Really interesting design experiment from Chinese university students. It is interesting that they use the ‘goldfish’ as the avatar of the AI. It also asks questions about how we relate to pets and whether augmentation like this would work.
Very interesting student project from Shanghai Jiaotong University, has your pet fish serve as an avatar/front end for a smart device pic.twitter.com/tHDODQHArM
This Amazon advertising pitch deck is interesting for a number of reasons
They claim that Amazon advertising data taps into consumer purchase behaviour both on and off Amazon – that would be of interest to anti-trust regulators
Otherwise the Amazon advertising seems to have both Facebook and Google advertising offerings squarely in its sights. This will be attractive for many brands that are looking at having a DTC route to market over the coming years.
People aren’t that excited for iPhone 8, Piper Jaffray says | CNBC – it makes sense, smartphones are a mature device now, the form factor is set (not sure this a good thing), the app market has peaked and the hardware commoditised. You’d buy a new iPhone when your old one is no longer fit for purpose
TalkTalk looks to hang up on its mobile business | FT – what does this mean in the broader landscape of telecoms triple play businesses? BT invested a lot buying EE and building up their media properties, Virgin Media still have a triple play offering and Sky has built up both broadband and an MVNO (paywall)
At the beginning of this month Amazon launched an addition to their Dash ordering hardware with the Amazon Dash button. There was a lot of incredulity amongst the media heightened by the unfortunate timing which overlapped with April’s Fool Day.
Why the incredulity?
I would break the cynicism down into two broad buckets:
The Amazon Dash button has a very singular usage / use case, narrower even the Yo! app which was a bit of a tech fad last year. Critics are at best uncertain that consumers would use them? I generally buy toilet rolls every 4-6 months, do I really need a button for that?
The Amazon Dash button implies that the hardware required is ridiculously cheap. How many boxes of washing powder, packets of Mac & Cheese or toilet rolls would be required for a button to break even?
Business perspective
Rather than ripping into this into too much depth I thought I would share Benedict Evans’ interesting hypothesis about the Amazon Dash button:
Amazon is trying to eliminate both vendor and brand decisions, and turning itself into a utility company – get your house connected to power, water, gas and Amazon. And choosing which commodity product you need is just another piece of friction to be removed by Amazon’s kaizen
There are some interesting directions that come out of this view point. Let’s break Benedict’s analysis down chunk-by-chunk:
Eliminating vendor decisions: there are two prongs to this. Firstly, it would reduce the basket size for supermarkets and also reduce impulse purchases. Let’s think about the Walmart ‘beer and diapers’ retail urban legend for a moment – if you weren’t shopping for the diapers, you aren’t likely to have picked up the beer next to it as you would have had no reason to go near those shelves. By implication it is also an attack on some of the categories carried in convenience stores. Given that the button is about ‘just-in-time’ shopping it implies that the users are not likely to have rooms in their lives for big box retailers or CostCo. The buttons are likely to aimed at urban dwellers rather than the suburbs were larger homes and larger vehicles to do the big box store shop are the norm – Sam’s Warehouse is safer than Walmart in this scenario
Eliminate brand decisions: since sales are diverted from supermarkets this also affects their private label sales, especially where they are acquired by accident as lookalikes stacked next to well-known brands. Challenger brands find that switching becomes much harder as they can’t intercept the customer at the point-of-intent through shopper marketing and the opportunity cost for the consumer gets raised due to the comparative nature of the friction in purchase. It also begs a question about how much it affects the share price of WPP and other marketing combines who have spent big on shopper marketing acquisitions over the past few years. Do buttons offer a net gain or loss of value to them? I do know that the button puts Amazon in a much more powerful position versus vendors in terms of discount pricing to retailer and warehousing. The key to understand the power that Amazon would bring is ‘choosing which commodity product you need…’. The very idea of a product being boiled down to a commodity buy would scare the living daylights of the average brand manager in an FMCG mega-corp
Turning itself into a utility: for Amazon this is about locking the consumer in via Prime to the consumer life. At the present time, logistics costs have been an increasing proportion of the cost of sales for Amazon, there must be a hope that the scale of grocery shopping will bring down the price of Prime and drive profits higher?
There is no reason why the likes of Tesco, Ocado or Iceland couldn’t have done this. The wider Dash technology would make it easier for consumers to do grocery shopping and reduce the friction of online purchases. Instead they seem to have wanted to reduce cashier numbers inshore and focused on self-service tills. Time will tell if they made the right technological choice.
What about the user?
This is designed to make the consumers life easier and I can see how it makes purchase of otherwise annoying to shop for items frictionless, but it only works within reason. You can’t have a wall of buttons on the front door of your fridge freezer and just when do you press the button in the bathroom to order up more razor blades or toilet roll? What happens during the run up to Christmas when Amazon has had sub-optimal performance with regards deliveries on occasion? What is the buying frequency required to make the button habit forming, used without thinking about it, without consideration. When does the opportunity cost for the consumer tip in their favour regarding button usage?
What I don’t have yet is a clear understanding on depth and breadth of the customer problem being solved by the Dash button.
Product design
The original Dash device was interesting because it represented a rejection of the broader theme of convergence where functionality is subsumed from dedicated hardware into a software layer running on a computer, via a web browser, tablet or smartphone. Instead Dash is a shopping appliance and wouldn’t look out of place in a cupboard full of Braun kit.
The Dash button represents a further evolution of specialist hardware, a brand-specific, tactile hardware interface. It mirrors software like IFTTT’s ‘Do’ application, the Yo! messenger app and the Dimple smartphone button project.
For non-food products like toilet rolls that come in a plastic bale that is quickly discarded, there may not be a barcode to scan in on your Dash device. Instead you would have to ask for a new pack of Charmin’ or more Mach3 razors. Processing each voice message is expensive, which makes the opportunity cost around creating dedicated buttons for certain classes of product much more attractive. Amazon first and foremost is a data-driven company, they will know which product categories that they want to have buttons for. However, what makes on an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t always make sense to the consumer…
At the end of last week Amazon unveiled Amazon Dash: an accessory to aid ordering from its Fresh grocery service. Fresh promises free same-day delivery on orders of over $35 of more than 500,000 Amazon items including fresh and local products; including products from respected restaurants and coffee shops. It has been rolled out in three major US markets: San Francisco, Seattle and Southern California.
Fresh has a mobile application on both Android and iOS to aid in shopping – which makes the launch of Dash much more curious. Dash is a piece of dedicated hardware which implies a failing in terms of ease-of-use for the smartphone application. Amazon obviously thinks that Fresh customers will be heavy high-touch, high-value consumers in order to spend this much trouble engineering and manufacturing the hardware and supporting services to make Dash work.
Dash is a product that wouldn’t be out of place in a collection of Braun kitchen appliances. It’s hardware interface so simple it looks really intuitive.
The Amazon Dash can be seen as part of a wider movement from converged general purpose devices to dedicated hardware. It is interesting to compare and contrast the Amazon Dash with the :CueCat; how just over a decade can make such a difference to a product. Back in 2000, Wired magazine sent out the :CueCat to US subscribers of their magazine. The :CueCat was a barcode scanner that allowed readers to augment the print content with a link to web content. Think a prehistoric QRCode. It didn’t work that well for a number of reasons. The codes were proprietary, partly due to consumer privacy requirements and intellectual property around barcodes. In order to use the :CueCat one needed to be connected to an internet-enabled PC via a wired USB or PS2 connection. Using the :CueCat was no easier than typing in a URL or searching via Google; a search engine on the ascendancy at the time. The :CueCat was a spectactular failing for the media industry looking to get to grips with digital media.
Moving forward to the Amazon Dash, the equivalent computing power of that desktop PC has been squeezed into a device that fits in the palm of your hand. Wireless connectivity provides a more flexible connection that removes contextual restrictions on the Dash compared to the :CueCat. The web extended computing so that the website and the PC or mobile device in a symbiotic relationship where it isn’t clear to consumers just were one starts and the other finishes.
The Dash takes inputs via a product barcode and voice memos. Despite the technology advances over the past ten years with the likes of Siri and S-Voice; there will likely be some sort of human intervention required to make these voice memos work. This is at odds with Amazon’s warehouse robot systems and lack of a human customer service face over a telephone line.
This voice memo challenge is not trivial, it was a contributing factor in SpinVox’s failure. The Fresh programme because of its logistical challenges will be hard to scale, and the economics of the Dash have to be carefully balanced between existing products that are repurchased via barcode scan and new or fresh products that would use the voice memo. Acquiring basket growth becomes incrementally more expensive. Over time the system may learn voice commands rather like Google’s old telephone-powered search; on the one hand local area focus is likely to limit dialect variations, on the other sample size maybe hard to scale to be statistically significant for machine learning. More related content here.
Welcome to my June 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 23rd issue or as 23 would be called in bingo halls ‘thee and me’.
Basketball legend Michael Jordan wore the number 23 on his jersey when he played for the Chicago Bulls and when he returned to basketball to play for the Washington Wizards.
At the beginning of the 20th century, 23 and 23Skidoo appeared memetically as short hand for ‘to leave’ or to be asked to leave in American English. There are no satisfactory explanations about its origin.
It went on to be referenced in American plays, a Popeye cartoon, a William Burroughs story and inspire the name of a post-punk band founded by original international Stüssy Tribe member ‘Alex Baby‘.
Burroughs inspired the ’23 enigma’ which appeared in new age and alternative literature including The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Walsh’s of Mullingar and more things dwelt on multi-generational businesses in Ireland, memetic ideas in architecture and the political act of hacking.
Augmented retailing – how machine learning is being used beyond efficiency to actually help customers in a customer-centric approach to customer experience.
I finished Rogue Agent by Andy McDermott. It’s an easy undemanding read, ideal for a holiday. It benefits from good pacing of the plot line and feels like it’s aimed at a British working-class male reader. It feels like it would be a good Amazon Prime or Netflix series if adapted from the novel.
Things I have been inspired by.
Walk the house
Walk the house is an exhibition at the Tate Modern by a Korean artist Do Ho Suh. The exhibition features a number of works that challenge what we think about living spaces and their sense of permanence. There is a traditional Korean house reproduced in charcoal rubbed fine paper, which captures every detail of the building’s exterior.
There is a tension between the scale and ephemeral nature of the work. The traditional Korean house also contrasted with modern apartment replicas in polyester mesh curtain material and wire supports.
The material and the extreme fidelity to detail that the artist brings gives them a dream-like quality like reliving a memory.
The exhibition is on at the Tate Modern until October and I can’t recommend it enough.
Time for some new ‘Age Thinking’
There was a moment in 2023 when the IPA Census of the UK advertising industry saw no one reach retirement age in any advertising agency. Anna Sampson was tasked with writing a report about age, systemic barriers and ageism with in the industry.
This directly impacts concerns around inclusivity, diversity and representation. It’s adversely affecting the work done for clients.
I remember listening to a creative director’s challenge in getting a production company to cast old people for a film. The production company was suggesting 40 year-olds, when what required was 70-plus.
I can also recommend Matthew Knight’s interview with Anna Sampson after the publication of the report.
What’s working in raising brand awareness?
WARC published their report What’s working in raising brand awareness, which is instant click bait to strategists. The findings in the report reinforce what we already knew from The Long and the Short of it and Ehrensberg-Bass’ How Brands Grow. It cites Research by Fospha found that brands who allocated at least 5% of their budgets to awareness and consideration saw a 22% higher return on advertising spend. When higher-awareness brands boosted their spend by 10%, they saw a 13% increase in sales.
AI’s dot com moment?
Given Mary Meeker‘s heritage in the late 1990s dot com bubble as evangelist rather than analyst – I was instinctively a bit leery of the hockey stick-shaped graphs in her new presentation on AI. The report gives good context to where many of the exponential claims. Like telecoms and the web before it, the presentation is an expression of confidence in progress, not a business model endorsement per se. Look instead at the financial results of major players in quarterly and annual filings.
Chart of the month.
Global podcast advertising growth seems to have matured based on data from WARC.
Things I have watched.
Bad Day At Blackrock – the film merges film noir with the western. It has a cast dominated by award-winning actors including Spencer Tracy as one-armed veteran with judo skills. Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin play local yahoos who try and needle a new arrival. The quality of the cast, the setting in the California high desert, a ramshackle western town and the Southern Pacific streamliner train – create an amazing film. Just ten years after the end of the second world war, Bad Day at Blackrock deals with racism against Asians. In my mind, it is John Sturges best film, but always overshadowed by his later works Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.
I first saw Le Doulos (aka The Fingerman) in an arthouse cinema in Liverpool with some art student friends. It was great to watch it again, this time in Blu-Ray. Jean-Pierre Melville directed a classic piece of French New Wave cinema noir. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, a complicated character whose true place in the story isn’t revealed until the final third of the movie. Belmondo’s role lights up the screen displaying movie star looks and the hardness of a gangster. The plot is carefully doled out like a well-played poker hand with enough twists and turns that kept me on the end of my seat. It’s a masterclass in storytelling.
Useful tools.
Pocket is shutting down
Pocket was a service that was integrated into Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation that allowed the user to bookmark a web a page that was used to save articles and webpages for later. if you’re a Pocket user and looking for an alternative I can recommend Pinboard. I have been using Pinboard for the best part of 15 years, so can vouch for the service.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency.
I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
