Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Facebook Canvas + more news

    Facebook Canvas

    Creating Facebook Canvas ads: step-by-step guide | The Digiterati – great step-by-step guide by Marie Page. Facebook Canvas. Facebook Canvas are full screen mobile adverts.

    Facebook Officially Launches Canvas Ads That Load Full-Screen Rich Media Pages In-App | TechCrunch – Instant Articles, meet Instant Ads. Facebook wants to give advertisers an immersive way to reach people without making them leave the social network

    Business

    Is Taking Yahoo Private An Option? | MediaPost – does it make sense taking Yahoo private? – Probably yes, getting the activist shareholders off the company’s back would have benefits. All be it ending up with a highly leveraged business. Does it make sense to have the current team do it? That’s a much trickier call to make, there is a strong argument to say no. But you would struggle to find a qualified management team who could step up to take it on

    Morgan Stanley Marks Down Its Stake In Palantir, Dropbox – Fortune – not terribly surprising clipping of the unicorns. Palantir seems to be a solution looking for a problem. This is a common issue with enterprise software. Given its defence connections and the need for extensive consultancy and software one has to wonder about breakout use cases

    Ideas

    The Information Revolution’s Dark Turn – Tech – GovExec.com – interesting article discussion on whether technology frees us or dominates us

    Kiddle – Ask Jeeves mark II? Will Kiddle finally be the people to get natural language search to work well consistently?

    Reactions: Not everything in life is Likable — Facebook Design — Medium – interesting breakdown in methodology

    Media

    Warner Bros to buy Korean-focused DramaFever – BBC News – they have been taking a kicking from Viki (Korean based) owned by Rakuten

    Most Germans Think the Press Is Lying to Them About Refugees – SPIEGEL ONLINE – as if the media doesn’t have enough on its plate, a lack of belief in its core proposition could kill it entirely. More German related topics here

    Wireless

    Demand for heat pipes for smartphones may emerge – DigiTimes – suggests a lack of die size and power saving improvements. Interesting technology through. Will heat pipes for smartphones reduce the localisation of heat on shells and how will cases affect their efficacy?

    Web of no web

    【双语】Shenzhen pilots vehicle ID chips 深圳八类车上将安装“电子车证” – The chips will be installed in 200,000 vehicles in Shenzhen-mostly commercial vehicles and public buses-and allow officers to access vehicle data

  • Ad blockers

    If you work in the advertising or media sectors, the elephant in the room will be the problem ad blockers. Specially developed software designed to stop ad tracking and ad vending online.
    ad blocker
    Over five years from 2010 to 2015 the installed base of ad blockers has increased eight-fold. The root problem is a that of a poor web experience. It is a well known heuristic since the late 1990s that page load time and the likelihood of a consumer to click away to another page have inverse relationship with each other.
    page load times

    Can it be the ads themselves?

    Display ads have been around almost as long as the commercial web.

    Secondly, Google research found that 56.1 per cent of display ads vended in a trial were not viewable by the audience.

    But that number is a problem for advertising customers as they want to get greater efficiency and effectiveness in their marketing campaigns.

    Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed went on record last year demanding 100% viewability for digital advertising. In order to support this, there needs to be tracking technology deployed to monitor the advertising experience.

    This is on top of tracking technology that is used to conduct retargeting and aid programmatic selling of advertising. All of this slows page load times as information is conveyed to a plethora tracking servers, which then controls which ads are served.

    Retargeting is a tool that is particularly crudely used, audiences aren’t that impressed by brands stalking them throughout their online journey. More media related content can be found here.

    More information

    IAB: 100% Viewability of Digital Ads Is ‘Not Yet Possible’ | Advertising Age
    5 Factors of Display Visibility | Think With Google (US)
    The Future of Viewability | 360i
    CPM is dead: a guide to viewability in online advertising | Econsultancy GooglePlus account
    Measuring Ad Viewability | Think With Google
    Why viewability will become one of the key issues in digital advertising in 2016 | The Drum
    State of Viewability Transaction 2015 | iab
    Unilever’s Keith Weed: ‘Digital ads must be 100% viewable’ | Marketing Week
    Ad Blockers and the Next Chapter of the Internet | HBR – retargeting blamed (hat tip Daniel Appelquist)

  • AirBNB + more news

    Build them and they will come | The Economist – or how AirBnB doesn’t make much of a difference in London due to structural issues

    IBM’s Supercomputer is Controlling a Massive Virtual Reality Game, and They Need Beta Testers – In Brief This virtual reality game will be powered by cognitive computing and cloud technology. And they are seeking beta testers.

    Porn Industry Uses Airbnb, Rental Houses for Filming | NBC Southern California – Nearly four years after Los Angeles County passed new requirements for pornographic performers, the porn industry has spread to nearby counties like Ventura County and much of the filming is done via AirBnB. The irony of the gig economy supporting another gig economy business isn’t lost on me. More adult entertainment industry related posts here. I wouldn’t be surprised if film and TV didn’t follow suit for non-studio shoots

    WhatsApp to end support for BlackBerry, Nokia, and other older operating systems by the end of 2016 | VentureBeat | Mobile | by Paul Sawers – WhatsApp is to cease support for a number of operating systems by the end of 2016, the company announced yesterday. This is the point at which the old mobile eco-system finally handed over to Android and iOS

    Disney World and Disneyland Introduce Demand-Based Pricing | TIME – there is only so far that you can go with sophisticated queue engineering and Disney’s moves indicated that it has tapped out service design innovation

    Norway Becomes First NATO Country To Accuse China of Stealing Military Secrets – what’s interesting is why they’ve gone there.

    The art of wellbeing at work | McKinsey – modern technology apparently leaves us exhausted, eerily prescient when one things about Zoom and similar app adoption (PDF)

    Music’s Role In Digital Content Is Small And Shrinking | Music Industry Blog – and the music industry’s major labels only has itself to blame

  • MWC 2016 as a case study on talkability, brand mentions and brand performance

    Mobile World Congress (or in industry parlance MWC 2016) is where the telecoms industry goes to set out its stand. It has gradually changed from being a conference where the big issues of the day are hashed out, to more of a trade show a la CES or CeBIT.

    From a brand point of view, it was of interest to me for two reasons:

    • It offers largely culture neutral brand discussions, many of which occur online
    • I have an interest, having worked on a few mobile brands during my agency career (Palm, Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, Qualcomm, Telenor Myanmar and Huawei)

    I pulled this slide ware together for a talk I am giving at an internal event at an agency.

    The first data that I have put together is looking at the amount of mentions that occurred regardless of the channel. It is a relatively easy data point to pull out of monitoring systems very quickly.

    Obviously the value of mentions will depend on how many people view them, what is the context that the mention appears in. What was the content around it? Who said it, are they expert or trustworthy? So looking purely at the number of mentions would be crude, offering little value apart from nice PowerPoint slides.

    Breaking the mentions down by platform gives an idea of relative marketing communications competencies of brands. So looking at Huawei and Xiaomi shows contrasting approach to building talkability and conversations. Huawei focuses on traditional media channels where as Xiaomi focuses on social.

    By comparison LG and Samsung seem to have a more holistic approach.

    I then moved on beyond the mention data to try and look at relative authority of whoever mentioned the brand and looking at the relative distribution by brand and channel.

    I had done some initial analysis on the event in general here. These numbers showed how well brands had built high authority communities and the discussions around them.

    What was quite surprising was the polarised authority of mainstream media sources. Newswire syndication had destroyed authority of many online traditional media channels. A second cross brand observation was the relatively low authority of the blogosphere.

    These slides only start to delve into understanding talkability and are time consuming to create in comparison to looking at raw mention numbers, but offer superior strategic insight for both earned and paid media approaches for future launches.

    I did some broad profiling of online conversations around MWC here.

  • Come to Singapore + more

    Come to Singapore

    Come to Singapore! The Sights (And Branding) Are Lovely | WIRED – it feels very Monocle-esque in terms of editorial style. Come to Singpore! is very different to the Conde Naste Traveller type editorial. Singapore is aiming at developing a start-up culture so targetingWired (US) readers make a good deal of sense. More Singapore related posts here.

    Decline of cyberspace

    William Gibson on the decline of cyberspace. It is fascinating in terms of how Gibson’s inspiration has evolved over time. He was reacting against genres that he didn’t want to write as much as ideas he wanted to convey. The ability to say no, is a very interesting creative process and it reminds me of an interview I saw with an Apple executive talking about why the iPod didn’t have an FM radio.

    Renault Alpine Vision

    Interesting to see Renault going back to Alpine’s sports roots with the Vision sports coupe. It is made to a similar formula to the original 1960s cars that made Alpine famous. A light, small car, a rear-mid engine placement with a highly tuned small capacity engine. Performance is viewed by the Alpine team in much more holistically with an equal focus on handling and breaking.

    Tesla Model X

    I am a sucker for well done manufacturing and process films. The first one up is from Tesla, highlighting robots working in a manufacturing cell on their X model vehicle. Tesla has had problems around areas like panel fit. I am not sure if they have resolved those quality issues, but robots should provide them with a very consistent process and higher throughput.