The rear-wheel drive AE86 model generation of the humble Toyota Corolla has a dedicated following. The cars were light, had twin-cam engines, a very balanced weight split and a limited slip differential.
Back in the 1980s in Ireland they were a steady performer on the local rally scene. The AE86 because of its simplicity became very adaptable for street and motorsport tuning. The AE86 popularised car culture internationally, turning up across media formats and supported by a vibrant cottage industry of parts manufacturers who exported their parts around the world.
The car entered popular culture across Asia and beyond through the manga and anime adaptions of Initial-D, which told the tale of Takumi – a student holding down two jobs – a petrol station attendant and delivery driver for the family’s tofu business in a Toyota AE86 Sprinter Trueno.
Takumi’s adventures in the family AE86 went on to be portrayed in an 18-year long manga series, a Hong Kong film featuring Taiwanese entertainer Jay Chou as Takumi, 27 game adaptions at the time of writing and at least 12 anime series or feature length films.
This soft culture footprint gave the AE86 an impact across Asia, hence the Malaysian meet-up that Hagerty shot in Kuala Lumpur. Will the popularity of the AE86 die off with this generation of young adults? It’s possible given that over a quarter of them in the US don’t drive.
Toyota / Hyundai motorsport collaboration
In advance of Rally Japan, Toyota’s Gazoo Racing and Hyundai’s N Sport held a joint event in Korea. It’s quite rare to see rival manufacturers partner in this way.
How to read a compass
This took me back to my 12-year old self away at scout camp (which I did only once) doing the activity for my map-making activity badge. Taking bearings from multiple locations and triangulating them allowed me to plot out my map. I need to dig out my Silva compass that my Mam and Dad probably still have somewhere in their attic.
I found myself using the basics of reading a compass when living in urban Hong Kong and Shenzhen as the extremely tall buildings stopped GPS from working that well. Sharing here, partly out of nostalgia and the the life skills benefits.
Hello Kitty and an adoption mindset.
Japan popular culture commentator Matt Alt put out a video about the history of Hello Kitty and Sanrio. One of the interesting things that came out of the video was how adult women embracing the playfulness of Hello Kitty, rather than ‘adulting up’ then became on the leading edge of technology adoption. I thought the idea of a ‘playful mindset’ and adoption was very interesting – yet something that we don’t often think about. I used to think about it as curiosity, but it’s more specific and it can be fostered regardless of age.
Mooncakes were a big part of my time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen. This year, mid-September marked mid-autumn festival across Asia or known as Chuseok in Korea. It is similar to harvest festivals that happen elsewhere in the world.
It is celebrated in Chinese communities with mooncakes. Mooncakes traditionally have been made of fat filled pastry cases and lids filled with red bean or lotus seed paste and a salted dried egg yolk.
Mooncakes are moulded and have auspicious messages or symbols embossed on the top, like the double happiness ideogram which also appears on new year decorations and at weddings.
In the past mooncakes have been used to make political statements in Hong Kong where they were embossed with messages against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019. This mirrored mooncake history, where concealed messages were alleged to have been used to ferment rebellion against Mongolian rule in China centuries ago.
China saw a halving of mooncakes sold this year, compared to last year. This is a mix of fast-moving events like the state of consumer spending and longer term factors including gifting culture and attitudes to health and fitness.
The economy
The consumer economy seems to be doing worse than industrial output. Youth unemployment is still an issue.
Gifting culture
China saw a crackdown on premium priced mooncakes as part of a government move against ‘excessive consumption‘ driven by societal excess and ‘money worship’. This overall movement has dampened luxury sales. The Chinese government stopped officials buying mooncakes a decade ago as part of a crackdown on corruption.
Some consumers just aren’t into them
They were as divisive as Christmas cake is in Irish and British households. Brands like Haagen-Daz and Starbucks have looked to reinvent mooncakes into something more palatable.
Health and fitness
Health and fitness has been steadily growing as a trend in China. A number of reasons have been at play including changing beauty standards. Chinese women are still going to favour slimness over muscle, but home workouts and running have been increasing in popularity. The fitness industry has been growing and the Chinese government has also tried to foster interest in winter sports. So there would be a good reason to avoid ruining all the hard work that you put in by eating mooncakes.
Why Do Workers Dislike Inflation? Wage Erosion and Conflict Costs* by Joao Guerreiro, Jonathon Hazell, Chen Lian and Christina Patterson – workers must take costly actions (“conflict”) to have nominal wages catch up with inflation, meaning there are welfare costs even if real wages do not fall as inflation rises. We study a menu-cost style model, where workers choose whether to engage in conflict with employers to secure a wage increase. We show that, following a rise in inflation, wage catchup resulting from more frequent conflict does not raise welfare. Instead, the impact of inflation on worker welfare is determined by what we term “wage erosion”—how inflation would lower real wages if workers’ conflict decisions did not respond to inflation. As a result, measuring welfare using observed wage growth understates the costs of inflation. We conduct a survey showing that workers are willing to sacrifice 1.75% of their wages to avoid conflict. Calibrating the model to the survey data, the aggregate costs of inflation incorporating conflict more than double the costs of inflation via falling real wages alone
FMCG
Unilever ends up as a punching bag for Greenpeace and having their purpose blown up. As a campaign idea, the public celebration by the Dove brand team of the 20th anniversary of Dove’s real beauty positioning and creative left themselves open to this. Greenpeace used a skilful reframing in this creative.
The reason why the developing world seems to be disproportionately affected by plastic waste highlighted is for a number of reasons:
A lot of and paper and plastic recycling is shipped abroad. It used to go to China, but they declined to accept waste to recycle from 2018 onwards. So this waste went to other markets.
Developing markets have single portion packaging so that FMCG companies can distribute via neighbourhood shops and sell the product for the price a consumer can afford.
Plastic is easier to colour, manufacture, package and transport than glass, metal or coated paper. Biodegradable or effective post-use supply chains are well behind where they should be. And even if you were open to recycling, there may be brand issues.
The pairing of advertisers with consumers close to the point of purchase via rich, first-party data is leading to better ROI relative to other channels for some advertisers and is cited as a key driver of increasing retail media investment.
Retail media is growing in double digits every year; it currently accounts for around 14% of global ad spend and is projected to account for 22.7% of online advertising by 2026.
Retail media is no longer a ‘medium’ in the conventional sense but is instead evolving into an infrastructure underpinning the entire digital advertising ecosystem.
I had used SCART for a long time. The large parallel port plugs and stiff coaxial cables that looked as if they were limbs that had fallen of a cyberpunk twisted oak, were just part of the living room. Even if you hadn’t looked behind the TV cabinet, you maybe seen them as part of the flight cased TV and laser disc combo back when karaoke first took off as an activity in your local pub. Or the connection between a pub’s TV for Sky Sports and the set-top box held up high on the pub wall for punters to enjoy the game with their drink.
That was up until their replacement by HDMI cables, TOSLINK and ethernet cables in my home TV set-up over the past ten years. SCART was actually the name of the French radio and television makers association who developed the standard back in the mid-1970s. SCART came along as TVs were becoming more reliable and one started to see the decline of the TV rental market.
My parents first TV that they bought in the UK was a HMV-branded set with glowing vacuum tubes in the back despite a relatively modern looking TV case with push buttons similar to this one. SCART came along just a few years later.
A lot of the SCART features assumed that consumers would move to larger TVs with better displays and sound that would come to dominate the living room of European homes. And they were right, though through much of the 1980s many homes still had a 13″ colour portable TV.
SCART became compulsory for televisions sold in France from 1980 onwards. The standard was sufficiently robust and scalable for it to be used in transmitting 1080p high definition video as HDMI came to prominence. France eventually revoked their compulsory adoption of SCART in 2015.
Things that we take as standard on HDMI like using the VCR, set-top box or disc player to turn on the TV, were also standard on SCART from the late 1970s. You could daisy chain equipment together, which was important for people who were early adopters of satellite receivers, cable TV boxes and laser disc players.
SCART came at a time when globalisation moved the gravity of consumer electronics further east. First to Japan, then Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Malaysia and eventually China. Brands like Philips, Grundig, Nokia, Nordmende, Thomson and Ferguson were swept to the side by likes of Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sharp, LG and Samsung.
The SCART socket and plug were clever designs. You could only put them in the right way around and for something with 21 pins in they were not only robust but easy to plug and plug out again. Though once you had a SCART connection set up, you left it well alone.
China’s property crisis is stirring protests across the country – Nikkei Asia – Around 50 to 70 demonstrations are now occurring monthly, though August saw about 100 worker-led protests, three times as many as the same month a year earlier. Since June 2022, demonstrations have occurred in 276 cities nationwide. The protests have been somewhat concentrated in wealthier cities, particularly Shenzhen, Xi’an and Zhengzhou, and together have involved tens of thousands of people.
How Liverpool’s legendary Club 051 was brought back from the brink of demolition – Features – Mixmag – “The nightclub in itself is a thing of the past,” he continues. “Most of the stuff people class as nightclubs now are bars or bar-restaraunts that have DJs playing in there and it’s booze culture. There is industrial clubs, especially in London – but in Liverpool, there isn’t really any.” It’s difficult to disagree with Lee, being in this space with its pillars and it’s expansive-yet-intimate atmosphere feels markedly different to being in the kind of modern venues that tend to be of a similar capacity in the UK — converted warehouses and industrial spaces, with a routine approach of sticking decks and the end of the room alongside the soundsystem and a bar at the back
Design
Language Log » Eddie Bauer – young people either can’t read or don’t want cursive fonts according to this Eddie Bauer rebrand
Case Study | Fashion’s New Rules For Sports Marketing | BoF – When the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games begin in July 2024, LVMH brands will have a significant presence. Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Berluti will design uniforms and Chaumet will create the medals. This is the first time LVMH will sponsor individual athletes. This “premium” partnership highlights the growing importance of sports to the fashion industry.
Survey reveals surprising age trend among paid subscribers of electronic comics in Japan | SoraNews24 – an Internet survey conducted by Oricon ME between May 17 and June 7 of this year revealed. According to 10,438 e-comic reader respondents between the ages of 15-79 who read e-comics at least once per week, the age demographic that subscribed most frequently for these services, at 50.5 percent, was those in their 50s. Conversely, the age group that subscribed least frequently, at 6.2 percent, was those between 10 to 19 years old.
Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats—With Weapons Tested on Palestinians | The New Republic – “It’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist,” said Eli Pinko, the former head of Israel’s Defense Export Control Agency, in 2021. “I would like to see each of you face this dilemma and say: ‘No, we will champion human rights in the other country.’” Under this ethos, the Israeli economy quickly “abandoned oranges for hand grenades,” as one critic memorably quipped. After the Six-Day War in 1967, when the 19-year-old nation launched a preemptive strike on its neighbors—taking over the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights—a new era in Israeli politics began
The Russian Way of War | Foreign Affairs – Russia has long been home to creative thinking in both conventional and nonconventional warfare. In the conventional arena, during the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet military thinkers generated novel ideas such as the concept of deep battle—breaking through enemy lines and creating a continuous moving front. These ideas shaped, and continue to shape, NATO thinking. In the unconventional space, Soviet influence was even more profound. From its founding days, Soviet leaders developed a body of ideas and practices about subversive conflict, including forging documents, co-opting agents abroad, and establishing disinformation campaigns. An early example was the groundbreaking Operation Trest. Carried out in the 1920s, Trest operatives established fictitious underground political cells in Europe in the 1920s to infiltrate anti-Bolshevik groups and lure their members back to the Soviet Union.
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records | WIRED – The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs’ departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T’s infrastructure—a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had “serious concerns about the legality” of the DAS program, adding that “troubling information” he’d received “would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress.” That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified”
IPSOS conducts CX research on an annual basis. They surveyed 1,000 CX (customer experience) specialists around the world about the current state of CX in their businesses. The IPSOS CX research painted a complex picture of organisations. Key take outs of the CX research:
82% of respondents believed that CX investment will provide a competitive edge, but only 52% were expecting an increase investment over the next 12 months.
28% of respondents admitted that their organisation’s CX was worse than promised and only 15% of respondents consider their organisations ‘CX leaders’.
Only 52% have CX governance policies in place.
At the present time the majority of CX leaders have data integration issues and 46% now have to integrate AI as well, adding to their business challenge.
Environmentally friendly clothing brand Patagonia gets called out about the ‘greenwashing’ design of its buffalo work boots by the Rose Anvil YouTube channel who specialise in analysing boot and shoe design.
Standard Model: The Chanel J12 Eclipse Set – LUXUO – interesting, particularly given the manufacturing problems that Rolex has had with dual colour ceramic bezels. Chanel has managed to master this and master it across the whole watch. Matching bezel and case divisions.
Interesting analysis on supercar prices.
Profile of Lacoste.
Marketing
A few days of lunch time viewing from the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) media planning and strategy summit. Interesting mix of presentations and case studies.
Really interesting case study on McDonalds and how the brand has evolved over two decades in the UK.
Enquire Within tends to appear in book collections for people of a certain age, or, where the book collector has inherited part of their collection. Spending time on the family farm in Ireland during my childhood, I used to see a copy of an early 20th century vintage sit next to a dog-eared copy of Old Moore’s Almanac (not to be mistaken for a separate UK publication: Old Moore’s Almanack), Old Moore’s was used for deciding what to plant in the garden besides potatoes.
During the bank holiday weekend, staying with my parents, emergency works on a water main managed to take out the broadband and electricity along their road. I went back though my Dad’s boxes of books and leafed through my parents copy of Enquire Within. My Dad thinks he had received the copy as a gift from a the owner of a second hand book store in Birkenhead market right after he had moved into the first house that my parents had bought. But he can’t be certain. Given that the outer gloss paper wrap around the hardback inner cover uses a font that looks similar to Eurostile and the price is in decimal – I guess it’s from the early to mid-1970s.
Enquire Within could be thought of as a primer for everyday life. Topics included how to play a variety of card games, basic first aid, the basics on taxation and education with the addresses of the UK government departments responsible. There was a travel section with a few paragraphs on every western European country, which had been written by the Financial Times travel correspondent. The gardening section went into much more depth explaining what a hardy annual and hardy perennial were, alongside the correct way to build a compost heap, how to dig drills and prune roses.
At the back there is an exhaustive list of children’s names together with their meanings.
Enquire Within and the origins of the web
What I didn’t find out until later on was that Tim Berners-Lee was partly inspired to create a predecessor to what would become the world wide web by a Victorian vintage copy of Enquire Within that was in his parents house when he was growing up. The system was called ENQUIRE and seemed to be similar conceptually to HyperCard or a Wiki. The World Wide Web came out of Berners-Lee’s efforts to integrate disparate systems including ENQUIRE together to facilitate better collaboration between CERN research projects.
This video on money laundering is as much of interest for the phenomenon of quality documentaries on YouTube as it is for recycling known truths about HSBC.
The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Search And Product Discovery, Q3 2023, Surfaces The Challenges Of AI Unchecked – Don’t let buzzwords distract you from what your customers — and your business — need. Vendors often use their own terminology, especially in a market that hasn’t had a Forrester Wave evaluation in place already. One will talk about how extremely relevant their results are, while another will scoff at “relevancy” as outdated methodology. You’ll hear semantic, vector, hybrid, ML, AI, and all sorts of branded names for products and functions
Security
The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System | WIRED – the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap. – This reminds me of the blue boxes used for phone phreaking decades ago.
Adobe’s AI diversity auditor | Patent Drop – is seeking to patent a system for “diversity auditing” using computer vision. Essentially, this system uses facial detection and image classification to break down photos of employees and slot them into categories based on certain physical traits and characteristics. Adobe’s system looks through several images and detects faces in each one, then classifies each face based on a predicted “sensitive attribute” relating to “protected classes of individuals,” such as race, age or gender. For example, Adobe noted, this system may classify images from a company’s website, then compare its predictions to a “comparison population.”
Technology
Mexico’s Microchip Advantage | Foreign Affairs – there are significant hurdles to making Mexico a bigger player in supply chains for chips and advanced technologies. The country lacks its Asian rivals’ existing networks of high-technology firms. Until now, investments in the sphere have been sparse. To change this situation, Mexican political and business leaders need a clearer strategy for attracting semiconductor investment. The dividends, both for Mexican industry and for U.S. supply chain security, could be significant. Today’s large-scale shift away from China-focused assembly operations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a more fully integrated North American semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Despite the United States’ major involvement in many segments of the chip industry, there is at present hardly any semiconductor packaging or assembly in the country and very little anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains a leading role in R&D-intensive segments of the semiconductor industry, including chip design and manufacturing equipment. The CHIPS Act is intended to increase the amount of chip fabrication in the United States. Yet neither the United States nor any country in the Western Hemisphere plays a major role in the final stages of the chip manufacturing process—assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP)—in which semiconductors are tested and assembled into sophisticated packages. The Western Hemisphere also does relatively little assembly of advanced electronic systems that require a lot of chips, such as consumer electronics.
