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
Pink Floyd released their seminal album The Dark Side of The Moon in 1973. The album went on to be very influential in the decades to come. I first heard of the album in primary school, Mr Garrett talked about seeing Pink Floyd perform The Dark Side Of The Moon – Live At Wembley. I am not sure if he actually went to the concert or saw the film of it.
He was considered our coolest teacher with tales of swimming across the Suez Canal and having a dark green down belay jacket as a winter coat. This was before technical wear became mainstream.
Anyway back to The Dark Side of the Moon. It influenced so many different genres of music and subcultures. It was a popular soundtrack for relaxing at home and beloved even my the mod revivalists that I knew.
The reality was the the psychedelic aspects of the 1960s and 1970s had large scale youth appeal well into the late 1990s.
The voice recordings and ambient noise influenced sampling culture, though Pink Floyd wasn’t always happy about it. The alarm clock sound on Time was sampled by The Prodigy and Bomb The Bass were declined permission to use a sample from Money on a track dropped from their second album Unknown Territory.
Ambient rooms in clubs would see The Dark Side of the Moon and later Wish You Were Here albums played regularly. To celebrate the 50th anniversary, Pink Floyd launched an animation competition.
Generative AI was one of the go to techniques that artists went to in order to match the cosmic nature of the music. Some of the videos are beautiful to watch.
Concern about Christian Japanese
Fervent religious belief in Japan has led to two tragedies in modern Japan. The assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe associated with anger at the Unification church and the Tokyo subway attack with Sarin in 1995 by the Aum Shinrikyo sect.
Devout Christians are a small but visible community in Japan and many Japanese are uncomfortable around them due to these incidents. This leads to children becoming socially isolated in school and friends pulling away in adult life.
Yellow Magic Orchestra
Japan’s Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) get a documentary that highlights the importance to popular music production.
Condor
Condor was British Railways attempt at containerisation, before the popularity of intermodal containerisation. It makes interesting viewing. It would be great if the UK and Ireland could take a similarly enlightened approach to integrated logistics now.
SKYN Japan
Skyn presents undressing softness – the latest brand film and campaign was released in Japan for Valentine’s Day. I was struck by how it about brings out empathy. The performing couples are nervous. They didn’t know what they’ll be asked to do next and they have to do it in public. This becomes even more obivous for the thousands who saw the film on an OOH digital billboard at Shibuya station. It comes across more sweet and loving, than erotic or sexual, which is different for the category.
Whiskas
Whiskas finding the purr in every cat is a really interesting and smart proposition. I love the way AMV BBDO did the creative around this proposition.
Patriotic Alternative wasn’t a name familiar to me when I first heard about them instigating a riot in Liverpool on Saturday night. It doesn’t take that much to create a ruckus in some of the poorer areas of Liverpool.
I wasn’t particularly surprised by the burnt out police van; it sounds like a Merseyside Saturday night that went a bit out of control. That’s as Liverpudlian as a fried breakfast served in a ‘bin lid’ – a large white bun or bap large enough to contain bacon, sausage, a fried egg or two and brown sauce.
But there were aspects that did surprise me and all signs point to Patriotic Alternative. It’s a multi-cultural city, everyone has relatives abroad whether its extended Irish family, West Indians or deep connections within the Chinese diaspora. Which is why I was surprised that Patriotic Alternative managed to stir up so much trouble against an asylum hotel in the Knowsley area of Liverpool.
The city does have a certain degree of prejudice; primarily sectarianism. Its one of the few areas in England that has a marching season rather like Northern Ireland with an Orange Order parade held annual in Southport back when I lived up there. But Knowsley was something else. Patriotic Alternative managed to do something that I never thought was possible in cities like Liverpool or Bristol.
So reading about the event and the role of Patriotic Alternative in Dazed was an eye opener. It portrayed a city that I no longer recognised. Patriotic Alternative apparently organised the protest on a Telegram channel. What Dazed claim happened is that mainstream political statements and mainstream media coverage created an environment ripe for trouble makers like Patriotic Alternative.
According to Hope Not Hate, Patriotic Alternative shared members with prescribed far right organisation National Action. For an organisation that has a couple of hundred core members Patriotic Alternative has an outsized footprint. This footprint seems to be driven by the Patriotic Alternative Telegram channel with some 5,000 followers
Consumers in the 1970s on the changing nature of growing old, unfortunately attitudes and biases haven’t improved in the last 50 years.
Economics
US chip packaging firm Amkor closes its Shanghai plant for a week amid global market downturn | South China Morning Post – this is signalling a recession, as was AP shipments to Chinese smartphone brands stay in decline in 1Q23, says DIGITIMES Research – Fourth-quarter 2022 smartphone application processor (AP) shipments to China-based smartphone vendors amounted to 137 million units, plunging 24% from the prior quarter and 20.3% from the prior year, and will continue to experience a double-digit decline in the first quarter of 2023, according to figures from DIGITIMES Research’s latest report covering smartphone AP shipments. Because of shrinking demand and high smartphone inventory at the channel in both China and emerging markets, AP shipments to China-based smartphone vendors had already experienced on-year declines for five consecutive quarters
How China Fell In Love With Cheap Wine | Sixth Tone – reminds me of my time working on the Bordeaux wine marketing board as an account at the agency I worked for in Hong Kong. The work was focused on mainland China and promoted Bordeaux as a lifestyle brand for wine consumption rather than just gift giving
Massachusetts Democratic organ donation proposal sounds like prisoner organ harvesting. | Slate – Democratic state representatives Carlos González and Judith García introduced legislation that would allow incarcerated people to go home early—if they “donated” their organs. Specifically, the bill would “allow eligible incarcerated individuals to gain not less than 60 and not more than 365-day reduction in the length of their committed sentence” if they “donated bone marrow or organ(s).” Gonzalez argued that the bill was a step towards advancing racial equity in health care and making it easier for people of color to obtain transplants.
Hong Kong
The Hong Kong government must break its habit of relying on property developers | South China Morning Post – the article itself isn’t that interesting, but the author is. Regina Ip would be what the conservative party in the UK would call a big beast. She is a former minister level politician in the pro-China camp. Add to this the fact that despite mainland Chinese companies now outnumber local and foreign firms in Hong Kong and the economy is in decline. I expect Ip’s op-ed to be the tip of an iceberg of a shift in economic drivers that will occur sometime after John Lee leaves office. The clock is ticking on the big five families to diversify their wealth out of Hong Kong and China, following Jardines example to go into Indonesia might be a prudent start
Hong Kong reopens with post-Covid charm offensive | Financial Times – Johannes Hack, president of Hong Kong’s German Chamber of Commerce, who sits on a new task force to promote the city, said a “long-haul” effort to change business perceptions would have to go beyond plane ticket giveaways. “If you have relocated corporate functions to another place, half a year later you are probably not going to reverse the whole thing,” he said. “People who have moved to Singapore with their teen kids, there is no way they are going to do that again . . . They are not going to come back.” – feeds into the ‘its just another city in China now’ narrative
UK universities starting to lose allure for Chinese | News | The Times – well that’s screwed the Ponzi scheme that universities have engaged in via over-priced student accommodation real estate investments for reasons that aren’t exactly clear given their ownership structure and charters
Japanese fashion magazine Popteen ends physical version, switches to web installments instead – move to online only and moving away from monthly updates. Popteen ended its physical publishing as of February 1, 2023, with the February 2023 edition (released on December 28, 2022) being its last. web-based articles will be released on the first and the 15th of every month, known as “Popteen media”, and full editions of the fashion magazine will be updated a few times annually. The main reason for switching to the web edition was to make the magazine more accessible to middle and high-school students, who may not receive an allowance or be able to work part-time to afford physical copies of Popteen
Great video on microchip counterfeiting and recycling. The Japanese are doing some of the best work authenticating chips. Also if its bad for US defence contractors, just imagine how bad it will be for the sanctioned Russian defence sector.
Seeing for the Sightless – Luo, 26, suffers from congenital cataracts and is pursuing a degree in acupuncture and massage therapy at a college in Beijing. He needs help on the scales as there is no voice assistant function at the training center. On a mobile app called Be My Eyes (BME), he sends out a video call. Pointing his phone camera at the scales, he asks, “Hello, can you read the number for me, please?” A volunteer on the other end tells him, “91 kg.” Luo says thanks and hangs up. Usually, these exchanges only last a few seconds. Being tech savvy, Luo wrote a program back in high school to help the visually impaired memorize English vocabulary, something he himself struggled with. The app would randomly pick a word from a list he composed and he would spell it out after hearing the word. BME, developed by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a visually impaired man from Denmark, drew Luo’s attention as soon as the Android version was available in China in 2017. Currently, there are 445,000 visually impaired users from all over the world and more than six million volunteers on BME.
Style
Adidas Tumbles as Losses From Its Kanye West Venture Pile Up – The New York Times – interesting how badly Ivy Park is doing and this on their business in China: Adidas in China: a brand seeking its redemption – In the second half of 2022, Adidas CEO Kasper Rorsted estimated losses of revenue of more than 35% in the Chinese market. He declared that such a violent drop was caused by some mistakes. For instance, the struggle of keeping up with the local brands, the failed recovery after the zero-covid policy, and the scandal of Xinjiang cotton.After the winter Olympics, the trend of Guochao, or the “national trend”, started to develop. More young Chinese consumers prefer buying local brands rather than western sportswear brands. In August 2022, the local firm, Anta, overtook Nike and became the biggest sportswear brand in China with a revenue of more than USD3.79 billion. Li-Ning, another Chinese firm, also registered revenue of USD1.76 billion against Adidas’ USD1.72 billion, pushing the German brand out of the podium. The zero-Covid policy has been a big problem for Adidas. In 2022, the company had to deal with closed shops and rising costs. In particular, the general lockdown which paralyzed China for the last few years resulted in the desegregation of the complex system of supply chains built up by the German brand. The disrupted supply chains cost Adidas a loss of USD427 million in the first quarter of 2022.
SMIC expects 10-12% revenue drop in 1Q23 | DigiTimes – China-based pure-play foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) expects to post a revenue decline of 10-12% sequentially in the first quarter of 2023, with gross margin falling further to 19-21%.
MotherDuck: Big Data is Dead – Jordan Tigani spent ten years working on Google BigQuery, during which time he was surprised to learn that the median data storage size for regular customers was much less than 100GB. In this piece he argues that genuine Big Data solutions are relevant to a tiny fraction of companies, and there’s way more value in solving problems for everyone else. I’ve been talking about Datasette as a tool for solving “small data” problems for a while
Chinese New Year or CNY 2023 in online shorthand meant that for many people through Asia and beyond we are now in the year of the rabbit. You may see CNY 2023 also called lunar new year or ‘spring festival’. This post is later than I usually do for Chinese New Year, but that delay allowed me to watch more adverts so that you didn’t have to.
Traits of Chinese New Year
The rabbit is one of 12 signs in the Chinese zodiac. During the festival a number of things happen:
Family members try to gather and visit wider family members. In mainland China, this triggers the world’s largest internal migration of people over a three week period. An article by Bloomberg estimated that mainland Chinese people will have made more than 520 million trips within the country by road, rail, water or air in the first 13 days of the new year
People stay up late together, this apparently helps to give longevity to your parents
There is a corresponding rise in food purchases, alcohol and other ancillary items. Depending where you are families may make dumplings together or toss bowls of noodles together in order to gain good fortune and prosperity
There is a tradition of buying new clothes. In Hong Kong, going to sleep in (new) red underwear is believed to give good luck. Having a red theme to clothes is supposed to help bring good fortune
Money. Money in currency and gold is gifted in red envelopes. Companies will pay their employees a lunar new year bonus, usually equivalent to one pay packet (a weeks wages, or a month’s salary was the norm in Hong Kong.) Bosses also give their employees a red envelope from their personal pocket.
There are media events. So in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia there is usually a ‘Chinese New Year’ song specially composed. Special films that are suitable for all age groups do well in the cinema such as Hong Kong’s ‘All’s Well that ends well’ series of movies
Consequently, from an advertising perspective this can be equivalent to Super Bowl Sunday in the United States or the Christmas season in the UK when brands drop their tent pole ad creative.
Ad dynamics
In general, the best adverts seem to come from Malaysia and Singapore rather than Hong Kong or China and CNY 2023 is no exception. Businesses that lean in particularly heavy to CNY 2023 advertising include telecoms companies, banks and financial services and health companies. Some FMCG brands also get involved, but that seems to be more sporadic in nature. Finally in CNY 2023, some sectors like airlines have more customers than they do available seats so there doesn’t seem to be a campaign by the likes of Cathay Pacific this year.
China
Apple
Apple puts on a film that showcases Chinese opera and tells an individual tale of persistence as part of its shot on an iPhone series of films.
https://youtu.be/HjHG5kzi85o
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola features a touching story about a family of rabbits celebrating lunar new year. I can’t embed here because Coca-Cola China seems to be using all YouTube’s copyright tools for some reason.
It apparently says:
Time will change, traditions will change, and the expectation of reunion will never change. A bowl of handmade dumplings evokes the taste of the New Year in memory. A can of Coca-Cola can fully release the beauty of reunion. The first words of reunion in everyone’s mouth are Coca-Cola® Cheers! Regardless of whether the dishes on the table this year are classic dishes or trendy New Year dishes, as long as they are paired with “Coca-Cola”, the magic of delicious food can be opened, and the whole family can welcome the new and beautiful “rabbit-morrow” together!
Translation by Hakumi Chan
Gucci
China is opening up and Gucci wants to get its share of revenge spending. Hence a lavish short film to celebrate the year of the Rabbit (and a platinum UnionPay card to buy it with).
Hong Kong
Asahi Dry
Japanese lager Asahi Super Dry put together this ad with surprising production values compared to other efforts in the market.
Malaysia
Bing Chilling
Bing Chilling is a local ice cream brand. It has an ear worm of a Chinese New Year song and manages to make the product fit naturally into the film – which is no mean feat.
https://youtu.be/vB633cGTP70
Khazanah Nasional
Khazanah Nasional Berhad (“Khazanah”) is the sovereign wealth fund of Malaysia. The film about a ‘leap of fortune’ is an apropos theme to the brand.
KitKat
To celebrate KitKat pink ice cream Nestle’s ice cream marketers commissioned an advert that put together a catchy song and campy outfitted young people to create CNY 2023 perfection.
Listerine
Listerine mouthwash captures the tension of a family photo orchestrated by a demanding Auntie.
Magnum
Magnum is a mobile gaming app, as a brand think of it as a Malaysian analogue to Foxy Bingo.
Mercedes Benz
Pure product porn with a flimsy plot line of a reunion for Chinese New Year.
Pepsi
Pepsi focuses on nostalgia with a slice of romance in its advert.
A second Pepsi film encourages consumers to finish their canned drinks rather than having multiple cans partly used – a common problem during lunar new year gatherings. Creatively, you can see the influence of Hong Kong television programmes on wider asian culture to this day.
Taylor’s University
Malaysia’s system which games access to public education to the benefit of the Malay ethnic group has fuelled demand for private universities at home and abroad. Taylor’s University is a private university based in Selangor. This seven minute film comes across as your usual tearjerker, but has a couple of twists in the plot to keep you guessing.
TuneTalk
Malaysian pre-paid mobile carrier TuneTalk focused on how broken friendships and relationships are healed as part of the process of coming together through CNY 2023. Alex and Cindy will be reunited!
Watsons
Hong Kong headquartered pharmacy retail chain wishes you a Happy Beautiful New Year for CNY 2023.
Singapore’s incumbent telecoms company brings back the rival, but related Ang and Huang families for their fourth outing in their annual series Chinese New Year advertisements.
Tiger beer
Singapore’s Tiger beer did this advert for its home market. It also did experiential activities that tied into the advert too. The agency who did it is called Le PUB – nominative determinism in action.
Wider diaspora
HSBC Canada (in partnership with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco)
The case study speaks for itself and I can understand why it appeals to well heeled Vancouver residents who call Hong Kong home.
McDonalds US x Karen X Cheng
The US arm of McDonalds partnered with Karen X Cheng to create augmented reality based CNY 2023 with a QRcode type glyph on food packaging at participating restaurants.
Is nepotism really that bad? | LinkedIn – Jed Hallam wrote an essay on nepotism and the effects that he perceives it as having on inequality. Jed tries to steer a line on nepotism somewhere between recognising that the people may have an interest and talent, whilst pointing out inequality related issues derived from nepotism. Nepotism itself is widespread, whether its impact is small or large.
Jed is concerned that nepotism can actively remove opportunities for less conventional candidates that may do better if assessed solely in merit.
Social, cultural and economic barriers
Even if nepotism disappeared, our unconscious desire to hire people more like us, can mean that candidates face challenges in social, cultural and economic realms. I don’t drink, don’t have an interest in rugby union or football. I knew no one down here and sold my car to pay my first month’s rent when I moved to London. The analogy of a viking burning his boat behind him would be apt. I didn’t, and couldn’t if I wanted to, move to London earlier than my late 20s. I had to put myself through university and build up a modest amount of money to back myself as my parents didn’t have any.
One aspect of Jed’s essay on nepotism particularly surprised me:
“the proportion of people from working-class backgrounds operating in the creative industries has more than halved since the 1970s–falling from 16.4 percent to just 7.9 percent”
The problem with nepotism is that its hard to define and work out the difference between good and bad nepotism. For instance:
I line managed some one who had gone to Harrow and had found it harder to get into a creative agency because he was considered to be too posh by interviewees. He since went on to work successfully for other agencies, inhouse at a well loved brand and now runs his own shop
Would someone following on into the family profession be a case of nepotism? A classic example from the creative industry would be Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk, whose father is disco producer ‘Daniel Vangarde’ aka Daniel Bangalter. One could imagine how being exposed to music and a studio environment from an early age made Thomas the kind of producer he was.
Or the Arnault children taking roles in LVMH? European business often rely on intergenerational family ownership and management
Nepotism is more obvious when you have events like the recent US college scandal. The problem with debate about any hot subject like nepotism is the lack of room for nuance and good judgement. A second aspect to it is making people feel like victims of nepotism and inequality, rather than encouraging striving. Admittedly that is even made harder to do when inequality that underpins nepotism has become much more extreme.
People look for easy solves and clear lines for issues like nepotism, when what we really need are better decision making and good judgement.
Nepotism unresolved
There will always be people who feel hard done by, it wasn’t them it was X external factor. Sometimes it isn’t your time, or you didn’t make clear how good you were. Equal opportunity doesn’t equate to equal outcomes, the case in point that nepotism can learn from is currently going through the US Supreme Court. In an age of algorithmically filtered CVs I can see nepotism become attenuated rather than resolved.
V Shanshan, “Why are you Forcing me to Embrace Solidarity?” – Reading the China Dream – Weibo post from someone whose uncle had died from complications from covid the previous day, writing to express his anger and bitterness at the hectoring calls in China’s official media to “come together” and “look to the future” as China decides to live—and die—with covid. That such calls ring hollow for many Chinese makes perfect sense, since China’s mighty messaging machine seems to have turned on a dime, suddenly arguing that Omicron is no big deal and that “everyone is responsible for their own health” after insisting for years that the virus is deadly and that collective behavior was the only way to control it
A Place for Fire – The Paris Review – the primal draw of fire in the home. This reminded me of the central role of the turf and wood fuelled range in the Irish farmhouse where I spent a good deal of my childhood
Project MUSE – The Surge of Nationalist Sentiment among Chinese Youth during the COVID-19 Pandemic – Since 2012, Beijing has been promoting a strain of populist nationalism which underscores both the institutional superiority of the ruling party and the cultural superiority of being Chinese. At the international level, however, the image of both the regime and the Chinese has been marred due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan (December 2019–January 2020). This study examines the extent and the form that the surge in nationalist sentiment of Chinese young people has taken during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a questionnaire survey of 1,200 students from a sample of 20 colleges/universities in China (June–July 2020), this study shows that the respondents express high satisfaction with the state’s performance in tackling the pandemic, and that there is a substantial surge of nationalist sentiment with a high level of hostility towards other nations (e.g. the United States). Such nationalist sentiment, however, is found to express a bifurcated pattern in that young Chinese also tend to embrace the opportunity to work and study in the Western societies they ostensibly dislike – yeah, is it smart to let them in though, given Chinese laws obligating them to cooperate with the MSS if requested?
Project MUSE – Living with the State-Led Order: Practical Acceptance and Unawareness of the Chinese Middle Class – China’s expanding middle class is often found to support the regime and lack democratic aspirations. We find that one section of the middle class depends upon the state for jobs and other material benefits, and the other works for the private and foreign sectors of the country’s economy. Once separated as such, we found that the non-state middle class clearly shows lower support for the regime. Furthermore, unlike the state middle class, which registers lower democratic support, the non-state middle class shows a similar level of democratic support as other social classes. In general, however, while only pragmatically accepting the current order, both middle class groups nonetheless appear lacking practical knowledge and understanding of liberal democratic institutions such as free media and multiparty elections. The unforthcoming attitudes toward democracy might also derive from a general sense of fearing the loss of order and the other related uncertainties
Economics
The true priorities of the global elite – by Judd Legum – The New York Times’ Peter Goodman, author of “Davos Man” — a blistering criticism of the WEF and its neoliberal ideology — recently offered this brief description: The World Economic Forum is not a secret government or organized conspiracy. It is a giant business meeting, a chance for the heads of multinational oil giants to sit opposite Persian Gulf potentates — fronted by the performance art of earnest panel discussions aimed at solving the problems of the day. More than anything, Davos is a prophylactic against change, an elaborate reinforcement of the status quo served up as the pursuit of human progress. Tuesday’s WEF program included a panel with Senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV). The pair shared an on-stage high-five in celebration of the filibuster, which has been used to block increases in the minimum wage, protections for voting rights, and efforts to maintain access to reproductive health care.
German tank manufacturer’s warning puts pressure on Ukraine’s allies | Ukraine | The Guardian – Battle tanks from German industrial reserves wanted by Ukraine will not be ready to be delivered until 2024, the arms manufacturer Rheinmetall has warned, increasing pressure on Nato allies to support Ukraine with armoured vehicles in active service instead, ahead of a key meeting this week.“Even if the decision to send our Leopard tanks to Kyiv came tomorrow, the delivery would take until the start of next year,” Rheinmetall’s chief executive, Armin Papperger, told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. Rheinmetall, which manufactures the battle vehicle’s gun, has 22 Leopard 2 and 88 older Leopard 1 tanks in its stocks. Getting the Leopard tanks ready for battle, however, would take several months and cost hundreds of millions of euros the company could not put up until the order was confirmed
Macau gaming: Chau’s jail term warns punters and investors alike | Financial Times – It is worthwhile considering this in part of the wider picture of how China is trying deal with capital flight. It also chimes with efforts to move Hong Kong from being about ‘wealth management’ i.e. schemes to allow capital flight out of the mainland to the west to trying to pull in western money to invest in Chinese businesses. Macau was part of that process too.
Expect a clampdown on insurance policy sales people. At the moment a lot of them sell these things via WeChat with a view to providing financial services to mainlanders in a similar way to what daigou do with luxury goods from abroad. I know work at home mums that do this for Prudential as a side hustle
Auction houses have expanded like crazy in Hong Kong during the pandemic and I would expect the authorities to look at how they can shut this off or use to only import items into China rather than having them leave again. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are strongly encouraged to shutdown in Hong Kong and up up in Sanya on Hainan island instead so they stay inside the yuan firewall
Expect pressure on foreign banks on wealth management / capital flight vehicles. There maybe some latitude through mainland banks where the government can monitor the flow through back-end access into their systems
Ultimately, Singapore will be the new Hong Kong – which is happening already due to ‘run culture’ and a plethora of wealth management and family office services being provided.
Hong Kong’s financial hub is at a crossroads | Financial Times – Look for a senior job in Hong Kong these days on LinkedIn and you’re unlikely to find any openings unless you’re a speaker of Cantonese or Mandarin, or both. “That’s a big change,” confides a longtime British expat in the territory. “It’s understandable. But it’s a big change.” The evolving jobs market is just one of the visible signs of the tilt to mainland China that promises to redefine Hong Kong’s role as a global financial centre. Beijing’s growing influence on the former British colony — evident in four years of security crackdowns and tough Covid lockdowns — has raised existential questions about the sustainability of the territory’s role as Asia’s unparalleled bridgehead to global finance – yeah soon even the finance bros will go
Japan was the future but it’s stuck in the past – BBC News – Japan had emerged from the destruction of World War Two and conquered global manufacturing. The money poured back into the country, driving a property boom where people bought anything they could get their hands on, even chunks of forest. By the mid-1980s, the joke was that the grounds of the imperial palace in Tokyo were worth the same as all of California. The Japanese call it the “Baburu Jidai” or the bubble era. Then in 1991 the bubble burst. The Tokyo stock market collapsed. Property prices fell off a cliff. They are yet to recover. A friend was recently negotiating to buy several hectares of forest. The owner wanted $20 per square metre. “I told him forest land is only worth $2 a square metre,” my friend said. “But he insisted he needed $20 a square metre, because that’s what he’d paid for it in the 1970s.” Think of Japan’s sleek bullet trains, or Toyota’s “just-in-time” marvel of assembly-line manufacturing – and you could be forgiven for thinking Japan is a poster child for efficiency. It is not. Rather the bureaucracy can be terrifying, while huge amounts of public money are spent on activities of dubious utility – this says more about the persons values than about Japan. Also coming from Britain’s public broadcast service, it is ironic that Japan is at the centre of many critical global supply chains and Britain is being stripped out of them. A bit of introspection is required
Luxury Brands Beware: Angered Chinese Tourists Are Avoiding Japan And South Korea | Jing Daily – South Korea issued yellow tags for China’s inbound travelers to wear at its airports, and Japan followed suit, giving red tags to passengers coming from the country. The initiative has elicited outrage online. On Weibo, the hashtag “Japan issues red tags to mark Chinese travelers” has gathered 200 million views, becoming the fourth most trending topic at one point. Many Chinese travelers complained that they not only had to pay for COVID tests and potential quarantines in subpar conditions upon entering South Korea but also had to wear a yellow tag on their necks to identify themselves as coming from China for special inspection at airports. The tags, along with South Korean reporters snapping photos at them, made them feel like they were criminals being transferred
Good to see that we’re finally beyond the 3D printing hype bubble and its true benefits can be appreciated. This article is a good run down of the pros and cons of 3D printing in an industrial setting. In some ways it reminds me of the ‘manufacturing cells’ concept were a computer controlled machine tool with switchable tool faces would do multiple jobs and process multiple types of products in small batches.
Not all manufacturing is true Fordian production lines. Just in the same way that digital printing has been good for small run books and catalogues or printing on demand; yet ‘traditional printing’ is still used for bigger print runs – additive manufacturing will be alongside traditional manufacturing processes.
Chinese Celebrities’ Political Signalling on Sina Weibo | The China Quarterly | Cambridge Core – Recent studies have revealed how the state disciplines and co-opts celebrities to promote patriotism, foster traditional values and spread political propaganda. However, how do celebrities adapt to the changing political environment? Focusing on political signalling on the social media platform Sina Weibo, we analyse a novel dataset and find that the vast majority of top celebrities repost from official accounts of government agencies and state media outlets, though there are variations. Younger celebrities with more followers tend to repost from official accounts more often. Celebrities from Taiwan tend to repost less than those from the mainland and Hong Kong, despite being subject to the same rules. However, the frequent political signalling by the most influential celebrities among younger generations suggests that the state has co-opted celebrity influence on social media to broadly promote its political objectives
Macs In the Enterprise: A Cisco Case Study – Creative Strategies – Despite extremely high desire from employees to use Macs (66% according to a study we did last year), most IT organizations keep the Mac users in their organization at arm’s length. Offering true platform of choice matters when it comes to employee experience and employee satisfaction with their workplace, tools, and IT departments. This is exactly what Cisco found when they studied internal employees. A Cisco report on IT satisfaction of employees found satisfaction to be significantly lower when employees were not offered their platform of choice in a laptop – this bullshit has been going on my entire career, HR departments are a major issue as well
CES 2023 marks the 25th year since I first started working in agency life. Back then I was working in what was the exciting world of technology. I had nascent internet clients, networking / telecoms clients and Palm, who were leaders in the personal digital assistant market. Things were just hinting at the convergence of the technology and consumer electronics world.
Like most trade shows CES 2023 works on two levels. The bit that’s in the media that helps people like me understand manufacturer led product and service trends. Some of the trends went well, like LCD televisions and some did badly like 3D television screens. The bit that wasn’t seen was the sales meetings that fuel much of the global trade in finished electronics products. 100s of billions of dollars in sales were agreed through CES Los Vegas each year and CES 2023 was likely to be similar to other years in this respect.
China at CES 2023
China had about half the companies that attended CES pre-COVID pandemic. This was a mix of:
Washington Entity list. Large technology players including DJI, ZTE and Huawei are barred from doing business with American partners. So turning up to CES 2023 would have a limited utility for them even if they were allowed to have a booth
COVID-disruption. Large swathes were locked down, something that the country has only recently opened up
Economic head winds at home
Finally, government focus on the right kind of business development with a tiered funding model
Bankers and experts said that the CSRC was trying to funnel money towards sectors it deemed strategically important as the country pushed for technological self-reliance and economic growth. The regulator’s move to refresh the listings guidance underscores Beijing’s efforts to make the country’s equity exchanges serve its national agenda, said analysts. “The Chinese government doesn’t want a market-based stock market,” said Larry Hu, an economist at Macquarie Group in Hong Kong. “It wants one that helps the authority carry out industry policy.”
A plethora of projector companies made a pitch to replace the TV set with 8K resolution projectors.
The physical nature of TV sets is considered to be a ‘problem’ that manufacturers are trying to solve. A second way to do this was through wireless technology. LG separated its TV set from its HDMI and other connectors, instead having the cables to go into a hub that then wirelessly connected to the TV.
If I was to make a guess as to why this was happening, I would partly credit the pandemic and the way some consumers looked to change their living space during that time. Another TV which seemed to capture lots of TV news overage of the show was the Displace wireless TV set. It completely dispensed with a power cable due to being powered by TV sized lithium batteries and was held up with a suction cup.
Descriptors used included comparisons to it being a ‘giant iPad’ which wasn’t really true as its not really a tablet computer. This probably says more about the iPad being co-opted as a media consumption device. Secondly, just because it grabs attention doesn’t mean that it has a consumer use case.
IoT (internet of things)
IoT is often called smart home or home automation. Like most technology ideas it actually goes back several decades. In the case of home automation, the pre-internet communications protocol was X10, invented by a Scottish technology start-up in the 1970s. My 1978, X10 enabled products were on sale in the Sears department store (then the US’ largest retailer) and Radio Shack (for UK people of a certain age: Tandy).
Use of IP protocol has allowed for much more functionality and use cases. It is even parodied with the Internet of Shit.
According to veteran analyst Tim Bajarin, a decade ago IoT the way we now think of it didn’t have its own section at CES, five years ago it suddenly did. CES 2023 didn’t necessarily present solutions to IoTs myriad of problems, such as cybersecurity and personal security.
It’s still a very important trend, despite the decline in Chinese vendors turning up with weird new products this year.
The underlying of technology has inspired new applications in
Health technology
Food technology
Sports technology
All of which now have their sections at CES 2023.
Health technology
Healthcare monitoring has been a big area of growth. The reasons for this are many-fold:
Consumers increased focus on their own health, from the quantified self to the rise of smart watches like the Apple Watch
Organisations like US healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente who have pioneered a focus on preventative health and maintenance rather than waiting for people to get sick
People are increasingly living with co-morbidities such as diabetes
You now have traditional big pharmacy companies like Abbott appearing at CES 2023 with their health monitoring solutions
This surge in healthcare technology has been enabled by smart sensors and machine learning powering hardware and software solutions enable it. Some technologies like accelerometers have moved along in leaps and bounds alongside other silicon MEMS chips. However as we have seen with high profile cases such as Theranos, there often isn’t the miraculous leaps forward in technology that we might expect in other areas due to the likes of Moore’s Law.
Some analysts have speculated that pet health and activity tracking will be the next growth areas after their humans have digitised their own health regimes.
Adaptive technology that could be considered to fit within the health technology space can reduce the cost of care in a similar way to self monitoring, or can be an exercise in ‘brand purpose’ like L’Oreal’s robotic lipstick applicator. In L’Oreal’s case, brand purpose and cynical PR stunt seem to be interchangeable.
For someone who grew up with personal stereos and iPods, I can understand how there would be a demand for a set of headphones that sit somewhere between the Apple AirPod and a hearing aid. Sennheiser have introduced the Conversation Clear Plus and Jabra have a similar offering.
Advertising technology
A good deal of hardware technology is supplied to the consumer on razor thin margins and innovation allows greater data collection. This has meant that ad technology was an area of discussion at CES 2023. Experian were there to sell products that allow advertisers to deal with ‘pesky’ issues like consumer privacy, regulatory requirements and data deprecation. Your internet connected TV and streaming hardware are target advertising platforms and are snitching on your viewing habits.
As someone who works in the advertising industry, I can understand the rationale; as a consumer I detest the invasion of my privacy.
Metaverse
The metaverse had its own sections and both hardware and software companies were noted as having some innovative products.
I think that there is a wider question over the health of the metaverse and related technologies such as Web 3.0 and VR. As CES was on, Microsoft got ready to shut down its virtual reality optimised social network Altspace which had a small but vibrant community on there.
We’re at least a decade away from the open VR web-like metaverse imagined by technologists and the financial downturn isn’t helping with this.
Some of the technology on show was also related to other trends such as the head-up displays rolling out on connected cars.
Automobiles
At the start of my career, car stereo head-units and DVD players may have got a look in at CES. For CES 2023, with the move towards electric vehicles, digital cockpits and a desire for more autonomous driving the car looks more like a computer system on four wheels.
Gains in autonomous vehicles have been modest and this was apparent in the mature GPS based tilling programming for John Deere tractors and the simple shuttle service between halls provided by Tesla.
The big thing this year was an upgradeable module to power the digital dashboard and in-car entertainment. This doesn’t sound much of an exciting product, until you realise that cars take longer to develop than gadgets and new cars can be relying on technology that is 10+ years old.
If nothing else upgradeability would solve issues with trying to source obsolete micro-processors for car manufacturers. The automotive sector is sufficiently important to CES that agricultural equipment and ride on lawn mower maker John Deere gave a keynote at the show.
CES 2023 Gadget Gap
The Wall Street Journal walk around highlighted a number of issues at CES 2023. It noted that new product companies in the hardware space were finding a lack of funding, COVID-related development, manufacturing and logistics issues; together with consumer demand challenges would be here for the long haul. They quote a 50 precent drop in venture capital funding.
This has implications for future years of the CES show. They even gave it a name the ‘Gadget Gap’.
A lack of focus
Reading this post on CES 2023, will make you aware of the lack of focus in the event. A good deal of CES is no longer products aimed a consumer end audience, the participation of Experian, John Deere and Caterpillar were a case in point. Yes, CES is still the world’s largest technology trade show, but what does it mean? It feels too broad to have a meaningful purpose. It feels to me like some dystopian digital skid stain across all aspects of modern life. This at odds with the excitement I felt over game changing technologies in previous years. Others like analyst and author Jonathan Goldberg noticed the lack of focus too.
Combine the lack of focus with the broken globalisation model due to the US – China war means that CES needs to move on from CES 2023, or it will go the way of similar trade shows like CeBIT – nothing but a memory full of old news releases on technology company websites.
