Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Chinese State Security + more things

    When Chinese State Security police knocked on ABC journalist Bill Birtles’ door, he realised he was no longer safe in China – ABC News – interesting how business and finance reporting has been hard for the past few years. Which is one of the reasons why scandals like Luckin Coffee happen. Chinese state security is incompatible with the kind of transparency needed for good business reporting. More on Luckin Coffee here.

    Mulan’s official Chinese poster advances a nationalist agenda — Quartz – tweaked its posters, fascinating run through he symbolism

    Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web – IEEE Spectrum – For a generation of French citizens, Minitel wasn’t about hardware, switches, or software. It was about the people they chatted with, the services they used, the games they played, and the advertisements for these services they saw in newspapers and on billboards. Many of the services that we associate with the Web had predecessors in Minitel. Before there was Peapod, there was 3615 TMK (Tele-Market), a service that enabled Parisians to order groceries for same-day delivery. Before there was Cortana or Siri, there were Claire and Sophie, services that provided personalized information using natural-language interfaces. Before there was Ticketmaster, there was Billetel. And before there was telebanking, there was Minitel banking

    Brand Equity May Be Auto Industry’s Biggest AI Risk | CLS Strategies – The AI Risk Index reflects a substantial gap between what is intended and what is perceived by critical stakeholders. The results are stark—especially in the context of substantial investment and many more years of public scrutiny as AI is improved—and reveal a growing crisis of trust. Though an average of 62% of Americans are familiar with companies in the transportation industry, only 35% have a positive opinion of them (compared to 43% for non-automotive manufacturing and 41% for retail companies) and only 37% trust them (compared to 44% for manufacturing and retail companies). Even more concerning is that the transportation companies most heavily involved in AI technology drive this sense of distrust, more so than traditional carmakers. That may explain why only three out of eight transportation companies analyzed during the third quarter of 2018 mentioned advancements in AI at all—indicating that auto companies are either communicating poorly or not communicating at all.

    Amazon’s profits, AWS and advertising — Benedict Evans – interesting analysis of where Amazon makes it’s money

    Strategic Management: Evaluation and Execution – Table of Contents – great book available in the creative commons

    BlackBerry Is Planning a Comeback. For Some, It Never Left | WIRED – a bit like me and Nokia feature phones LOL. On a more serious note you see this kind of loyalty on lots of diminished, but distinctive brands. SAAB would be the classic poster child

    2007 forever – The Magic iPod – resurrecting AplusD type mashup culture

    Facebook May Be Ordered to Change Data Practices in Europe | New York Times – Facebook is facing the prospect of not being able to move data about its European users to the United States, after European regulators raised concerns that such transfers do not adequately protect the information from American government surveillance. – this comes under the Irish data commissioner. More here – Facebook Fights Irish Privacy Watchdog’s Data-Transfer Curbs – Bloomberg 

    Human values: understanding psychological needs in a digital age – BBC R&D – really interesting work done by BBC Research and Development that could be applied to site and app design

    Douyin, China’s TikTok, permanently bans live-streamer who verbally harassed young women on the streets | South China Morning Post 

  • Orchestrated media

    I decided to revisit the idea of orchestrated media recently. I had been working on the SEO of a post from 2011. This post linked out to an article by BBC research and development on orchestrated media.

    Picture of a test card from CCTV in Beijing
    Test card from Chinese public broadcaster CCTV.

    The BBC where aware that media consumption had become more complicated. Attention whilst watching the TV at one time competed with the occasional trip to the kettle; or flicking through a newspaper that was to hand but otherwise undivided. What became the TV changed with the advent of content distributed over internet connections to the web and mobile devices. But it wasn’t only about the proliferations of screens, but also how it interplayed with other media.

    It doesn’t necessarily imply simultaneous consumption of content via these different media forms. Nor does it imply the consumed content is related across the screens (e.g. an audience member may be using Facebook or Twitter for a completely unrelated purpose, while paying less attention to the TV show).


    Thinking in those terms is perhaps unnecessarily limiting in scope and misses the broader picture around the opportunities of social media, creating more seamless media experiences, and how these flow from home environment to beyond.

    Jerry Kramskoy on the BBC R&D blog on ‘orchestrated media‘

    This gives marketers a number of interesting things to think about. When is TV not TV. Think about live event programmes like The Apprentice or Britain’s Got Talent where social acts a ‘giant sofa’ as viewers share their opinions on what they see on screen. Twitter has tried to tap into this link between TV and discussion in its marketing efforts.

    As broadcasters, the BBC started to think of the potential in a two-way conversation that was far more democratic than SMS polling, email or letter bags and phone-ins.

    Orchestrated Media (OM)to refer to this experience of interaction, synchronisation, and collaboration of programme and companion content across devices. OM creates a new form of audience engagement with the broadcaster. Let’s start with some high level goals

    • Enable interactivity around the content (voting, games) and synchronisation thereof, based on time and/or events (such as a producer-console triggered “button push”)
    • Enable richer exploration of programme
    • Enable social network interactions through sync-related information and content identifiers for replay purposes
    • Migrate content between the TV and mobile devices (such as a load-and-go service that runs overnight to load the mobile with video corresponding to the unwatched portion of a program, or a resume-for-home service that picks up viewing on the TV from where it left off on mobile)

    Some of the necessary components in reaching these goals include
    • Visual feedback of shared interactions on TV screen
    • Private interactions on mobile screens
    • Support for not only live experience but also time-shifted and on-demand and pay-per-view ones
    • A back-channel to broadcaster for interactions, behaviour etc
    • Audio for different languages, directors commentary, clean audio etc, selectable per individual, synchronised to the programme
    • Accessibility for all above
    • Application life-cycle and runtime management

    Orchestrated Media – beyond second and third screen (II)

    This seems to be aimed to provide a seamless anytime, everywhere experience. Think of the way services work in the background as part of Apple’s ‘Continuity’ service layer. As marketers, if we’re thinking about an orchestrated media landscape, how do we hand off between channels and provide prospective customers a similar kind of seamless experience. How do we manage long term and short term attribution and feed these insights into proportion of media spend?

  • Things that caught my eye this week

    The Lebanese armed forces were celebrating their 75th birthday and wanted to celebrate the contribution that they make to society. So they worked with a marketing agency to come up with PEACECAMO. PEACECAMO is based on photographs taken of different humanitarian incidents over the years that were then rendered into camouflage. These uniforms will be worn when concealment isn’t necessary. For instance parades or humanitarian work. Its a lovely idea, unfortunately this happened before the Beruit port explosion, which has fractured the government from the Lebanese people. More information here. More design related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/m2IGeqRFj1Q
    PEACECAMO video

    Marketing Week columnist and academic Mark Ritson at the Amplify marketing festival. In this presentation Ritson talks about balancing short term and long term needs in marketing. If that sounds familiar, well that’s because Ritson was inspired by this article by Tom Roach here.

    Larry Shiller’s car collection and garage is a site to behold in terms of its scale. Although I wouldn’t be choosing any of these cars for myself I like the way he collects based on a narrow time period of design. You can see the jet age aesthetic coming through in the fins and tail lights.

    I like the way he is pretty much self-sufficient from a parts perspective. With enough time, he can handle most of the repairs himself. This wouldn’t be possible now with the rapid evolution in technology. It was simpler times; chip design and software are essential to most modern cars.

    Photographer Trey Ratcliff has been putting out these videos that would be beloved of VJs playing a rave in the early 1990s. Pull out your old Goa trance CDs and watch with this playlist for full effect.

    If Trey Ratcliff’s videos weren’t trippy enough for you maybe refractive glasses are what you need? Refractive glasses turn each firework into an explosion of hearts 

  • Full spectrum information ops + more

    Internet Observatory – New White Paper on China’s Full Spectrum Information Operations – China’s influence strategy on COVID-19 has involved a full spectrum of overt and covert tactics, which has included domestic censorship, English-language state media messaging bolstered by Facebook ads, and the use of fake accounts to influence conversations on Western social media platforms. English-language state media Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts, as well as Chinese diplomats and embassies, took part in an overt messaging effort to amplify the CCP’s preferred narratives on COVID-19. Covert state-sponsored activity leveraging fake Twitter accounts paralleled these efforts, praising the CCP’s pandemic response and criticizing the responses of other actors, such as the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan. See also: Special Report: Australia faces down China in high-stakes strategy – Reuters 

    Huawei’s consumer chief says Harmony operating system will be rolled out on its smartphones in 2021 | South China Morning Post – security is an issue, and it doesn’t bode well that its all under a proprietary licence. Developers are an issue not only because of the installed base but the average revenue per user (ARPU). Points that are missing in this article

    Row over withdrawal treaty triggered law chief’s resignation | Financial Times – “Number 10 are doing this deliberately to pick a fight with the judiciary. They want to put the judges and Supreme Court on [the] wrong side of popular opinion. It’s a mistake to assume this is all about Brexit.” – reminds me of how Hong Kong is now being criticised for a defacto lack of separation in legislative and judicial powers brought in by China. It also affects the UK’s ‘gold standard’ contract law benefits

    FSI | Cyber | Internet Observatory – A US PR Firm Steps Into Contested Elections – interesting that they name the firm: CLS Strategies

    China Launches Initiative to Set Global Data-Security Rules – WSJ – playing to the global south. More on data privacy here.

    Australian correspondents Bill Birtles and Mike Smith pulled out of China after five-day diplomatic standoff over national security case – ABC News – no Australian journalists now in China

    Mediatel: Mediatel News: An age-old issue – Finally, note the profusion of industry 30 Under 30 awards (just Google it). Even actuaries have one. But don’t kill them. They’re vital. No, let’s have the 50 Over 50 awards, and 60 Over 60 (assuming you can find that many), or OAP Heroes of WPP

  • Science, Strategy and War by Frans P.B. Osinga

    Science, Strategy and War isn’t a book that would have normally made it on to my reading list, but we’re living in strange times. The book is an analysis of the history and strategic theory created over time by John Boyd.

    Boyd’s thinking led to the development of post-Vietnam, pre-stealth fighter aircraft that dominated the world’s skies. Boyd employed his experience and the insight that a ‘Swiss Army knife’ approach seldom provided an adequate design solution. A lesson that the US failed to learn when it created the F-35.

    Boyd was also responsible for creating the ideas that encouraged the US to move war into the IT space. Boyd’s thinking on strategy has shaped military thinking on tools, structure, integration and responsibility. What military-types call network-centric warfare. This seeks to translate an information advantage, enabled in part by information technology, into a competitive advantage.

    We saw the potential of this thinking in the first Gulf War when sensors, missiles and satellite imagery changed the face of modern warfare. What was less appreciated at the time by commentators is that this form of warfare was uniquely aided by Iraq’s flat terrain; which aided remote sensors and wireless networks. But the network-centric aspect really came into its own with William Owens’ paper on the system-of-systems which was emerging as the military followed Boyd’s approach.

    Ok, whilst there is some crossover with technology concepts such as Kevin Kelly’s ‘mirrorworld‘; where AR knits together networked information with location this is all pretty arcane stuff.

    Boyd breaks out of military circles

    John Boyd is particularly famous for a model called OODA which has broken out from its military origins. Probably the most high profile fan at the moment is Dominic Cummings – the special advisor to Boris Johnson and political activist.

    Cummings has talked about Boyd in terms of disruption and marketing of his political messages – through getting inside their OODA loop.

    Boyd’s ideas have also been picked up by sports coaches and even litigation teams in the US.

    OODA

    OODA or observe–orient–decide–act, is often described as a ‘loop’ and shown that way. However this deceives the audience of its true nature. As Osinga correctly points out; observe and orient are continual flows of information that feed into the decide and act functions. Strategists talk about ‘getting inside the enemies OODA loop’; that is disrupting their intelligence, understanding of their situational awareness and ability to act.

    Osinga’s critique of Boyd

    In Science, Strategy and War, Osinga sets out to do achieve a number of things with regards John Boyd’s ideas.

    First of all Osinga provides context, by providing a history of Boyd’s career in military service and as a retired service member and academic. Osinga brings a great deal of understanding to this part of the book as he also served in an air force and is an academic.

    John Boyd Climbing out of F-86 Cockpit, circa 1953
    John Boyd standing up in the cockpit of the F-86 Sabre that he few during his military service.

    Secondly, he explains how Boyd developed and honed his ideas over time. Boyd’s OODA model was borne out of empirical experience as a combat pilot. It was first used to change fighter pilots about engaging with the enemy. Use of it then expanded to encompass bigger strategic outlooks.

    Boyd read widely and had a deep understanding fo scientific principles due to his engineering background. He applied meta analysis to the great strategies and military campaigns of history and the literature describing them. He drew on his understanding of science to try and provide analogies for the many areas of uncertainty in implementing a strategy. He drew on the social sciences and concepts like post-modernism.

    Whilst Boyd was technical; Science, Strategy and War makes it clear that he wasn’t technocratic in nature. Boyd was keenly aware of human factors including the different aspect of moral power. I think that this one of the least understood aspects of Boyd’s thinking.

    I don’t think that Osinga’s book is essential reading for marketing. It was never meant to be. Instead, it provides a good insight into how many of our thinkers operate only at the surface level without truly understanding the concepts they talk about. Boyd was not a surface player, he thought deeply about things and read widely. In that respect I think he can be an example to us all. Osinga did a really good job at bringing this to light in an accessible way.

    More on strategy here, more strategy related book reviews here.