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Plastic surgery hack + more

Hackers threaten to leak plastic surgery pictures – BBC News – this follows on from the hack on Finnish mental health services. Given the link between plastic surgery and self image; black hat hackers have a lot of sustained leverage. More security related posts here.

Regulators tell Jack Ma’s Ant Group to rectify five problems – the five areas included: Ant’s inadequate governance; regulatory negligence; unlawful profit-seeking; monopolistic practices and; infringement of consumer rights, said China’s central bank vice governor Pan Gongsheng. China orders Ant Group to rein in unfettered expansion as regulators put up fences around financial risks | South China Morning Post – Ant must return to its origins in online payments and prohibit irregular competition, protect customers’ privacy in operating its personal credit rating business, establish a financial holding company to manage its businesses, rectify any irregularities in its insurance, wealth management and credit businesses, and run its asset-backed securities business in accordance with regulations, the People’s Bank of China’s deputy governor Pan Gongsheng said in a statement on Sunday.

Beijing launches antitrust investigation into Alibaba | FT – of course, its not political.

Who’s behind Marcus Rashford? – UnHerd – interesting profile of Roc Nation’s UK arm

SolarWinds Adviser Warned of Lax Security Years Before Hack – Bloomberg – I’d be surprised if there isn’t shareholder class action suits now

The OnlyFans revolution – The Face – Selena suggests we “talk about OF in a way that doesn’t glamourise the economics of the operation”. Instead, we need a more “nuanced conversation about the nuts and bolts of what the actual labour looks like. We aren’t seeing the injustices. It’s either focused on our trauma or on the glamorous hyperbolic examples, while most of us are somewhere in the middle.” There are many sides to running an OnlyFans that are less visible, including work that goes into maintaining a profile and the emotional labour involved in keeping up with fans. Historically, sex workers basically act as ad hoc therapists to their clients – it’s said to come with the territory, from escorting to camming to BDSM. And the “girlfriend experience” applies here too. A key part of the site’s success is one-to-one connection – often creators’ bios will explicitly state they talk with all their followers – for the right brands there is an opportunity for influence campaigns

North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts November 2020 Billings – Semiconductor Digest – generally a good sign for the global economic outlook. A dip in semiconductor equipment is usually the canary in the coal mine for global economic time.

December 28, 2020
Cyberpunk and things that made my week

Cyberpunk history part one and two have been done by Indigo Games. I blogged about part one a while ago on the blog. But now I get to share both parts of this Cyberpunk history. The gap reflects the amount of time and effort that went into both series.

Part one covers cyberpunk culture up to the early 1980s.

Part two moves the cyberpunk story via personal computing, the end of the cold war, gulf war and mainstream Hollywood. I hadn’t made the Philip K Dick connection with Screamers. It also delves into a wide variety of early computer games that I didn’t know and the cult anime Armitage III.

I can’t wait until their next instalment drops. Watch this cyberpunk history instead of the staid Christmas TV programming. More culture related posts here.

Mercedes-Benz managed to create its own ‘Baby Yoda’ moment with the ‘plushie’ in this winter TV advert. However Mercedes don’t seem to have thought about how to exploit this cultural moment that they’ve created.

https://youtu.be/-bE16foH9m0

The Irish government’s department of foreign affairs has put together To Be Irish | at Christmas that provides an Irish experience to the COVID stranded diaspora. I’ve put together a playlist of Christmas music you can enjoy here.

The Korea Culture Centre has put together online experiences based on the works of Korean artists. More here. They’ve made an interesting use of video and VR type experiences in this work. The KCC has kept its artist curation at its usual high standard.

December 25, 2020
Looking back at 2020
Looking back at 2020 was based on desk research I undertook at the end of March through to the beginning of May this year for 90TEN; with a healthy dollop of hindsight added.

The first thing that I tried to make sense of was all the noise from experts who claimed that everything was going to change. Clearly that wasn’t going to be the case. But what would elements would be most affected? I narrowed it down to a combination of three factors:
- Demand side and supply side economic change
- Accelerating trends
- Behavioural change
Where you have an intersection of all three, then you are more likely to have lasting change.

Behavioural change on its own won’t work. When we had the Spanish flu, there was a similar level of masking and social separation. But what followed was the hedonism of the roaring 20s. But all three factors together would act as a push-and-pull on sustained behaviour change.

Thinking specifically about acceleration, we saw a number of things happen.
- Changes in sectors and practices that would have taken years have taken months. Such as the adoption of remote working practices
- Things that were on the edge suddenly became mainstream, like mask wearing that was previously only popular in east asian countries like Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan
The rise of e-commerce and food delivery was a classic edge case to mainstream move.

Looking back 2020, one of the topics is the speed of change in circumstances and the relative lack of change in human behaviour. One academic claimed that it revealed what really mattered to a population. Although this misses out that the competency of a government as a key determining factor.

Canvas8 presented a model of human behaviour during an epidemic, which I shared in looking back at 2020. This shaped a key part of my thinking around human behaviour.

Like the grief process, the pandemic human behaviour model starts with denial.

And then anxiety…

Adjustment is how people have adapted to the circumstances. Society as a whole is still under strain.

Life is reconsidered moving forward, a classic example of this would be the Wuhan EDM pool party held in the autumn.

The new normal where COVID-19 is now under control and will have shaped future consumer behaviour.

Canvas8 also mapped out likely consumer behaviour against the stages.

Consumers had a clear view of what they wanted from brands. Brands often struggled to match the expectations of consumers. Dettol’s UK marketing efforts being an exemplary example of how to get it wrong. Looking back at 2020, we had the opportunity to do fantastic marketing work utilising digital and TV platforms, but very little of that opportunity was utilised.

A couple of organisations deserve for their efforts to be highlighted. My former colleagues at LONDON Advertising used their own marketing during the middle of the crisis to demonstrate the power of marketing. Secondly, the IPA ran a sustained campaign in the FT promoting the power of advertising to the c-suite.

The economic factors that will be a driver in societal change, made up the third factor alongside behavioural aspects and acceleration of existing trends.

The initial economic forecasts were very negative which drove a ‘correction’ in the stock markets.

Past trends indicate that these kind of crises cause an economic decline that countries bounce back from. However a lot of the change happening is non-COVID related or only tangentially related like China’s escalating trade sanctions on Australia.

Post COVID-19 economic impact is like dropping industry sectors in a time machine. The kind of change that would normally have taken years to run its course has happened in months. What is more worrying is the amount of unsustainable debt that has been taken on board by businesses across sectors. Over time this will benefit larger established businesses over smaller, or newer ones.

I put in an extra section into looking back at 2020 about the young because the insights challenge many of marketers holy cows in terms of views on younger members of society.

Telemedicine attitudes and usage shows that the heuristic of young people being technology adopters doesn’t hold up. Which is usually presumed in sentiment around digital natives.

The resisters shatters a stereotype of young people being progressive, purpose driven people. And they are media literate and media savvy by nature. Yet they are exhibiting behaviours that would be more in tune with older people with reactionary views.

I put in the links to the sources that I mention in the presentation. However I formed my views by looking at much more material. Just over a gigabyte of data sources that relate to COVID-19 which I went through is on Google Drive. Everything from consumer behaviour to economic data is available here. The looking back at 2020 presentation is available for download here. (More on issues related consumer behaviour here.)
December 25, 2020
Private sector control + more things

China’s Xi Ramps Up Control of Private Sector. ‘We Have No Choice but to Follow the Party.’ – WSJ – In some cases, it is taking charge entirely of companies it regards as undisciplined, absorbing them into state-owned enterprises. – Push driven by a concern over the private sector business owners being unpredictable and not trusted. They think a centrally planned complex economy is the way forward; with the private sector playing a subservient role at best. This view has been strengthened by the state engineered swift recovery from COVID-19. I presume that they consider that China’s place in global supply chains, big data and machine learning will solve a lot of the problems that bedevilled previous centralised economic planning systems like what happened in the Soviet Union. More economics related content here.

Party Committees See Rising Prevalence in Private Sector | Marco Polo – China clamping down on private sector

Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play • The Register

Quick Thoughts on the Russia Hack – Lawfare – interesting post on the SolarWind hack based attacks

North American Semiconductor Equipment Industry Posts November 2020 Billings – Semiconductor Digest – this looks good in terms of world economic growth

China-Europe Trade Forum Canceled After China Sought to Bar Critics – WSJ – Officials familiar with the exchange say the two people Beijing wanted to exclude from this year’s virtual event were Reinhard Bütikofer, the European Parliament’s chairman of the EU-China caucus who has publicly criticized Beijing over Hong Kong and its treatment of the Uighur minority; and Mikko Huotari, the head of Merics, a German think tank critical of the Chinese Communist Party. – China is depriving itself of unvarnished information about how it is viewed. A recipe for miscalculation in policymaking. Mainland Chinese contacts fail to understand why they don’t seem to have friendly relations with other nations anymore, despite Chinese achievements

Huawei, 5G, and the Man Who Conquered Noise | WIRED – Steven Levy explains Erdal Arikan’s breakthrough in information theory well. What’s interesting is how the west has abandoned long term research projects. Arikan took 20 years for his breakthrough. In an American university you wouldn’t get, or maintain tenure doing that

‘Made in Hong Kong’ prestige provides springboard for retailers Watsons, Sa Sa to find success in Greater Bay Area | South China Morning Post – ‘Made in Hong Kong’ prestige provides springboard for retailers Watsons, Sa Sa to find success in Greater Bay Area. Well-known Hong Kong retailers are aggressively expanding in the bay area, where the prestige of their brands makes them a hit with mainland consumers. The city’s retail sector has been devastated by the coronavirus keeping deep-pocketed mainland tourists away – if true, I don’t seeing it being a defensible differentiation in the medium to long term

MindGeek: the secretive owner of Pornhub and RedTube | Financial Times – Porn pioneered elements of the global online advertising industry such as targeted advertising, pay-per-click and email marketing and is today a substantial part of the internet economy

Gen Z: the rising power in Chinese market and their 7 digital lifestyles – ChoZan – not the greatest guide to life stage trends in China

December 21, 2020
Endeavour Christmas card and other things that caught my eye this week

Creative agency Endeavour sent out the first Christmas card that I received. This year they focused on content rather than design with everything that you need Christmas 2020 – Endeavour.

There was guidance on how to make paper Christmas trees including a green PDF that you can print out if you don’t like the snow white look of unprinted paper and a Spotify playlist.

The Financial Times have put together a series article looking at The Future of the City. The City in question being the London’s international financial services sector, whose traditional home is the City of London – think Wall Street in New York, or Central in Hong Kong. I found How London grew into a financial powerhouse particularly informative and all the articles are chock full of charts.

A relatively modern Carroll family Christmas tradition has been my Dad and I watching the BBC adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People. It will carry extra weight this year due to social distancing and the recent death of John Le Carre. My Dad read his books whilst working shifts during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He used to buy books second hand from a florrid looking book dealer in the local market. I in turn, read my Dad’s books (Len Deighton, Alistair Maclean, Hammond Innes, Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre) as I went through the early years of secondary school. Le Carre was the only one of these authors that I decided to read more than once.

This time, we’ll both be watching them on Blu-Ray whilst keeping the video open on FaceTime to discuss it as we go along.

It doesn’t get more 1990s than this. A skateboarder reading his self-authored poetry. Mike Vallely a professional skateboarder. If my memory serves me right, Vallely rode for Powell Peralta (Bones Brigade) factory team a few separate times during his career. In this video he gives the poetry reading in a LA skate shop back in 1996.

https://youtu.be/QTr2Mvz873c

The Luxury Society held a panel in Shanghai talking about luxury brands and the digital behaviour of the Chinese consumer. More luxury related content here.

December 19, 2020