Whilst Cambridge Analytica surprised most people in digital marketing who get the technology. The claims surprised for three main reasons:
Facebook’s scope of data access wasn’t surprising to marketers, but the level of shock the media felt was seismic
Cambridge Analytica was considered to have some mythical secret sauce by the media. Those marketers close to the political scene were surprised. How was Cambridge Analytica thought effective?
The media have avoided discussing the advertising technology that underpins modern online media. This creates richer data profiles and improves media targeting. Unfortunately this technology runs on their website, analysing their traffic, vending their advertising
‘Supernatural’ technology
I caught up with a friend who had recently upgraded the operating system on their Mac laptop and iPhone. They made a restaurant booking and were surprised when the web site ‘knew who they were’. and automatically completed their information. Then, on the day of the booking a notification popped up. It said that they should leave now as there was moderate traffic.
They ascribed all this magic to the the website ‘knowing’ everything about them. I explained to them that this was their Apple products trying to be helpful rather than dialing their anxiety levels to 11.
People are powerless
There is an assumption amongst the general public that technology has supernatural powers.
It makes them uncomfortable, but they feel powerless in the face of it. This discomfort reminded me of the ‘uncanny valley’ experienced with humanoid robots. For the rest of consumer there is latent inertia. They will generally put up with a lot of discomfort.
They realise at a base level that The Technium is – . They don’t realise how they should adapt to it.
The technium is a superorganism of technology. It has its own force that it exerts. That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself.
It’s just the way things are. Consumer actions won’t make a difference. #deletefacebook will barely make a dent and that’s what’s scariest of all. More related issues here.
Sex Workers Say Porn on Google Drive Is Suddenly Disappearing – Motherboard – don’t assume that the contents of your Google Drive hasn’t been thoroughly examined by Google. Adult entertainment is merely the canary in the coal mine for Google Drive privacy. I would be very careful about using a cloud storage platform if you haven’t encrypted the entire folder as a bundle before uploading it. And don’t use Google Drive. More related content here.
Consumer behaviour
The unparalleled joy of writing with a fountain pen – and five beautiful pens to inspire you – Country Life – Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
Millennials: you will not be quite so special in the ‘futr’ | FT – could it be that millennials, the most scrutinised, criticised and debated generation of our time, were not that special any more? “Millennials are still important as a customer,” Ms Ganatra told me later. But there is now a “millennial mindset” that has nothing to do with age, she said. In other words, millennials may have been the first generation to have grown up in a digital world but the rest of us are catching on fast. People of all ages are now so used to shopping with a click or talking to a chatbot that retailers need to think about the needs and desires of all their customers, not just those born between 1981 and 1996 – or an artificial construct in terms of their digital uniqueness
Ideas
Cigarettes are the vice America needs | FT Alphaville – Cigarette smoking is essentially the anti-Facebook. While Facebook is a fundamentally misanthropic venture that pretends to be a community, smoking is a community activity for people who pretend to be misanthropes. The activity itself is fundamentally pro-social! It gives people reasons to interact with strangers (“got a light?”). And since it was banned indoors — undeniably a good choice — it gives people a reason to go outside and make idle small talk, all while pursuing a common activity. And unlike alcohol, cigarettes alone don’t often lead to property damage or missed days of work (paywall)
Study: Smart Speakers are Changing the Way We Select Products – interesting how this is impacting retail. FMCG brands in particular should be really concerned as this is far beyond what supermarkets could do with dodgy shelving layouts and look-a-like private label brands
Building for the modern web is really, really hard | O’Reilly – average website clocks in at 4MB with 100s of elements including 3rd, 4th and 5th party based interactions – which also explains page load times – and slow AF ad related technology such as trackers
Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google? | Nautilus – worthwhile reading about the effect of Google – of course they both have an impact otherwise you wouldn’t advertise on it. The question needs to be does the utility justify the impact? I think search has a better case than a social network, but both have merits
Alex Stamos, Facebook Data Security Chief, To Leave Amid Outcry – The New York Times – Some of the company’s executives are weighing their own legacies and reputations as Facebook’s image has taken a beating. Several believe the company would have been better off saying little about Russian interference and note that other companies, such as Twitter, which have stayed relatively quiet on the issue, have not had to deal with as much criticism
Technology
China’s Huawei Technologies reshuffles board for first time since 2012 – I presume the reason why Mr Ren is getting back behind the wheel is that overall and smartphone revenue figures for 2017 was Huawei’s slowest growth in four years. I am not convinced that premium products will be the way forward when they are locked out of the North American retail system. I am also not sure why the management team at Huawei Mobile Devices hasn’t been refreshed
The Valley of Death: the students vying to be millionaires | Telegraph – In 2015 Oxford, the UK’s number one university for research, produced four spin-outs. Not per professor. That was for the whole university. The situation was not better elsewhere. Data on British university spin-outs is not in any publicly available league table. But it exists, via what’s called the HE-BCI survey (it stands for Higher Education – Business and Community Interaction). For 2015-16, Cambridge University recorded a total of two spinouts in the HE-BCI survey. Imperial College London, another of this country’s most vaunted research universities, listed three. Of 160 institutions, 59 officially produced no spinouts at all.
Catching up with fellow former Yahoos. Employees of Yahoo! were known as Yahoos. All three of us worked on the European marketing team in London at the time when web 2.0 was kicking off. It was great to see my fellow former Yahoos. We kicked around the move away from quality in online media, historic ‘pirated television reception’ in Ireland, the worrying state of brand marketing and new ventures. If you are looking for high-quality male grooming products Charles has been working on Scrubd.
Andrew Tuck tells the Monocle story on the Mediamasters podcast. Really interesting origin story – what’s interesting is the contrarian thinking of Tyler Brûlé. Monocle is notable for building a print magazine in the face of a digital onslaught of media. More media related content here.
Great interview with Roger Smith about the wonders of mechanical watch.
Smith worked with Dr. George Daniels who invented the co-axial movement which has been a major step forward in mechanical watch making – changing the way power is delivered that is more efficient and can improve accuracy.
Smith is exceptionally articulate about the technical differences of the different watches from high accuracy quartz watches to classic Rolex and Omega movements.
Antonio Da Silva’s Hell’s Night where famous film characters interact in one night club stunned me when I saw it a few years ago. In the meantime he did a sequel and has had time to work on the colour grading of the video to make it even more mesmerising.
Hell’s Club
Hell’s Club Two
Finally I am surprised that this was something I hadn’t heard already – what if the late great Terry Wogan had listened to Skibadee or MC GQ vintage mixtapes and Rinse FM? Peter Serafiniwicz channels The TWOG$.
Alternatives to Big Tech, and a t-shirt | Creative Good – as someone who has used RSS for a long time I am intimately aware of the needs for alternatives to big tech. Google Reader obliterated RSS readers and then obliterated RSS readership by abruptly withdrawing the product. I’d argue that you could use Apple’s default iCloud account and MacOS apps. Mark Hurst recommends Safari or FireFox but ignores Mail.app, Calendar.app and Contacts.app. I have been using these three apps since I started using OS X in 2001.
Nice little Nesta egg: Former lottery quango took £7m from Google • The Register – details of Google’s influence in European academic life are detailed in a report by the Campaign for Accountability (CfA), an initiative part-funded by Google’s competitors. Google turned out to be the only corporate sponsor of think tank Readie, the Research Alliance for a Digital Europe, hosted at Nesta.
VW Just Gave Tesla a $25 Billion Battery Shock – probably the best argument that I’ve read for super capacitor and hydrogen fuel cell technology due to the shortage of cobalt. Lithium prices have also inflated massively over the past few years
Amazon: The Making of a Giant | WSJ – Today, the AI assistant has more than 30,000 skills available on its store and can be used to control more than 4,000 smart-home devices from 1,200 different brands. (paywall)
The new Roxanne Shante biopic looks amazing and you know the soundtrack is going to be good. Roxanne Shante was like a breadth of fresh air in the early rap scene. She had an amazing technique and was well able to cut male competitors down to size. Roxanne Shante is a legend despite her limited profile.
The South China Morning Post have launched a news site for an international audience focused on the Chinese technology sector – Abacus. Given the amount of blogs that used to cover the China tech sector that have disappeared, this is a welcome addition. Its a nice looking site, it has great interactive design and a good editorial team. My one complaint is that it doesn’t have an RSS feed which is a real bummer.
Unsupported | The Greatest Stories Retold – interesting attempts at really short form storytelling. It doesn’t work well in Safari as a web browser. Something to provide creative inspiration for those 15 second ad spot scripts.
Re-evaluating Media is a piece of research put together that tried to rebalance expectations on more traditional media. Whilst there was room to land meaningful points (TV is better at mass reach for a given CPM), and there is an argument to be made for a media neutral approach where the media mix fits the communications problem to be solved. Instead they made bigger leaps and had a methodology that was optimistic at best – this became the focus of debate among people that I knew. There are arguments to be made about the wider role of brand building which would better help traditional broadcast advertising more.
