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

  • SITA + more things

    SITA

    SITA | SITA statement about security incident – this gave limited and basic information – specifically your name, membership number and tier, seating preferences and a code corresponding to your meal preferences. – according to Cathay Pacific. It looks like this attack on SITA was more about tracking the travel of persons of interest around the world; so more likely to be a state actor rather than commercial motives. China is known to use this kind of data to track and harass its enemies

    Business

    If you read nothing else here, read this piece of investigative journalism. It reads like something out of a post-Smiley John LeCarre novel – British American Tobacco Fights Dirty In West Africa – OCCRP

    Like China, The West Needs National Champions  

    China

    Jack Ma personifies the contradiction of China’s ideology | Financial Times – interesting end to the article, with a question about whether Goldman Sachs, BlackRock et al will be able to convincingly align themselves “politically, intellectually and emotionally” with Xi Jingping? How will the west regard Communist party cells in their management decision structures?

    China, Russia Images in U.S. Hit Historic Lows – I would imagine that this is a bigger problem for China than Russia. I think will continue to be a big issue for China and would be mirrored across other western countries across Europe. Worth reading alongside Xi Jinping turned me into a China hawk – POLITICO 

    The Fall of China’s Working-Class ‘Palaces’ – Sixth Tone – interesting read on ‘peoples palace’ public spaces

    Luxury

    Kering bets on first-mover advantage with resale | Vogue Business – pretty much all the major houses now have a resale brand of sorts

    H. MOSER & CIE SWISS ALP WATCH FINAL UPGRADE | Watches News – I do like the sense of humour in the design

    LOEWE | The Loewe Show Has Been Cancelled – Loewe’s approach to marketing its spring and summer collection aped a newspaper to create a cookbook.

    Loewe virtual collection newspaper themed look book
    Website screenshot

    Marketing

    An Oral History of Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby Super Bowl Ad – this feels like the creative was done before the strategy which sounds completely out of whack

    Airbnb slashes spend in permanent shift from performance marketing to brand | Campaign – makes sense since AirBnB is ‘verging’ as Faris Yakob would say. And here comes the why: Why you need a strong brand to win in e-commerce: Adidas’ Simon Peel | WARC. More from Simon Peel here.

    Tymbals : The Agency of the Future – I was reading this by Nigel Scott. I suspect that he’ll be right. My main concern as a marketer is the piss-poor job that the martech stack players do, supporting brand building. The fundamental problem is they only view things from a performance marketing perspective because engineers, programme managers and even the company CMOs don’t get brand. These are the people that brought us growth hacking. Their model is a secondhand car lot salesman.

    Shoppertainment & Livestreaming Gain Steam in Europe’s E-Commerce | Alizila – QVC on your mobile…..

    Russia

    Why the Europeans Don’t Have a Russia Policy – Carnegie Europe – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – the belief held by the older generation of German Social Democrats—and Christian Democrats—that Russia should not be isolated. This was the thinking behind Germany’s Ostpolitik, or Eastern policy, which was begun by the Social Democrats in the late 1960s. That policy was based not only on the idea of dialogue with Russia but also on the notion of Wandel durch Annäherung, or change through 

    Technology

    Qualcomm Snapdragon Sound Countdown | The Science Behind the Sound | Qualcomm – I think that this sits between two stools. It isn’t hi-fi and it won’t be cheap.

    Wave Goodbye, Hello MIPS as Chapter 11 Resolved | EE Times – still has a strategic focus on the RISC-based processor architectures. They are looking to support a mix of legacy MIPS technology and a new “standards-based 8th generation architecture,” based on the open source RISC-V processor standard

    Can WhatsApp stop misinformation without compromising encryption? — Quartz 

    Don’t know how to train your dog? This device will do it for you – CNET 

    Tools

    I have been playing with this for a few days now and could definitely see a use for it – flowchart.fun 

  • Declare ads & things that caught my eye this week

    Declare ads

    YouTuber Tom Scott delves into the marketing industry and laws that force influencers to declare ads. It is worthwhile watching regardless of how involved you are in marketing. Scott points out what he considers to be inconsistencies in the principles of when to declare ads. In particular, he focuses on the role of product placement in film and TV programmes and the way that is handled.

    Future of

    Wired contributor and author of What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly has spent the COVID lockdown putting together some great talks on YouTube on the future of different aspects of technological progress.

    Kelly’s opinions are usually well thought out and the videos are better than sitting through a few conferences; especially TED conferences.

    SolarWinds

    World Affairs put together a great panel to discuss the recent SolarWinds hack and the impact it has had across both enterprises and governments.

    Celebrity Zoom Bombing

    I was listening to a podcast about a University of Sydney research paper on Zoom based culture building. TL;DR – it doesn’t work unless participation is truly voluntary. Most of them are painful. Lights and Shadows were commissioned to help help promote fun in a company corporate culture. Usually did creative events, but for COVID-19 they had to get creative in Zoom.

    Somehow they managed to get celebrities, or convincing deep fakes to bomb existing Zoom calls.

    Strong Enemy

    The strong enemy is Chinese Communist Party-speak for the United States. China increasingly sees its relationship with the US to lead to eventual war. Xi Jingping has been talking more about the strong enemy in speeches aimed at the PLA to get them ready for inevitable conflict with the US. Sinocism has this great essay on it all.

  • Nexta & things that caught my eye this week

    Nexta

    Nexta media operation and its role in the Belarus protests was the main article in this weekend’s FT magazine.

    FT magazine on Nexta
    FT magazine on Nexta

    A few things about the article. The old maxim of ‘hearts and minds‘ is still true despite technology. Secondly, Belarus seems to view media and propaganda as a tactic rather than something strategic. This surprised me given that Belarus has always been authoritarian in nature and Soviet in terms of the way it operated. It is at odds with the way countries like Vietnam and China operate.

    Finally, the irony that the smartphone is the instrument of protest. Nexta seem surprisingly well organised in a way that wasn’t seen with voices around the Hong Kong protests.

    Most of the Belarussians will be using handsets based on technology from Google. Google doesn’t believe in privacy (apart from the privacy of its executives) and has a viewpoint of data that most authoritarian regimes would appreciate.

    Old Hong Kong

    YouTube has a lot of digitised archive footage. First up is unused footage shot in 1962 filmed for a Pathé film This is Hong Kong.

    The next reel was shot six years later. Again it was footage that ended up on the cutting room floor of Pathé. The footage was shot for one of its Colour Pictorial episodes. These were film magazines that screened prior to the main feature film in a cinema. Television would be soon squeezing cinema as the main form of video based news and documentaries.

    Some of this footage was familiar to me from my times going and living in Hong Kong, whilst other aspects of it were unrecognisable. Both of these films reminded me of Miroslav Sasek’s book This is Hong Kong.

    Japan

    This footage is said to be taken in Tokyo, Osaka and the countryside in Japan during the 1980s. Though the airplane through bamboo scaffolding footage from 0.23 – 0.25 seems to have been taken on the run in to Hong Kong’s old Kai Tak airport. Some of it is beautifully shot.

    It is underpinned by a an ambient track that works really well.

    Talking of Japan, ASICS have a shoes that reminds me of the bindings used to hold bamboo scaffolding together and the weaving of bamboo screens. Asics and a Japanese architect made a shoe inspired by bamboo weaving.

    ASICS have put together a film to promote the shoe.

    Berocca integration of radio and voice services

    Finally Berocca did an innovative radio advert to take advantage of voice services as part of its radio advertising campaign. Alexa has a well documented API stack for building skills, which is what Berocca is encouraging consumers to use. I could see this happening more as Alexa is rolled out in automotive environments.

  • Clubhouse & things that caught my eye this week

    Korean American security researcher Brian Pak looked at Clubhouse and some of the findings were very interesting. Pak posted a full analysis in Korean here. The key takeouts for me where:

    Some (probably early adopter) Koreans have been buying used iPhones so that they can try Clubhouse, since the app is currently iOS only.

    The concept of an audio chat app that isn’t new. Pak identified Clubhouse’s key strength as having an intuitive UI/UX and a large number of participants from various backgrounds.

    I found it interesting that Pak felt there might be technical difficulties in having Clubhouse for desktop (macOS / Windows) or Android. I suspect that the reason was more about managing the scaling of the app.

    Clubhouse is a closer to a mashup than a ‘real app’. It’s voice functions are based on Agora, a Chinese provider. Most of the rest of the features are using the Pubnub communications service platform. The way protocols have been handled was highlighted as a security risk. Stanford Internet Observatory got into this in more detail here.

    I can also recommend this coverage about how Clubhouse usage has evolved in Hong Kong, China, Japan and Nigeria.

    There was a major fall of snow in the US last week. It unfolded as a catastrophe across Texas. NBC’s New York affiliate set up a live stream at New York’s Time Square. It is amazing to zone out and watch. It could be considered to another entry in the slow TV genre pioneered by Norway’s public broadcaster NRK.

    I watched Adam Curtis’ Can’t Get You Out Of My Head last week and wanted to track down some of the films in it. Here are some of them.

    Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain was a film about opposition to the Japanese invasion of China. filmed during the pre-communist phase of China.

    Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy is a Communist propaganda film describing how a communist infiltrated a bandit gang and helped the communists to destroy them. It was apparently based on an incident that happened during the Chinese civil war. Like the other Communist films featured here, it is extremely stylised using Peking opera techniques mixed with ballet.

    A ‘slave’ girl on Hainan island runs away and joins a female group of communist soldiers who are fighting a local warlord in The Red Detachment Of Women. The film was made just prior to the cultural revolution at Shanghai Tian Ma studio.

    https://youtu.be/zoPM9d18e9o

    Finally The East Is Red is musical dramatising from the Chinese communist party perspective; the decline of the Qing dynasty through to the communist takeover.

    The original film was produced in 1965, right before the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The prologue seems to have been added after the ‘Gang of Four’ were put on trial. There is certainly a touch of the classic MGM musical to the production style, alongside Beijing opera and ballet.

    Filipino brand Jollibee did a pandemic themed Valentine short films which was really clever. All of the films were made by local directors and are emblematic of the COVID-19 experience. Tonally it hits the right spot for the Philippines. What might seem to be too cute and emotional for UK audiences resonates well in that market. Thankfully, it isn’t the tear-jerking emotional rollercoaster that Thai ads can take you on.

    I particularly like the second one because of the twist in the plot.

    Jollibee’s overall approach on brand as media makes sense when you think about the nature of the Philippines media market and the good number of diaspora that they need to reach.

  • Signal messenger + more things

    Signal privacy orientated messenger

    Signal has become a popular messaging clients among my contacts for privacy orientated messaging. I’ve shared this guide a number of times, so I thought I would share it here. More on Signal messaging here. I use Signal on my phone and my desktop computer, both of which are an integrated experience.

    Innovation

    FISCAL YEAR 2020 a great report by the UD Department of Defence – a U.S. business climate that has favored short-term shareholder earnings (versus long- term capital investment), deindustrialization, and an abstract, radical vision of “free trade,” without fair trade enforcement, have severely damaged America’s ability to arm itself today and in the future. Our national responses – off-shoring and out-sourcing – have been inadequate and ultimately self-defeating – punchy, but I don’t see much attention being paid to it (PDF)

    The Times view on institutions’ ties with China: Academic Decoupling | Comment | The Times – overall change in UK stance across elites

    Germany to help Europe invest ‘billions’ in chip manufacturing 

    Quad’ nations sign up for meta think-tank to advance ‘Techno-Democratic Statecraft’ • The Register – Universities and think tanks from Australia, the USA, Japan, and India have come together in a new group that together hopes to advance discussions on the intersection of information technology, regional security, and internet freedom. Dubbed the “Quad Tech Network”, the group is managed by the National Security College at The Australian National University, an organisation backed by Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

    Technology

    China issues new anti-monopoly rules targeting its tech giants | Reuters – interesting how the global temperament turning against technology and e-tailing

    China Blocks Clubhouse App After Brief Flowering of Debate – The New York Times – At times, the conversation went off the rails, as when one man who identified as Taiwanese chimed in to curse out mainland Chinese people, before quickly signing off. But for the most part, users said that the app’s use of moderators and real-time voice sharing promoted a civility and intimacy lacking on other popular social media platforms like Twitter and its Chinese equivalent, Weibo. – interesting given its reputation for racism and sexism

    Clubhouse is now blocked in China after a brief uncensored period | TechCrunch – they were a bit slow, obviously some of China’s project Golden Shield people need to reflect on their shortcomings.

    Brexit

    PRWeek poll: A third of PR businesses predict Brexit revenue hit | PR Week – “First, whereas previously the UK would always be the gateway for new entrants to the European market, we’re now seeing Germany emerge on par as the primary entry point. Historically, Germany would almost always be the secondary priority after the UK, then followed by France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. “Second, we’ve seen clients proactively ask to have multinational teams lead their account in Europe, as opposed to the traditional approach of having a UK-led European approach. In our mind, this is because the UK no longer has the same authority to lead. “This is one of the softer impacts of Brexit in terms of the UK’s perceived influence and leadership in the region.” Mark Pinsent, managing director of The Hoffman Agency Europe, has also noticed a trend for UK-based clients to “explicitly tell us that they’re keen to be positioned as European companies rather than UK”. “That can be tricky if they’re headquartered in the UK [or] don’t have a significant presence on mainland Europe,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see whether, over time, the UK becomes less of a priority market for international businesses looking to market in Europe… certainly for UK-founded start-ups, I could see it accelerating their need to have EU-based businesses.” – the psychology of the UK’s diminished image is fascinating

    Culture

    Kaffeine | Rave culture and specialty coffee a comparison – nice verbal history of the Australian wave of London specialty coffee shops. It is interesting to see how specialty coffee went mainstream over time

    Luxury & streetwear

    New Balance wins $3.9m in damages from China logo copycats | Financial Times – The two defendants, Fujian-based footwear maker New Barlun and its distributor Shanghai Shiyi Trade, have expanded quickly in China’s smaller cities and sold knock off shoes at below half the price of New Balance. – Damages are still pretty low, only 2.5m pounds or so

    Luxury’s Involvement in Resell Could Be the Beginning of the End – I had written about peak streetwear a while ago