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.

  • Scratching + more things

    History of scratching

    A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators

    Consumer behaviour

    Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?

    Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music

    Marketing

    Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.

    FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.

    Media

    Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers

    TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea

    Retailing

    Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents

    Security

    From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?

    Software

    Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would  fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.

  • The limits of digital

    A few articles that I read over the past few days highlighted the limits of digital. The FT published an analysis on the modern problems that digital has wrought on the advertising industry.

    Jeff Goodby, chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – a successful longtime American advertising agency said:

    In the past, he said, the only true measure of success was whether the public knew and cared about your work. “You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two, whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.” Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”

    In essence advertising campaigns had lost talkability, positive brand associations and long term memorability – the kind of things that you would think of being important in terms of marketing’s role in brand building. Digital has worked in performance marketing, brand building shows up the limits od digital

    Brands, particularly emerging brands like designers have it as bad as advertising agencies, here’s fashion site Man Repeller on the challenges of building a brand:

    When I first started working in fashion retail, coming from a fine arts background, I thought it would be completely different. Working with the clothes but also seeing the way it had to recycle every six months got me thinking about the branding that gets pushed upon designers. I think it happens in all creative fields because of social media. I see it with a lot of my peers. We see the same obsession with youth — young painters — in the art world that you have in fashion with young designers, the same pressure for a cohesive vision. At 25? Nobody knows what they’re doing at 25. And that’s totally fine. You’re still finding yourself. And there has to be more room to find yourself when you’re young as opposed to this pressure to emerge as a fully formed Greek myth coming out with her uncracked egg, or whatever.

    Which impacts the kind of businesses likely to grow in the future. They are likely to be ‘culturally stunted’.

    The noisy environment of social has meant that brands are also distorting themselves to get cut through, Vice magazine covered what can only be described as sociopathic brand personalities of independent coffee shop chains in London.

    Or Instagram baiting street side billboards like a pub landlord who misquotes Enoch Powell and thinks that the National Front aren’t serious on race issues

    More digital related posts here.

    More information
    How the Mad Men lost the plot | FT
    MR Round Table: The Burnout Generation – Man Repeller
    London Is Tearing Itself Apart Because of Coffee Shop Sidewalk Signs | VICE

  • Worth less than nothing + more

    Why Yahoo is worth less than nothing – I, Cringely – for someone who bleeds purple having Yahoo worth less than nothing was sad to read, but that doesn’t mean that its not true. The basic sentiment that has Yahoo worth less than nothing is down to the strength of Yahoo’s Alibaba stake versus its challenged ad business. More on Yahoo here.

    Disney near deal to buy a stake in Vice Media | New York Post – alongside investment bank Raine Group, WPP, Technology Crossover Ventures and 21st Century Fox

    Microsoft stops reporting Xbox console unit sales, shifting focus to Xbox Live active users | Geekwire – online services must the prime mover here which spells bad news for games resellers like Gamestop

    Verizon: Millennial phone ‘frustration’ – Business Insider – the network is key, but will they blame the device or their carrier?

    Businesses will not get new powers to clamp down on copycat packaging, UK government confirms | Out-law.com – will this dissuade supermarket private label products who are often the worst offenders?

    Hacking Fitbit | Schneler on Security – one malformed packet over Bluetooth and both wearable and laptop are pwnd

    The future of encryption | NSF – National Science Foundation – but can it be trusted?

    PR ethics in Asia are a patchwork of values | PR Week – and they aren’t in other places?

    IAB: US Internet Ad Revenues Up 19 Percent In First Half of 2015, Driven By Mobile, Social, Video – the second quarter of 2015 generated a record-setting $14.3 billion in online ad revenues

    Instagram Blog – Boomerang – short form video clips

    Yahoo’s stab at original programming didn’t work | VentureBeat – not terribly surprised

    In D.C. And China, Two Approaches To A Streetcar Unconstrained By Wires | NPR – super capacitor powered trams in Guangzhou

    Learn More About China | MRUniversity – great market primer

    Disney to launch its own streaming service in the UK | The Drum – interesting move, especially that is it mobile only. Disney used to have MVNOs, surprised this wasn’t tied into that in some ways (though if I was them I would want this traffic on home wi-fi networks)

  • MANifeste + other things

    Hermès MANifeste is a short motion graphics based video aimed at their menswear collection

    Hermès MANifeste has got an Eames or Rand feel to it. It is full of clean mid-century modern imagery with icons that would have been in the library of every letterpress and hot metal print works prior to digitisation. This gives the animation a clean masculine feel, that doesn’t feel too old world or conservative. Which is different to the way many male consumers might see Hermès.

    The Project Apollo archive on Flickr gives us access to all the NASA photography from the project. What people don’t appreciate is how comprehensively Project Apollo and the moon landings were documented

    The Spirit of Buffalo video by Dazed Digital featuring Jamie Morgan and Neneh Cherry is a documentary about the Buffalo Collective who influenced the way modern streetwear is styled. The centre of the Buffalo Collective was Ray Petri, who pretty much invented the stylist as a modern concept in the fashion industry. Petri partnered with photogaphers Jamie Morgan, Mark Lebon and Cameron McVey. Models included Barry and Nick Kamen, Naomi Campbell and 13 year old Felix Howard in the iconic Killer picture taken by Jamie Morgan. You can blame Buffalo for the whole Pharrell Williams look which borrows from late 1980s London.

    More content on the buffalo collective here.

    (1) 香港警察 Hong Kong Police | Facebook – acts as lightning rod for the divisions in society made apparent during the Occupy protests, but its also very surreal. Full disclosure: I ran training on social media for the Hong Kong civil service including what they call the disciplined services (this included the police, government flying service, emergency ambulance service, prison service, customs and immigration). The people that I came across were smarter than whoever is managing this page.

    A great remix by The Avalanches which has been on heavy rotation during my dipping into Soundcloud

  • The Google search post

    the Charles Arthur wrote an an interesting analysis piece on Google search business which I have linked to in the more information section called Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile.

    According to Fortune, Google search and display advertising counted for 90 per cent of Google’s revenue stream in 2014. By comparison Tencent makes just 17 per cent of its revenue from advertising; its revenue instead comes from payments  a la PayPal, premium accounts (brands pay for specialist facilities on WeChat for instance) virtual goods including gaming and stickers. Whilst Google has tried to diversify beyond advertising (payments, paid for content on YouTube, enterprise product sales), it has failed to change the balance of revenue. Any disruption of their Google search advertising unit represents an existential threat to their business.

    The key points in Charles Arthur’s article:

    • Consumers are using apps on smartphones rather than searching for a given services (which puts to rest the app versus mobile web argument mobile developers have)
    • This will have a more pronounced effect as the world internet population starts to level out next year
    • New internet users in the developing world may not be worth having (from a commercial perspective ‘An ad click from the US/Germany/Japan/Taiwan can be worth from 5 cents to $1 depending on the day/season, but clicks from China/India/Brazil/Vietnam are worth fractions of a penny to maybe 1 penny’

    Arthur’s assertions represent a huge change in consumer behaviour. Working for Yahoo! in the mid-naughties, we used to cite a Morgan Stanley quoted statistic that seven out of ten web journeys started with search. Search Engine Journal cites Forrester as the source of a claim that 93% of online experiences started with search.
    Mobile application is just one part of a wider change:

    • Google started to see a decline in the growth rate of search volumes to about 10 per cent a year, yet the amount content to be indexed continues to rise on a non-linear scale
    • Whilst the internet usage has been expanded by cheaper broadband with wi-fi and the rise mobile devices (both feature phones and smartphones) there hasn’t been a universal adoption of the open web. Yes smartphones have apps which disrupts the open web, but in places like Indonesia a lot of new feature phone surfing netizens don’t realise they are online and only go as far as Facebook
    • Amazon has risen as a wide ranging threat to Google. If you want to buy a book, many people’s evoked set is to go on Amazon. Amazon is not only an e-tailer but a vertical search engine across an increasing number of retail categories. Eric Schmidt claimed that about 30 per cent of purchase web journeys started on Amazon, that represents a significant lost opportunity for Google

    More information
    Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile | The Overspill
    10 Stats to Justify SEO | Search Engine Journal
    Is Tencent leading the way or lagging behind Facebook? | Walk The Chat
    In online search war, it’s Google vs. Amazon | Fortune
    Google’s Eric Schmidt: “Really, Our Biggest Search Competitor Is Amazon” | Search Engine Land
    Amazon Vs. Google: Understanding the buyer’s search engine | Wordtracker
    Millions of Facebook users have no idea they’re using the internet | Quartz
    Google Search Stats | Internet Live Stats