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.
The inspiration for this post on every old idea is new again came from my opening up Rakuten‘s Viber messaging app on my iPhone. Viber is a messaging platform and also does voice over IP, including out to the phone network. It is a hybrid of Skype and WhatsApp in terms of functionality. Viber is popular in parts of Asia, much of central and Eastern Europe, Greece and Russia – often as a second string to Telegram or Zalo.
Scratchcards, giveaways
I saw the following image in Viber.
Viber’s scratch card giveaway promotion.
Which took me right back to roughly the same time of the year back in 2012, when I worked at Ruder Finn and did a similar digital scratch card execution to promote The National Lottery scratch cards in the run up to Christmas.
I was fortunate to work with a great creative and technology team: Stephen Holmes and Dru Riches-Magnier on the project. The promotion was executed within a high security environment because Camelot’s IT standards were way beyond what we usually worked with.
Here’s the case study that I wrote up about the scratch card project in my portfolio.
This was the most stressful time I had during my time working at Ruder Finn and one of two high points in terms of the work that we did.
So when I saw the Rakuten Viber execution, I had a deja-vu moment and the epiphany that every old idea is new again.
Strawberry fields forever & the square mile
So how do we get to a point where every idea is new again? Years ago I used to DJ in bars, clubs and parties. A couple of young lads on a music production course saw a record label release one of their assignments to tap into the psychedelia and dance-indie hybrid sound. The record was a cover version of a Beatles track with a Soul II Soul type break beat underneath. It became successful and topped the charts.
There were a surprising number of people who didn’t realise that it was artfully created cover version of The Beatles, I even heard the original described as a poor version of Candy Flip.
Newness is a matter of perspective. This was brought home to me at a talk that Damien McCrystal gave years ago. This was about the time that he was a business columnist at The Observer. I can’t remember the context but McCrystal said that the memory of ‘the square mile’ (think Wall Street in US parlance) was about eight years.
Which was the reason why the 2008 mortgage crash looked eerily like the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s. And that is despite most of the people in investment banks having a passing familiarity of Michael Lewis’ insider account Liar’s Poker which outlined how derivatives fuelled much of the 1980s Savings & Loans crisis.
I got to read it in college, despite having no interest in entering the world of finance. By and large I managed to stay clear of finance aside from being an in-house marketer early on in my career at what’s now HBOS and credit card provider MBNA. I also had a bit of early luck in my career timing, as I left MBNA before the payment protection insurance scandal hit the sector.
This was the classic example of every old idea is new again, but with the added wrinkle that a bad set of ideas can suddenly turn into good ones over time.
But as a strategist, this taught me to be careful on interventions pointing out a given concept is an old idea, given that every old idea is new again at some point.
The racket sport padel seems to have got the zeitgeist, if not the player numbers yet. We haven’t really seen a surge in sports fads since the 1980s. During that time skateboarding rose from a peak in the late 1970s, to a more stable underground sport that we have today. The closure of a squash racquet factory in Cambridge, saw the sport globalise manufacture and playing. In a few short years rackets went from gut strings and ash wood frames to synthetic strings and carbon fibre composite rackets. It was as much a symbol of the striving business man as the Filofax or the golf bag. Interest was attracted by a large amount of courts and racket technology that greatly improved the game.
Squash had its origins in the late 19th century and took the best part of a century to reach its acme in the cultural zeitgeist. Skateboarding started in the late 1940s and took a mere 30 years to breakout. Padel falls somewhere between the two. Padel was invented in 1969. But it took COVID-19 to drive its popularity in Europe and North America.
There is a new world professional competition circuit for 2024. And it has attracted the interest of court developers looking to cater to what they believe is latent consumer demand.
Finally, you can get three padel courts in the space for one tennis court. More on the padel gold rush from the FT.
The challenge is if padel is just a fad, or has it longevity? Skateboarding is popular, but many councils didn’t see the benefit of supporting skate parks built in the 1970s around the country. Squash still has its fans but doesn’t have the same popularity that it enjoyed in the 1980s.
What’s it like being a Disney adult? – The Face – this is much more common in Hong Kong, but then people had annual passes to go there. I found it interesting that The Face othered it as a sub-culture
Vittles Reviews: There Is Always Another Province – Province-chasing isn’t just a Western phenomenon; China is still so vast that when the barbecued food of Xinjiang, one of China’s border provinces, showed up in a former sausage shop on Walworth Road at Lao Dao, it didn’t need to open to the general public for months, choosing only to take bookings via Chinese social media. The paradox is that the success of regional Chinese restaurants has created a Western audience which wants more, but that same success has allowed these restaurants to bypass those customers altogether
Culture
Television: one of the most audacious pranks in history was hidden in a hit TV show for years. – Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl. It turns out all of these objects, and more than 100 others, were designed by an artist collective called the GALA Committee. For three years, as the denizens of the Melrose Place apartment complex loved, lost, and betrayed one another, the GALA Committee smuggled subversive leftist art onto the set, experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator. The collective hid its work in plain sight and operated in secrecy. Outside of a select few insiders, no one—including Aaron Spelling, Melrose’s legendary executive producer—knew what it was doing. The project was called In the Name of the Place. It ended in 1997. Or, perhaps, since the episodes are streamable, it never ended
Rode acquire Mackie | Sound On Sound – this is big for podcasters, but also for artists that record in their own studios. Mackie mixers have powered the home grown set-ups of artists like The Prodigy, The Crystal Method, Brian Eno, Daft Punk and Orbital.
Health
China e-cigarette titan behind ‘Elf Bar’ floods the US with illegal vapes | Reuters – In the United States, the firm simply ignored regulations on new products and capitalized on poor enforcement. It has flooded the U.S. market with flavored vapes that have been among the best-selling U.S. brands, including Elf Bar, EBDesign and Lost Mary. In the United Kingdom, by contrast, Zhang has complied with regulations requiring lower nicotine levels and government registration while building an unmatched distribution network — and driving a surge in youth vaping
Hong Kong’s first ‘patriots-only’ district council poll reflects political tale of two cities, as some eagerly rush to vote and others shy away | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong on election day splits into two camps, with one eager to vote out of civic duty and others giving polling stations wide berth over lack of political diversity. ‘I thought more people would come and vote because there has been more publicity,’ one elector says after discovering sleepy atmosphere at local polling station – the question is will Beijing take anything from this voter turn out? Does it signal suppressed but indignant separatists, or Hong Kongers who are more focused on prosperity and weekend Netflix? If they suspect the former then the security situation is likely to get more dire
Inside Louis Vuitton’s Hong Kong spectacle | Vogue Business – While Hong Kong is gradually recovering from the pandemic lockdowns, growth in Mainland China is slowing. According to HSBC estimates, luxury sales there are expected to grow 5 per cent in 2024, a sharp deceleration compared with 2023’s projected 18 per cent.
It took me a little while to write this post on Pebble. Pebble was a start-up that looked to build a more civil microblogging platform than Twitter. Unfortunately it closed on November 1, 2023.
It supported 280 character posts, replies and messages. The staff validated prominent users such as journalist accounts. The service had its own mascot rather like the famous Twitter fail whale; it was a snail called Herbert.
It was the little touches in the user interface that most impressed me when I first started using it, like the ‘radio button’ functionality that showed you what mode you were using the service in. In the screen shot above you can see how the profile icon on the left is filled out to show I was looking at my profile.
The Pebble community
The founders set out to build a community that more resembled early Twitter than the reactionary discussion dominated platform of today. Along the way they also looked in improve the Twitter user experience design. The product was launched as T2 and slowly built up a community. There are good reasons for slowly building a community.
As co-founder, Gabor Cselle put it
“Twitter, but back to the roots”
From T2 to Pebble: The Rise, Challenges, and Lessons of Building a Twitter Alternative by Gabor Cell on Medium.com
Years ago, I got to see George Oates talk about how the community around photography social network Flickr built up. The key was a slow build up of the right people to ensure a community was built with a set of norms that would morph into community rules and culture as the platform scaled larger.
Which begs the question is Pebble a platform at all, or a common state of mind that bonds the community together?
The Pebble community was surprisingly diverse from designers, fantasy authors and Silicon Valley insiders to Japanese cat enthusiasts and a few random netizens like myself. It was odd and eclectic like Twitter circa 2006 / 2007. In this respect it certainly met the brief of “Twitter, but back to the roots”.
This diversity was even more surprising that the platform had about 20,000 registered accounts in total. Media coverage of T2 had garnered an original waiting list of 33,000 interested people.
T2 is dead; long live Pebble
Originally the platform was called T2, a not so subtle allusion to the ambition of building a better Twitter microblogging service. One that isn’t full of reactionary content, or the erratic policies of owner Elon Musk.
T2 rebranded to Pebble. This was to provide a name that was more human-friendly than T2. The move to Pebble pleased investors, but didn’t help attract new consumers.
Criticisms
Pebble didn’t work for everyone, my friend Stuart claimed that he found it unusable with Microsoft Edge. Pebble didn’t have an app, which would have taken time to develop and so would APIs.
If Pebble had started licensing APIs to social listening platforms, this may have driven more brand interest in the platform over time and would have been a clear differentiator vis-a-vis Threads, Bluesky, TikTok and Instagram.
Scale
In the technology sector, scale is considered to be everything. But that’s the approach that left us with TikTok, Facebook and Twitter with all of their attendant problems. Yet despite the attendant problems of large technology platforms, trust and safety were not clear compelling differentiators for Pebble.
A second problem that the founders identified was that there wasn’t enough content coming in to make it a daily destination. Like Twitter and Threads before it, I found I had to ‘wind up’ to putting content on the platform on a daily basis.
My timing wasn’t great.
The End
The last post was by Serge Keller, who posted a video of Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again.
“This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”
Winston Churchill
Pebble didn’t completely die. As soon as news broke of the platform’s demise a few things happened. Participants started rallying around, sharing their details on other platforms and sharing invites for Bluesky and Mastodon.
Gabor set up a sub-Reddit for Pebble participants, which didn’t get too much take-up. But a Mastodon instance that he skinned in the Pebble UI and put up as a social experiment did manage to take off.
It provides an improvement on the user experiences I have seen on other Mastodon instances so far. A surprisingly large amount of the Pebble community kind of held together across Bluesky and Mastodon. This indicates to me that to those that know safety and trust might be more compelling than we currently believe. I find myself using the Pebble Mastodon instance more than Bluesky at the moment.
For some brands sponsorships aid in research and product development, motorsport and mountaineering are two sports where this the case. Other sponsorship deals, for instance college athletes and premier league footballers depend on the individuals effect as an influencer as much as their role on pitch. All of these complexities will affect the perception of the sponsorship value and effectiveness. Sponsorship being unmanaged and unmeasured isn’t a new phenomenon. – Sponsorship ‘unmanaged and unmeasured’, WFA warns – The Media Leader. Shirt sponsors are basically dependent on the amount of time on screen. Sponsoring celebrities like Jackie Chan is more about attracting eyeballs to the companies advertising campaigns.
(Jackie Chan represents a particular problem in this sector of sponsorship because he represented over 12 brands at the same time. From local companies that made game consoles suspiciously similar to Nintendo systems to Japanese multi-nationals Canon and Mitsubishi.)
Part of this focus on sponsorship measurement might be about the culture change digital advertising created: How the digital revolution led to a greater justification for advertising – The Media Leader. Famously, telecoms executives love of particular sports influenced sponsorship programmes of their companies. Sir Peter Bonfield was a keen sailor and BT sponsored the Global Challenge yacht race series.
Sir Chris Gent, over at Vodafone was a big cricket fan. The sponsorship would have been difficult to measure as a lot of the impact would have been in cementing existing relationships and facilitating new ones through corporate entertainment. With both, there would be some efforts to demonstrate the relevance of the sponsorship, but it was very much putting the cart before the horse.
Grateful Dead x Stundenglass Bong | Esquire – yes the Grateful Dead now have an official bong for resale, but the author’s deadhead memories are the thing to read on this article
Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière | Vogue Business – Louis Vuitton is selling a €6,000 digital mini trunk by Nicolas Ghesquière. The next product available to LV’s exclusive group of NFT holders is a mini trunk bag designed by the brand’s women’s artistic director. Only 200 are available, and the physical will land in March.
I had used SCART for a long time. The large parallel port plugs and stiff coaxial cables that looked as if they were limbs that had fallen of a cyberpunk twisted oak, were just part of the living room. Even if you hadn’t looked behind the TV cabinet, you maybe seen them as part of the flight cased TV and laser disc combo back when karaoke first took off as an activity in your local pub. Or the connection between a pub’s TV for Sky Sports and the set-top box held up high on the pub wall for punters to enjoy the game with their drink.
That was up until their replacement by HDMI cables, TOSLINK and ethernet cables in my home TV set-up over the past ten years. SCART was actually the name of the French radio and television makers association who developed the standard back in the mid-1970s. SCART came along as TVs were becoming more reliable and one started to see the decline of the TV rental market.
My parents first TV that they bought in the UK was a HMV-branded set with glowing vacuum tubes in the back despite a relatively modern looking TV case with push buttons similar to this one. SCART came along just a few years later.
A lot of the SCART features assumed that consumers would move to larger TVs with better displays and sound that would come to dominate the living room of European homes. And they were right, though through much of the 1980s many homes still had a 13″ colour portable TV.
SCART became compulsory for televisions sold in France from 1980 onwards. The standard was sufficiently robust and scalable for it to be used in transmitting 1080p high definition video as HDMI came to prominence. France eventually revoked their compulsory adoption of SCART in 2015.
Things that we take as standard on HDMI like using the VCR, set-top box or disc player to turn on the TV, were also standard on SCART from the late 1970s. You could daisy chain equipment together, which was important for people who were early adopters of satellite receivers, cable TV boxes and laser disc players.
SCART came at a time when globalisation moved the gravity of consumer electronics further east. First to Japan, then Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and eventually China. Brands like Philips, Grundig, Nokia, Nordmende, Thomson and Ferguson were swept to the side by likes of Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, LG and Samsung.
The SCART socket and plug were clever designs. You could only put them in the right way around and for something with 21 pins in they were not only robust but easy to plug and plug out again. Though once you had a SCART connection set up, you left it well alone.
China’s property crisis is stirring protests across the country – Nikkei Asia – Around 50 to 70 demonstrations are now occurring monthly, though August saw about 100 worker-led protests, three times as many as the same month a year earlier. Since June 2022, demonstrations have occurred in 276 cities nationwide. The protests have been somewhat concentrated in wealthier cities, particularly Shenzhen, Xi’an and Zhengzhou, and together have involved tens of thousands of people.
How Liverpool’s legendary Club 051 was brought back from the brink of demolition – Features – Mixmag – “The nightclub in itself is a thing of the past,” he continues. “Most of the stuff people class as nightclubs now are bars or bar-restaraunts that have DJs playing in there and it’s booze culture. There is industrial clubs, especially in London – but in Liverpool, there isn’t really any.” It’s difficult to disagree with Lee, being in this space with its pillars and it’s expansive-yet-intimate atmosphere feels markedly different to being in the kind of modern venues that tend to be of a similar capacity in the UK — converted warehouses and industrial spaces, with a routine approach of sticking decks and the end of the room alongside the soundsystem and a bar at the back
Design
Language Log » Eddie Bauer – young people either can’t read or don’t want cursive fonts according to this Eddie Bauer rebrand
Case Study | Fashion’s New Rules For Sports Marketing | BoF – When the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games begin in July 2024, LVMH brands will have a significant presence. Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Berluti will design uniforms and Chaumet will create the medals. This is the first time LVMH will sponsor individual athletes. This “premium” partnership highlights the growing importance of sports to the fashion industry.
Survey reveals surprising age trend among paid subscribers of electronic comics in Japan | SoraNews24 – an Internet survey conducted by Oricon ME between May 17 and June 7 of this year revealed. According to 10,438 e-comic reader respondents between the ages of 15-79 who read e-comics at least once per week, the age demographic that subscribed most frequently for these services, at 50.5 percent, was those in their 50s. Conversely, the age group that subscribed least frequently, at 6.2 percent, was those between 10 to 19 years old.
Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians | The New Republic – “It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist,” said Eli Pinko, the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, in 2021. “I would like to see each of you face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the other country.’” Under this ethos, the Israeli economy quickly “abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” as one critic memorably quipped. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when the 19-year-old nation launched a preemptive strike on its neighbors—taking over the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—a new era in Israeli politics began
The Russian Way of War | Foreign Affairs – Russia has long been home to creative thinking in both conventional and nonconventional warfare. In the conventional arena, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet military thinkers generated novel ideas such as the concept of deep battle—breaking through enemy lines and creating a continuous moving front. These ideas shaped, and continue to shape, NATO thinking. In the unconventional space, Soviet influence was even more profound. From its founding days, Soviet leaders developed a body of ideas and practices about subversive conflict, including forging documents, co-opting agents abroad, and establishing disinformation campaigns. An early example was the groundbreaking Operation Trest. Carried out in the 1920s, Trest operatives established fictitious underground political cells in Europe in the 1920s to infiltrate anti-Bolshevik groups and lure their members back to the Soviet Union.
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED – The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified”
