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

  • EXP TV + more stuff

    EXP TV – not quite sure how to describe it; EXP TV is just tremendous. In their words “EXP TV daytime programming is called “Video Breaks”—a video collage series featuring wild, rare, unpredictable, and ever-changing archival clips touching on every subject imaginable. Similar to how golden era MTV played music videos all day, daytime EXP TV streams non-stop, deep cut video clips filtered through our own distinct POV. Our Nite Owl programming block features specialty themed video mixes and deep dives on everything under the sun: Bigfoot, underground 80s culture, Italo disco, cults, Halloween hijinks, pre-revolutionary Iranian pop culture, midnight movies, ‘ye ye’ promo films, Soviet sci-fi, reggae rarities, psychedelic animation and local news calamities. On any given night you could watch something like our Incredibly Strange Metal show followed by a conceptual video essay like Pixel Power—our exploration of early CGI art. Aside from our unique tone and deep crate of video materials, one thing that really sets us apart in 2020 is our format. We are *not* on demand, we are *not* interactive—just like old TV! You can tune in anytime and something cool will be on. That’s EXP TV in a nutshell. It’s funny, it’s art, it’s music, it’s infotainment, it’s free and it’s 24/7.” EXP TV reminded me a lot of the pioneering night time TV programming that used to run on British TV.

    Gen Z wants brands to be ‘fun,’ ‘authentic’ and ‘good,’ study says | Marketing Dive – Gen Zers prefer brands that are authentic, with 82% saying they trust a company more if it uses images of real customers in its advertising, while 72% said they’re more likely to buy from a company that contributes to social causes. Product quality, positive ratings and reviews and customer service are the top three characteristics that establish trust in a brand among Gen Zers – really? I am sure if you asked any cohort through time of the same age that would have come out as the result. More on ‘generations‘ here

    Why Corporate America Gave Up on R&D – Marker – great conversation about basic research and its place in the economic life of a business

    The Changing Structure of American Innovation: Some Cautionary Remarks for Economic Growth – basically US innovation is dying out as corporate basic research is no longer happening. It echoes the work that people like Judy Estrin has done in the past

    Produce your own physical chips. For free. In the Open – FOSSi Foundation – interesting that Google is supporting open source silicon prototyping on 130nm process – not cutting edge but moving things forward massively for electronics designers

    China ‘trying to influence elite figures in British politics’, dossier claims | Politics News | Sky News – not terribly surprising. I’d be surprising if Chna wasn’t trying these things. More fool the UK for allowing it to happen passively

    Exclusive: Digital natives see PR as ‘press releases and gin-soaked lunches’ – Sorrell | PR Week – depending on the industry its probably pretty fair, though probably less gin than there was previously

    What’s really behind “tech” versus “journalism” | Revue – really management vs employees – it seems to have got much more toxic than when I worked at Yahoo!

    MullenLowe merges Profero and Open in UK – surprised that that this wasn’t on the cards sooner to be honest with you

    Lessons from the fall of luxury e-tailer Leflair – Vietnam based luxury start-up goes under with $280,000 in unpaid goods

    TikTok to pull out of Hong Kong – Axios – interesting how they got out ahead of Facebook, WhatsApp etc. TikTok might feel its mainland app Douyin can be swapped in. It is an interesting canary in the coal mine for Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp etc

    Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality – Facebook Research and Alphabet buys a rival company North who do similar technology Our focus on helpful devices: Google acquires North – more related posts here.

    Interesting French short film about the future from 1947. In some ways it is a better predictor of technology usage than Star Trek some two decades later.

    La Télévision, œil de demain (1947) – J.K Raymond Millet

    ‘What Big Tech does to discourse, and the forgotten tech tool that can make tech less big’ with Cory Doctorow – It is a conspiracy is to have an energetic mastery of wrong information. And sometimes that information in fact provides a good, not evidentiary basis, but a good fact pattern to support skepticism of a regulator – Cory Doctorow’s speech is long but well worthwhile.

    Luckin Coffee investors oust founder | Financial Times – this looks very similar to WireGuard. The problem is that audited books can’t be trusted due to local law. And locally written analyst reports have to self-censor allowing this kind of thing to happen. China doesn’t seem to be moving to change its law in the same way that Germany is to try and protect shareholders

    Facebook Suspending Review of Hong Kong Requests for User Data – WSJ – based on the Xi administration’s concerns about national security and cyber sovereignty; one can expect China to extend Great Firewall into Hong Kong with this. Which will then impact multinational companies who have traditionally used Hong Kong as an exit point for China operation VPNs. It will also affect Hong Kong’s position as a regional base. Firms would no longer want to use the data centres and backbone networks that Hong Kong has. More from the FT: Facebook and Twitter block Hong Kong authorities from accessing user data | Financial Times – WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram have all given the Chinese Communist Party the finger. They have a strong incentive to. Chinese drop shipping businesses like Shein or Wish will suffer more than Facebook. And it plays well in parliaments and distracts from the other troubles that they may have. China gets burnt because of its information warfare games on these platforms. Facebook et al provide Chinese marketing teams a gateway into markets around the world that WeChat and TikTok don’t – which dings the Chinese government’s economic goals

    ‘Abolish Silicon Valley’ vs. ‘Always Day One’: Who’s Right About Fixing the Tech Industry? | OneZero – this conversation wouldn’t have even happened 10 years ago, but its needed. If not from ethics perspective, then from its failing in innovation as outlined many years ago by Judy Estrin.

    Encryption-Busting EARN IT Act Advances in Senate | WIRED  – if you care about privacy, this is frankly terrifying

    Above Avalon: Apple Is Pulling Away From the Competition – the obvious candidates missing here are Huawei, Xiaomi and the BBK firms (Oppo, Vivo etc) which have driven the smartphone market into the middle in China and opened a can of whoop ass on the premium sector overall

    Philip K Dick’s Metz speech is mind blowing. It was done at an international science fiction festival in 1977, held in Metz, France.

    Did China Steal Canada’s Edge in 5G From Nortel? – Bloomberg – short answer yes. Though it probably didn’t help that they had a management team that had failed to act when they were warned about infiltration, a infrastructure business reliance on the frame relay network market and partnered with Microsoft on a lot of enterprise technology. Some fantastic stuff in this article – Did a Chinese hack kill Canada’s greatest tech company? – BNN Bloomberg – in the late 1990s, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the country’s version of the CIA, became aware of “unusual traffic,” suggesting that hackers in China were stealing data and documents from Ottawa. “We went to Nortel in Ottawa, and we told the executives, ‘They’re sucking your intellectual property out,’ ” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, who headed the agency’s Asia-Pacific unit at the time. “They didn’t do anything.” By 2004 the hackers had breached Nortel’s uppermost ranks. The person who sent the roughly 800 documents to China appeared to be none other than Frank Dunn, Nortel’s embattled chief executive officer. Four days before Dunn was fired — fallout from an accounting scandal on his watch that forced the company to restate its financial results — someone using his login had relayed the PowerPoints and other sensitive files to an IP address registered to Shanghai Faxian Corp. It appeared to be a front company with no known business dealings with Nortel. The thief wasn’t Dunn, of course. Hackers had stolen his password and those of six others from Nortel’s prized optical unit, in which the company had invested billions of dollars. Using a script called Il.browse, the intruders swept up entire categories from Nortel’s systems: Product Development, Research and Development, Design Documents & Minutes, and more. “They were taking the whole contents of a folder — it was like a vacuum cleaner approach,” says Brian Shields, who was then a senior adviser on systems security

    Why China’s Race For AI Dominance Depends On Math | The National Interest – concerns about STEM education outside China

    “Who Sells Bricks in Hong Kong” Hopes to Introduce New Actors | JayneStars – as dark as things are for Hong Kong’s film industry, ViuTV drama looks to Hong Kong film past for inspiration

  • Autopilot Whopper + more things

    Burger King’s Autopilot Whopper campaign reminds me of a lot of the classic work that Crispin Porter Bogusky have done for Burger King over the years. The Autopilot Whopper is based on the insight that Tesla cars machine learning powered vision system that helps with self driving function mistakes the Burger King logo for a Stop sign.

    https://youtu.be/A0cb7wZVFf4

    Autopilot Whopper entertaining with this schadenfreude around Tesla technology. And it also lands the message that the Burger King drive through is as good a place to stop as any.

    YouTube announced the winners of its 2020 YouTube Works awards. I would strongly recommend that any brand planners bookmark this in their browser and dip in on a regular basis.

    The one that really piqued my interest the most was Hulu’s campaign for live sports that tapped into a growing consumer cynicism around influencers. The sports linkage was using NBA basketball players as the influencers.

    The iconic Zero Halliburton briefcase stuffed with cash, that more money is thrown into as ‘Hulu has live sports’ is mentioned riffs on the old McDonald’s initiative. The McDonald’s scheme that paid rappers for name checks on songs and mixtapes. It also tapped into how consumers view influencers.

    Public Enemy came back when we most need them. Flavor Flav seems to have patched up his beef with Chuck D. Public Enemy have partnered with DJ Premier to capture the zeitgeist. Black Lives Matter, COVID19 and chaotic leadership feature in State Of The Union (STFU). DJ Premier’s product references earlier Public Enemy works scratching in sounds of early Public Enemy vocals in this track. The beat is more laid back than what one would expect from the Bomb Squad production team. But the Public Enemy fire in the belly is still there.

    The step chickens are a meme driven ‘cult’ that have sprung up on TikTok. More accurately they are a directed community. Here’s the founder on how they came about. Their heat has been parleyed in a community for a new app. From a product point-of-view, this means that something like TikTok could lose chunks of its user base IF the step chickens phenomenon was widely and successfully replicated. Given that it was a mix of smarts, happenstance and pure luck it isn’t likely: sorry brands.

    German China-focused think-tank MERICS had a thoughtful presentation put together on the Hong Kong national security law. The presentation focused on the impact for the financial services sector. But there similar lessons to be drawn for professional services (accounting, management consultancy, legal firms). And only for a a slightly lesser effect on the strategy and planning functions of creative agencies, or counsel based PR functions.

    On reflection, I would be concerned about how some of the creative briefs for China-focused campaigns that I have written would have faired against the Hong Kong national security law. Probably not that well.

    What immediately becomes apparent is the implications for quality research into companies and economics won’t meet international standards. Which means more fodder for the likes of Muddy Waters Research LLC. It likely indicates a conscious effort for China to decouple from the international financial system.

    The calculus behind the Hong Kong national security law seems to be that the Chinese government think yet another (internal) market for Chinese stocks will be a better deal than the traditional gateway to and from China Hong Kong has provided. I am not sure what this bet will mean. Shenzhen already has a robust stock market by Chinese standards; would China really need Hong Kong? Without the gateway role, Hong Kong would also find it harder to be the point of capital departure from China for high net worth citizens. Dampening capital flight would definitely hold some attraction to the Xi administration.

  • K pop stans + more things

    Were TikTokers and K pop stans really behind Trump’s low rally turnout? | Dazed – There’s no way to prove whether the fake bookings caused genuine Trump supporters to lose seats. Many have attributed the low turnout to Trump’s failing campaign, with Bernie Sanders tweeting: “Maybe people are catching on that he is a pathological liar and a fraud.” Others have cited the ongoing coronavirus pandemic as reducing turnout, with mass gatherings still not deemed safe (six campaign staffers later tested positive for COVID-19) – the catchy story about K pop stans might be obscuring a more interesting story: that Trump just doesn’t have stadium filling power anymore. Interesting how K pop stans aren’t labelled as fanatics (yet). More Korea related stories here.

    Rocky start for Land Rover’s new Defender | Financial Times – Despite being configured online 1.6m times by enthusiasts, only 11,000 customer orders have been placed for the car so far, with a further 11,000 test-drive cars ordered by dealers, according to JLR’s annual results – fascinating insight in terms of website conversion numbers for the Land Rover

    Facts vs feelings in the BLM debate – UnHerd – so much to unpack here, not all of which I agree with wholeheartedly. But we need dialogue and debate more than slogans

    Quite apart of the inappropriateness of defining segments by ‘generations’ some of the economic data in these presentations are quite interesting. I would challenge their assumptions about attitudes over time made in the video.

    Hong Kong families prepare to flee the city, fearing a reign of terror from Beijing – The Washington Post – Their departure is so hurried that Ho has yet to assess school options for her two children. Her husband does not know what he will do in Taiwan, which lacks a financial sector comparable with Hong Kong’s. But even working at a restaurant would be acceptable. “Having my freedom of speech is worth more,” he said. – this shows pure fear in the face of evil. Its like refugees in pre-war Europe facing fascism

    How Diversifying Channels Can Help Retailers and Consumer Goods Brands Survive Covid-19 | Ogilvy – could we see a diversification beyond digital focus. Market penetration is key for marketing growth

    Solving online events — Benedict Evans – No-one has ever really managed to take a networking event and put it online. You certainly can’t just make a text chat channel for everyone watching the video stream and claim that’s as the same as a cocktail party. Equally, I can go up to a booth on the Qualcomm or Ericsson stand at MWC, wait my turn and then ask an engineer lots of questions, but how do we do that online? I could book a sales call, but that’s not the same at all.

    Mediatel: Mediatel News: Export to survive – According to Ad Association, UK advertising exports hit £7.9bn in 2018, a 15% increase on the year before. They’re growing faster than other services exports and, surprisingly to me at any rate, the growth rate has accelerated since Brexit – but the Brexit restrictions haven’t kicked in yet

    Group M forecasts 12.5% decline in UK ad market – I was expecting a greater decline

    China is setting itself up to win cold war 2.0 | Financial Times – At the height of the cold war in 1963, the US federal government spent more on research and development than the rest of the world’s public and private sectors combined, Mr Atkinson says. Today, it spends less on R&D as a proportion of gross domestic product than it did in 1955

    Indonesia says China’s ‘nine-dash line’ puts its interests at risk | Financial Times – interesting

    Instagram ‘will overtake Twitter as a news source’ – BBC News – when this happens the rationale for Twitter fades away

    Behind China’s Twitter Campaign, a Murky Supporting Chorus – The New York Times – No doubt some of these accounts are run by patriotic, tech-savvy Chinese people who get around their government’s ban on Twitter and other Western platforms. But an analysis by The New York Times found that many of the accounts behaved with a single-mindedness that could suggest a coordinated campaign of the type that nation states have carried out on Twitter in the past. Of the roughly 4,600 accounts that reposted China’s leading envoys and state-run news outlets during a recent week, many acted suspiciously, The Times found. One in six tweeted with extremely high frequency despite having few followers, as if they were being used as loudspeakers, not as sharing platforms – surprised that the bots don’t mutually follow each other as social proof

    TSMC at the head of history’s tide: two high walls and one sharp knife – China AI – translated from a Chinese article

    Nearly a third of all online ads in China invalid: report | Advertising | Campaign Asia – 31.9% of all online advertising traffic in China was invalid last year according to Miaozhen Systems. Worth RMB 28 billion. 57.5% of KOL fans are fraudulent – I thought that this could be even higher

  • Sophisticated card skimming & more

    Sophisticated card skimming in Mexico by a Romanian criminal gang was first highlighted by Brian Krebs. This documentary was produced by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and features cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs. It is amazing how audacious this sophisticated card skimming scheme was.

    Sophisticated card skimming in Mexico with Romanian criminal gang.

    Adam and Eve DDB’s effectiveness expert Les Binet on COVID-19 and recommendations on marketing. Much of it is more common sense and nuanced consideration than just simple rules by other people. The key outtakes here compared to some of the stuff that I have seen coming out of Ogilvy Asia is the differentiation between supply-side driven recession and demand-side driven recession.

    Elders Corner is a documentary that focuses on the political context that Afrobeat exists and had been played in. It tells the stories of Nigeria’s musicians who pioneered the Afrobeat sound and the role of their music in society during a time of tremendous political upheaval.

    Asian brands really seem to have taken to Animal Crossing, with a Hong Kong eatery hiring a marketer to build their Animal Crossing presence. The Global Pride festival seems to be no exception to brands and culture going into Animal Crossing. The creator tools allows creative expression that works really well for Pride month celebrations.

    In the same week that Boston Dynamics released their ‘Spot’ robot, a Thai shopping mall are doing an interesting exercise in human computer interaction featured in the Singapore media Robot dog hounds Thai shoppers to keep hands virus-free – TODAYonline. I’d love to know if they managed to gather effectiveness data around this initiative. The only thing that surprised me about this was that it was a Thai shopping mall, rather than one in Singapore. It is much less creepy than the way China has used robots to educate people on COVID-19 and demand compliance.

  • Chinese diplomatic failure + more

    ‘Chinese diplomatic failure’ as Australia’s dovish voices fall silent – Inkstone – it will be interesting to see if this Chinese diplomatic failure forces the Chinese government to alter its approach

    China’s Trillion-Dollar Campaign Fuels a Tech Race With the U.S. – WSJ – to develop next-generation technologies as it seeks to catapult the communist nation ahead of the U.S. in critical areas. Since the start of the year, municipal governments in Beijing, Shanghai and more than a dozen other localities have pledged 6.61 trillion yuan ($935 billion) to the cause, according to a Wall Street Journal tally. Chinese companies, urged on by authorities, are also putting up money.

    The mystery document holding up China’s sale of Anbang hotels | Financial Times – this reads like a Robert Ludlum novel. More China related content here.

    Coronavirus: ad shift from TV to digital will speed up says Goldman – move away from brand building to activation

    China Millionaire Livestreamer Viya Shows Online Shopping Future – “E-commerce livestreaming,” as it’s lovingly called by analysts, will already feel familiar to many in America and elsewhere; the latest stage in an evolution from infomercial pioneer Ron “But wait, there’s more” Popeil, the Home Shopping Network, Oprah’s Book Club, and Kim Kardashian. Amazon’s been experimenting with the concept for more than a year, most recently teaming up with “Project Runway” stars Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn for a spin-off and retail tie-in that will make the show’s winning designs immediately available to buy. Facebook has been trying to get users to shop on its platform for years; in May, it announced a partnership with Shopify to help integrate buying there and on Instagram

    ‘Don’t waste the crisis’: EU business group presses China to open markets | South China Morning Post – European chamber’s annual survey finds companies grappling with a more politicised, state-dominated environment. Forced technology transfers also a big concern for foreign players in the country

    UK businesses in China say opening measures have little impact | Financial Times – it will be interesting how much of a car crash it will be with Chinese retaliatory measures

    Daring Fireball: Zoom, Still Shitting the Bed – headline nails it

    Memorandum on Protecting United States Investors from Significant Risks from Chinese Companies | The White House – this has been a long time coming

    AUS antitrust probes zeroing in on Google Search, rival says – CNET – questions focused on ways of requiring Google to provide alternatives to its search engine on Android and in its Chrome web browser, Weinberg told Bloomberg

    A Come Back Story or a Mirage – Story of China’s Street Vendors | LinkedIn – my bro Calvin on the rise of small businesses in China

    Sequoia Capital China’s Neil Shen and Softbank Vision Fund partner quit board roles at Qihoo 360 | South China Morning Post – probably something to do with Qihoo 360 being sanctioned by the US representing a wider Chinese diplomatic failure

    Briefing with Senior State Department Officials on Limiting the CCP’s Ability to Steal U.S. Technologies and Intellectual Property – United States Department of State – interesting read

    Nomura/Hong Kong: beyond our Ken | Financial Times – interesting how Hong Kong’s national security law could encompass a brokers ‘sell’ note on Chinese equities. This is likely to be another Chinese diplomatic failure

    Huawei – Nowhere to run pt. XVI. – Radio Free Mobile – rather assumes China won’t use grey market techniques to get parts for Huawei

    Huawei builds up 2-year reserve of ‘most important’ US chips – Nikkei Asian Review – not terribly surprising. I also suspect that its set up a web of front companies to buy on the grey market as well

    Beijing Threatens Hong Kong’s Companies and Workers – The New York Times – China and its allies are using threats and pressure to get business to back Beijing’s increasingly hard-line stance toward Hong Kong, leading companies to muzzle or intimidate workers who speak out in protest.Leung Chun-ying, Hong Kong’s former top leader, on Friday called for a boycott of HSBC, the London bank, because it had not publicly backed Beijing’s push to enact a new national security law covering the territory

    Hong Kong Filmmakers Discuss the Dire State of the HK Film Industry | JayneStars.com – this breaks my heart, having grown up on Hong Kong cinema

    HKU Legal Scholarship Blog: Johannes Chan Comments on the National Security Law (RTHK English News) – what constitutes ‘national security’ has never been defined. “In China they never really define what exactly is ‘national security’. So the law could change according to political expediency or political necessity,” he said. “We don’t know if it will be more clearly defined in the coming law but in accordance with their tradition and the current scope, it could be exceedingly wide,” Chan said, adding it is naive to think the law will only apply to only a small group of people. The legal scholar also said he doubts if the central government will accept unfavourable rulings by Hong Kong courts linked to the new security law

    Presentation Design by 24Slides | 24Slides – interesting side service by Sheraton Hotels

    GOOPiMADE – really cool Taiwanese streetwear brand

    The Quietus | Missing The Jackpot: William Gibson’s Slow-Cooked Apocalypse – “One thing I was curious about with Dominic Cummings,” Gibson continues, “is I wondered if he had noticed that Bigend’s mother was a Situationist – or someone who hung with the Situationists –and I wondered if he knew who they were and what their schtick was, because I somehow doubt he’d get that.” But I guess he sees himself as some sort of disruptor, shaking things up – albeit perhaps in more of a Silicon Valley kind of way, than in a Situationist vein. “But disruption is not hot anymore!” Gibson exclaims. “That’s an old meme.”

    Legendary fashion bibles STREET and FRUiTS are finally online | Dazed Digital – huge online asset

    How Did I Not Hate the new Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045 CGI Anime? – J-List Blog – one observation J-List’s anime figure buyer made is that Netflix-funded anime rarely result in figures or other products for J-List or other anime shops to sell, and in general don’t have a “long tail” that allows anime fans to enjoy the work over many years, compared with more organically-created anime series. Sometimes this “Netflix short tail” problem is caused by the business model of streaming, which prefers to dump a whole series online at once so fans can binge it and get more addicted to the platform. One such anime was Relife, about a company that lets people return to high school and re-live a year of their lives over again, which totally failed to make a splash because it came out all at once on Netflix, rather than one episode per week

    The Wizards of Buzz – WSJ Online – The next time you visit a buzzy Web site, see a funny video clip online or read an unusual take on the news, chances are you owe it to someone like Mr. Worthington. A new generation of hidden influencers is taking root online, fueled by a growing love affair among Web sites with letting users vote on their favorite submissions. These sites are the next wave in the social-networking craze — popularized by MySpace and Facebook. Digg is one of the most prominent of these sites, which are variously labeled social bookmarking or social news. Others include Reddit.com (recently purchased by Condé Nast), Del.icio.us (bought by Yahoo), Newsvine.com and StumbleUpon.com. Netscape relaunched last June with a similar format. The opinions of these key users have implications for advertisers shelling out money for Internet ads, trend watchers trying to understand what’s cool among young people, and companies whose products or services get plucked for notice. It’s even sparking a new form of payola, as marketers try to buy votes – from back when influencers weren’t such a malign dystopian concept of shallowness

    The Infinite Heartbreak of Loving Hong Kong | The Nation – The same brutal policing tactics and authoritarian legal frameworks developed by the British to suppress leftist dissent are being recycled by Chinese authorities against pro-democracy Hong Kongers. The CCP constantly casts itself as the answer to Western imperialism. But Chinese state media now argues Hong Kong’s new national security law would improve upon the “frail” British security framework—in other words, that it wants to bolster, not dismantle, the colonial machinery of repression – interesting diacotomy in narrative. All of this compounds Chinese diplomatic failure in Australia and other western countries

    Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization – TL;DR – no clear correlation between political polarisation and social networks

    WARC | Global Ad Trends: COVID-19 & Ad Investment – advertising investment is set to fall 8.1% – $49.6bn – worldwide this year. This year’s downturn will be softer than in 2009, when the ad market fell by 12.7% ($60.5bn). Traditional media will fare far worse than online. Almost all product sectors will record a decline this year, with the most severe falls seen among travel & tourism (-31.2%), leisure & entertainment (-28.7%), financial services (-18.2%) and retail (-15.2%).