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

  • Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation

    With the Yahoo Q2 2015 progress report on product prioritisation  – Yahoo! published a list of properties that it was closing down and services that it was changing support on over the next few months. Most of the coverage amongst the people I follow has been around the shutdown of Yahoo! Pipes, as despite its flakey behaviour it was tremendously useful for putting together cheap, fast services to help with social media monitoring. I ‘built’ monitoring pipes for the likes of Microsoft and AMD after I had left Yahoo! that included careful key word filtering. This allowed them to take this feed and syndicate ‘good’ news machine translated into different languages on different micro-sites. This ‘Pipe building’ process took just a few hours.

    My friend Mat Morrison had put it up to much more inventive uses.

    Yahoo! Pipes, like the Fire Eagle location service came out of a golden age of web development. An influx of talent into the business like Bradley Horowitz, Simon Willison, Stewart Butterfield, Tom Coates and Joshua Schachter brought with it a web 2.0 philosophy of data being:

    • Portable – consumers could back up their own data at any time, or use it to move to a rival service. In stark contrast to the Facebook and WeChat walled gardens of today
    • Data is to be manipulated – data could be overlaid or processed through other services, like crime data on maps, or Pipes

    But enough eulogising; Pipes was an interesting idea that never got the support from consumers or Yahoo! that it needed. The service was flakey at times, if it was a car it would have been a late 1970s/early 1980s vintage Alfa Romeo or Lancia – it was that bad. It is obvious from the Yahoo! Pipes blog that it has been in a mode of minimal maintenance for years – the last post prior to the shut down notice was posted in 2012 to outline a work around from Yahoo! shutting down its Babelfish translation service (which was originally on AltaVista.com in the late 1990s and relied on technology licenced from Systrans).

    Lets look at some of the other services that Yahoo! has sunset this time around.

    The market specific services are interesting, as they paint a picture of Yahoo! under-performing across international markets and in sectors where it previously had a strong advertising offering. Take the cars section across the main European markets, looking at the UK offering – there is no page takeover by a car brand, there is no sponsored content and there is two banner ads (one for AutoTrader, one for BSkyB), one tiny rich content ad at the bottom of the page for the new Terminator film and one re-targeting module. If this is an indicator of what other European markets are like then automotive advertising at Yahoo! Europe is in a bad way.

    TV and film properties have little to no ads on the front page, again no takeovers or sponsored content. So Yahoo! seems to be struggling with getting advertising spend in two key sectors.

    If we go to Asia, the move out of the Philippines is particularly interesting, presumably driven by advertising opportunity – or the lack there of. But when you look at the economic indicators of the Philippines, there is a consistent growth predicted in retail sales according to Statista
    philippines retail sales

    According to Ken Research, the Philippines online advertising market grew with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43.4% during the period 2008 – 2013 and is predicted to grow almost 15% CAGR between 2013 and 2018. E-tailing is expected to grow by 101.4% CAGR over 2013 – 2018. So why is Yahoo!, which has been established in the Philippines unable to capitalise on the in-market growth. Is it that Yahoo! sees ways to earn more money elsewhere and the opportunity cost is too high in the Philippines, or is it a broken advertising sales machine?

    The closure of Yahoo! Entertainment in Singapore is more curious as Yahoo! still manages to get advertising from major brands. As I write this Oreo has a full page frame running and there is a dynamic banner by group shopping site Qoo10.

    Yahoo! Mail and Contacts support of older Macs and iPhones. I was surprised that these were called out. Yahoo! Mail is depreciating support for devices running iOS4 or older and running the native mail application. A couple of things here; given Apple’s expertise at upgrading iPhone users speedily why would this even be an issue?

    Secondly,  why does Yahoo! need to make a special effort to support accounts that were presumably using POP3 or IMAP email standards? The webDEV standard would make a similarly curious point about Yahoo!’s depreciation of support for contacts on a Mac running OS X 10.8 and earlier. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

    Former CEO, Carole Bartz famously said of Yahoo! that you can’t cut your way to growth. So what do these ‘product updates’ say about Yahoo!? Over the past two years prior to this update, Yahoo! has already closed over 60 services, where does it all stop? More technology related content here.

    More information
    Q2 2015 Progress Report On Our Product Prioritization | Yahoo! Blog
    Pipes End-of-life Announcement | Yahoo Pipes Blog
    Q4 2014 Progress Report | Yahoo! Blog

  • Tech trends myopia in ideas

    Tech trends event at The Churchill Club

    The Churchill Club recently had their annual Top 10 Tech Trends event in Silicon Valley. This was the 17th time that they had their event. It’s a great bit of content to have on in the background. The collective opinions in the panel bought up concerns for me with a consumer behaviour myopia exhibited around tech trends in Silicon Valley.


    Cognitive behavioural therapy

    A classic example was some of the very smart things said about wearables and health monitoring in the session. There was skepticism expressed for some very valid social behavioural reasons – if one looks at Facebook, consumers generally share only the good things in their lives, with the notable exception of life events, such as the death of a family pet. Stephen Waddington even describes his behaviour on Facebook as ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’.

    So people really into fitness are far more likely to employ self tracking than couch-dwellers.

    Quicken problem

    Self tracking was described as a ‘Quicken Problem’. Quicken allows US consumers to easily complete their tax returns – a universal problem, yet is only used by five per cent of the population for various reasons.

    All of this is very valid stuff of its self, but what happens if it isn’t only consumers making the decision?

    Self tracking tech trends

    My reservations about self tracking technologies are well recorded, to quote myself from Stephen Waddington’s Brand Vandals

    Self-tracking adds massive amounts of data to your personal data pool and social graph and raises huge privacy concerns that users need to be cognisant of

    A number of the key points that I made in my conversation with Stephen was not about consumers using their self-tracking data but how the data could be used to recalibrate car insurance, home insurance (based on absence from home) and health insurance based on activity and risky behaviours.

    Let’s look at a specific type of self tracking, the car insurance black box. Aviva (Norwich Union) trialled the use of telematics to set car insurance premiums on a monthly basis as a type of continuous assessment. It looked at factors such as:

    • When the car was used, nighttime driving was considered to be risky behaviour
    • What distance was covered, charges were on a per mile basis
    • Car location (particularly when cross-tabulated with crime statistics)
    • Speed
    • Braking data

    In IBM Research’s case study, Norwich Union envisaged that black boxes would allow it to sell insurance to consumers that drive less often. Norwich Union dropped the pilot in 2008, apparently due to a lack of consumer interest, but resurrected the car insurance black box when the European Union ruled that charging for car insurance on the basis of gender was illegal. Presumably the needed some other form of actuarial data instead of whether the driver was a female or not. This is just one example where consumer behaviour didn’t drive  product innovation that wouldn’t be accounted for in the tech trends discussion.

    Credit ratings were driven by the need for businesses to mitigate risks, direct (rather than operator) dialling on a telephone was developed to help reduce the manpower required to run telecoms networks. Night safes and ATMs (automatic teller machines) were about providing services without staff. The US airline tradition of baggage charges came from shareholder pressure not consumer demand yet is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

    The point at the end of the day is that opportunities for venture capitalists are broader than meeting consumer needs and wants.

    More information

    Brand Vandals by Stephen Waddington & Steve Earl
    AA launches black box car insurance | Guardian
    Norwich Union heralds new Pay As You Drive insurance – Aviva Media Room Archive
    Norwich Union Insurance Telematics Pilot – Pay As You Drive Telematics trial of usage based motor insurance by Volker Fricker of IBM Research – (PDF)
    Aviva Telematics Insurance Review | Telematics.com – Norwich Union (now Aviva) abandoned telematics insurance a number of years ago and is now reinstating it

    More related content here.

  • Drones in advertising and things that caught my eye this week

    Pepsi has got in on drones in advertising before it all goes a bit lame and tired. Some really interesting projection mapping type effects as well

    Drones in advertising builds on work that has been done since the Beijing olympics on the use of drone swarms for massed visuals that are complementary to fireworks and 3D projections

    Audi advert: Kevin Smith, Jason Meyes. Enough said (oh and some cameos from actors who’ve appeared in Marvel comic film adaptations including pioneer Stan Lee)

    Enterprise storage outfit Box.net have a great interview with Stewart Butterfield of Slack (and Flickr fame). Some interesting comments on how a GUI isn’t always the right interface for people who use keyboards. This is so right. I remember working on terminal screens when I worked in a call centre and the ease with which I could quickly tab around screens, rather than having to reach for a mouse to click a multitude of radio buttons. More design related posts here.

    Scottish National Party member of parliament Mhairi Black gave an interview back in March. I found it interesting as it shows that kind of impact social media will have on future political careers, particularly when it it will provide greater clarity than the 2009 debate around David Cameron’s raving history. Imagine if you were presented at the age of 50 with selected fringe thoughts you had at 19 years old?

    As Black notes:

    My uncle summed it up when he said that, when he was a teenager, he just used to shout at the telly. My generation tweets and there is a record of it.

    What adult doesn’t look back to things they said when they were 16 or 17 and go, ‘Oh my God?’

    The difference is my comments are being dragged out for the whole world to see.

    No trite social media analysis or fantastic technical wizardry just a great idea, client belief and a budget made 3M Korea’s Unforgettable Post-It Proposal

    Finally Helios is a new Hong Kong film gaining traction in the Chinese box office. In the face of a lack of new Hong Kong actors coming through, it was interesting that the new blood came in the form of Korean boy band member Choi Siwon who also performs some of Super Junior’s mandarin repertoire

  • Virtual cockpit & things from this week

    Razorfish Berlin’s interactive brochure for Audi to promote the TT coupe’s virtual cockpit. I was reminded of an ad that Mercedes did where the phone became the rear view mirror of a car, emphasising performance. Also McDonald’s had used the mix of print and circuits with phones to create beat making place mats.

    But I find the intersection of print and digital an exciting space, even if the virtual cockpit concept doesn’t appeal to me that much.

    More related content here.

    Leo Burnett Italy created an app for P&G’s Always brand that directly addresses the insecurity women may feel in an unfamiliar area at night time; it connects them with a friend, to protect them on your way home.

    It is a smart play for the brand to maximise how it can be useful to consumers.

    Celebrity music streaming service Tidal faced critics at launch, this was probably the best of them

    I love this old video about Bell Laboratories’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey that AT&T have put on YouTube as part of their efforts to digitise their archives. This is Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley

    At the other end of the spectrum, Ogilvy Hong Kong for Hong Kong Clean-Up produced a campaign that puts DNA analysis into an Orwellian future.

  • The Amazon Dash button post

    At the beginning of this month Amazon launched an addition to their Dash ordering hardware with the Amazon Dash button. There was a lot of incredulity amongst the media heightened by the unfortunate timing which overlapped with April’s Fool Day.

    Why the incredulity?

    I would break the cynicism down into two broad buckets:

    • The Amazon Dash button has a very singular usage / use case, narrower even the Yo! app which was a bit of a tech fad last year. Critics are at best uncertain that consumers would use them? I generally buy toilet rolls every 4-6 months, do I really need a button for that?
    • The Amazon Dash button implies that the hardware required is ridiculously cheap. How many boxes of washing powder, packets of Mac & Cheese or toilet rolls would be required for a button to break even?
    Business perspective

    Rather than ripping into this into too much depth I thought I would share Benedict Evans’ interesting hypothesis about the Amazon Dash button:

    Amazon is trying to eliminate both vendor and brand decisions, and turning itself into a utility company – get your house connected to power, water, gas and Amazon. And choosing which commodity product you need is just another piece of friction to be removed by Amazon’s kaizen

    There are some interesting directions that come out of this view point. Let’s break Benedict’s analysis down chunk-by-chunk:

    • Eliminating vendor decisions: there are two prongs to this. Firstly, it would reduce the basket size for supermarkets and also reduce impulse purchases. Let’s think about the Walmart ‘beer and diapers’ retail urban legend for a moment – if you weren’t shopping for the diapers, you aren’t likely to have picked up the beer next to it as you would have had no reason to go near those shelves. By implication it is also an attack on some of the categories carried in convenience stores. Given that the button is about ‘just-in-time’ shopping it implies that the users are not likely to have rooms in their lives for big box retailers or CostCo. The buttons are likely to aimed at urban dwellers rather than the suburbs were larger homes and larger vehicles to do the big box store shop are the norm – Sam’s Warehouse is safer than Walmart in this scenario
    • Eliminate brand decisions: since sales are diverted from supermarkets this also affects their private label sales, especially where they are acquired by accident as lookalikes stacked next to well-known brands. Challenger brands find that switching becomes much harder as they can’t intercept the customer at the point-of-intent through shopper marketing and the opportunity cost for the consumer gets raised due to the comparative nature of the friction in purchase.  It also begs a question about how much it affects the share price of WPP and other marketing combines who have spent big on shopper marketing acquisitions over the past few years. Do buttons offer a net gain or loss of value to them? I do know that the button puts Amazon in a much more powerful position versus vendors in terms of discount pricing to retailer and warehousing. The key to understand the power  that Amazon would bring is ‘choosing which commodity product you need…’. The very idea of a product being boiled down to a commodity buy would scare the living daylights of the average brand manager in an FMCG mega-corp
    • Turning itself into a utility: for Amazon this is about locking the consumer in via Prime to the consumer life. At the present time, logistics costs have been an increasing proportion of the cost of sales for Amazon, there must be a hope that the scale of grocery shopping will bring down the price of Prime and drive profits higher?

    There is no reason why the likes of Tesco, Ocado or Iceland couldn’t have done this. The wider Dash technology would make it easier for consumers to do grocery shopping and reduce the friction of online purchases. Instead they seem to have wanted to reduce cashier numbers inshore and focused on self-service tills. Time will tell if they made the right technological choice.

    What about the user?

    This is designed to make the consumers life easier and I can see how it makes purchase of otherwise annoying to shop for items frictionless, but it only works within reason. You can’t have a wall of buttons on the front door of your fridge freezer and just when do you press the button in the bathroom to order up more razor blades or toilet roll? What happens during the run up to Christmas when Amazon has had sub-optimal performance with regards deliveries on occasion? What is the buying frequency required to make the button habit forming, used without thinking about it, without consideration. When does the opportunity cost for the consumer tip in their favour regarding button usage?

    What I don’t have yet is a clear understanding on depth and breadth of the customer problem being solved by the Dash button.

    Product design

    The original Dash device was interesting because it represented a rejection of the broader theme of convergence where functionality is subsumed from dedicated hardware into a software layer running on a computer, via a web browser, tablet or smartphone. Instead Dash is a shopping appliance and wouldn’t look out of place in a cupboard full of Braun kit.

    The Dash button represents a further evolution of specialist hardware, a brand-specific, tactile hardware interface. It mirrors software like IFTTT’s ‘Do’ application, the Yo! messenger app and the Dimple smartphone button project.

    For non-food products like toilet rolls that come in a plastic bale that is quickly discarded, there may not be a barcode to scan in on your Dash device. Instead you would have to ask for a new pack of Charmin’ or more Mach3 razors. Processing each voice message is expensive, which makes the opportunity cost around creating dedicated buttons for certain classes of product much more attractive. Amazon first and foremost is a data-driven company, they will know which product categories that they want to have buttons for. However, what makes on an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t always make sense to the consumer…

    More information

    Amazon Dash button
    Benedict Evans newsletter edition 106
    Investing in smart logistics | Fidelity Worldwide Investments
    Amazon, in Threat to UPS, Tries Its Own Deliveries | WSJ (paywall)
    Supply Chain News: A 360-Degree View of E-Fulfillment Part 1 | Supply Chain Digest
    Amazon joins numerous startups in building delivery networks to disrupt Fedex and UPS. | DataFox
    The Amazon Dash post
    Dimple smartphone button project | Indiegogo
    SpinVox: the shocking allegations in full | The Kernel