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

  • Hells Club + more things

    Hells Club -an amazing film mash-up, spot the different appearances. In the words of the maker

    There is a place where all fictional characters meet. . Outside of time, Outside of all logic, This place is known as HELLS CLUB, But this club is not safe
    TERMINATOR VERSUS TONY MONTANA VERSUS TOM CRUISE VERSUS CARLITO BRIGANTE VERSUS BLADE VERSUS JOHN TRAVOLTA VERSUS AL PACINO VERSUS PINEAD VERSUS THE MASK VERSUS ROBOCOP VERSUS DARTH VADER VERSUS MICHAEL JACKSON.

    The film editing that went into Hells Club is impressive.

    Colin Faver, one of the first pioneers of house and techno in the UK died on September 5. Faver who co-founded Kiss FM and played all the big seminal nights in London and beyond even merited his own obituary in The Telegraph – I am sure that the irony of this wouldn’t have been lost on him. Mr C did a great tribute mix to Faver highlighting some of the tracks that he had championed, with a particular focus on his house music legacy. The mix is 3 hours and 3 minutes in length (3:03) a nod to the Roland TB-303 that is responsible for the ‘acid’ sound. Listen to it and spare Colin a thought.

    Ok the next two things that I want to share with you are a bit weird (but not in an NSFW way) so sit down and buckle up. And before you wonder about my internet habits these where shared with my by colleague Jenn Russell who worked on video stuff with me and is based out of Hong Kong.

    Southern Comfort have put a couple of ad spots on their YouTube channel. These spots feature a campaign message ‘SHOTTA SoCo’ which I guess is what some aging advertising copywriters thought was how young people would say a shot of Southern Comfort (presumably for their Bourbon whiskey and Coke).

    The video looks as if it has been made by Next Media Animation (out of Taiwan) or some similar high throughput CGI shop. I think that I can see the reason for this; NMA videos are quite popular online, it looks a bit like machinima (which young people love because they are on their consoles all the time).

    Ok, so far so good? These videos wouldn’t have been that expensive since they are all pre-existing models so maybe $20,000 a pop spend with NMA. There are a couple more including one that warns about the perils of drink driving.

    SHOTTASoCo seems to be something that Southern Comfort are doubling down on, but they don’t seem to have spent any money on advertising to promote the videos and get them views. The NMA style videos have garnered between 3,000 – 13,000 views – so somewhere on the bell curve of viewership that I have seen on other consumer accounts I have worked on. Southern Comfort also invested in (presumably more expensive) SHOTTASoCo videos by American producers Funny Or Die – none of which have over 600 views – weird or what? And why aren’t spending on paid to amplify campaigns like this? More marketing related content here

    Dark ambient veterans Autechre have put together a four hour mix that is like a history of electronica (taking in Kraftwerk, electro, freestyle, post disco, house and back again) for the Dekmantel podcast series. It is well worth a listen to cleanse the audio palette after Disclosure et al.

    Bonus mention, a dinner at Wagamama Hammersmith (in a converted fire station) with some of my former Racepoint colleagues.
    Dinner with former Racepoint colleagues
    More on this trip out from a digital point-of-view on a later post.

  • Nielsen TV data + more things

    Facebook and Google, Two Giants in Digital Ads, Seek More – The New York Times – Facebook combining Nielsen TV data, treating its ads like TV. and Google plays catch-up with targeting by email address. I think that this doesn’t make a lot of sense from a data perspective. But I can understand why Nielsen TV / Facebook deal was done from a commercial perspective. It will be interesting to see if any comparative data on effectiveness comes out from Nielsen TV

    “Negropodamus” disses Internet of Things, predicts knowledge pills | Ars Technica – I think Negroponte gets it right on a lot of IoT applications. More related posts here.

    Two HN Announcements – Y Combinator Posthaven – big move but interesting why they felt now was the right time

    Volkswagen Faces Harsher Penalties Than a U.S. Company Might | NYTImes – interesting that the New York Times admits discriminatory prosecution practices against foreign firms

    China’s smartphone market continues online shift | TelecomAsia – implied no carrier subsidies and probable show rooming behaviour. For handsets like Xiaomi and OnePlus this is likely to be trying a friend’s device

    Valuing Vodafone | Digital Evangelist – Liberty was a joker of a bid anyway, Ian give its a more in-depth response

    Sony to skip PlayStation Vita 2, blames mobile gaming for handheld’s decline | ExtremeTech  – When the DS debuted and promptly tanked, I wondered if there was still a market for dedicated handhelds. Nintendo proved there was, provided you hit price points and committed to supporting it over the long term. Sony didn’t — and that fact explains far more of the difference between the two companies than all the smartphones in the world

    Could Didi Kuaidi take on Uber Internationally, and Win? | SocialBrandWatch.com – probably not but it is gaining traction

    Apple Is Sourcing A9 Chips From Both Samsung and TSMC | Chipworks – interesting because of the work that has to go into two different taping out processes

    Google To Let Advertisers Upload And Target Email Lists In AdWords With Customer Match – not terribly surprised by this, Facebook and Twitter have done this for a good while. Sina Weibo have been doing it

    The Royal Spanish Botnet Army | Motherboard – interesting article on political social media spam in Spain

    The Switch – I love the idea of this Netflix switch and the way they have approached making it available

    NHS Approved Health Apps Could be Leaking Your User Data | Lifehacker – which makes it harder to encourage adoption

    Guess what: Millennials aren’t all the same when it comes to news consumption » Nieman Journalism Lab – not terribly surprising, though the millennials I have worked with don’t read news in the traditional sense

    Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future of Computer Chips – The New York Times – new directions required as Moore’s Law is running out of steam

    Is Android a monopoly? | The Verge – I don’t necessarily agree with the author’s argument, although I could see that you could argue consumer benefit. I could also see how the government can see clear parallels between Microsoft’s bundling policies which got them in hot water and Google’s bundling of its own services on Android

    Here’s what happens in tech when the money runs dry – Business Insider – “Uber for X” or gaggle of startups that want to recreate everything their mom did for them – probably the best descriptor of many start-ups today

    China Company Directors and China Criminal Liability | China Law Blog – interesting piece on the differences in Chinese company director convictions and those in the west. It’s about direct responsibility

    What Happens Next Will Amaze You | Idlewords – the title is ironic, great downbeat summary on the state of the web

    An NPR Reporter Raced A Machine To Write A News Story. Who Won? : Planet Money : NPR – so if machines can turn out stories where does that leave press release writing and media relations?

  • Traackr – beyond the buzzword event

    Thanks to Delphine at Traackr UK for inviting me alone to their event last week. I started to make notes about what was being presented but in the end also started writing reactive notes as thoughts occurred to me.  Here they are below (with the spelling corrected).
    IMG_7976The event was given the theme of ‘beyond the buzzword’ which has multiple interpretations – Traackr looks at influencers more like a granular taxonomy than around keywords, but it also signifies a mainstreaming of ‘influencer marketing’.

    There was an explanation of why influencer marketing
          • Authoritative content
          • The ability to better scale high touch relationships, something that traditional public relations isn’t able to do. The mix of people in the room from marketing agencies and PR agencies gives an idea of how ‘blended’ the concept of influencer marketing is. PR agencies see it as an extension of PR, specialist agencies see it in a different light and mainstream marketing agencies see it as an extension of their content marketing divisions

    What became apparent to me during listening to the introduction and the presentations was that Traackr and the people on stage hadn’t met the same requirements I’d heard from clients with regards a business case for influencer marketing. Influencer marketing wasn’t quite taken as an article of faith, but considered to be a good thing. There was a focus on measurement benchmarking and a lack of concern over RoI or the lack of econometric data to back up the decision. The lack of econometric data to support PR is starting to become an issue and may affect where PR sits (at least in B2B environments at least for those companies with a strong marketing automation programme in place). IMG_7966
    There was some hints that influencer marketing was looked at in a similar to customer services, in particular the advocacy journey above reminded me of customer service models.

    Coca Cola

    Coca-Cola focus the majority of their influencer relations programmes on what Brian Solis calls the Magic middle, the point at between the head and the long tail in a ‘long tail distribution’, the man from Coca-Cola defined this as  ‘people who don’t have agents and strong bonds with followers’. They are likely to know the majority of their followers personally. They use interaction and prize give-aways as a way of encouraging brand advocacy and continued heavy consumption patterns. In a similar way to on pack tokens and giveaways would have done in pre-internet times.
    They also like to do activities that encourage co-creation and in-real-life (IRL) interaction was consider the acme of these campaign interactions. When asked about whether they use sponsored / affiliate marketing of magic middle influencers – Coca-Cola generally don’t touch them. They only pay for a-listers and this seems to be on a market-by-market basis.
    Interestingly, they use Traackr to consolidate programme data, keep things up to date, integrate with rest of the toolbox. I wonder what would be economics of this approach rather than using Salesforce’s tools to provide the customer records?
     The objectives for influencer marketing at Coca-Cola where around brand love, brand affinity and purchase intent – which makes sense given the dynamics of the mature market oligarchy that they operate in.

    De Grisogono

    De Grisogono is a Swiss-based jewellery brand that also make mens watches. They discussed their use of influencer marketing as part of a panel discussion. Historically luxury brands had been slow to react to social platforms due to their perception of exclusivity and what it meant to be exclusive. In many cases social was imposed by customers on the brands. De Grisogono sees social and influencer marketing as an extension of their IRL social events. Since they are a relatively new brand there was  also no heritage as baggage.
    There overall intent is to drive footfall into stores, however it was interesting that they don’t look at location-based services like Swarm/Foursquare and instead focus on content channels. They don’t need to look at customer segmentation, since their approach to pricing does that for them.
    They qualify influencers based on expertise and passion. Generally their jewellery influencers have 30-50,000 followers, mens watch influencers have less. This is in sharp contrast to fashion bloggers who may have millions of followers.
    When thinking about influencer relations they put a focus on how they design content and experiences. They also pay a lot of attention to provide clients and prospects at any IRL events that influencers attend with adequate privacy.
    The brand produces content that features influencer, to keep the production levels high. User generated content is not obvious for for a luxury brand (despite customers taking selfies) – De Grisogono take a more graduated control of visual content than other brands.
    In trying to define the ROI, De Grisogono said that they don’t measure it explicitly but have noticed a causality between influencer coverage  and a 300 percent increase in press coverage.

  • Weiden Kennedy Tokyo + more

    Weiden Kennedy Tokyo did this great brand video for Nike Korea, they supported it with a ‘Be Heard’ campaign on KakaoTalk. Weiden Kennedy Tokyo work for Nike is consistently of a really high standard. More marketing inspiration here.

    One of the things that had been keeping me busy over the summer was working with Racepoint Asia on the planning and strategy behind this video to promote the Huawei P8. On reflection it could be cut down to 3:15 with a branded end screen to make it tighter, but its a great bit of video shot by Jenn Russell.

    Ashley Vance talks about his talks with Elon Musk of PayPal mafia, Tesla and SpaceX fame

    Adidas China put together a few videos of local artists in China to promote the Superstar ‘shelltoe’ trainer. They feature musician Eason Chan (Canto-pop veteran with some EDMish remixes), VJ Mian, pixel sculptor Li Tian Lun, and street muralist Hua Tu Nan. This is hosted on YouKu so you will need to be patient to get it to load

    There is something meta about the concept of TED Talks at the Burning Man festival; its like a cliche of daikaiju proportions, but if this gets people interested in mathematics, so much the better.

  • Hong Kong banks + more

    Hong Kong banks

    Hackers threaten to take down websites of Hong Kong banks unless they pay bitcoin ransoms – interesting move and good PR by Akamai, the block chain has allowed researchers to see which Hong Kong banks are paying up.

    Business

    Chinese Soccer Prepares to ‘Fly Alone’: Will Success Follow? | WSJ – moving away from government. It will be interesting to see if China can displace the European teams in the world’s sports media markets. I suspect that a key component of that, which hasn’t been addressed yet, would be changes in sports betting

    Design

    Should Your Logo Be a Wordmark or a Symbol? + Subtraction.com – app design space predictates going with a brand symbol which has its own risks. But wordmarks work in other media like word-of-mouth

    Gallery: A practical, low-tech Japan | Ars Technica – really clever product design

    How to

    BeeCanvas – Collect and share your information visually – great for assembling mood boards

    Innovation

    LINE Maps for Indoor – Android Apps on Google Play – Japan only indoor mapping. More related posts here.

    Glove-like socks are made from material stronger than Kevlar – Swiss Barefoot Company. It is interesting that so much effort is put into materials technology for glove-like socks.

    Ireland

    Direct flights from Hong Kong to Ireland would really see bilateral trade take off, says Irish consul general | South China Morning Post – it would also affect the role as Heathrow as the long haul hub for Irish flights

    Marketing

    3M Builds an Impressive Branded Rube Goldberg Machine From a Variety of Its Products – absolutely nails the brand positioning of 3M as a business and is a good profile raiser amongst technical specifiers

    Selfridges puts Apple Watch at the center in floral window display | Luxury Daily – interesting targeting strategy by Selfridges, focusing on Apple Watch sales to women, rather than men. It reinforces the devices status as a fashion device that happens to have health benefits

    Online

    LinkedIn Lookup app replaces company intranets – Business Insider – defensive move against Facebook for Work

    Kik Takes $50 Million Investment From WeChat Parent Company Tencent, Hits $1 Billion Valuation – interesting move by Tencent to invest in Nik

    Vlogger Chyaz on product placement online – BBC News – ASA clarifying yet again

    Retailing

    Smartphone-Owning Millennials Say Most of Their Retail Browsing Occurs In-Store | Marketing Charts – so retailers need to put in free wi-fi without a reg wall

    Wireless

    China’s smartphone sales slide 10% year-on-year (but not for the reason you think) | Techinasia – consumers going for premium handsets and keeping them for longer than changing cheap handsets. Is it total cost of ownership or status driven?