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
Burger King King of Stream campaign conducted in conjunction with Ogilvy agency DAVID based in Madrid, Spain. The King of Stream makes sense when you look only at the data. Target young people who do gaming. Presumably there is some group cohesion data or insight that shows a propensity to eat fast food with gaming.
However what would have been an interesting half-formed idea in a brainstorm seems to have had a negative impact in real life. Often what makes sense on Excel isn’t that smart when it meets the real world.
It reminded me of the introduction to Robert X. Cringely’s insiders story of the PC industry, Accidental Empires written in the 1991:
… PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program, and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.
Spreadsheets and the data models inside them can be extremely powerful business tools and also weapons of mass destruction. And King of Stream seems to be the advertising equivalent.
The use of bot powered donations to Twitch with the donation sizes related to Burger King special deals had an adverse effect on the gaming community on Twitch for a few reasons.
Burger King is a big brand, yet isn’t engaging with the community in a respectful way. It was culturally tone deaf.
This was the bit that surprised me the most given Ogilvy’s reputation around its use of behavioural economics or behavioural science in campaigns. The ‘donations’ are miserly. There is a lot of psychology around the value of donations or gifts. If it really want to engage with the gamers, why not sponsor them?
The execution was intrusive and felt like spam
More on this can be found on the King of Stream by reading this thread here. More on other Burger King campaigns here.
https://youtu.be/236KSswX7v4
Celebrating Hong Kong style milk tea. According to the descriptor on this video is made by the Cui Brothers in Hong Kong; though I suspect it might be carefully edited from other films. It features classic Hong Kong dishes including French toast and pineapple bun with butter.
Indigo Gaming have put together this guide to cyberpunk culture. It is called part one, was done months ago and there doesn’t seem to be a part two yet. Part one of this guide to cyberpunk culture is worthwhile watching on its own.
The best of dance music over the past 30 years or so in a Soundcloud account – The Classic Mix CD Series | Free Listening on SoundCloud – mix CDs were time capsules of what was hot in different clubs at the time. They owe their origins to the mix (cassette) tape packs that club promoters used to sell of their nights. Mixmag took that concept and came up with the first properly licensed recordings.
The original ones were done as one track per DJ mix. At the time CD players would in a space between each track recorded on a CD. Even early versions of iTunes used to do the same thing with both mix CDs and recordings ripped of mix CDs.
At their height, they were an amazing money maker for record labels. They received steady royalty payments from licensing their tracks to appear on these mix CDs. For example Gat Decor, who had a break out single called Passion – appeared on 191 compilations and mix CDs.
Influencer endorsements fail to influence purchase decisions | WARC – Influencer endorsements play only a small role in affecting the purchase decisions of their followers, according to research from influencer endorsements platform Influencer and GlobalWebIndex. In their survey of consumers in the UK and US who follow influencers on social media, just 15% said influencer endorsements motivates them to make a purchase – the tenth most common response. In comparison, more than half of consumers who follow influencers say free delivery (57%) and offers/promotions (52%) would motivate them to make a purchase. – Interesting in light of the high amount of spend put around influencer endorsements by the likes of Unilever personal care and beauty products. Is this a lack of ‘influence’ or being more budget conscious that is the driver? There might need to be a readjustment of charges for influencer endorsements. Also as WARC notes, a long term test is required.
Jailed WeChat User Says Chinese Police Monitor Overseas Accounts Too – Jin Chun, a former big data engineer at Huawei’s Nanjing Research Institute, meanwhile recently told reporters that all Chinese communications companies and internet service providers companies are required to monitor users on behalf of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. Faced with an official request for data, no company will resist, because they would cease to operate, he said. More on China here.
Google giving far-right users’ data to law enforcement, documents reveal | Technology | The Guardian – Saira Hussein, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, said in a phone conversation that EFF was concerned about the “vast amounts of user data” Google appeared to be voluntarily passing on to law enforcement, but questioned Google’s goal in doing so. “Are they expecting law enforcement to do something, or is this just a way of covering themselves? Does Google see its responsibility as simply reporting this to law enforcement and moving on?”
New Cold War With China Demands Radical Industrial Rethink for United States – Since March alone, China has threatened to withhold medical equipment from the United States and Europe during the coronavirus pandemic; launched the biggest cyberattack against Australia in the country’s history; hacked U.S. firms to acquire secrets related to the coronavirus vaccine; and engaged in massive disinformation campaigns on a global scale. China even hacked the Vatican. These incidents reflect the power China wields through its control of supply chains and information hardware. They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and democracies everywhere. And they pale in comparison to what China will have the capacity to do as its confrontation with the United States sharpens
Miss M: Guarding the City We Call Home | We Are HKers – Like many of our forefathers, Mainland Chinese flee to Hong Kong and even overseas for obvious reasons.Among the younger students in my school, 80% have Mainland Chinese backgrounds (they are either from China or they speak Mandarin at home). Many treat learning English with disdain and fantasise that China will rule the world in the near future and foreigners will have to learn Mandarin to please the Chinese. This is a tragedy. Their parents send them to Hong Kong to study despite all the hardship, but the kids fail to forego their conservative Chinese mindset. This happens not only in Hong Kong, but also in Canada. The CCP have already gotten their hands on Chinese language newspapers such as Mingpao and Sing Tao Daily. Lennon Walls in Canadian universities are destroyed within days by Mainland Chinese students and their physical attacks on Hong Kong students are common – the degree of population change is quite phenomenal
Why marketers should embrace Share of Search as a metric | WARC – “The SoS calculation itself is simple. Calculate a rolling 12-month average of the various brands to be analysed, including your own. Total this. Divide each individual brand’s 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %. This is Share of Search, using Google Trends data.”
Epic’s battle for open platforms ignores consoles’ massive closed market | Ars Technica – and the majority of games played on Fortnite are played on consoles. Epic’s battle for open platforms rings hollow. More gaming posts here. More on other (more legitimate) battles for open platforms here. Epic’s battle for open platforms is about extra revenue not consumer benefit. They’ve deliberately picked a fight for some reason that won’t become apparent yet. One also has to view Epic’s battle for open platforms through its Chinese ownership as well
Why marketers should embrace Share of Search as a metric | WARC – “The SoS calculation itself is simple. Calculate a rolling 12-month average of the various brands to be analysed, including your own. Total this. Divide each individual brand’s 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %. This is Share of Search, using Google Trends data.” More here in an interview for Contagious by Les Binet. Why share of search is a vital marketing metric | Contagious – The internet has made it almost impossible to accurately measure brands’ share of voice and the world seems perfectly content with that trade-off, so marketers have been forced to look for a replacement metric fit for the digital age. Share of search, it seems, might just fill the void…. Binet however is tentative on the tantalising prospect that share of search can give marketers an almost immediate insight into how a brand-building ad will perform over the long term. ‘Kind of,’ he says, when asked if share of search could show brands the value of emotional advertising in days instead of years. ‘You can to some extent use it to get a prediction of the long-term effects in the short term,’ he says, ‘but it may not work in every category. It tends to work best in categories with considered purchases.’ What most excites Binet about his research, though, is that when he looked at the effects of advertising on share of search he saw – consistently across all categories – that around 40% of the impact was felt in the short term (the first month) and around 60% of the uplift was delivered over the long term (the following two years). ‘That 60/40 ratio is one I’ve seen before,’ he jokes, alluding to his earlier work with Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It, which established a 60/40 rule for brands looking to divvy up their marketing spend between long term brand building ads and short term activations. ‘So the share of search analysis provides a further piece of independent, empirical evidence for the hypothesis we have about how advertising works.
Brand is a strategy | WARC – Gartner recently announced that, partially at least, in response to the pandemic and its associated uncertainties, CMOs now rank ‘brand strategy’ as their top priority. As with any survey, we should consider the research skeptically — but since CMOs largely direct how they spend their budgets, it’s worth the industry that serves them considering what they might be looking for assistance with. The survey was interesting beyond the headlines. Last year the same group considered analytics their most vital marketing capability, which highlights both the increased scrutiny that marketing faces to be accountable and the endless pendulum that swings in the industry, between brand and performance. And they are going into prioritisation of brand just at the time when the board will squeeze them on performance
Strategist’s Digest: the gulf between corporate values and company culture | Contagious – Over 80% of large companies publish on their websites the values they profess to live by, according to research. Integrity was the most often listed value, claimed by 65% of all companies. Collaboration came second, with 53%, and customer focus was third at 48%. But do these values make a difference to the companies’ culture and how they behave? The researchers used Glassdoor reviews, posted by employees, to find out. After analysing 1.2 million reviews for more than 500 large companies, they found no significant correlation. In some cases there was even a negative relationship between core values and the company culture as reported by employees. And more at the Sloane Review – | When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk? | Sloane Review
Jimmy Lai/Hong Kong: buy orders on democracy | Financial Times – Next Digital is a benchmark for resistance to Chinese authoritarianism in other ways. Views on its digital platform double when there are protests, to an average of 80m a day. Next Digital has survived constant mainland pressure, including the withdrawal of its underwriter just before its listing and advertising boycotts by Chinese companies. The shares trade at a just over 0.3 times book value. Investors with ethical policies may have awkward questions for HSBC and Standard Chartered. These UK-listed banks have expressed support for the law under which Mr Lai was detained. The arrest of a chief executive warns foreign multinationals to locate elsewhere.
Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed – The New York Times – For years, Sternberg had been saying that the fashion industry was a giant bubble heading toward collapse. Now the pandemic was just speeding up the inevitable. In fact, it had already begun. An incredible surplus of clothing was presently sitting in warehouses and in stores, some of which might never reopen. “That whole channel is dead,” Sternberg said. “And there’s no sign of when it’s turning on again.” – well worth reading particular the section about novelties. Novelties is when fashion houses put on additional zips or features just to get into department stores
Movable wealth｜Ngan Shun-kau – Chinese UHNW (ultra high net worth) individuals (100 of them or so) have 78 trillion yuan offshores in Switzerland
Nike Japan: Create with Air Max by AKQA. Japan seems to be particularly open to an augmented reality AR campaign in general. This AR campaign taps into the challenges that COVID-19 lockdown represented to creators and the wearing sneakers. The purpose of the AR campaign was three fold:
Reinforce the cultural aspect of the Air Max
Emphasise innovation in the Nike brand through the AR campaign functionality
Beatboxing and digital sampling technology meets meditation in this video by Yogetsu Akasaka, a Japanese Zen Buddhist monk ‘Heart Sutra’ vocal live looping remix.
The Korean Tourism Organisation collaborates with Netflix to promote Korea as a travel destination. The ad spot highlights locations drawn from food travelogues to Korean dramas on the platform. Korean drama already has an international following, previously it has been on specialist sites and DVD boxsets. Netflix has made the potential reach for Korean dramas even larger. At least some of the Netflix audience won’t have heard of ‘hallyu’, or K-pop. Netflix had helped improve access to international dramas in general. That’s the audience that the KTO is trying to tap into with this ad creative.
Why business in Hong Kong should be worried | The Economist – Hong Kong is trapped like the grips of vice. Its economy is dominated by finance and rent-seeking businesses – Simon Cartledge for Gavekal Dragonomics, a consultancy, because these firms are over-represented in government, “Hong Kong’s single biggest disincentive to risk-taking and entrepreneurship—its high costs, especially for property—cannot be tackled.” That is why the back-to-business message is unlikely to resonate with ordinary Hong Kongers. This is probably why Hong Kong start-ups like DJI moved to Shenzhen to found their businesses. (Frank Wang did a lot of the key work on DJI drones whilst studying at HKUST. And even benefited from a small HKUST grant. But he moved across to Shenzhen to found the business itself in 2006.) Fintech has been a bit of a busted flush. It was the latest in a long line of business ideas like wine trading, the arts and medical tourism as failed niches for Hong Kong. Singapore seems to have been much more successful in business creation and seems to be seeing more venture capital interest. Current sectors in Hong Kong likely to be affected include the legal practices specialising in commercial arbitration. Without trustworthy commercial arbitration in Hong Kong doing business in China looks much less attractive. Singapore is trying to bridge the gap, but I suspect that there might be long term corrosion of Chinese business dealings. Digital companies and foreign banks face big worries. Between the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong National Security Law – Helping America to enforce sanctions would violate the security law. Not doing so would incur American penalties
Mark Ritson: In a virtual marketplace, only the strongest brands will survive – Companies see better profit margins and an almost unlimited customer base but miss the drastic reduction in barriers to entry. – so brand hyper-competition will ensue and the winner takes all model will extend beyond tech. Expect venture capital money to pour all kinds of weird industry niches as they try to pick category winners
Chinese liquor group Kweichow Moutai tumbles after graft news report | Financial Times – Moutai sales are linked to gifting and lavish consumption and some have linked the share price increase with a corresponding uplift in sales and by implication graft. The damaging bit in the article is that Moutai’s former chairman Yuan Renguo quoted saying in private that sales linked to corruption are “a normal part of business” and that China’s corruption clampdown would not reach far enough to affect the company’s business
Banning junk food from TV an ‘irrelevant symbolic gesture’ that won’t reduce obesity | The Drum – the argument whilst true won’t be believed by regulators. Their rationale would be why would junk food companies advertise if it didn’t work? The distinction of this is junk food brand fighting out with similar brands in its category won’t wash. Secondly, advertising bans worked in the past on tobacco products over time
Outrage Over China’s Treatment of Hong Kong Galvanizes the West – WSJ – Complaints about China have piled up in Western capitals in recent years, but it took Beijing’s new curbs on Hong Kong’s autonomy to galvanize them around something approaching a common cause. – In many respects its like boiling a frog in reverse, it is likely that China didn’t expect the frog to jump out of the pot, given that the heat had been on so long
Opinion | A Coronavirus Care Package From China – The New York Times – After the Communist takeover in 1949, traditional Chinese medicine was institutionalized. Folk remedies helped fulfill both a tangible need — credentialed doctors were scarce — and an ideological end: That system of knowledge is quintessentially and uniquely Chinese. Today, the Chinese government sees a political opportunity in the continuing emotional appeal of traditional medicine. If Chinese people can embrace an Eastern alternative to Western medicine, they might also be more likely to accept the Communist Party’s governance model and reject liberal democracy
Speaking in Tongues – Chinese Storytellers – such a great essay on the current challenge facing Chinese (and in particular Hong Kongers) writing for foreign audiences: a Chinese storyteller telling stories for an English-speaking audience in a divided world. As a writer who has called Hong Kong, Beijing and New Haven home, I find myself often in the position of what Zadie Smith once called “speaking in tongues”: equivocating between the lens of the insider and the outsider, examining the places I call home with both the “objective,” parachuted gaze of the foreign correspondent, and the emotionally implicated and invested eye of the local storyteller. Increasingly, that has felt impossible
Google considers alternatives to Hong Kong for undersea cable | Financial Times – Hong Kong has – become less critical for not only US cloud providers but also their Chinese rivals, according to Tao Wu, a senior research analyst for Gartner, a tech research firm. “Singapore has become much more important than Hong Kong from a location and population perspective,” Ms Wu said. “Other top cloud providers such as Alibaba Cloud are much more focused on south-east Asia to go global than expanding in Hong Kong.” – this will have a big impact for those property developers who’ve invested in data centres (internet hotels). Hong Kong’s financial position for international trading desks will also be diminished if international telecoms infrastructure starts to divert away from Hong Kong. From a pure connectivity point of view Korea, Singapore and even the Philippines start to look really good
