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

  • High production values & things from last week

    If there was one theme that ran through most of the things in this week’s post its high production values in content creation

    The thing that blew me about this advert is how old school it feels and I mean it in a good way. High production values, great copywriting and beautifully shot. Pretty much everything that modern day adverts tend not to be with production being commoditised with the constant focus on how it can be used on Istagram / Facebook / Snap / Twitter Video – good enough rather than doing things well. These changes are symptomatic of all the forces affecting the ad industry at the moment. More on quality related issues here.

    While we’re talking about ad making, I also love this ad done for McDonalds Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Such a simple idea really well executed – you don’t need to speak Cantonese to get it. It is apparently based on this advert screened during the Super Bowl in the US. The creative was done during Leo Burnett’s 35-year run as creative agency for the fast food chain.

    Scott Galloway tends to polarise opinions, so I’d ask you to put aside any feelings you have and listen to this interview with Mr Bags – one of the biggest influencers in the luxury sector for Chinese netizens at the moment.

    Amazing photos and insight into the Yakuza life: Behind the Yakuza: documenting the women of Japan’s mafia | Dazed Digital

    Currently reading City of Devils : A Shanghai Noir by Paul French. It is a true crime story about Shanghai during the Warlord period prior to World War Two. I’m only a little bit into the book but it’s very obvious why the young Chinese Communist Party would have held a passionate dislike for western powers interfering in their country.

  • Pegatron + more things

    Apple reportedly shifting more iPhone XR orders to Foxconn from Pegatron, says paper  – Pegatron’s production has been affected by a lower-than-expected yield rate and shortages of workers at its plants in China – the manpower issue at Pegatron is very interesting and implies a possible rift between the factories and local government. Historically local governments have gone out of their way to facilitate large Taiwanese employers China has just begun to see a decline in worker numbers overall in its population. Pegatron used to be part of ASUSTek. When that business reorganised its OEM manufacturing business became what we now know as Pegatron.

    Brands throwing cash at sponsorship with little idea of return, report finds – Mumbrella Asia – not terribly surprising

    Deepfakes web α | Generate your own Deepfakes – Japanese currency denominated service to create your own deep fakes. This service looks as if its designed for the curious, rather than virtual revenge porn creators, the accessibility of this capability brings with it a variety of issues

    Smart cities — too clever by half? | Financial Times – hell is other people’s technology. Smart cities don’t have the attendant ethical considerations because that would dull their ‘smartness’. In addition law enforcement would prefer to have maximum choices on data. It was interesting that China Mobile’s key use case for 5G was urban crime fighting in the first adverts that they ran.

    Life insurance company John Hancock wants to track your Fitbit data – Vox – very sinister. What demands will the insurance company put on the insured? How will it be using the data?

    Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me – innovation entropy

    Adobe Changes Its Marketing Cloud Trajectory With Marketo Acquisition – this going to be a very different marketing / sale model for Adobe

    Alexa, Blow My Mind | Gartner L2 – Apple’s recent iPhone and Apple Watch launch lacked buzz in comparison to previous launches.

  • Through a storm with Big Bird

    Just when you think that Sesame Street can’t get any more awesome, you find out that they’re putting out content like this on how the characters of Sesame Street get through a storm

    Jaguar Land Rover’s ‘Googly Eyes’ isn’t just a gimmick but a classic bit of human computer interaction thinking. The cars gaze passes important information to pedestrians in its ‘line-of-sight’

    Hypebeast founder Kevin Ma plays blinder; offering to pick up the tab for every ticket to Hypefest.

    Culture and learning shouldn’t have a price attached to it.

    I will personally cover the cost of tickets to make Hypefest a free experience for all.

    Over a decade ago, I began a website documenting the things we love. Next month we will be holding our very first festival @hypefest which will bring our culture to life. To celebrate this moment, I will be personally covering the cost of tickets to provide free tickets for everyone. All are welcome to come share this moment with use. Tickets available tomorrow 12PM tomorrow on hypefest.com

    CHiPs ‘roller disco’ – the most Seventies bit of television ever. I’ve heard this being used as the intro track on some of Luxxury‘s mixes. It helps you get through a storm of a day with feelgood disco

    Sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

    Hollywood studios had to get through a storm. Television had led to declining cinema audiences. Cinemas hadn’t moved to the kind of multiplex higher comfort experience that we know now, so were closing in large amounts. Some fleapits in major cities were kept open screening badly dubbed martial arts films and pornography. It was around this time that Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven and Behind The Green Door developed mainstream popularity.

    At the time you had film stars making guest appearances on television; this gave them an invaluable boost to incomes that had dried up. The movie studio system hadn’t glommed on to blockbusters yet and was in the thrall of directors of the American New Wave. There wasn’t a lot of roles at the time for stars of the 1960s like Breakfast at Tiffany’s George Peppard. Others like Lee Van Cleef and Richard Harrison went to work in the Italian and Asian film industries.

    They probably didn’t know that change was just around the corner the launch of the over budget and under-appreciated Heaven’s Gate put an end to the American New Wave.

    Steven Spielberg and others brought in the rise of the blockbuster and the studio system was saved. But George Peppard never made another cinematic film; instead he lives on in the minds of many people as Hannibal Smith from the A-Team.

    Finally a 1970 concert film of Miles Davis performing the title track from Bitches Brew

  • Dr Eugenia Cheng & things that made last week

    Dr Eugenia Cheng

    Dr Eugenia Cheng talks about the key themes in her book The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn’t

    Outtakes from Dr Eugenia Cheng talk:

    • Pure mathematics is a framework for agreeing on things
    • Pure maths is a framework for how to think
    • Make progress rather than repeat things to make a better logical argument
    • Logic validity doesn’t equal morally valid in analogies
    • Interconnectedness is often erroneously simplified by blaming a single item as a cause
    • Its easier to change actions, than it is to change feelings. Feelings just are
    • Great feedback loops tied into obesity is fascinating
    • Relationships between things – media affects thinking by shoehorning natural geometry into one or two dimensions
    • Intelligence: reasonable – can be reasoned with, powerfully logical – not just using logic but using techniques to move an organisation further and being helpful: emotion

    More ideas related content here.

    Merino wool producers assume that cyber punk is a synthetic dystopia, instead of thinking abut how wool is a technical fabric by its very nature. The ad was done for the Woolmark Company by TBWA Sydney. Do humans dream of technical merino wool?

    Live footage of Talking Heads performing Once in a Lifetime in 1980. The performance encapsulates everyone that I expect Talking Heads to be.

    Zegna’s radical reinvention | How To Spend It – great profile of Gildo and the fashion brand that he manages. The process of reinvention doesn’t seem to create a tension with the heritage – which is a great attributed to a luxury brand. There isn’t that much difference between Zegna and Stone Island in terms of innovation.

    Jori Hulkkonen – Attack Magazine –  he has a great back catalogue, so looking forward to his Simple Music for Complicated People album. Hulkkonen’s work goes from extremely emotive soulful house to minimal techno and everywhere in between.

  • Good strategy inspired by Matt Holt

    A couple of tweets on good strategy by Matt Holt inspired this post. Strategy and planning are considered to be disrupted by changes in the advertising industry. It often boils down to ‘ who needs strategy when you have big data / machine learning’.

    Big data; isn’t good strategy. Instead it tells you retrospectively where you should have zigged rather than zagged. It doesn’t plot an overall direction.  It is usually pretty reductive only focusing on sales now. It doesn’t think about future sales through building a brand and its good standing.

    In marketing automation, it is focused on ‘harvesting’ from the end of the marketing funnel.

    Travelling

      • It is sacrifice. It’s about making choices and saying no
      • It is specific. There is a specific well-defined problem to be solved. 
      • It is simple to explain (even if the subject matter is complex). If you’re setting a direction, the roadmap has to be clear for all stakeholders.
      • it has elegance. Which is a good measure of its simplicity.
      • It steers tactics. It provides a directional lens to the data and helps in deciding KPIs (key performance indicators) and HVAs (high value actions).
      • Good strategy is stubborn in the face of the shiny and new. Strategy is not a fad is a long term roadmap. The shiny and new can be a facilitator at best. At worst its a distraction. 
      • It is saying no to excess. Keep the strategy focused on the objectives that it addresses
      • Good strategy seems self evident in retrospect. It’s not just a way to solve the problem, but has been sweated out to optimise it to the point that it seems self evident in retrospect.
      • It is emergent, but not realtime. A strategy needs to be able to flex as conditions change. Its the direction, not an exhaustive road map.
    • It is not ‘big data’. Big data can be a source of insights that will help develop a strategy, but it’s not a strategy in of itself. For example the inspiration for Compare the Market’s meerkat campaign was misspellings in search data for the word market

    More ideas related posts here.