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.
Some thoughts on #SMWLDN – Matt Muir nails the ephemera that passes for thought leadership in social circles
Technology
There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley | Buzzfeed – Tech is manifestly unready for this new era. They’ve been playing small-ball politics of regulation, and coasting on incredibly high approval ratings. But there are signs they feel the winds changing. You can usually detect a political figure’s problems from their overcompensation, and Zuckerberg’s Midwestern tour had all the hallmarks of a classic reaction to a specific political polling question: “Does he care about people like me?” The move was widely misinterpreted as some kind of beginning to Zuckerberg’s political career. But Zuckerberg is Facebook, and his image is his company’s. His mission was to fix the company’s image, and I’m just not sure this one is fixable.
You can see the shape of how this plays out in a recent exchange between Mark Halperin and Rep. Adam Schiff, in which Halperin asked of Facebook: “Did they put profits ahead of patriotism in their conduct during the campaign?”
Digital News Report by Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism latest findings discussed by Dr. Rasmus Kleiss Nielsen. This Digital News Report is based on a survey of more than 70,000 people across 36 countries.
P&G’s Pritchard Calls for Next Generation of Digital Ads | Special: Dmexco – AdAge – I kind of agree with him from a an overall sentiment point of view, but viewability is also a function of how much of the viewable area it fills? I realise that it would be hard to measure but it would be a function of ad size, scrolling speed and display size. In the real world think about the ads on the tube escalators.
P&G Asia brand director: ‘We were clickbaiters – and a giant duck still got more likes than we did’ – “I’ve been through generations of training in how to make a good Facebook ad, which has gone around 360 degrees and come back to the simple principles of marketing. We went through lots of complications in how to get clicks – we were clickbaiters. We honestly were. And yet that duck in Hong Kong Harbour got more likes than any of pure branded messaging, and we thought that’s maybe a good thing. But it’s not and it doesn’t help brands or businesses. It’s taken us time to get to where we are and the simplicity of those core marketing principles.”
Security
On the Equifax Data Breach – Schneier on Security – Surveillance capitalism fuels the Internet, and sometimes it seems that everyone is spying on you. You’re secretly tracked on pretty much every commercial website you visit. Facebook is the largest surveillance organization mankind has created; collecting data on you is its business model. I don’t have a Facebook account, but Facebook still keeps a surprisingly complete dossier on me and my associations — just in case I ever decide to join.
I also don’t have a Gmail account, because I don’t want Google storing my e-mail. But my guess is that it has about half of my e-mail anyway, because so many people I correspond with have accounts. I can’t even avoid it by choosing not to write to gmail.com addresses, because I have no way of knowing if newperson@company.com is hosted at Gmail.
WPP locks in minority stake in Gimlet Media podcast network | Mumbrella – podcasting as an advertising / sponsorship format seems to have got over its measurability barrier. Gimlet Media was founded in 2014 and has a range of factual and entertainment content franchises including investigative journalism, comedy and commentary on internet culture. A number of Gimlet Media shows moved over from being produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to continuing on their podcasting network.
Business
UK car sales and registrations down – Business Insider – British people have a close to zero household savings rate, and way too much debt, making further car purchases difficult. Consumers are afraid a recession might be coming and have reduced their spending on expensive items. The PCP car loan trend may have peaked, flooding the market with nearly new used cars. – two things about this, the UK is way over leveraged at a government and consumer level. Brexit is just going to make this a lot worse. Secondly, the auto finance model is broken and the UK could be the contagion that causes a sub-prime two crisis to ripple around the world. It also make the UK market less attractive for European exporters, which means a harder time trying to get a deal for BREXIT
China to Shut Bitcoin Exchanges – WSJ – interesting that the article doesn’t cite sources. Caixin broke this story at the end of last week. Is this down to these currencies providing black economy payments and capital flight?
Autonomous Cars: The Level 5 Fallacy – Monday Note – A two-to-three year engineering timeline isn’t unusual; five years is considered longterm. Beyond the five-year horizon? No thanks, I’ll switch to a more spiritually and financially rewarding pursuit. We’ll leave the worthy but nebulous commitments to Carnegie Mellon and Stanford. In other words: No Level 5 in the foreseeable, bankable future. Instead of the soothing vision of a saloon on wheels on the road tomorrow… That’s Uber’s autonomous aspirations fucked then and probably explains why Apple has scaled back its car ambitions for the time being. It also shows the corporate aversion to hard innovation now, compared to 50 years ago
I have grown tired of a ridiculous statistic being used so frequently that it becomes marketing truth. It’s regurgitated in articles, blog posts, social media and presentations. The problem with it is that affects the way marketers view the world and conduct both planning and strategy. The picture below is a goldfish, his name is Diego. If you’ve managed to read this you aren’t Diego.
I realise that sounds a little dramatic, but check out this piece by Mark Jackson, who leads the Hong Kong and Shenzhen offices of Racepoint Global. It’s a good piece on the different elements that represent a good story (predominantly within a PR setting). And it is right that attention in a fragmented media eco-system will be contested more fiercely. But it starts with:
Over the course of the last 20 years, the average attention span has fallen to around eight seconds; a goldfish has an attention span of nine! The challenge for companies – established and new – is to figure out how to get even a small slice of that attention span when so many other companies are competing for it.
Mark’s piece is just the latest of a long line of marketing ‘thought leadership’ pieces that repeat this as gospel. The problem is this ‘truth’ is bollocks.
It fails the common sense test. Given that binge watching of shows like Game of Thrones or sports matches is commonplace, book sales are still happening, they would have to be balanced out with millisecond experiences for this 8-second value to make any sense as an average. The goldfish claim is like something out of a vintage Brass Eye episode.
To quote DJ Neil ‘Doctor’ Fox:
Now that is a scientific fact! There’s no real evidence for it; but it is scientific fact
Let’s say your common sense gets the better of your desire for a pithy soundbite and you decide to delve into the goldfish claim a bit deeper. If one took a little bit of time to Google around it would become apparent that the goldfish ‘fact’ is dubious. It originally came from research commissioned by Microsoft’s Advertising arm ‘How does digital affect Canadian attention spans?‘. The original link to the research now defaults to the home page of Microsoft Advertising. Once you start digging into it, the goldfish wasn’t actually part of the research, but was supporting desk research and thats when its provenance gets murky.
PolicyViz in a 2016 blog post The Attention Span Statistic Fallacy called it out and provided links to the research that they did into the the goldfish ‘fact’ in 2016 – go over and check their article out. The BBC did similar detective work a year later and even went and asked an expert:
“I don’t think that’s true at all,” says Dr Gemma Briggs, a psychology lecturer at the Open University.
“Simply because I don’t think that that’s something that psychologists or people interested in attention would try and measure and quantify in that way.”
She studies attention in drivers and witnesses to crime and says the idea of an “average attention span” is pretty meaningless. “It’s very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is.”
There are some studies out there that look at specific tasks, like listening to a lecture.
But the idea that there’s a typical length of time for which people can pay attention to even that one task has also been debunked.
“How we apply our attention to different tasks depends very much about what the individual brings to that situation,” explains Dr Briggs.
“We’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect. And those expectations and our experience directly mould what we see and how we process information in any given time.”
But don’t feel too bad, publications like Time and the Daily Telegraph were punked by this story back in 2015. The BBC use the ‘fact’ back in 2002, but don’t cite the source. Fake news doesn’t just win elections, it also makes a fool of marketers.
This whole thing feels like some marketer (or PR) did as poor a job as many journalists in terms of sourcing claims and this ‘truth’ gradually became reinforcing. Let’s start taking the goldfish out of marketing.
Voyager probe – NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched some really cool posters to celebrate 40 years of the Voyager programme. You can download them here.
The Voyager programme consisted of two probes that were launched in 1977. The original launch time was designed to take an advantage of an alignment of Jupiter and Saturn that would allow a fly by so that scientists could learn more about them. During the Voyager journeys the have revealed previously unknown details about planets and their moves. We found out about Jupiter’s complex weather system and the complexity of Saturn’s rings. More related content here.
Skeletor
Moneysupermarket nail it with this advert, I wonder if its any coincidence that Dirty Dancing has just arrived on Amazon Prime this month?
Who knew. Red Hot Chilli Pepper makes acid tracks, some of it is pretty darned good. Back in the late 1990s, you had a surprising group of bands who dipped their toe in the water, either through their choice of producer or pseudonyms like Acid Test. Tears for Fears had Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams that was released as a white label without their name on it with a remix by Fluke. The Cult experimented with techno remixes of She Sells Sanctuary.
Banjo covers
Slipknot covered on banjos with a great video. The acoustic instrument works surprisingly well for Slipknot and the down-home gothic vibe is very in keeping with them.
Don Dayglow
I’d been listening to the sounds of Don Dayglow aka Adam Hignell who specialises in post-disco remixes similar to Luxury but with a little more funk in the mix. Hignell has only released his recordings on digital formats so far. When he isn’t doing Don Dayglow project he works as a sound engineer. More on Don Dayglow at Discogs
