China’s Technology Transfer Strategy: How Chinese Investments in Emerging Technology Enable A Strategic Competitor to Access the Crown Jewels of U.S. Innovation Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh – China is executing a multi-decade plan to transfer technology to increase the size and value-add of its economy from its base as the world’s 2nd largest economy. By 2050, China will be 150% the size of the U.S.2 (with the goal of being double the US economy by that time and decrease U.S.’ relevance globally). This technology transfer to China occurs in part through increasing levels of investment and acquisitions of U.S. companies which are at record levels today. China participated in about 10% of all venture deals in 2015 up from a 5% average participation rate during 2010-2016. China is investing in the critical future technologies that will be foundational for future innovations across technology both for commercial and military applications: artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, financial technology and gene editing. The line demarcating products designed for commercial vs. military purposes is blurring in these new technologies. Investments are only one means of technology transfer which also occurs through the following licit and illicit vehicles where the cost of stolen intellectual property has been estimated at $300 billion per year. (PDF) – China technology transfer is like the piracy or opium trading of past centuries. China technology transfer is war by other means. More related content here.
I was a big fan of Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario. It conveyed the monotony and horror of the war on drugs really well. Taylor Sheridan crafted a taunt storyline, you had great actors in Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Donovan as Brolin’s foil. Alejandro Gillick as a character played really well to Benicio del Toro signature mix of pathos and violence. The music was the film’s unsung character that turned out a virtuoso performance. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack carried a lot of the weight in the film with its dark dissonant ambience. It was in many respects a modern day spaghetti western in the grand tradition of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci.
Sicario 2: Soldado had a lot to live up too. Denis Villeneuve handed over directorial reins to Stefano Sollima: one of Italy’s best crime film directors. Sollima kept close to Villeneuve’s style from the previous film. Jóhann Jóhannsson was replaced on soundtrack duties by Hildur Guðnadóttir. This wasn’t due to Jóhannsson’s deadly cocaine overdose in Berlin; but a decision by the director to recruit an entirely new team.
She went from playing cello on the first film soundtrack to taking over the composition and performance of Sicario 2. Guðnadóttir kept a similar formula in the soundtrack, all be it with an even harder edge to the film. Most of the main players are back the exception of the FBI agents from the first film. Given the ending of the first film where Gillick made it clear to the Emily Blunt character that she wasn’t morally flexible enough. Sheridan Taylor takes on writing duties again.
Plus points
Matt Craver (Josh Brolin) and Steve Forsing (Jeffrey Donovan) chewing the fat, in classic spaghetti western cornball dialogue; that reminds me a lot of the
Nice day for a drive ha?
Aww, beautiful day. Blue skies, large calibre weapons. I love getting out of the office.
The film starts with a grand vision that feels very zeitgeist with illegal immigration being front-and-centre
The film does action exceedingly well. The assassination, kidnapping, bombings and shootouts are all incredibly well choreographed
Minus points
The Plot, the plot and oh did I mention the plot? ***Spoilerish ahead***
At the beginning of the film it paints a big canvas as the film moves from the border, Kansas city, Somalia, Djibouti and Washington DC over the first half hour. This grant vision fizzles out
The plot lacks morality centred in one person like the first film and the director compressed with the story arc. So that leads to….
Character inconsistencies. del Toro’s character Alejandro Gillick kills a cartel leader, his wife and his kids at the dinner table at the height of the first film. In Sicario 2; the film hinges on him having a massive change of heart and going soft. Matt Craver’s ‘the end justifies the means’ viewpoint suddenly goes soft, when he is required to have a cartel leader’s child killed
Plot logic: they are obviously going after the head of the Reyes cartel, with a view to understanding the organisation structure and operational methods. They are keen to find key decision makers. They find one and then abruptly drop it. Maybe it was editing and what we are seeing is a film pared down into just over two hours in duration
A weak flip-flopping president who is concerned that the deaths of corrupt Mexican federal police officers will impact his standing amongst 50 million Hispanic voters. In sharp contrast to signing off on covert action just a short time before to combat foreign terrorists using people smuggling rat lines to get into the US. Chances are he’s probably already screwed by his law-and-order stance a la Trump
Injuries that should have caused nasty disfigurement, don’t
The weak ending that is obviously setting up a franchise a la Marvel. That’s if Marvel allowed itself to go as dark as say Garth Ennis’ interpretation of The Punisher
I felt divorced from this film rather than numb from the grimness of the original. It’s hard to maintain power and impact, but Sicario 2 had so many doors that it could have gone through with the start of the plot, that the last half of the film felt like a cop out.
In summary
Modern day narco spaghetti western Sicario 2: Soldado is faithful to the original. It has bags of style and the kind of kinetic experience that you’d forget. A worthy successor to the original film with the exception of a story line that fizzles out and then comes back at the end to set up a Marvel-type franchise. Sicario 2 won’t have me watching it several times in the way that the original film did. I just hope that this is the movie making equivalent of a difficult second album and Sicario 3 will raise the bar again. Maybe hand the reins back to Denis Villeneuve and support Taylor with a writing team that will collaborate and challenge him to do better with the story, rather than the reductive process that Sicario 2 seems to have gone through. Stefano Sollima’s admitted as much in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter
We condensed the script’s narrative arc in order to preserve and pronounce the soul of the movie. The script was a bit wider in scope at first. Then, we organically pit the two lead characters [played by Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin] against each other, something that wasn’t present in the first draft. Story-wise, I felt it was a really important and interesting turning point
The Bureau season 3 on Amazon. It is one of the most well written series I have watched in a long time. The Bureau season 1 and 2 where taunt thrillers that were James Bond reimagined by John Le Carre. It is the show that Spooks should have been. The ending was on a cliff hanger and I didn’t think that we’d see The Bureau season 3 The Bureau season 3 sees our protagonist captured by ISIS. Guillaume Debailly is captured by ISIS who know him by his former cover of Paul Lefebvre.
A brass band cover of Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name
This amazing episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert featuring Rakim (of Eric B & Rakim fame). What people tend to forget is the difference that Rakim made to hip-hop. Before him, most rappers rapped on the beat. Rakim used his rhymes the way a jazz musician plays their instrument. They go around the beat, yet are in time.
With Amazon delivering analytical data like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot more sites signing up to Amazon’s affiliate marketing scheme, even if they don’t want to sell anything for the beast of Seattle. The recommendation areas draws from its massive retail data set that shows what consumers are interested in across various different product categories.
This week I have mostly been working my way through John Kelly’s Mystery Train for my listening pleasure. Kelly is a veteran Irish DJ who has a rare skill in the quality of his sections. Naturally this is all backed by the massive music library of RTÉ. The original run of it in the mid to late 1990s was legendary and thankfully Irish state broadcaster resurrected it. Kelly just nails music selection. More culture related content here.
In order to get a brand on social media it isn’t about dropping brand assets on social channels but thinking about what it actually means.
Distillation of this process is likely to appear on a social media document:
It contextualises why social, there must be a business and brand reason to be there beyond ‘well everyone is on Facebook’ in order to get a brand on social media
An explanation of how to use the document. Those involved need to view the document as a ‘north star’ for social. It needs to be clear that the document is a set of guidelines, but not immutable
In order to get a brand on social media, you need to understand what what will look and sound like
How the brand manifests itself on social:
What’s the brand’s tone of voice on social media channels. Does it want to want to sound like an everyman, does it want a bit of distance and gravitas, does it want to be an authority on a given area?
What’s the personality? If it was a person, what kind of person would it be. This frames the content, what questions it will answer and the view point that it will take. It’s adding extra dimensions that won’t necessarily be applied in public relations, print or even TV advertising due to the nature of social channels
What are the content pillars? Think of this as the core messages. Every piece of content created and shared will demonstrate at least one pillar. These are typically things like organisation innovation, heritage, values, point of leadership (thought leadership, authority / expertise, style leadership etc)
Cross channel rules:
How will you handle hashtags
How ill you handle localised domain names? (Will their be local domains?)
Who has the right to publish what first? For instance if you look at sports brands like Nike or New Balance; you’ll see that soccer related content first appears on their specialist football channels
Should local channels link back to ‘global accounts’?
Are there any sponsorship or IP-related watch outs? When I worked on New Balance; any club kit related content had to feature a minimum of three players. Otherwise there would be problems with the players other sponsors (notably their boot sponsors and their agents who would be looking for another pay day). Who needs to approve use of sponsorships and how long will approvals take? Can you do a flow diagram to provide insight into the process? How do you handle successes or set backs of partners?
How do you handle rumours and speculation? (New iPhone launch or renewal of sponsorship deal with Tiger Woods)
How do you handle images that might have a competitor brand in shot?
Do you ignore controversial news?
Will you share partner content? What channels and handles are legitimate partner content to share?
What kind of tools will you put in place? Large brands often use an intermediary platform like Percolate that provides measurement, asset management and an approvals workflow as needed. It even allows the localisation of content by the local brand team
Social channel-specific rules
How often will you post on a given channel? This might be dictated to you by the kind of account you have on some channels like WeChat. With most others it will be driven by audience content consumption. Twitter generally lends itself to more frequent posts than Instagram or Facebook
Specific channel aims over the coming year
How will the channel be used? Are there particular segments that it is good at reaching?
What kind of content can be published? Example content categories. Best practice executions from other (non-competing) brands to get best practice ideas
Social crisis response
Crisis like accidents have an incident funnel marked by small events, the more of these that happen, the harder it is to climb out of the funnel. The trick is to limit these before they take you down the funnel.
Have a clear workflow in place to handle negative criticism. The US Air Force had a really good workflow to borrow from.
Real-time monitoring should highlight things before they escalate. How is this intelligence distributed and to whom?
Who is going to be part of the decision group, you’ll likely need people from: customer services, product expert, public relations, management. How will you ensure that employees and the supply chain speak with one voice?
Mark Ritson wrote an op-ed over at Marketing Week on influence and influencers. Whilst it lacked nuance on the subject area, a lot of what it said is true. Go over and have a read; I’ll be waiting for when you come back.
Whilst I disagree on the finer points, what Ritson wrote needed to be said. There needed to be a turning of the tide on influencers from boundless optimism to a greater degree of sobriety and critical analysis of the influencer opportunity.
I first noticed this boundless optimism when I attended the In2 Innovation Summit in May last year. Heather Mitchell on a panel. Mitchell worked at the time in Unilever’s haircare division where she is director, head of global PR, digital engagement and entertainment marketing. I asked the panel discussing influencer marketing about the impact of zero-based budgeting (ZBB) and the answer was ducked. ZBB requires a particular ROI on activity, something that (even paid for) influence marketing still struggles to do well.
This was surprising given the scrutiny that other marketing channels were coming under, I couldn’t understand how influencer marketing merited that leap of faith.
Substitute ‘buzz marketing’ for ‘influencer marketing’ and this could be 15 years ago. Don’t get me wrong I had great fun doing things like hijacking Harry Potter book launches when I worked at Yahoo!, but no idea how it really impacted brand or delivered in terms of RoI. Influencer marketing seems to be in a similar place.
Just five years ago we had managed to get past the hype bubble of social and senior executives were prepared to critically examine social’s worth. In the meantime we have had a decline in organic reach and massive inflation in both ad inventory and influencer costs. What had changed in the marketers mentality?
Onward with Mark Ritson’s main points.
Ritson’s Three Circles of Bullshit
A very loose reference to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy trilogy; but for modern marketers
The First Circle of Bullshit: Are the followers real?
Are they bots?
Are they stolen accounts?
Are the user accounts active any more?
Has the account holder padded their account with bought followers and engagement. Disclosure – I ran an experiment on my Twitter account and still have a substantial amount of fake followers. More on this experiment here.
The Second Circle of Bullshit: Are influencers trusted?
Ritson did an unscientific test that showed (some) influencers would post anything for a bit of money
The Final Circle of Bullshit: Do they have influence?
Some influencers are genuinely authoritative; but this is a minority of influencers out there
Ritson alludes to the lack of organic reach amongst an ‘influencers’ followers which is likely to be 2% reach or less
Trends in influence
I looked at Google Trends to see what could be learned in the rate of change in searches over time. Consider Google Trends to be an inexact but accessible measure of changes in interest over time.
Global interest in influencers have been accelerating
There has been a corresponding rises in interest around paid influencer marketing
There hasn’t been the same interest peak in organic (PR-driven) influencer work
All of which supports the following hypotheses:
it’s become on-trend from the perspective of marketers, agencies and ‘influencers’
A significant amount of influencers are in it for the money – which brings into question their (long term authority and consumer trust)
A significant amount of influencers have an exceedingly good idea of their value (more likely overly-inflated)
Ego is less of a motivator for becoming an influencer than material gains
What would influence look like?
Propagation of the content by real people. Instagram, a particularly popular influencer channel, has made sharing posts difficult for followers historically. Re-gramming was a pain in the arse for the average Instagram user.
If we look at the mainstream media and how it is shared on Facebook we see that only five media brands are consistently in the top ten most shared media properties. ‘Traditional’ influencer status isn’t necessarily a garrantor of consistent successful propagation either, if Newship’s data is to be believed.
Attributed sales. Some luxury brands in China have had success collaborating with influencers and selling through their channels; the post child being Mr Bags collaboration with Longchamps.
How is the best way to use influencers in marketing?
Assuming that you are using influencers in the widest possible sense at the moment.
Treat the majority of influencers as yet another advertising format
That means that reach, the way the brand is presented, and repetition are all important – smart mass marketing following the playbook of Byron Sharp.
Viewing your influencer mention in that prism, it means estimating what the real reach would be (lets say 2% of the follower number as an estimate) and paying no more on a CPM rate than you would pay for a display advertising advert
Ensure that the brand is covered in the way that you want. Some luxury brands have managed to get around this by keeping control of the content; a good example of this is De Grisogono – a family-run high jewellery and luxury watch brand. They work with fashion bloggers that meet their high standards and invite them to events. De Grisogono provides them with high-quality photography of its pieces and the event. They get the high standard of brand presentation which raises the quality of the placement
Get repetition with the audience by repeating the placement with other content that delivers the same message with the same high standard of production
All of this might work for a luxury brand, IF you found that the amount of agency time and creative work made commercial sense. It is less likely to work for normal FMCG brands. What self-respecting influencer is going to be bossed around by a breakfast cereal?
Thinking about micro influencers, probably the area that has had the most interest from marketers recently due to them appearing to be better value than macro influencers.
Brown & Fiorella (2013) explanation of micro-influencers:
Adequately identifying prospective customers, and further segmenting them based on situations and situational factors enables us to identify the people and businesses – or technologies an channels that are closest to them in each scenario. We call these micro-influencers and see them as the business’s opportunity to exert true influence over the customer’s decision-making process as opposed to macro-influencers who simply broadcast to a wider, more general audience.
Brown & Fiorella focus on formal prospect detail capture and conversion.
This approach is more likely to work in certain circumstances; where there is low friction to conversion (e-tailing for discretionary value items).
It starts to fall apart when you deploy their approach to:
Consumer marketing
Mature product sectors
Mature brands
You would also struggle with many B2B segments where social provides a small reach and little social interaction.
Work with real influencers on long term collaborations
There is more likelihood of having audience trust if they can see and understand the long term relationship between a brand and its influencers
Better brand placement easier, with an influencer that ‘gets’ the brand
You’ve got a better chance of being able to get access and fully understand the underlying analytics of their accounts (which should be a prerequisite for long term relationship)
You can look at collaborations and attribution payment models that raise all boats
