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

  • RoomAlive + more things

    Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game | The Verge – interesting idea, taking immersive experiences to the next level with RoomAlive without the disadvantages of VR goggles, by project mapping over the room instead. More related content here.

    Analysis: What’s Next For Waggener Edstrom? | Holmes Report – interesting analysis on WaggEd. An ideal acquisition target for BlueFocus? The agency had stagnated for a long time, despite building (and losing) a deep bench of expertise. Secondly building around a single client like that in the long term means that your margins can get hollowed out for your hero client and your processes warped to handle just one way of working. (Paywall)

    The overstated financial impact of Occupy Central | Hong Kong Economic Journal Insight – interesting analysis of the market implications of recent events in Hong Kong

    FBI Director: China Has Hacked Every Big US Company | Business Insider – admission that law enforcement is impotent in the face of widespread state actor hacking. Given that security is so lax, this is yet another great argument for strong cryptography on assets. Secondly, it highlights the US inability to fight in this grey space. This tells China that it can operate without cost, which will embolden it to act in more brazen ways.

    When review tapes were ‘kind of bicycled around from one TV critic to another’ | Jim Romenesko – two things about this, firstly media being biked around for review. I worked on the launch of IMD in the UK which saw the delivery of digital audio and video to TV and radio stations including advertising assets, music promo videos and tracks. Secondly the way the reviewer talks about his habit for following live events on TVs reminded me of the social channel hopping I do today across Twitter lists

    Weibo: TCL dotes on HTC, LinkedIn’s Shen warns of bubble | SCMP – is a tie-up with TCL what HTC needs? TCL already has a plethora of low end phone brands including Philips and Alcatel, HTC might fit into the mid range for them

  • Why did Yahoo Directory closing become a big deal?

    Yahoo Directory is a bit like the shark. It has been around pretty much as long as the modern commercial web. Yahoo! was among the first online media companies. Whilst peers like Lycos and Excite disappeared Yahoo! managed to survive. The name Yahoo! is actually an acronym: Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Yahoo! started as a list of interesting links to sites, these then needed to be categorised as it grew and the first iteration of Yahoo! was as a directory.
    yahoo
    Yahoo! then expanded its service offering with a portal, email, shopping, auctions, celebrity chats and specialist kids content. Directories were the forerunner of search as they provided editor-driven categories. In 1998, Netscape went into competition with Yahoo! with its own directory, which now exists as DMOZ – an open directory hosted by Aol and run by volunteer editors. DMOZ has catalogued 4,167,366 sites in over a million categories over 16 years. It became obvious that human editors couldn’t scale.

    Even when consumers went away to the search box of Alta Vista HotBot and Google, the Yahoo! Directory served a secondary purpose. As a repository of ‘screened and categorised’ websites algorithmic search engines took entry in a number of directories into account as part of their ranking for sites. Directories became important to search agencies.

    When I worked at Yahoo! during the start of the web 2.0 period, tagging and its role in social search was considered to be reflective of Yahoo!’s past in directories and offered a future that was not solely dependent on the dictatorship of an algorithm. Social search promised a blended approach.

    Over the past decade Yahoo! Search and Google both gradually depreciated the importance of a directory entry for search ranking as other signalling factors took over including social mentions.

    A lot of digital marketers have lived with Yahoo! Directory for a long time. The shutdown of Yahoo!’s original service comes at a turning point for the company. It looks as if Yahoo! is about to be torn apart as Wall Street tries to get it to liquidate its holdings in Yahoo! Japan and Alibaba; return the cash to them and pick over the rest of the assets like a dead carcass on the Serengeti.

    More information

    Progress Report: Continued Product Focus | Yahoo! Corporate Tumblr account
    The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close | SearchEngineLand
    Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organisation | Ars Technica
    Yahoo Directory, once the center of a web empire, will shut down at year’s end | The Verge

    More Yahoo! related content here.

  • Social media week & things from last week

    My week was dominated by Social Media Week. I got to see Battenhall’s opening presentation and catch up former colleagues from past agency and in-house lives. A lot of Social Media Week is useless, its like as if the industry doesn’t move on from the late 2000s. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to see Ogilvy’s presentation on Twitter cards, which look extremely useful. So will have to make do with Slideshare:

    Twitter cards offer opportunities for marketing consent and building audiences. James Whatley’s presentation for Social Media Week covers the possibilities offered by Twitter cards really well. 

    American rock band The Eagles are known for being extremely difficult and unpleasant. As I was once told, if you were a festival organiser and where offered stage four cancer or The Eagles – the cancer is preferable. Don Henley and Glenn Frey were allegedly horrible excuses for humanity. The world is reputedly better off now that Frey is dead, after a decade and half of being seriously ill.

    For instance, it is impossible to clear samples or have their tracks played on television. David Letterman takes them to town. It absolutely destroys them. This clip was originally run in 2014, when Letterman was the host of The Late Show.

    JJ Abrams reinvigoration of the Star Wars franchise includes a Millennium Falcon with a Batman tumbler easter egg

    I love this advert for Hong Kong app / service GoGoVan; chock full of memes and Hong Kong cultural references.

    Finally Slate wrote a great ode to the font Futura.

  • Yahoo stock + more things

    Yahoo Stock Crashes As Alibaba IPOs – Business Insider – Yahoo stock represents an ideal target to do an LBO and asset strip to pay down the debt. The challenge for shareholders of Yahoo stock is how to minimise

    Ashley Madison Steps Up Search For Asian PR Support | Holmes Report – they are banned in South Korea and Singapore. Thailand would likely be added to the list if Ashley Madison launched there

    Logistics: The flow of things | The Economist – explains why e-railers are building their own logistics networks (paywall)

    Dude, where are my socks? | the Anthill – great story about a small TaoBao reseller

    Bits Blog: Net Neutrality Comments to F.C.C. Overwhelmingly One-Sided, Study Says | New York Times – paywall

    Apple – Privacy – interesting that Apple didn’t do this sooner

    Peter Thiel Says Computers Haven’t Made Our Lives Significantly Better | MIT Technology Review – Peter Thiel often comes across as a bit of a dick but is right on the money with regards the lack of hard innovation and excess of soft innovation

    Single Chinese company owns 60% of world market for tantalum | WantChinaTimes – which is really important for electronics manufacture

    Move over Hong Kong, here comes…Chengdu? | SCMP – huge economic growth in Chengdu which is viewed as an important city due to its proximity to the western edges of China which are the current high growth areas

    Smartphone stress in Coolpad cuts, China Mobile ‘naked’ strategy | SCMP – bottom end of market suffering with Coolpad laying off 1,000 employees

    Why news extortion is so hard to uncover | China Media Project – not just a Chinese problem, look at the uncomfortable aspects of media power with NewsCorp / News Int’l

    Clamshells Gets Smart | CSS Insight – could we see a return of clamshell devices?

    Facebook Is Hiding Important Information – Business Insider – nothing new pointing out yet again that mobile app adverts count for a significant amount of their revenue sales

  • Flightdecks & things from last week

    Virgin Atlantic’s forthcoming Flightdecks on board a plane being managed by Cake rather reminded me of the KLM Fly2Miami campaign done some three years ago. Both were about turning the cabin into an inpromptu night club with live DJ sets. 

    Apparently Virgin will be live streaming their event. The line up includes Gorgon City and Rudimental. It just goes to show that an idea like Flightdecks can run and run. 

    The World Economic Forum held another event in China this year and there was a rare opportunity to hear Chinese policy makers talk about the web. In short, the libertarian values of the web that we all know and love which came from the 1960s counterculture movement is likely to be reined in globally because the one thing governments can agree on is that more regulation and power is something they rather like.

    It included Lu Wei the minister of cyberspace administration from the Chinese government. It is impressive that they take it so seriously when the internet was largely seen as a joke by UK politicians prior to Edward Snowden’s embarrassing disclosures. But then China spends three times as much on internal security as it does on defence. Internet companies like Alibaba have broadened the marketplace into rural ‘TaoBao villages’ as rural enterprises.

    The only technology vendor / service provider represented was Qualcomm which felt unbalanced.

    SmartInsights had a great set of examples of digital experiential marketing using VR headsets like the Oculus Rift.

    iOS 8 rolled out the other day, my iPhone toting counterparts in the office are happy with it. I am giving it until after the weekend to ensure that any vagaries with carrier settings are ironed out before upgrading my phone. More iOS related content here.

    Liam Neeson’s A Walk Among The Tombstones is actually based on a novel rather than a darker remake of the Taken series of films but the trailer looks epic.