Ged Carroll

Blog

  • The limits of digital

    A few articles that I read over the past few days highlighted the limits of digital. The FT published an analysis on the modern problems that digital has wrought on the advertising industry.

    Jeff Goodby, chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners – a successful longtime American advertising agency said:

    In the past, he said, the only true measure of success was whether the public knew and cared about your work. “You could get into a cab and find out, in a mile or two, whether you mattered in life, just by asking the driver.” Now, “No one knows what we do any more.”

    In essence advertising campaigns had lost talkability, positive brand associations and long term memorability – the kind of things that you would think of being important in terms of marketing’s role in brand building. Digital has worked in performance marketing, brand building shows up the limits od digital

    Brands, particularly emerging brands like designers have it as bad as advertising agencies, here’s fashion site Man Repeller on the challenges of building a brand:

    When I first started working in fashion retail, coming from a fine arts background, I thought it would be completely different. Working with the clothes but also seeing the way it had to recycle every six months got me thinking about the branding that gets pushed upon designers. I think it happens in all creative fields because of social media. I see it with a lot of my peers. We see the same obsession with youth — young painters — in the art world that you have in fashion with young designers, the same pressure for a cohesive vision. At 25? Nobody knows what they’re doing at 25. And that’s totally fine. You’re still finding yourself. And there has to be more room to find yourself when you’re young as opposed to this pressure to emerge as a fully formed Greek myth coming out with her uncracked egg, or whatever.

    Which impacts the kind of businesses likely to grow in the future. They are likely to be ‘culturally stunted’.

    The noisy environment of social has meant that brands are also distorting themselves to get cut through, Vice magazine covered what can only be described as sociopathic brand personalities of independent coffee shop chains in London.

    Or Instagram baiting street side billboards like a pub landlord who misquotes Enoch Powell and thinks that the National Front aren’t serious on race issues

    More digital related posts here.

    More information
    How the Mad Men lost the plot | FT
    MR Round Table: The Burnout Generation – Man Repeller
    London Is Tearing Itself Apart Because of Coffee Shop Sidewalk Signs | VICE

  • Green labels + more news

    Green labels

    There are more than 450 meanings behind “green” labels – Eco-conscious shoppers have probably noticed hordes of new “green-approved,” “100% natural” eco-friendly goods—claiming to be “certified” by some organization or other—popping up on store shelves. Green labels have many problems. One of them is that environmentalists can’t agree on what’s green so green labels are challenged. Let’s take take hybrids versus old cars on carbon footprint – since most carbon release is in manufacture, yet the hybrid cars would sell on green labels. Or electric cars overall, we don’t understand the energy requirement to recycle them yet they will get green labels. Ands thats before you look at how electricity is generated where they are being sold. Chinese electric cars may get green labels, but the majority of China’s electricity generation comes from coal-fired power stations.

    Business

    I, Cringely Amazon’s cloud monopoly – I, Cringely – Bob Cringely provides some interesting insights into the market position of Amazon regarding cloud services. It also highlights the challenges that Alibaba, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP in addressing Amazon’s cloud monopoly

    Yahoo, NHL Ban Employees from Paid Fantasy-Sports Sites | WSJ – ethics (paywall)

    Consumer behaviour

    68% of Chinese men are smokers—and millions will die because of it | Quartz – most of the cigarette brands are owned by state owned firms and China has a surplus of males to females. More China related posts here.

    Innovation

    Weekend edition—The lure of Mars, citizen Schmidt, lobster mysteries  – Hot on the heels of the release of the action movie The Martian—and the discovery that the red planet still has liquid water—NASA has unveiled a bold three-stage plan for getting humans to Mars – interesting lessons in messaging and storytelling from this

    Marketing

    adam&eveDDB, Temptations Dress Up Cats for the Holidays – Ad Week – blatant link bait

    Has Essena O’Neill signalled the end of influencer marketing? | Econsultancy – probably not, influencer marketing is too much ‘on trend’ but it does beg the question are the fees worth it?

    Online

    WeChat reading rates are dropping. How much, and why? – In mid-2015, the number of views of WeChat subscription accounts started to decline. Some popular accounts saw a decline of more than 50% in readership. More on WeChat here.

    product insights from wechat — Medium – interesting WeChat insights

    Technology

    Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain? – NYTimes.com – so your cryogenics is probably wasted

    Web of no web

    Watch How to Eat a Virtual Cookie | MUNCHIES – how is a virtual cookie possible? By altering the taste of food with different visual cues using virtual reality techniques – literally creating a virtual cookie.

    Wireless

    iPhone Vs Samsung: Apple is still the marketshare leader | BGR – Apple still commands more than 90% of all the profits in the smartphone market

  • The Boardroom + more stuff

    What The Boardroom Thinks About Data Breach Liability | Dark Reading – cybersecurity risk vs cost of insurance premiums is the sums that the boardroom will be making. Expect the insurers to force innovation and better practices on large corporates rather then doing it off their own bat, a case in point being Sony Entertainment breach and TalkTalk. There was surprisingly little impact on the boardroom given the seriousness of the cases

    Tablet users indifferent to upgrades | TechEye – because they work well on their current consumption media use cases

    Huawei who? We probe the sleeping storage dragon’s brains • The Register – nice summary of where Huawei is from in terms of history and culture

    Vulnerable Coffee Machine Demonstrates Brewing Security Challenges Of IoT | Dark Reading – not terribly surprising that the internet of things has such poor security. There is no incentives for vendors to harden the tech at all. The problem is that in categories like TVs, you no longer an purchase a ‘dumb’ option. More on IoT here

    Microsoft says that collecting user data is ‘not an issue of personal privacy’ (MSFT) | Business Insider – oh really???

    Facebook Prods Users to Share a Bit More – WSJ – interesting data point

    Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind – to save articles or get newsletters, alerts or recommendations

    Young shopper: south korean’s young shopper – What they expect from retailers | GfK – great insights on Korean consumers

    Microsoft Surface Book teardown reveals almost impossible-to-repair design | ExtremeTech – 1/10, just waiting for Greenpeace to realise that there is campaign mileage in low teardown scores

    Samsung Sells More Phones — but for Less Money – WSJ – the brutal commoditised business of Android handsets (paywall)

    Internet firms to be banned from offering unbreakable encryption under new laws – Telegraph – you have no right to privacy but really bad people do

    ‘Candy Crush’ owner King sold to Activision Blizzard for $5.9bn – FT.com – (Paywall)

  • Magic Leap + more things

    Magic Leap has shared an interesting concept video. Magic Leap that has technology which provides a more immersive experience, layered on top of the real world. It would be impressive if Magic Leap manages to pull it off. A demo are notorious for being the technology equivalent of snake oil salesmen who sell but can’t deliver. There’s even a name for it: vapour ware. I have no idea yet if Magic Leap is vapour ware. But the engineering challenges in terms of optics, software, power management and hardware are immense. More on web-of-no-web type experiences here.

    Once they have nailed the device, there is a requirement for content development. Lots of it. This also has implications for story telling.

    The Rise and Fall of China’s economy is a provocative title. The title was designed to be really good link bait rather than accurately reflecting the content of the video. The video actually does give a good background on how the Chinese economy has developed on a macro-level in a way that the interested non-economist would understand.

    I like the way Nestle has brought on board a gingerbread man character to advertise Coffee Mate in the US. There has been a move away from mascot-type figures in marketing in general. This is a really nice counterpoint to that trend.

    Nikon seem to be reaching out to millennials with this profile of a skateboard photographer, it is likely to appeal to a contingent of generation X too.

    It targets a very different type of photographer who would wouldn’t be impressed by the traditional photography ‘personalities’ from Rankin to Dave Lee Travis (Leica paid him good money back in the day, apparently he was interested in bird-watching).

    This is a world away from the first skating video shot by Stacy Paralta back in the mid 1980s, with grainy low-fi VHS cameras.

    Really nice mobile experience: Sync! Illumination lets you watch Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade from home on multiple phones

  • WeChat Life Report

    Chinese consumers literally live a WeChat life as shown by this great  collection of consumer behaviour data on WeChat. Over the past year WeChat has expanded the services that it provides to include Skype like conference calls, which changes and expands the behaviour in this report. (Presentation on Slideshare)

     

    Key takeouts

    • The ubiquity of WeChat can’t be over stated with over 93% usage in tier one cities. It will grow over time in lower tier cities for a couple of reasons. There will be a network effect that will reach out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers and countryside. Secondly, WeChat services will start to permeate out of the tier one cities and into the lower tiers. You will then have a virtual cycle due to network effects and ever-increasing ubiquity
    • Call and message data shows how it binds the diaspora back to friends and loved ones in China. The Chinese talk about ‘near and far networks’. But WeChat closes the gap, meals can be shared with photos and videos. Voice messages popular with older users also helps with asynchronous communications over difficult time zones
    • Chinese people tend to exercise during the week, rather than at the weekend according to WeChat fitness data. The idea being for rest is an insight and an opportunity for fitness and sports apparel companies
    • Male shoppers spending 30% more than female shoppers  was an interesting statistic emblematic of WeChat life. Generally men are not as enthusiastic a shopper as women are. They have to save for a home, a car and marriage. My take was that women offer WeChat a growth opportunity in payments; if it can address the underlying cause of this disparity
    • The average social circle on WeChat at 128 is very close to the Dunbar number

    More on WeChat here.