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

  • Ghostly sounds + more things

    Ghostly sounds

    All the ghostly sounds that are lost when you compress to mp3 – this has been quite well publicised but there is something about it that sends shivers down my spine each time I listen to the ghostly sounds.

    Culture

    Benjamin Von Wong’s superhero series of pictures are amazing

    TJ Fuller’s animated GIFs of psychedelic animals are tremendous

    Gadget

    The Apple Watch Is Time, Saved | TechCrunch – watch as context dependent screen for iPhone

    Apple Watch vs. Samsung Smartwatch: No new Gear announcement at MWC | BGR – a lot of supposition here but it was interesting that Samsung kept all the limelight for the Galaxy S6 models

    Innovation

    BBC News – Technology helps visually impaired navigate the Tube – interesting where 2.0 project on the London Underground

    Japan

    A History Of Gundam, The Anime That Defined The Giant Robot Revolution – as if this needs any explanation. More Japan related content here.

    Marketing

    Wednesday. Hump Day. Peak of the week. – hump day promotion great way to bury the competition by O2

    StateOfPR – Research report – the key take out in the stateofpr research report for me was the stagnation in budgets, however this maybe due to the CIPR membership skewed towards NFP and public sector

    Media

    David Shing’s vision of a world united by tech: Media360Summit – Campaign Asia – the sixth biggest contributor to stress is media overload

    Online

    Adult content policy on Blogger – Blogger Help – Google looks to clean up Blogger which has become a bit of a spam nest. More related content here.

    Retailing

    Why has ASOS removed its guest checkout option? | Econsultancy – they must have data to back this up surely? Or they don’t value drive by custom? More related content here.

    Security

    When Strong Encryption Isn’t Enough to Protect Our Privacy | Alternet  – much of this is because the information about the communication is useful in itself. It provides the typography of networks, the nature of the communication. Frequency of communications indicates the relative strength of communication. Strong encryption is like an envelope, but the stamp, the address, the colour of the envelope, the way the address is written, the franking over the stamp and the return address all provide useful information. 

    Edward Snowden Citizenfour: The former contractor sparked a movement that’s winning the surveillance argument. | Slate – interesting analysis of the dynamics of the US privacy movement. Thi is going to have legs. The only thing that surprises me however, is that other people are surprised. It is a natural extension of the ECHELON network of the late 1990s.

  • Robot nation in China factories +more

    China’s Factories Are Building a Robot Nation – Caixin – it is amazing how manual things like smartphone manufacture is. Apple moved production to China because pick and place ‘robotic’ automated machines had been used in phone manufacturer, but couldn’t handle the jewellery like manufacturing. Pick and place had been used in Japanese consumer electronics manufacturing since the early 1980s. We’ll see if the China robot nation works out in manufacturing. More related posts here

    Google and Apple may be forced to pay more tax in Russia | Gigaom – it makes sense

    Pablo by Buffer – Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds

    Satya Nadella is cleaning up Microsoft’s ‘dirty little secret’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – the challenge is how do you give enough cloud away to encourage trial and adoption. It was easier with package software or OS where you just targeted C-suite and management consultants. I don’t think is necessarily that negative a story for Microsoft

    Vince Vaughn and Co-stars Pose for Idiotic Stock Photos You Can Have for Free | Adweek – genius collaboration with iStockPhotos

    Fund that hasn’t picked a stock in 80 years beats 98pc of peers | SCMP – Voya Corporate Leaders Trust Fund

    What Is the Future of Chinese Trade? | Yale Global – interesting analysis of the Chinese economy

    Brands must target digital strategies to local culture in Japan | Luxury Daily – great insights from L2

    China manufacturing shrinks again in Feb. | WantChinaTimes – partly down to the timing of spring festival

    Chinese shoppers are angry that their luxury Japanese toilet lids are made in China | Quartz – which says a lot about ‘brand China’ for its own consumers

    AirCloset is a subscription fashion box startup with a twist | Techinasia – interesting wear-and-return model

    Panasonic Developing ‘VR Goggles’ – Nikkei Technology Online – interesting that they can be worn as glasses implying a major reduction in weight in comparison to competitors

  • Age of Ultron + more things

    Age of Ultron

    The latest trailer for Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron looks like a CGI feast for the retinas. Age of Ultron is part of the Marvel arc planned out for the next few years. The main protagonist Ultron was originally created by Tony Stark and then went ‘Skynet’ which is where the Age of Ultron picks up the story. More on the Marvel universe here.

    Cerrone

    Amazing documentary by Pitchfork on French musician and producer Cerrone. Cerrone pioneered electronic disco, influencing electro, Italo-disco and house music. The Cerrone ‘sound’ first came together in his track Love in C Minor. Supernature saw him replace orchestra elements with electronic sounds and the rest as they say is history. Cerrone went on to sell charting disco records, film sound tracks and live shows. His records have been highly sampled in hip hop culture. You can find more culture related stuff here.

    Range Rover Evoque

    I am not particularly impressed by the Range Rover Evoque convertible but I did like this trip through the central London section of Crossrail. It has got a James Bond movie feel to the video, which is fitting given the tie in that the brand has had with the Bond franchise films featuring Daniel Craig.

    Valuation: four lessons to take away

    Aswath Damodaran, “Valuation: Four Lessons to Take Away” – on company valuations is a fascinating talk to have on in the background while you work away. 

    Learning how to learn

    A great presentation that I wish I had seen at college on the skill of learning. I had to learn a lot of these lessons by trying and working out what seemed to work for me. 

    The idea of going back and forwards in modes is very interesting in order to help learning. The neural scaffold needs to be built over time. 

  • A Twitter experiment on fake followers

    In 2013, I worked with a number of companies and executives that has used services to inflate their Sina Weibo accounts standing with fake followers.  (In case you haven’t heard about it, Sina Weibo is a Chinese micro-blogging service). Often this was seen as a cheap way of getting an ego-boosting metric on their account or showing a positive delta relatively cheaply.

    The idea of follower count as a measure of worth can be seen in real life. Look at the front cover of magazines and the value of a celebrity is often measured in the number of followers that they have.
    Untitled
    Take this Elle magazine cover and interview with Kim Kardashian. Kardashian’s social media presence is as much a mark of status as a Hermès Birkin bag.
    ingrid's birkin
    However with Birkin bags going for as much as £55,000 online (holds head in hands and rocks slowly back-and-forth), getting fake followers on social platforms like Twitter might be a bit easier. If Twitter isn’t your thing, there are a number of suppliers of fake followers for Instagram, fake YouTube subscribers and fake Facebook likes too.

    I want to reiterate this here, acquiring fake followers is a cross-platform issue, Twitter is just a handy canary in the coal mine. The reason for this is the amount of tools that are are available to measure Twitter as a platform and the prevalence of its use amongst media elites.

    Looking at the variety of fake follower services, it seems to be a thriving business. A quick search on buy twitter followers cheap gave me over 31,100,000 results according to Google, and who am I to argue with their maths?

    De Micheli and Stroppa estimated that fake accounts used as fake followers accounted for 4 per cent of the Twitter user base, whilst Twitter claimed that the number was 5% in the S-1 document it filed prior to its IPO. The estimates of fake accounts on Sina Weibo are thought to be as high as 30% of the user base – it is hard to tell because Chinese Weibo consumption tends to be largely passive using it as a news stream rather than a ‘social’ channel.

    Politicians and celebrities have both been caught out using fake followers to bolster numbers (presumably to add credibility to their social presence).

    So what are the benefits and how does it work?

    I added 55,000 fake followers on Twitter, so that you don’t have to.

    The process itself is really easy. The fake follower services generally accept payment by PayPal and have easy-to-use e-commerce services. The followers are generally delivered over two-to-five working days.

    First I tried buying a big batch of followers, 50,000. The supplier delivered 56,000+ followers, but the number declines by about 100 followers over a week or so. This number seems to be pretty consistent. I can’t work out if this is just a common business practice or a part of Twitter’s ongoing conflict with fake accounts.

    The purchase didn’t:

    • Move my Klout score
    • Improve the quality or number of organic followers that I received

    I made a second purchase with a different vendor for 5,000 fake followers. This was delivered over five days, again an extra 10 per cent of followers were added on the top by the vendor and a similar decay pattern of about 5% of the followers occurred. This small increase had more of an effect on Klout causing a temporary bump in the score.  It has a more pronounced effect on Sysomos authority measure bumping my authority from 7 to 9 out of a possible 10.

    It didn’t improve the volume or quality of followers that my account got organically.

    With both vendors at least 5 per cent of the accounts that they used seemed to real people’s dormant accounts that had been co-opted into the fake follower game. There obviously seemed to be a market in taking over accounts that had been dormant for over 12 months. None of the fake follower accounts were set to private – this could factor into developing a heuristic for looking at fake follower accounts?

    My overall conclusion on the fake follower business is that it almost purely about personal vanity rather than gaming a system. More related content here.

    More information

    Pay up and embrace Twitter’s fake followers | Marketing Week
    Fake Twitter followers: An easy game, but not worth the risk | The Next Web
    How the market in ‘fake’ Twitter followers works | Yahoo! News
    Rihanna Loses 1.2 Million Instagram Followers After Spambot Purge | Gigwise
    Instagram makes teens and celebrities angry by killing millions of spambots | The Verge
    Twitter and the underground market by Carlo De Micheli & Andrea Stroppa at 11th Nexa Lunch Seminar, Turin, Italy (May 22, 2013) – PDF
    Inside a Twitter Robot Factory | WSJ
    Twitter Admits 5% Of Its ‘Users’ Are Fake | Business Insider
    I Bought 10,000 Fake Twitter Followers. Why Didn’t Klout, Kred (or Others) Notice? | Ignite Social Media

  • Marketing singularities

    This post was prompted by a couple of conversations over the past few days that culminated in the idea of marketing singularities.

    Conversation number one

    A friend pointed out that they’ve got a new job, just received a document on what we’re doing from my global social agency ‘X’. What’s your opinion of them and where do you think client and agency responsibilities should lie? Question number two didn’t really get answered as ‘X’ is a social agency? was a much more interesting talking point. Would they be any good, when did they become a social agency? What just happened? The upshot of it is that social is a thing that everyone is now an expert in.

    surveillance sticker art

    Conversation number two

    I was in conversation with a potential technology vendor for a specific project and I outlined the point solution that I liked about their product, which was something that made them a particularly good fit for said project. They then explained to me why they were so much more than the point solution I required and were in fact a complete CRM-type solution.

    Other peers (let’s not call them competitors, as they have a slightly different world view and do slightly different things) have been acquired by CRM or software vendors. Those that were too big to buy have done deals to integrate their offering as a kind VAR-like partnership.

    Structure

    What these two conversations are indicative of are a pair of marketing singularities.

    Think of marketing as a broadly horizontal industry sector rather than the vertically integrated leviathans that are often brought to mind by the words Martin + Sorrell or the letters W, P +P respectively.

    I would consider the marketing groups to be more analogous to conglomerates than integrated marketing creatures. Competing clients and bespoke client needs create the need for different marketing brands and single purpose agencies but for many parts of the business they tend to operate independently from a day-to-day operation. Collaboration and genuinely integrated working are journeys to be yet taken rather than destinations that they will be soon arriving at.

    WPP are an interesting organisation in that as a conglomerate they have tried to build a vertical stack of agencies and technology vendors. They own a variety of technology companies particularly involved in the purchasing of online advertising (programmatic advertising or real-time bidding as it has been called in the past).

    There has been concerns amongst amongst the ad worlds largest clients that groups may use their privileged position as vendor and agency to play against their clients. Major brands seem to have developed a distrust of both agency trading desks and the lack of transparency into market data. Instead of giving agencies an unfair advantage and allowing them to play both sides of the trade, they are bring the trading desk in-house.

    So there is both client pressure and expertise factors that come into play which suggest the horizontal model is likely to be dominant for some time to come – now matter how many spreadsheets using a Monte Carlo method are developed by investment banks predicting a sure-fire success.

    However within this  horizontal model there some consolidation happening. On the one hand tools are rushing towards total customer information awareness. The key problem is one of structure, tools are used to selling into one kind of person (someone like me), not re-engineering a business from the ground up. Secondly relationships with agencies are not going to provide the kind of trust and access that would be required to fulfil the full potential of this vision.

    You could imagine the conversation in the board room

    Hi Mr CEO, Sterling Cooper Draper Price, the marketing agency the last CMO appointed want to re-engineer our business with their social software.

    Wait a minute Mr CTO, when did we have Sterling Cooper on board? What happened to McMann and Tate?

    They were fired two years ago by the last CMO, who left six months ago

    Our current CMO handed in her resignation yesterday, to start her own yoga retreat franchise. No doubt the new one will want their own agency…

    Ok, so a bit of poetic license is used in this thought experiment, but the point is suppliers like marketing agencies tend to be changed more frequently than the vendors of key business systems. Something has to change radically for this work.

    Whilst on the agency side of things everyone has tried to ‘own’ the social space as there is client fatigue over what that now means. And while social is now something everyone does at a marketing agency level, there are less individuals who are willing to admit that they have a specialism in it; as it seems to have about as much long term career growth in it as being a CB radio operator. More marketing related content here.