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.

  • Facebook Live + more things

    Facebook live

    A Facebook live streaming service (a la U-Stream and YouTube) was newly launched this week. You can stream on your page or in-group. There is a map to discover streams going on in realtime. I already  found one seminar by Nu-Skin a multi-level marketer of wellness and beauty products in Hong Kong as an example of where Facebook Live was being used from a commercial perspective.

    The Stanton Warriors embraced the new Facebook live streaming service to promote further fan interaction whilst they were in the studio. It will be interesting to see the best and worst that brands do with this medium. From a piracy point-of-view I would imagine that it is likely to be used for streaming live sports coverage – expect the Premier League to be very unhappy.

    RUN and RUN

    Not exactly the same sound but J-Pop act lyrical school’s debut track RUN and RUN has a really clever smartphone optimised video with amazing breaks of the fourth wall.

    UPDATE: Our James pointed me in the direction of an even better link for the RUN and RUN video on Vimeo that I hope works here

    RUN and RUN / lyrical school 【MV for Smartphone】 from RUNandRUN_lyrisch on Vimeo.

    If you can’t see anything point your browser here.

    Godzilla

    Japan’s king of all monsters, Godzilla returns from chilling out on Monster Island for his 31st outing in the Japanese cinema. This new trailer is interesting as the visuals evoke Fukushima Daiichi  nuclear disaster and the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. Check out the Cloverfield-esque shots in the 30 second trailer below. There is a longer trailer where Godzilla appears fully in shot leaving no mystery to how bad ass he is this time. This means that the film is likely to go beyond his usual mayhem and might touch on contemporary issues.

    Vintage CGI

    Last, but not least; a vintage show reel by 1980s CGI shop MAGI Synthavision in its full neon wireframe magnificence and southern country rock soundtrack. More similar visual stuff here.

  • Online ad and tech data points

    Over time, I pulled together online ad and tech data points. It happened because I have had to compile data and visualise it based on desk and primary research. I thought that these slides may be of use to other people. So I have compiled them here. As I have time, I will try to update them with new data.

    There are here as JPGs and as a presentation on SlideShare which I have linked to at the bottom of the presentation.

    I decided to take a macro view looking at major email and OTT messaging platforms using monthly active users as a measure of adoption. This took a long slog of time to do as I had to go back and trawl quoted MAU (monthly active user) numbers from the dawn of the internet for people like Hotmail and Yahoo!. The numbers came from a wide range of sources.

    What’s interesting in this graph is how the internet dot.com time felt like a rocket ship, yet saw a gentle rise in user numbers in comparison to later smartphone based services like WhatsApp, WeChat et al. Google didn’t manage to cash in as big despite owning Android, but instead acted as a spring board for new players.

    Communications service adoption (active users)

    Brandwatch had a set of snapshot numbers that are rather different to the ones I had from my research

    Platform numbers snapshot

    The IPA Databank is an amazing source of quality planning information and work around the optimum number of channels in advertising campaign. The data is in sharp contrast to the 300+ channels that Machine Zone’s CMO Gabe Leydon claims that they work with to have an optimal communications mix.

    Optimum number of advertising channels

    My former boss Salim Mitha used to constantly go on about how online was underspent in comparison to the amount of consumer attention that it received. More up to date data shows that its channels like OOH (out of home) and radio which are currently underspend with online rapidly coming to parity between time spent and percentage of advertising budget spent.

    Audience time spent vs. advertising spend share

    Of course audience spend does not take into account the context under which the audience experiences the brand.

    I also have additional information on the health of the media industry and adoption of wearables in the statistics attached. More on consumer behaviour here.