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
Vintage Obscura Radio – back when I used to work at Yahoo! we had an editorial team who surfaced great websites like the Liveplasma, which allowed you to discover new artists and authors based on what you liked. Or The Cloud Appreciation Society. We used to package up the best of these sites in an event called The Finds of The Year. Vintage Obscura Radio would have definitely made the cut. What is Vintage Obscura Radio? It is web radio channel that surfaces songs from YouTube that have less than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and were released before 1996.
It’s not powered by a machine learning algorithm, but by 70,000 music obsessed Redditors looking to surface nearly forgotten music. This takes us back to the best parts of the pre-social platform web, where there was more room for the weird and the wonderful. Vintage Obscura Radio is a pleasant distraction from doom scrolling.
Blind Spot Monitor
Ogilvy South Africa put together some clever in-dealership installations to bring the dangers of a vehicle blind spot to light for Volkswagen. Volkswagen were looking to promote the benefits of their IQ DRIVE system which eliminates blind spots for drivers, rather than eliminating other road users.
Gordon Murray’s five favourite cars
Gordon Murray designed some of the most iconic formula one cars for the Brabham and McLaren teams. He went on to design the McLaren F1 road car that preceded the current range of road cars, setting the bar for their looks, performance and handling.
Like Lotus founder Colin Chapman, Murray likes his cars small and light. I understand why, the most dangerous and most fun car I ever owned was a Fiat 126.
Gordon Murray’s five favourites are:
Lotus Elite / Lotus Type 14
DeTomaso Vallelunga
Lancia Appia with a Zagato designed and coach-built body
Abarth 1000GT Bialbero – a car I used to have on the wall of my bedroom as a teen. Bialbero means twin-cam
Alfa Romeo 1600 Junior Zagato
Murray admits that his collection skews towards the 1960s, which was when engineers often had to work with very little.
If
After a particularly trying week, one of our colleagues sent around the poem If by Rudyard Kipling. I found this version recited by Dennis Hopper from sometime in what I guess is some time in 1969 through to 1971.
Dami Lee on Studio Ghibli
Dami talks about the world building in Studio Ghibli films and how its creativity couldn’t have come out of ‘AI’.
Vending machine museum
Back when I first started work, we had a single Klix coffee machine which could just about vend cups of hot or cold water dolloped into a pre-filled plastic cup of coffee mix or powdered orange. These decades old Japanese vending machines put modern western machines to shame and are mechanical wonders.
The Threat of Decivilisation | Quillette – President Macron when having a Chatham House type discussion with sociology experts used the phrase processus de décivilisation – as a descriptor for the widespread civil and political unrest that has rocked France.
Rishi Sunak and Emmanuel Macron
On the face of it, decivilisation is an appropriate term if Macron believed that there was something rotten at the centre of French society. But the phrase decivilisation is problematic and Macron has been capitalised by French on the political left.
Renaud Camus
The crux of the left’s criticism is a work by the author Renaud Camus. Camus became famous writing a book called Tricks about a series of up to 45 stories (depending which edition you read) about one-night stands he had travelling around the world as a gay man in the late 1970s. Decades later Camus became more famous for his contributions to ideas of the far right, notably the great replacement concept in reaction to increased immigration in France from former French colonies. While these works were published in French they were summarised for English readers in his book You Will Not Replace Us!
In his works he describes the gradual takeover of France as decivilisation.
The left
The left drew a line between Camus work and Macron’s phrase and assumed that it was a way to build a bridge to the resurgent far right in France.
The reality is more complex. The degree of change in French society has driven backlashes in French society, in a similar way that Brexit and small boat immigration did in the UK. The problem for the left is that these reactionaries would have been natural constituents of the left. The left, like in many countries, instead has pivoted to degree educated urban dwellers, abandoning the workers to the far right.
Is French society really breaking down?
It’s hard to tell whether ‘decivilisation’ is really happening. Civil disturbances tend to happen during times of economic unrest and in the past has been a reset. There is a body of opinion who believe that social media has its thumb on the scales, driving things harder and faster without a countervailing force to help balance things out over time, like happened in previous decades.
Japan Rail Companies Limit Train Passes Due to Chip Shortage – these stored value cards also allow consumers to buy things in combinis as well as travel. They are similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus cards. What’s happening to the chips through? Japanese YouTubers have published advisory videos around the debacle for tourists to Japan. It seems to be a drive towards registration as much as anything else
Cigars are still a thing. This looks like a feature length video produced in conjunction between the YouTuber and a cigar manufacturer.
Marketing
Multi-factored reasons in nature why campaigns seem to be working less well. We know that as campaigns have become more digital, campaigns have been less effective and marketers being less confident in their campaigns. Interesting the way brand building on digital is danced around. The channels often dont work and measures are BS only a technologist would love.
OPEC – the national cartel for oil producing countries is having a meeting this weekend. OPEC stands for Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. For me, OPEC is something from my childhood. I grew up in the aftermath of 1973 OPEC embargo.
The 1973 OPEC embargo
1973, a coalition of Arab countries launch an attack on Israel, with a view to regaining land that had been lost during the 1967. The OPEC embargo was targeted at nations that had supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War:
Canada
Japan
Netherlands
Portugal
Rhodesia
South Africa
United Kingdom
United States
The reality is that the impact was so much wider than just the embargoed countries. For instance, Ireland wasn’t targeted, yet was impacted heavily by OPEC’s action. The time was critical as well.
The oil shift
The west had moved from coal to oil after the Second World War. Societies followed the same energy path that Winston Churchill mapped out for the Royal Navy back in 1911 for many of the same reasons. Oil offered many benefits in a way that it provided double the thermal content of coal. Boilers in power stations could be smaller, trains and ships could go double the distance.
Countries like Japan and Ireland had moved from coal fired power stations towards oil fired power stations. Car ownership had taken off. Finally, the US had been on a journey from using domestically produced and nearby oil (via Canada and Venezuela), to rapidly increasing oil imports from 1970 onwards.
This gave the OPEC countries a lot of leverage. The embargo finished in 1974 but oil remained at $11/barrel.
1979 oil crisis
The Iranian Islamic revolution disrupted supplies of oil to the west. In late 1978, with the revolutionary fervour in the air foreign oil workers left Iran. Iran tried to use Navy personnel to keep things going. Then in 1979 the revolution succeeded and The Shah vacated his head of state role and left Iran with his family.
With the exception of the Gulf War oil production and pricing was stable through the 1990s.
OPEC back in the news
The Ukraine war gave Middle Eastern oil producers an increased amount of leverage as European oil and natural gas customers pivoted away from Russia as a supplier. Countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are investing for a post-oil economy with large infrastructure projects like Neom and need a $80/barrel in order to make their balance of payments.
Yet the oil price currently is too low. This has created a fractious relationship between OPEC and the business press, especially Reuters and Bloomberg who are banned from their meetings. A good of the reason why oil prices are so low is that China’s economy didn’t surge back, and fast growing economies like India and China are getting cheap Russian oil. And despite what the Saudis might want, the price of oil at the moment is more affected by demand, rather than supply-related issues.
Saudia Arabia itself as exasperated this as it has bought Russian diesel and resold it on in South East Asia at a higher price as an arbitrage play.
China investigated Covid lab leak claims, says top scientist | Financial Times – Professor George Gao, former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told a BBC Radio 4 podcast that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was checked by experts to see whether the facility could have been the source of the coronavirus pandemic. – to be fair just because you investigate it doesn’t mean its true. I would have expected them to consider all possible vectors
Economics
US-China trade war would hurt Britain most, says leaked analysis | Sunday Times – The analysis finds that the UK’s economy will suffer more than those of the US, EU and China in the event of a full-blown subsidies war. It says the UK cannot adopt “a wholesale activist industrial policy” like the US, EU or China because it is only a “mid-sized economy outside major trading blocs”. The UK does not have the same “fiscal capacity or economic strengths” as the world’s superpowers, the paper goes on to say – not terribly surprising given that it’s about scale. Even inside of the EU there are likely to be countries that are clear winners and losers
Does Gender Diversity on Boards Really Boost Company Performance? – Knowledge at Wharton – Despite the intuitive appeal of the argument that gender diversity on the board improves company performance, research suggests otherwise. Results of numerous academic studies of the topic suggest that the presence of more female board members does not much improve — or worsen — a firm’s performance
Japan’s leading cyber security expert Cartan McLaughlin gives an update on the current state of global cybersecurity and shares insights on how Japan can protect itself against the increasing wave of attacks. McLaughlin also answered questions on effective defense tools, whether Japan is catching up or falling behind, and Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine.
Words I never thought I would see myself writing together in the one sentence hacking and farming. Farming represents a large part of the US economy, and, food supply chain has national security aspects to it for obvious reasons.
I spent part of the bank holiday weekend reading and finally managed to tuck into designer Bruce Mau’s signature book MC24. For those that haven’t heard of him Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer and academic. He founded a brand design agency: Bruce Mau Design which is now part of marketing combine Stagwell. His Massive Change Network (MCN) is in the transformation business similar to Stewart Brand’s Global Business Network (acquired by the Monitor Group now called Monitor Deloitte) and The Long Now Foundation. The philosophy of Bruce Mau and feels like it had been lifted from an amalgam of TED Talks. Bruce Mau believes in a sustainable future with techno-optimist bent to his views.
Bruce Mau, like Robert Greene has principles that seem to contradict each other. Publisher Phaidon have wrapped the hard back cover of the book in an iridescent satin fabric that a photograph doesn’t do justice to. Regardless of whether you think the book is a self-help bible, your creative muse, an objet d’art or something nice to thumb through on a Sunday afternoon Bruce Mau and his book MC24 are ideal.
China
Where China is beating the world – by Noah Smith – interesting article, although it lacks some nuance about Chinese development, consider it a starting point that you can explore in more depth from, rather than the full story
I have alluded to the impact of China’s new espionage law. VisualPolitik has pulled together a good video on how it’s being interpreted by multinationals, policy wonks and politicians. It will have precisely the opposite impact that China would like it to have on its economy.
Consumer behaviour
How many Britons agree with Andrew Tate’s views on women? | YouGov – so much in this. You also need to think about bias in questions, that its done online and the ‘you can think it, but you shouldn’t say it’ aspect of how Tate supporters might think about the questions
Interesting debate on how the ‘evangelical bloc’ has evolved over time from being primarily theological to being primarily political in nature.
How doctors buy their way out of trouble | Reuters – When federal enforcers alleged in 2015 that New York surgeon Feng Qin had performed scores of medically unnecessary cardiac procedures on elderly patients, they decided not to pursue a time-consuming criminal case. Instead, prosecutors chose an easier, swifter legal strategy: a civil suit. Qin agreed to pay $150,000 in a negotiated settlement and walked free to perform more cardiac surgeries at his new solo practice in lower Manhattan. Qin faced no judge or jury. He did not admit to wrongdoing. He maintained his license to practice. What’s more, neither Qin nor government officials were required to notify patients who purportedly were subjected to vascular surgical procedures they didn’t need. Those included fistulagrams to spot issues like narrowed blood vessels or clots, and angioplasties to open clogged coronary arteries. Within months of the settlement, a registered nurse working for Qin at his Manhattan practice alerted authorities that something seemed amiss. The nurse, who ultimately turned whistleblower, alleged to federal prosecutors that the surgeon was performing unnecessary procedures on patients, mostly elderly Asian and Black immigrants whose care was covered by the public programs Medicare or Medicaid. Prosecutors indicted Qin in 2018 on a felony count of fraud, which carried a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. But in 2021, in a deal brokered behind closed doors, prosecutors dropped that charge in favor of yet another civil settlement, court records detailing that agreement show. Once again, Qin kept his New York license to practice with no restrictions; a restricted license is one of the few ways the public can learn that a doctor has been disciplined for bad behavior. Qin agreed to pay a total of $800,000 in annual installments ending in December 2025, deposited with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. As an added penalty, he was banned from billing public health programs until February 2025
Their inability to live up to the past German reputation for quality
Chinese manufacturers at the low-end
German automobile makers struggles with software
Japanese and Korean car manufacturers challenging the luxury end of the market. I would rather have a Lexus LX than a G-Wagen. At the moment Lexus have had to shut down the list on the LX they are that oversold
Hong Kong
chanhiu design – really nice graphic design. I love their project reflecting on Hong Kong-made knock-off toys familiar to Hong Kong children as well as European children – where these toys turned up in markets during the 1960s through to the early 1980s. More here: Chan Hiu explores Hong Kong’s playful past – The China Project
Cayman Islands fights attempts by Singapore and Hong Kong to lure Asia’s wealthy | Financial Times – the sharp uptake of Singapore vehicles versus Hong Kong vehicles is very interesting – an order of 10x magnitude greater. Interesting implications for Hong Kong’s wealth management business and China’s efforts to prevent capital flight from Greater China. It also implies that Hong Kong hasn’t been as successful at attracting foreign funds for investment in China. So the Hong Kong pivot towards the Middle East investor makes sense.
Apple expanding supplier base in China, Southeast Asia, and India – the number of manufacturing facilities/locations of Apple’s top 200 suppliers grew in 2022 in China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. However, manufacturing facilities/locations in the US and South Korea have dropped from 72 to 62 and 42 to 36, respectively. The latest list shows that Apple’s supplier base in South and Southeast Asia is growing amid Apple’s diversification move. Meanwhile, Apple keeps expanding its reliance on China, a sign that Apple is likely to prepare for a decoupled global manufacturing ecosystem. Due to Apple’s change of methodology, disclosing only “locations” instead of “facilities,” the numbers of certain geographies, including Taiwan, cannot be compared historically. For example, Apple said that TSMC had five “facilities” globally in 2021 but had three manufacturing “locations” globally in 2022. The methodology change led to fewer listed manufacturing locations of Apple suppliers in Taiwan, from 72 to 41
Starmer’s Britain – Portland – Kier Starmer is considered to be the most likely prime minister after Rishi Sunak. In some respects this feels like 1996, all over again. The then Conservative government back then was buffeted by scandals such as the Arms to Iraq affair report, the BSE crisis and the slow drip of sleaze.
Depending when in 2024 the general election happens, we will have had 14 years of Conservative rule and the government has been dogged by scandal.
Rewind to 1996
Unlike Kier Starmer era Labour, back in 1996, Labour looked like a political party chock full of ideas. Will Hutton’s The State We’re In focused minds on what a future Labour government would look like and long term thinking. Tony Blair and the policy wonks around him seeded the media and academia around them with their new ideas. Blair even used a computer system to analyse Conservative parliamentary statements and gain the upper hand in prime minister’s question time.
Back to the present
Kier Starmer and the modern day Labour Party isn’t the Labour of 1996. There isn’t the buzz of modernity about them. There is no vision thing at the moment. They are defined by not being the tories. Public Affairs specialists Portland have tried their hand at kremlinology to paint a picture of what a Kier Starmer-led government is likely to look like, should it get into power.
A number of people who contributed were veterans of the Blair – Brown administration. They recognise that Kier Starmer and colleagues are likely to inherit a country with problems across the economy, public services and infrastructure. The Kier Starmer administration is unlikely to share the globalist viewpoint of Tony Blair, partly due to decoupling and partly due to Brexit.
All of which makes the Kier Starmer five missions for a Better Britain look like a pipe dream without several back-to-back terms in government.
Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7 – with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.
Make Britain a clean energy superpower – to create jobs, cut bills and boost energy security with zero carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero.
Build an NHS fit for the future – that is there when people need it; with fewer lives lost to the biggest killers; in a fairer Britain, where everyone lives well for longer.
Make Britain’s streets safe – by halving serious violent crime and raise confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest levels, within a decade.
Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage – for every child, by reforming the childcare and education systems, raising standards everywhere, and preparing young people for work and life.
Kier Starmer needs his own version of The State We’re In as just under 70 percent of the British public surveyed are neutral to being in disagreement about whether they understand the current Labour vision for Britain.
Can Chinese Payment Apps Gain Traction Globally? | ChinaFile – Chinese fintech companies and their super-apps will still revolutionize global finance. In this excerpt from his book The Cashless Revolution: China’s Reinvention of Money and the End of America’s Domination of Finance and Technology, Chorzempa explains why Chinese fintech has thus far struggled to gain a foothold in the international market, but will likely inspire other companies to replicate the fintech super-app model in their home countries
People too tired to lead healthier lifestyles, UK survey finds | Health | The Guardian – A survey has found that tiredness is why 35% of people don’t make the changes to their diet and physical activity levels that would help them close the gap between good intentions and concrete action. The results, from a YouGov poll of 2,086 UK adults for the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF), illustrate the barriers many people face in their desire to adopt and stick to healthy habits. When asked what was stopping them from eating more healthily and exercising more often, 29% of men and 40% of women cited “feeling too tired”
The Lost Planet of Hong Kong | Newsroom – This just in from Hong Kong. Its chief executive has corrected the language of a journalist for asking a question at a press conference about the pro-democracy protests of 2019: “First of all, it is not [called] the 2019 protests. It is the black violence.” And: a 23-year-old has been charged under the Beijing-imposed national security laws for allegedly “intimidating the public in order to pursue political agenda”. He was attempting to stage a protest, otherwise known as a black violence. Also: a satirical cartoonist has been sacked after a government official complained about a drawing that mocked local elections, and his books were removed from libraries. When approached by the last signs of independent journalistic life in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Free Press, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department commented, “Books that are suspected to potentially violate national security law will be immediately removed for review.”
Young women in South Korea are live-streaming their suicide attempts | The Economist – the South Korean government announced its fifth “Master Plan for Prevention of Suicide”. Mental-health check-ups will now be available every two years, rather than every decade. Beyond that, the plan proposes different approaches for the young and old respectively. (Over-70s have the highest suicide rates in Korea.) For women in their 20s and 30s who live alone, South Korea will make available more counselling and therapy
The Rise of Generative AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT — Information is Beautiful and How Kevin Kelly is using AI in his creative process | Dropbox Blog and Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker – as A.I. becomes more powerful and flexible, is there any way to keep it from being another version of McKinsey? The question is worth considering across different meanings of the term “A.I.” If you think of A.I. as a broad set of technologies being marketed to companies to help them cut their costs, the question becomes: how do we keep those technologies from working as “capital’s willing executioners”? Alternatively, if you imagine A.I. as a semi-autonomous software program that solves problems that humans ask it to solve, the question is then: how do we prevent that software from assisting corporations in ways that make people’s lives worse? Suppose you’ve built a semi-autonomous A.I. that’s entirely obedient to humans—one that repeatedly checks to make sure it hasn’t misinterpreted the instructions it has received. This is the dream of many A.I. researchers. Yet such software could easily still cause as much harm as McKinsey has
What actually represents good taste and good style was discussed in this old show from the 1970s, which makes an interesting perspective to reflect on.
