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

  • Innovation in hardware + more

    Innovation in hardware

    How Streetwear Is Driving Innovation in Hardware | HYPEBEAST – the innovation in hardware that Hypebeast is concerned about is fasteners clips and connectors in clothing and accessories. Some streetwear brands are using zips in a similar way to Vivienne Westwood during punk. They are borrowing from technical clothing, military gear and alpine sports for inspiration. More design related content here.

    Branding

    Cause Marketing Isn’t Working for Young People – Adweek – according to DoSomething’s survey, “Nike still only secured a 60% aided awareness of an association with any cause at all and only 27% with racial justice.” – doesn’t work unless it goes beyond a single campaign. This also has implication for this work and ZBB

    FMCG

    P&G’s Pritchard wants to ‘reinvent’ advertising with films as streaming disrupts landscape – literally going back to soap operas

    Legal

    Brussels poised to probe Apple over Spotify’s fees complaint | Financial Times – Spotify trying to weaponise anti trust law against Apple in a similar way to Amazon did in the US over Apple Books a number of years earlier. Spotify | Time to Play Fair – of course, fails to discuss issue of when is Spotify going to play fair with artists?

    Luxury

    Ralph Lauren’s CMO on retelling its brand story to ‘reach the kid looking for Supreme’ | The Drum – “We’ve marketed those in a very bespoke, very direct way to newer audiences. We can market on one hand to someone who’s been into the brand for 20, 30 years, who wore Polo Sport back in the 90s, but we can also market that product mix and that story to a younger kid who’s looking for Supreme. – hype isn’t only about media targeting yet according to this puff piece its all about digital media technology which is BS. It indicates a wider lack of focus there on craft, planning style insights, design, curation, the move to online ‘drops’ on certain collections

    Media

    Where North and South Korea Meet: On TV – The New York Times – I do feel a bit concerned that these people aren’t treated with more respect (paywall)

    Vince McMahon’s XFL Sets TV Deals With Disney, Fox | Hollywood Reporter – second time around. The league originally ran in 2001 and then folded with a 50+ million dollar loss

    Technology

    Anki shutting down despite $200 million in funding – Axios – bigger question consumers must start to have about having cloud in the product, is it really that smart as a model. I personally don’t think so. Also should cloud and product be sold by different companies a la Alexia and Harmon Kardon etc

    Why doesn’t Britain have a Huawei of its own? The answer speaks volumes | The Guardian – goes back further than Thatcher with the wider UK banking culture, Walker, Goldsmith, Rowland. The lack of a long term management culture and lack of equivalent to the landesbank’s of Germany. But a good deal of the blame has to be laid at the feet of BT

    How the Apple Store Lost Its Luster | Bloomberg – Angela Ahrendts was a paper tiger in Apple’s retail stores. But I’ve not had as bad as an experience as the ones outlined in the article

    DeepGlint: the Chinese AI firm that helped police catch a criminal who had been on the run for 20 years | South China Morning Post – is it China’s technology or its implementation that is more of a paradigm shift. I am inclined to think implementation

  • Kraft mothers day marketing + more

    Kraft Mothers Day marketing

    Kraft’s marketing has left a lot to be desired in the past couple of years partly due to the way the brand has implemented ZBB, but the Kraft Mothers day campaign running in the US is genius. It is a brave campaign that could fail due to wokeness or social conservatism. And they still went ahead and did it anyway. More FMCG related content here.

    Feedi RSS search engine

    Feedi Search Engine – part of the importance of media literacy is finding quality sources and anything that encourages adoption of RSS readers has the potential to be a good thing. If you need a good RSS reader, I can recommend Newblur which I have been using for a number of years. The reason why I like it is that you can train it to surface content of interest over time. It doesn’t machine learning to guesstimate it, but you have to make active decisions, which I think is a healthier balance.

    Game of Thrones collaboration

    MGM Resorts International – Winter Is Coming – MGM and HBO did a great tie-in to celebrate the start of the final Game of Thrones season. It is well worthwhile clicking on the link and going through their case study to see what MGM Resorts did.

    ZTE’s cyberpunk Nubia Alpha smart watch

    ZTE’s Nubia Alpha smart watch looks like something out of a cyber-punk novel. I love what ZTE have tried to do with the aesthetic. The key challenge is what looks like a shockingly bad user experience based on this video unboxing and preview. Wearables are a relatively new space and fair play to ZTE for attempting something this ambitious.

    WePresent

    WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer. It is great the way WeTransfer consistently support fantastic creative. It is also a really amazing 404 error message page.

  • Reel-to-reel technology + more

    Return of reel-to-reel as musicians reject digital for better sound of dated technology – reel-to-reel tape recorders never really went away. They provide a super saturated effect to everything that they record. The bigger issue is perishable spare parts, servicing and future manufacturing of reel-to-reel tape machines. Ballfinger have attempted to make new machines, but existing manufacturers like Studer, Denon, Revox and Otari have long stopped making machines.

    TODAYonline | Exclusive: Tesla expects global shortage of electric vehicle battery minerals -sources – what about the environment? One of the reasons why I’ve been skeptical of Tesla’s approach to power for years. Its the reason why the likes of BMW and Toyota have looked at super-capacitors and hydrogen power – both internal combustion engines and fuel cells. It is interesting that Hyundai have been looking at hydrogen fuel cells for lorries. Toyota has hydrogen fuel cell powered cars.

    Nike’s Beijing 99 basketball tournament – It is hard to explain how popular basketball in China as a sport. Interest in the game is way beyond Europe. Basketball courts suit built up cities with a smaller area required than for a football pitch. The NBA has a large following in China. The local league has an extensive following as well.

    Chinese players that make the NBA draft are celebrated in China as well, even if they aren’t Chinese citizens, like American Taiwanese star Jeremy Lin.

    Chinese players like based on an ancient military ranking system with 99 shirts individually designed to be claimed. Nike cleverly melds Chinese interest and pride in their culture with their love of basketball.

    NIKE – Beijing 99 Teaser Film from M Skibiak on Vimeo.

    More on Nike here.

    Facebook Is Finding Problems With Artificial Intelligence Too – WIRED – (paywall)

    Disintegration – Great interview of the keyboardist on The Cure’s Distintergration which covers studio boredom well

  • Agnotology + more things

    Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation – Data & Society: Points – well worth a good read. Agnotology (formerly agnatology) is the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. This reminded me a lot of work that was done by large corporates on tobacco health and more recently on peak oil and climate change. More recently it seems to be culture and value related; where the results don’t fit the wider progressive view in academia. That too isn’t healthy. More consumer behaviour related posts here.

    WePresent – lovely creative brand building work by wetransfer and an amazing 404 error message page. Each of the works presented here are very thoughtfully curated for a creative audience. Its all amazing.

    Gigalife by Vodafone | FaceTime families: What 5G means for those who stay in touch by screen – not a lot, wi-fi and 4G is more important and perfectly adequate

    When manipulation is the digital business model – dark patterns as we call it in the trade (paywall)

    Facebook’s off-again, on-again affair with privacy – Axios – less of a pivot and more of a zig-zag. What appears to be apparent is that Facebook’s internal values are at odds with wider society and there won’t be any meeting of minds any time soon.

    Leo Burnett, Lucky Generals and Ogilvy decline to pitch for Audi – Leo Burnett London, Lucky Generals, Ogilvy, Saatchi & Saatchi London and VMLY&R all declined to take part in Audi’s advertising review. Which is a pretty damning critique of either Audi’s pitch process, or their reputation in the UK as a client. Given how toxic Boots or Samsung are as a client, this is a pretty damning indictment of Audi as an organisation in the UK. This is a world away from when Audi’s Vorsprung Durch Technik ads went head to head with BMW in the 1980s and 1990s.

  • Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019

    Record Store Day 2019 redux. Record Store Day has moved away from its origins, to drive music fans into independent record stores and support independent record labels in a time of iTunes and Spotify. For various reasons I didn’t do any any vinyl shopping but used The Vinyl Store to compile a list of what I would have considered buying if I had been in a position to.

    My picks from Record Store Day UK 2019

    A few things:

    • Madonna’s True Blue single was one of her classic 12 inch singles. I am less convinced by the fake ‘obi’
    • Cloud One were a studio-based disco production team
    • Jazzanova’s Heatwave was given a 1980s makeover which sounds amazing
    • Lonnie Liston Smith – Space Princess is a great disco cut from the man that brought you Expansions

    Online consumer behaviour

    danah boyd on the current state of play of participatory media. I first met danah back in 2005 at the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale with Bradley Horowitz. She was working on a project for Yahoo! Research back then and has kept close to youth and ‘social’ media since then.

    Design

    Even if you don’t know eBoy, you’ll recognise their work and its distinctive style. They’re doing a collaboration in customised Swatch watches. The video talks about how they work together, which is an interesting process in and of itself.

    Korea

    Asian Boss have done a collaboration with a documentary maker to bring Crossroads to YouTube. Crossroads is a documentary that shows how the Sewol Ferry disaster shaped modern Korean culture and politics. It was as big as the Poll Tax riots or the Brexit vote in the UK. It pressed the reset button on the Korean public’s relationship with the government captured by chaebol which was business as usual.

    Japan

    And Tomy’s range of mini retro consumer electronics are amazing. I presume that these are all aimed at adults. The level of detail is impressive. More related posts here.