Interesting and funny film from Mercedes for the SLS coupe AMG. The way the businessman loses his mind trying to define luxury feels like a parody of Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Are the metaphysics of luxury and the metaphysics of quality the same? The SLS coupe AMG is a very impressive looking vehicle. But surely its performance is a bigger draw than its luxury, it’s ride is likely to be very firm. Especially given the AMG heritage.
Vice put together a great documentary about a veteran tattooist in Hong Kong. His work goes back to when Hong Kong was a port of call for the merchant navy as well as the US and Royal navies. More Hong Kong related posts here.
I love the way Honda taps into the inner child of potential customers. With there being no truly bad cars now and green pressures, so brand and emotion becomes so much more important for car brands. Honda has been consistently been ahead of the curve.
PBS have animated interviews that were done with Robin Williams back in 1991, and they’re really good. Really smart and thoughtful stuff that makes you realise the huge hole that the loss of Williams made in the entertainment industry.
TOMY’s Cocoro scanner which detects stress (and according to the maker, lies). I could see managers thinking that it would be a good idea to keep the Cocoro scanner ton their desk. Though I would keep it out of view if I were you, as the display would be stress raising in its own right.
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
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SLS coupe & other things that made last week
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FES watch + more things
Who’s Behind the E-paper FES Watch? – Digits – WSJ – interesting the way Sony has become an internal VC operation. It makes sense since they need disruptive innovation and they still have smart people. they also need to allow their engineering talent to keep having an outlet for their creativity. The FES watch is a classic quirky Sony product that is very clever. The disappointing bit was hearing them working with an external product design agency on the FES watch. Especially given the internal industrial design capability to deliver iconic designs and a wider design language across product ranges. More design related content here.
Tightening too frightening for UK | HSBC – interest rate increase and lower than expected economic growth
Oh No They Didn’t: European Parliament Calls For Break Up Of Google | SearchEngineLand – inevitable but not sure it will make an impact, Google must have expected this?
Maglev elevators are coming that can go up, down, and sideways | Quartz – I love this
Flickr is about to sell off your Creative Commons photos | Dazed – Tech entrepreneur Stewart Butterfield left the company in 2008, but says that Yahoo-ordained plan is “a little shortsighted”. He added: “It’s hard to imagine the revenue from selling the prints will cover the cost of lost goodwill”. It’s the equivalent of looking for pennies that may have fallen down a crack in the sofa. Flickr photos are already used in the online and offline media. They have also been used to train image recognition algorithms, both of which are allowed by the licensing. The prints seems like a cheap, low value move.
Supermarket own-brands generate more than half of UK grocery sales | BrandRepublic – bad news for CPG brands. And bad news for brands in general, particularly when one thinks about how Amazon is building its private label lines across several sectors
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Wasted investment + more things
China has ‘wasted’ $6.8tn in investment, warn Beijing researchers – FT.com – define wasted. The ghost cities may fill slowly as rural policies move people into the cities. I would be more worried about monies wasted on systemic corruption
The click-through rate is not dead, it’s morphed into a zombie | Marketing Magazine – interesting that this has been associated with CTR rather than impressions which is a better analogue of cost per hour from the FT’s point-of-view
Edelman, TransCanada to split after Greenpeace strategy document leak | PR Week – “The conversation about Energy East has turned into a debate about our choice of agency partner,” the statement continued. “We need to get back to a conversation about the project itself, and as a result we have agreed that it is in the best interests of the project that we do not extend our contract with Edelman.” I would have thought that move won’t have been good for Greenpeace either in terms of moving the conversation away from the environment
European Identity: Strength or Weakness? | INSEAD – interesting question to pose, as an Irish national my perspective is that it is a definite strength. We are young nation unencumbered the baggage of former glories; having stepped out from having been colonised. Whilst we had corrupt bankers this doesn’t invalidate the idea of Europe. More consumer behaviour related content here.
Tumblr Is Now The Fastest Growing Social Media Platform, Edging Out Instagram and Pinterest by @mattsouthern – blogging by another name
MI6 oversight report on Lee Rigby murder: US web giants offer ‘safe haven for TERRORISM’ • The Register – I feel uneasy about this. How would you feel if the Royal Mail or Fedex was responsible for reading your mail?
How Technology Is Changing Media | Buzzfeed – a media pack masquerading as interactive post but lacking in subtlety
2014: The year Facebook organic reach died | The Drum – made its point clearly
Drone Flights Face FAA Hit – WSJ – increased regulation in the US on commercial usage likely to cramp marketplace in short term, but provide clear framework in the medium-to-long term
Sony Predicts Electronics Recovery | Variety – components rather than finished products
「TOYOTA FUN CHAIN」| DRIVING KIDS with TOYOTA – interesting Toyota effort to make driving relevant for young people
Uber removed blog post from data science team that examined link between prostitution and rides – the gift that keeps on giving for communications professionals
Regin: Top-tier espionage tool enables stealthy surveillance | Symantec Security Response – interesting whitepaper outlining a spying tool. Might it be a UK one? It’s possible given that 9% of the targets were Irish and none where in the US. But Ireland is also a financial centre and has one interesting defence company Timoney Technologies so it would depend who the Irish targets are
Grilled: the Daily Mirror’s deputy 3am editor Hannah Hope | PR Week – interesting traditional media planning cycle (paywall)
White House Push To Allow FBI Phone Hacks Could Hurt Intelligence Gathering – Defense One – very similar to the kind of points made back in the early days of online cryptography
The Grumpy Economist: Dusty corners of the market – anomalies exist in hard to trade paper presumably if they were easy to trade the opportunity would be capitalised upon as it appears
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Facebook engagement advertising fraud & things that made last week
A nice video on how Facebook engagement advertising fraud works. The illegitimate way to buy likes from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. But you see similar fake likes when you you use Facebook advertising. This can be seen in the behaviour of the lakers. The Facebook engagement advertising fraud is run by Facebook itself. More on Facebook here.
As good as special effects get, this time lapse footage of the sun still amazes
It is interesting how retail is looking to replace sales assistants. Nestle is rolling out SoftBank robots in Japan to sell cans of coffee. The robots are manufactured by a French startup that Softbank bought into. They are doing interesting things with these robots in Softbank mobile phone shops as well.
Interesting idea by jam band Phish that combines a Disney sound effects album from the early 1960s with their live performance. First I am amazed that Disney hasn’t sued them into oblivion as they are very careful about their intellectual property rights and the way brand assets can be used. Secondly, it is an unusual direction for Phish to take as well.Phish are best known in the UK for being the inspiration behind the name of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream. They come out of the live tradition of rock with devoted fans that The Grateful Dead pioneered. Many of the younger Deadheads that I have known think that Phish are the closest to the real deal of seeing the Dead live before Jerry Garcia left us.
Guardians of The Galaxy is rolling out on digital distribution, Blu-Ray and DVD in the US which seemed like a good time to highlight the many different ways of saying ‘I am Groot’ in different terran languages. I am not a big fan of the Marvel universe but I do like the tripped out kooky vibe of Guardians.
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Duracell, Buffett & more things
Duracell
Warren Buffett buys P&G’s Duracell business | Marketing Interactive – I think that this is smart, Duracell is a powerful brand. It has been extended from beyond its traditional high quality alkaline batteries to include rechargeable batteries, chargers and related products. Beyond distribution, the fit for Procter & Gamble is less obvious. Having Duracell under more focused management should bear dividends
Branding
Nokia would like you to know that it’s “up to something” — Tech News and Analysis – Nokia is more focused on the business to business space now, I wonder if its more than a licenced brand deal? Nokia says vanishing consumer brand may return | Reuters – as a licenced brand, think Bush, RCA or Philips
Consumer behaviour
Instagram is killing teen girls’ self-esteem – Quartz – an exaggeration, am sure you could have put in magazines, models or TV role models in this title just as well
Finance
China bad loans rise as growth slows | SCMP – medium businesses suffering
Kuwaitis to get Dow’s divested shares | Shanghai Daily – interesting move
Morgan Stanley pushed murky China stock to market | AP – Tianhe story probes and is a warning for due diligence`
Marketing
Is Adblock Plus Killing Your Conversions? | Kissmetrics – it is more the issue that they are counted as false impressions
Hong Kong Tramways: West Island MTR Line opportunity to grow ad revenue | Marketing Interactive – Hong Kong’s trams are a great outdoor advertising option which I’ve used to Tommy Bahama in the past
Security
The Nor » All Cameras Are Police Cameras – interesting article on the paranoia imbued by surveillance technology. It opens serious questions about devices like Ring security cameras
McChrystal warns against ‘police state’ | Politico – sweet spot between police state and anarchy
Technology
TSMC Predicts Next Big Thing | EE Times – MEMs and CMOS together on the one chip
Tencent’s Quarterly Earnings Disappoint As WeChat And Mobile Gaming Growth Slows | TechCrunch – games growth wouldn’t run at the same rate in the west anyway?
Build Your Own Tiny Titan Supercomputer for Less than a Grand | Motherboard – gives you an idea of how technology has changed
Tools
YouGov Profiler – so handy for throwing together personas