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.

  • Google design

    Google design has had a transformative effect on the world. It reminds me of Dieter Rams on the concept of design had said something to the effect of good design being invisible – once you see the product you couldn’t imagine things exist any other way.

    That’s a really good description of the web with Google design. In the markets where it operates (with the exceptions of Czech Republic, South Korea, Japan and Russia) it’s a monopoly. Different regulatory authorities are investigating them for leveraging their monopoly into market domination in other categories.
    urban dictionary on Google SERP
    With SERP (Search Engine Results Page) like this one above, I am not surprised that antitrust authorities are gaining an upper hand. This Urban Dictionary integration seems to cross the boundary from being useful to feature bundling. It deprives Urban Dictionary of an opportunity to put ad inventory in front of its audience. Urban Dictionary makes it’s money from retargeted banner ads and its own customisable merchandise. You can get any phrase in Urban Dictionary with its definition on a coffee mug, coaster set or tote bag.
    urban dictionary SERP
    It would be interesting to see if Google got into some sort of content agreement with Urban Dictionary. However I suspect that they have just gone ahead and done this? More about Google here.

  • Gucci apologises + more things

    Gucci apologises for sending warning letters to Hong Kong shops over paper handbag offerings – context, context, context. Paper items are burned as offerings for the dead to take them into the next life. It tends to be things that they loved or are likely to need. Gucci apologises because it got context wrong, there is zero cannibalisation of Gucci bag sales. More on luxury-related items here.

    Facebook drives more traffic to articles, but Twitter users spend more time reading them – Do small screens translate to shortened attention spans? Not so, suggests a new report from Pew Research Center. Turns out mobile users are spending twice as much time reading long-form articles

    Majority Of Germans Think The Media Is Controlled By Political, Economic Elites – According to a recent survey, the majority of people in Germany view the news media as simply a pillar of the government and the powerfully elite – which will have an impact on trust

    China’s Internet Giants Back A Smartphone On Four Wheels – smarter cars a la Tesla

    Canada cites espionage risk from two Huawei employees, saying it plans to reject their immigration applications | South China Morning Post – Huawei still has a trust gap. Canada might be especially sensitive given how throughly pwned Nortel was by China based hackers in years prior to their bankruptcy

    Dentsu Aegis Network Buys Hot Chinese Agency With Focus on Mobile, Retail, WeChat | AdAge – congrats to VeryChat

    Killing an American icon: Fuel delivery start-ups could downsize U.S. gas stations | SiliconAngle – something about this feels iffy to me. Service stations have a lot of safety restrictions for good reason, that could fall between the cracks in the ‘Uber model’. The margins in running gas stations are actually about the convenience store part of the business, not the fuel. It may make more sense in electric vehicles with easily swappable battery packs???

    Apple to Revamp Streaming Music Service After Mixed Reviews, Departures – Bloomberg – if the sub-editor had honesty tourettes this would read, ‘Veterans scarpered, Apple strives to make streaming service less shit’. ★ Apple Music and Coherent Product Design and Marketing | Daring Fireball – John Gruber on Apple Music, he is less negative than Bloomberg

    BlackBerry brings video calls to BBM on Android and iOS; North America only for now | VentureBeat | Apps | by Paul Sawers – way too late for many people to care – way behind Skype for Business let alone LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc etc

    Huawei G9 Lite released in two versions in China | Gizchina – interesting positioning as it seems to sit awkwardly between Honor and Huawei’s P series

    The Who, What & Why of Activist Investors’ Attacks | EE Times – McKinsey seem to have incredibly rose-tinted glasses about this, presumably not to disrupt business in other practice areas such as banking…

    The truth about social media algorithms – and why marketers should welcome rather than fear them | The Drum – basically the spiel that he gave at We Are Social last week

  • Predict ISIS attacks + more news

    How Traffic to This YouTube Video Could Predict ISIS Attacks – Defense One interesting, but is it actionable intelligence? This reminds me a lot of the term ‘chatter’ as used in the series ’24’. Or prediction markets, which may be better for financiers investing in related areas rather than providing something that the military and law enforcement can use effectively. For instance it would affect your stance on Insurance stocks and oil futures if you were able to predict ISIS attacks. More security related posts here.

    You can now hang out with Totoro and explore Studio Ghibli worlds in virtual reality | Rocket News 24 – indicates an interesting interplay between linear media and VR. Linear media storytelling sets the scene; VR allows you to explore it. I feel that we don’t ‘get’ storytelling in VR yet, having worked on a project for New Balance. This work by Studio Ghibli offers a complementary option that media companies could get onboard with

    Lenovo and Apple are fastest growing among India’s top 10 smart phone vendors | TelecomTV Insights – we’ll see how long this lasts, India like China is focused on domestic smartphone makers. I could see Apple appealing to elites like their peers globally, but the great bulk of handsets is going to come in at the bottom.

    brandchannel: The Language Of Now: Pepsi Kicks Off Global PepsiMoji Campaign – please millennials engage with our brand! To be fair PepsiCo have tried innovations for a good while. They were one of the first brands to use QRCodes for western consumers. Western consumer usage is only now starting to catch up with it a decade or more later.

    [Podcast] Tencent And QQ With Eva Xiao | Technode – great interview as a primer on Tencent. Tencent is one of the BAT of China. BAT stands for Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The BAT are a set of companies with a similar position to what GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) have in the west.

  • 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.