Nike ID.

    I found it interesting that Louis Vuitton’s approach seems to have been guided by exclusivity not being the same as accessibility. There was a wealth of helpful staff, you were positively encouraged to take your own pictures – again unusual for a luxury brand, many prefer to give you content that upholds their standards.

    A few touches that I really liked at the Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition

    #LVSeries3 Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition, 180 Strand, LondonLV logo motion graphics at the start of the exhibition, no real surprise right? What the designers did was remove the polarisers from the LCD screens so that the screens are apparently blank. The polariser is laid out in vertical strips at different distances and widths from the screen. This gives a kind of lenticular effect when you walk past it. This modern logo morphs through matrix-like digital noise and on to the more traditional LV design.
    #LVSeries3 Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition, 180 Strand, London
    It seems absurdly simple, but the idea of using projecting mapping techniques on a flat LED screen to emphasise how Louis Vuitton products are cut from a common material before being assembled was clever. Just because you have projection mapping technology at your finger tips means that one often looks for complex shapes like building fronts rather than a flat panel.
    #LVSeries3 Louis Vuitton Series 3 exhibition, 180 Strand, London
    The glass bins got the balance right between protecting the product so that it doesn’t look grubby from being over-handled, whilst still making it accessible and tactile rather than a museum experience.

  • Gundam themed advert + more things

    Toyota have made a Gundam themed advert for the Japanese market. It is interesting that this Gundam themed advert is a Japan only creative. It might be intellectual property rights. I think something like this would be popular abroad as a Gundam themed advert would tap into Cool Japan.

    In many European countries Toyota’s safe but boring line-up would benefit from the uplift provided by tying into Cool Japan. The reason for these boring product lines is free trade agreements and import quotas.

    Japan now means quality, engineering, design and is generally very much appreciated with a lot of goodwill. More Japan related content here.

    ISART digital animation school students came up with this great short film about a gravedigger and his son. It’s as good as anything that’s been coming out of the likes of DreamWorks animation.

    London DJ Kid Batchelor and E-Mix on this 1989 mix at Confusion de Londra, Shaftsbury London. It’s hard to understand now how much of the early house seen was built by the likes of Kid Batchelor in central London clubs. Now culture as moved away from the centre as property developers have moved in.

    NOTCOT.ORG | Rhei electro-mechanical clock with a liquid display – From an economic point of view this makes no sense. There are much easier ways to solve this as an engineering problem. But I can’t help but love the sheer bloodymindedness that underpins this as a project. More design related posts here.

    Parks and Pickering did a slow tempo mix with tougher beats of Imagination – Just An Illusion, but this uptempo live version kills them all. I’m surprised that there was never a more uptempo club mix of it as it sounds like a classic house track. Another Imagination track Changes was remixed by the legendary Larry Levan. Leee John is still very underrated as a performer.

  • Outlook for Mac + more

    Use Outlook for Mac? Don’t upgrade to El Capitan | The Inquirer – yet. It looks like the Microsoft dev team for Outlook for Mac have more work and testing ahead of themselves.

    Read our lips, no more EU roaming charges* | The Register – surely this would be pre-dictated on their network footprint? Would this mean that Vodafone Germany could sell me one of their SIMs in the UK?

    Attention! Facebook is losing its footing – Fanpage Karma Blog – as a service platform, it wouldn’t surprise me as Twitter’s context in this regard makes more sense, though I know people like BT have invested in customer services on Facebook (and in their case it makes sense due to the universal nature of their brand)

    The Surprisingly Traditional Media Path of Razor Clubs | L2 Inc. – I suspect down to needed authoritative endorsement?

    Why are luxury brands poaching leaders from the mainstream | Marketing Interactive – will this bring an existential crisis about what luxury means?

    Georgia Tech Pumps Water Through Silicon for Chip Cooling | Hackaday – this sounds really impressive. More semiconductor related developments here.

    What We Know About the Secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership that Was Just Signed | Motherboard – it makes some interesting reading

    Digital Ads Sell Candidates and Causes, in 15-Second Bursts | New York Times – short-form political campaigns

    Is the dotcom bubble about to burst (again)? | The Guardian – The issue that I see is that lack of liquidity in the market for $200M+ valued companies. There will be a series of events that cause more people to turn their non-public large tech holdings into cash than available buyers. This is not materially different from the repo market which caused significant issues in 2007/2008

    Study: Brands that message more, sell more | Venturebeat – just don’t piss off the customer

    Didi Kuaidi buys stake in Indian ride-hailing group Ola – FT.com – interesting international expansion moves, a coalition of the willing against Uber

  • 25 things you wished clients knew

    25 things you wished clients knew was crowdsourced from friends in the industry. A few points where consolidated from multiple people saying the same thing. The names are concealed to protect the guilty – enjoy.

    Advertising / design

    • No I don’t want to whip a complete campaign for a client (re)pitch just because X agency told you that they’d do it for free – its one of the great lies along with ‘I love you’
    • The principle of negative space, having your logo fill it won’t have the effect that you want
    • Out of the three design choices you will get from me, only two are viable. Whilst I want you to feel in control, I have gamed your selection in favour of the two concepts most likely to work
    • Your mother, wife or child isn’t a viable focus group / definitive form of research. There is an industry term for this it’s called HIPPO syndrome

    Client services / account planning

    • I am not your friend, at some point we may become friends despite our client / agency minion relationship
    • 3am in the morning in my time zone is not an appropriate time for a conference call
    • Unless the agency minion is dedicated on one client, they will have other demands on their work day in addition to your business
    • No I don’t want to over-service your business (that is work more time on the business than we are paid for on a regular basis)
    • I don’t feel that it is appropriate to spend two hours discussing your lanyard strategy as it relates to internal communications and change management (true story)
    • A recent case study of your rival doing exactly the same tactics does not mean it will work for your brand
    • Only in an exceptionally few cases is ‘everybody’ a target market, even then you will want to prioritise

    Public relations

    • Off-the-record is not off-the-record
    • Journalists generally won’t allow you to pre-approve their copy unless you are paying them (its native advertising / advertorial) or its a top tier celebrity / sports star interview
    • A strap line from advertising is not your PR messaging
    • The messaging workshop you’ve been invited along to is likely media training for people who feel that they don’t need media training
    • Unless you’re Samsung (in Korea) or a few other select advertisers, you withdrawing ad spend won’t affect editorial policy towards your company in a positive manner
    • In a disagreement with a journalist / publication you won’t get the last word
    • You aren’t spending enough on measurement of your programme (allow 30 per cent of your budget)

    Social media marketing

    • Viral videos are a myth, roughly half the views are bought on the most successful examples
    • Social reach is best achieved through paid means, it won’t nearly be as big if you rely on earned alone
    • Generally speaking, consumers haven’t been gagging for the opportunity to engage with your brand content
    • Social media is not some that you should just leave to the intern
    • Celebrities will generally want money to plug your product or service on their social channels
    • Klout scores have no place in any serious social media-related discussion
    • More followers is not a social media strategy

    Ok, your turn what things you wished clients knew would you include?

    More information

    Don’t Attempt to Create a Viral Video Unless You’re Willing to Pay for Distribution | Ad Week