Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • AI love advice + more things

    Japanese communications company to introduce AI love advice specialist | Rocket News 24 – we can all stand around an snigger about this. But it’s also really interesting. One of the ways that Yahoo! failed to innovate around search was a concept they called knowledge search. This was about opinions rather than facts: what’s the best place to get a cup of coffee in Greenwich? Yahoo! had envisioned it would be people powered.

    Eventually it would become Yahoo! Answers – which filled up with spam content. This was a fault of incentives and community management not principle as Quora proved. The more pertinent question would be: what would stop an AI love advice specialist?

    China’s Baidu Misses Expectations As Net Profit Crashes 18.9% | ChinaTechNews – Baidu is between a rock and a hard place. Yes it has a market protected from Google. But it is also shut out of the WeChat walled garden. Alibaba is where most purchases happen so Baidu isn’t that needed and they’re at the mercy of the Chinese government. Success has a price

    Spy Chief Complains That Edward Snowden Sped Up Spread of Encryption by 7 Years  – it came from the National Security Agency. “The projected growth maturation and installation of commercially available encryption — what they had forecasted for seven years ahead, three years ago, was accelerated to now, because of the revelation of the leaks.” More on privacy related posts here.

    Microsoft Flow is like IFTTT for connecting cloud services – Business Insider – back in the day this would have been called middleware. When I started off my agency career I happened to have telecoms clients. A lot of my colleagues had small software companies that provided software components for ‘n-tier’ systems. This allowed development of flexible and reusable apps. Logic and processing of data could be built into workflows.

  • China tech data slides

    I have been pulling together China tech data slides for me that were useful for some work that I have been doing. I thought it would be worthwhile sharing these slides with a wider audience.

    This month, I have selected a few slides that shed a light on advertising and consumer behaviour in China.
    May online marketing
    Looking at platforms it is hard to over play the importance of Tencent in the Chinese internet which is show at the heart of the China tech data I have collated. Looking at mobile behaviour Tencent is responsible for at least four of the top ten properties: WeChat, QQ, QQ Browser and Tencent Video.
    May online marketing
    If we look at two Chinese internet companies Tencent and Netease we can see how the companies have massively increased the number of non-game apps that they provide to keep consumers in their eco-system for their digital lives.
    May online marketing
    (Microsoft’s high number is driven by a number experimental project apps and enterprise apps). What this means is that the mobile OS becomes less important, which is one of the reasons why western brands from Samsung to Apple have been hit in the market. Their platforms give them less leverage.

    Tencent’s WeChat is one of the most popular methods of payment in China
    May online marketing

    If we look at advertising spend in the Chinese market we can see that digital and radio advertising spend over-indexes. In some ways this is surprising. Online content is huge and historically the government controlled traditional media much more tightly than online media – to the detriment of watchable content on the television. More recently, government regulation has tightened across platforms.
    May online marketing
    Print advertising only slightly over-indexes in comparison to digital or radio. On the face of it there looks to be a massive opportunity in television advertising.

    If we look at the media market consumption habits two things immediately stand out. Television and radio are largely holding their own in the face of rapidly growing digital consumption. The rapid growth in digital consumption is being driven by non-PC devices.
    May online marketing

    If you want to know why Huawei has partnered with Leica to boost the perception of its smartphone camera function, one of the factors involved is the massive growth of photography in Chinese mobile behaviour. This is especially interesting when one compares it to messaging and social – WeChat the largest mobile social platform is all encompassing in its functionality and place in modern Chinese life. A second factor is the way manufacturers are trying redefine the premium smartphone sector, at a time when innovation and experiential difference have become incremental.
    May online marketing
    May online marketing


    You can see the full presentation here. More posts on China and technology related subjects.

  • QQ themed KFC + more news

    First QQ themed KFC opens in Shenzhen | Marketing Interactive – interesting brand collaboration. KFC has always made a point of being more local and closer to the Chinese consumer than rivals. This has paid off over time. It is no surprise that there is a QQ themed KFC, but what’s next in terms of media-dining experiences? What could be the content tie-ins that would bring a QQ themed KFC concept to life? Is it the China market answer to Chuck E. Cheese?

    Here’s How Snapchat Might Be Beating Facebook | TIME – relative engagement rates and popularity with millennials desirable for marketers. But it has easily copied features and might end up being the beta tester for Instagram’s new features.

    Pentax K-1 Hands-on First Impressions – Bokeh by DigitalRev – I really like the look of it. Pentax has had a rough ride with change in owners but they are still a great DSLR camera platform. One of the key reasons for this is the cheap but good quality lens available for it.

    Google takes aim at Microsoft and IBM’s enterprise clients (GOOG, GOOGL, MSFT, IBM) | BusinessInsider – probably not what IBM needs at the moment. I think that Microsoft would have much less worried simply because it has better client relationships. IBM Global Services have had issues for years documented by Robert X. Cringely in The Decline And Fall Of IBM

    Is Apple starting to rot in China? Top level thoughts – SocialBrandWatch – It is less about ‘what the phone projects externally’, and more about “does the phone allow me connect digitally, if so, I am open to what fits me best” – interesting cross platform commoditisation as app layer becomes OS. WeChat is doing what Netscape thought that they could do with the browser and the web in the late 1990s. Also smartphones in trough part of innovation. The big gains between models are no more.

    How Facebook’s Stock Split Lets Mark Zuckerberg Keep Control | Fast Company – getting out ahead of things to prevent a future Yahoo! situation with activist investors and slowing growth ending up in tortious tech death

    Twitter now bills itself as a news app, not a social network | Digiday – ok, but where’s the revenue and user growth? Twitter has a lot of things going for it except the ability to effectively

    Google just pissed off the entire TV industry | TheNextWeb – hahahahahaha really, lets see reach curve data across different consumer groups and CPMs. Technology companies don’t get marketing and branding. They do get sales, but they’re lame on brand and really understanding the consumer. More posts on advertising here.

    The Guardian bets big on VR: ‘We’ve jumped in the deep end of the pool’ | Digiday – feels more like an experiment or a PR stunt rather than a meaningful media exercise. I guess it could be an interesting way to explore storytelling in VR. Film doesn’t work as well as an analogue as it has in video gaming. VR seems to be more about experiences and emoting

    Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek – My own take is Mayer had a nearly impossible job as a turnaround, but a manageable job as an optimise and shred. The products launched just weren’t up to standard and those that were aren’t monetised well. How on earth could Tumblr be worthless. We’re talking not just about underachieving a la Twitter, but literally having no value. When Yahoo! bought Flickr it was breaking even and they managed to ruin that as well

    This is one big example of the market conditions that are holding Apple down (AAPL) – lengthening upgrade cycles. You’ll see an emphasis on services. It also means that the first Apple device is a pre-owned Apple device

    Kaiser Kuo on Baidu, Foreign Reportage, and the ‘Paradoxes’ of China | Asia Society – great interview. Kaiser is one of the best ‘translators’ of China out there.

    The Shape of Things — Welcome to Thington — Medium – interesting vision thing on the IoT by Tom Coates.

    Traffic to Wikipedia terrorism entries plunged after Snowden revelations, study finds | Reuters – The traffic dropped even more to topics that survey respondents deemed especially privacy-sensitive. Viewership of a presumably “safer” group of articles about U.S. government security forces decreased much less in the same period. 

    Penney’s results, subjected to peer-review, offer a deeper dive into an issue investigated by previous researchers, including some who found a 5.0 percent drop in Google searches for sensitive terms immediately after June 2013. Other surveys have found sharply increased use of privacy-protecting Web browsers and communications tools. – I am not terribly surprised as an Irish child growing up in the UK during the Troubles I saw the community around me self-censor so they couldn’t be accused of anything.

    Apple iPhone, Once a Status Symbol in China, Loses Its Luster | NYTimes.com – “None of the brands do really great,” he said. “But while I might sell one or two Huawei phones in 10 days, I may not even sell one iPhone 6s.” (paywall)

    The rise of China’s millionaire research scientists | South China Morning Post – A total 1.4 trillion yuan was spent on the sector last year, according to the government, more than the entire GDP of New Zealand

  • Rediscovering Quora + more

    Probably the biggest thing that happened was me rediscovering Quora the question-and-answer network. I replied to a question ‘What are the major reasons behind Yahoo’s drastic downfall?‘ and then republished it as a blog post with a few more bits and bobs. Traffic blew up on the post when Dave Farber published a link to it in his Interesting People email list. I read Yahoo’s $8 Billion Black Hole – Bloomberg Businessweek on Thursday and it felt like part two of my piece on Yahoo! which looks to now and forward whereas I looked at macro factors and heritage. Rediscovering Quora also reminded me of the lost opportunity in Yahoo! Answers.

    Great video mash-ups plugged the gap post the Game of Thrones series launch

    I got to see Keith Weed present an aggregate view of social as it pertains to Unilever’s brands and whilst on stage he revealed that they had an inter-agency war room set up to steer the media spend around Knorr’s #LoveAtFirstTaste campaign.

    Short of Tinder integration I don’t really know what else they could have done. I do wish that it wouldn’t keep recommending chicken dishes to me though. Check out the campaign site here and the ad below.

    Really nice creative driven by MullenLowe.

    Pepsi went big with a digital OOH augmented reality campaign in Singapore. Most AR projects tend to be smaller rather than going for giant screens. Pepsi has an under-appreciated heritage in pioneering media devices. It did QRcodes on cans in western markets, so far ahead of consumer adoption that they had to provide instructions on the cans explaining what a QRcode was. This was on Pepsi Max which is right in that young adult / youth marketing space.

    Hasbro who own the Monopoly board game, posted this surreal live stream on their Facebook page. It is strangely compelling like some bizarre form of performance art.

  • Bury the hatchet tech style + more

    Google and Microsoft bury the hatchet | Techeye – this is potentially huge. Especially if Microsoft is considering itself to be less of an OS business and more of an enabler. There is also a certain irony in this behaviour from Microsoft. Previously companies like Sendo and Nortel usually found when Microsoft bury the hatchet, it was in their backs. More on Microsoft here.

    10 forces that threaten to tear the internet apart | World Economic Forum – really nice read. Unsurprisingly government, in particular cyber sovereignty is high on the list.

    How Traditional Storytelling Is Ruining Virtual Reality Film – not really that surprising, it took years for the craft of cinema storytelling to

    Nokia to buy digital health firm Withings for $191 million – Nokia said Tuesday it is buying French fitness gadget maker Withings to kickstart its re-entry into the consumer market and boost its move into digital health. Smart buy, Withings design some the nicest wearables out there

    Daring Fireball: The Encryption Farce – interesting read of WSJ coverage on Apple vs. FBI legal issues

    Top risk expert says Apple could be shut out of China | South China Morning Post – more likely to be about helping domestic brands as China understands the need to defend against foreign attacks , more so than US politicians

    BeautifulPeople.com Leaks Very Private Data of 1.1 Million ‘Elite’ Daters — And It’s All For Sale – Forbes – but its a handy database for identity theft and blackmail

    Why Facebook and Baidu Are Becoming Fast Friends — The Information – in addition to Chinese e-commerce businesses looking to sell abroad

    Operational WhatsApp (on iOS) — Medium – tweak the security settings on Whatsapp

    Three ways behavioural science can identify the best messenger for your campaign | PR Week – ok op-ed, it reminded me a lot of the narrative around Edelman’s Trust Barometer in past years

    Reject Parochial Nationalism for Sake of Continued Progress_英文频道_手机财新网 – interesting, however seems very out of step with the government position

    The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof. — Backchannel – As we discuss other apps on his home screen — YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo  – we forget the draw that Yahoo! Sports is

    Microsoft Android patent-licensing revenue falling – market is skewing to cheaper handsets and not all (Chinese) manufacturers are paying licensing fees. I also presume the razor thin to no margins mean Microsoft legal action wouldn’t be worthwhile. And if it was done in China wouldn’t be likely to succeed