Ged Carroll

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  • That was 2005

    January 2005

    Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, ten years after the peak of the Happy Mondays. London creative team Lee and Dan made an Al Qeada inspired calling card for Volkswagen that managed to leak out on to the web. Analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston won the monthly award for stating the bleeding obvious. We did a bit of homegrown analysis with the help of information from Popbitch to work out just how much News International made from the Prince Harry Nazi pictures. We also found that the Watchman character that the rc personality most resembled was The Comedian, more details on testing your Watchman Personality Inventory here.

    February 2005

    Words of the month were Mum Truck and KAGOY (kids get older, younger). Hunter S Thompson killed himself and half the media world pretended that they were avid readers of his work. The books of the month were Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (another pioneer of the gonzo school of journalism). The US Army released details around its successful word-of-mouth marketing campaign to attract recruits. America’s Army a realistic 3D game garnered interest in soldiering as a career and was far more fruitful than their television advertising campaigns. Bob Cringely highlighted how 25 billion USD needed to be invested by VC funds in the next 18 months or else they would lose their management fees. This of course wouldn’t have anything to do with the bubbling up of Web 2.0 would it? Carly Fiorina was finally ousted from H-P much to the relief of its employees. Sci-Fi London hosted a fantastic all-nighter of Shaw Brothers classics including Super Infra Man and Monkey Goes West.

    March 2005

    renaissance chambara turned 1 years-old. Forrester mapped out trends in consumer electronics for 2005. March’s word was Search Arbitrage. Seymour Hersh highlighted the Pentagon’s plans for axis-of-evil club member Iran. Hersh’s pioneering journalistic approach contrasted with general media malaise. The Sony PSP picked up a lot of interest on the web with some hailing it as the new iPod, I don’t think so…. And most importantly the rc towers local pub got recognised as Pub of the Year by the Evening Standard.

    April 2005

    PR gossip blog Spin Bunny was shut down for the first time as an unnamed PR agency called in the lawyers. Red Bull’s Art of Can exhibition brought a bit of culture to the Truman brewery. Word of the month is Kronenbourg. H-P manages to launch survey results that make them look foolish. There was less content overall as we were burning the midnight candle at work.

    May 2005

    Flying Records, one of the UK’s foremost dance record shops finally closed its shutters after ten years at the forefront of the scene, however its spirit lives on as Andrew Baker now champions new tracks online working for distributor Goya Music. Palm launched the LifeDrive and it didn’t look that impressive compared to an iPod, retail therapy was thus avoided. Michelle Delio was found to have made up some of her stories that she contributed to Wired News. The word of the month was Sachet Marketing.

    June 2005

    Country Music Television appoints a vice president of Dukes of Hazzard in a brilliantly executed PR campaign to promotes its re-runs of the original series. Omega releases its Planet Ocean watch – the watch that the Seamaster should be. WTF Apple goes Intel! Web 2.0 starts looking bubblicious. It was a few months since the Miami Winter Music festival and the Ibiza season was just starting to kick-off so a bumper month was had in the vinyl stakes. Michael Jackson is found not guilty, but the court of public opinion isn’t so sure. The word of the month is Mommy Consultant, Burson-Marsteller’s phrase e-fluential missed out because it was too close to effluent and we wouldn’t want you to be under the opinion that we thought all bloggers were full of sh!t now would we?

    July 2005

    Cracks start to show in the eBay edifice. Fatigue for consumerism starts to set in. Coke rolls out their Love poster campaign, arguably the best piece of creative this year. The ongoing rising price of oil gives Hubbert’s Peak a mainstream audience as consumers wake up to the fact that oil isn’t going to get any cheaper or more plentiful. The New York Times celebrated the tenth birthday of e-commerce.

    August 2005

    Wired issues its ten-year netrospective ‘celebrating’ the original of the bubble with the Netscape IPO. Citizen journalism sees its first cynical cash in with the launch of Scoopt, a picture agency for the general public and their camera phone. Paparazzi sleep easy though. Music industry bodies blame everybody but themselves for the continued under-performance of their industry. Bob Cringely launches his NerdTV series of interviews and Stussy’s 25th (XXV) anniversary collection is full swing. Towards the end of the month I managed to survive Silicon Valley. In Utah, the heavy mob is used to deal with kids listening to repetitive beats in an incident rather like the infamous police raid in Nelson near Blackburn back in the day. I am sure American’s everywhere feel safer already. The harvest of quality dance music on an acid house tip.

    September 2005

    Chigger is the word. Nick Love’s film The Business reminds us why the 1980s were so good and so crap at the same time. Palm previews a Windows device, Dell stumbles and I try hard not to snigger, its especially hard when some bright spark calls Dell’s answer to the iPod Shuffle the Dell Ditty and styles it like a Ronson lighter. Apple launches the iPod Nano and gadgeteers recoil in horror from the Motorola ROKR. Nestle re-releases the Texan bar. Geek-in-chief at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan Schwartz, appeals to the troops to stop leaking confidential news via their blogs; via a blog!

    October 2005

    Designers Burro shut up shop, while Criminal opens a Covent Garden boutique and Matmos see sense and re-release the Telstar lamp. Disgraced analyst Harry Blodgett starts his own blog. Super Southerner is the phrase of the moment. Spin Bunny gets shut down for the second time, this time it looks like its permanent as the entire site is removed from Typepad, speculation is that a South Bank based agency was responsible for letting loose the dogs of law. The tune of the moment is Tiger Stripes – Spirited Away. In a pre-Halloween push Burger King’s clumsy viral marketing efforts get unmasked by Slate.

    November 2005

    Lynx launches a bespoke perfume in conjunction with Oki-Ni, research shows that music downloads have plateaued proving the proving the point that you can only buy so much crap. Talking of crap, Hypercolour looks like it may be making a come back. AOL makes its first interesting move in years by taking TV to the web and my even have a good business model. The word is Shorty (at least according to DJ Tim Westwood).

    December 2005

    Christmas comes in with a whimper and Sony messes up a street marketing campaign for the PSP. rc floats the concept of a media bond and futures market to capitalise on the digitisation of content, the long tail and too much sloshing around waiting to be invested. Bootlegs mixes of Aretha Franklin and Pink Floyd move the feet so that the mind will follow. The word of the month is Uncanny Valley. Designers Terratag have some awesome gear in their latest fashion collection. Amazon take a Hermann Goring approach to email marketing in the final run-up to Christmas. A brief trip to Ireland left me with a number of contradictory observations about the state of the Celtic Tiger.

    Image courtesy of Sanrio. More related content here.

  • 3iYing & teen marketing

    3iYing

    A design and marketing company called 3iYing has enlisted the help of 15 – 25 year old girls to help develop more effective marketing strategies.Earlier this year a group of 8 young women enlisted by 3iYing walked into the Virgin Mobile office and told them their teen marketing strategy was all wrong. The girls pointed out that pay-as-you-go tariffs cost too much for teen girls who usually resort to using ‘guilt-tactics’ on their parents to get them to pay.

    3iYing spurs guilt marketing

    Virgin listened and subsequently ran a campaign in CosmoGIRL that included tear out phones that allowed teens to make fake calls in front of their parents, thereby pushing their ‘guilt button’. 3iYing’s Chief Executive Heidi Dangelmaier came up with this approach having been a leading voice in girl market trends. The teen demographic has increased by 17 per cent over the last 10 years, Moreover the financial muscle of these teens in terms of home spending is growing even faster.

    Companies like Virgin, realising they cannot properly relate to this market are turning to alternative approaches like that offered by 3iYing. User-centred design and marketing has always proved a successful approach, by designing relevant services and consumer experiences. By listening to what teens really want will make for more compelling, teen-centric brands and products.

    Teens also provide insights into their parents, who were the best people to advise on how to manipulate the parents. Parents still hold the purse strings, but teens are the key to accessing their spend. Kudos to Steve. More related content here.

    Update: USA Today has an article about Gen Y in the workplace, basically they want a dot.com style work environment with a decent pension plan. Sounds similar to Gen X really, apart from the fact they are more mouthy and high maintenance. Kudos to Blake Barbera.

  • IT First Look + more things

    IT First Look by Forrester Research

    Forrester Research has some interesting video and audio sessions attached to its IT First Look (November 9, 2005) – subscription required. Forrester’s work on IT First Look is interesting because it touches on how technology and web companies are failing in their marketing communications with consumers.

    IT First Look touches on how these companies understand how build the stuff, but do not understand how the consumers really use and adopt it.

    AT Kearney on mobile media

    Thanks to Ian Wood who pointed out an interesting thought piece and associated research by management consultants AT Kearney. Some interesting data in there which I haven’t had a full chance to check out but two points immediately leapt out:

    • Western European survey respondents were less interested in downloading music on to their mobile phones than their counterparts in Asia, The US and Russia. This and a flatlining of online music sales in the US since May this year indicates that the post-iPod age may be upon us
    • Interactive entertainment like games was less popular and did not have as much repeat demand as other mobile services. Interactivity is something that tech advocates bleat on about since before the arrival of the CD-ROM, but it fails to take account of the different types of people and the various ways that they like get and work with information.

    Mobile society

    The FT devoted much of its magazine over the weekend to mobility and its impact on society. The main article by Richard Waters, their US technology correspondent can be read here. What is really interesting is the way people have absorbed mobility into their cultures, rather a brave new world occurring like all the tech-mavens like to crow about.

    37 Signals

    Salon.com has an interesting article about 37 Signals a Chicago based software company that is making waves. The company has developed lean, responsive web-service based software applications for project management and personal productivity.

    Odeo

    Odeo is a way of making podcast publication and consumption much easier, it has the ease-of-use that one would expect from one of the founders of Blogger.

    Firedrop and Basecamp

    When I worked during the dot.com boom I briefly used a great free document management service called FireDrop to manage approvals from press releases to appraisal forms for my team. There has seldom been a web service that has impressed me since, however BaseCamp looks like it might do that.

    Unlike many web services offerings it is truly platform-agnostic.

  • Ireland by Frank Delaney

    Frank Delaney’s Ireland was one of the most enjoyable books that I have read in a long time. The book has been compared to James Michener‘s books and Alex Haley’s Roots – fiction based on history with more elemental truths in it than most non-fiction.

    The book is complex and multi-layered, but easy-to-read. The story focuses on a young boy in a middle class household in rural Ireland during the 1950s and how his imagination and interest in the country’s myth and history is fired by a traditional storyteller. His search for the storyteller unravels some of the elements of his own family story which people have sheltered from him.

    The book accurately reflects the social environment of my parents Ireland. A rural-based community bound by morality, coming to terms with its fractured identity post-independence and oppressed by its own family secrets. It highlights the reasons why I used to get chastised as a child when I was willful or bold (and I wasn’t actually that bad) with ‘you’ll disgrace us’ or ‘you’ll disgrace the family name’.

    The clash with modernity lived on in the small farms that I grew up on for much of my childhood. Electricity made it to my uncle’s farm when I was a toddler and I can remember helping to foot the turf, drinking stewed tea and red lemonade along with a packed lunch as we worked in the bog, filling the high sided cart with sods of turf to be dragged home by a donkey and stored in a shed down the yard.

    I was in primary school before they moved away the traditional cocks of hay to bales and sudden bounty of shiny nylon twine that tied the bales was a wonder material that held fittings, extended electric fences and acted as a temporary way of securing a gate to a post. The excitement of making silage with all the heavy machinery running around the place compensated for the eventual reduction in the nylon twine supply.

    My only criticism is that the book portrays this rural life in a rosy way like the Famous Five books of Enid Blyton and her ‘scones and lashings and lashings of ginger beer’. Whilst the upside of a closely knit community would have been more a sociable people that cars, a faster pace of life and commuting no longer facilitate. Life is hard and it requires commitment to get up and ‘fodder’ animals in the early hours of a winters morning, clear out stables, dig out potatoes out of a storage heap that’s frozen over, pull in hay in the baking sun, dig a turf bank or repair ditches.<

    The Raleigh bicycle with one gear and a heavy frame that you could get in any colour so long as it was black was the standard mode of transport. They lasted forever, it would be common to see these rust covered scrap heaps parked up and then the owners come along jump and go. This was also the only way to get your shopping (or messages as it would be called). It had levers rather than brake cables with thick chromed steel rods and linkages running to both the front and the rear brake pads. That may mean a round trip of 14 – 20 miles with your shopping on a bike.

    The only concession to modernity would be a seat protector – there would be a plastic fitted shower cap put on over the leather coil sprung seat so that when the owner came out to ride the bicycle away he would not have the discomfort of a wet bum. More book reviews can be found here.

  • Loose connected networks

    In order to tell you about loose connected networks, I wanted to tell you about my friend Heather. During the dot com era when I started my agency career, Heather and I were pod (as in cubicle) neighbours at the same agency for 2 1/2 years.

    The last time we worked together was almost five years ago. However we have managed to keep in touch over the past five years via email on an irregular basis, the occasional phone call and kept up to speed with the happenings in each others lives.

    Heather is a classic example of a loose connected networks within my professional life.One which would not have been realistically possible without the benefit of email. This network maintenance with people who I have known through different phases of my life is a key example of how the Internet has altered our social fabric and social networks such as LinkedIn, SoFlow and Orkut have tried to codify this process.

    The value of loose connected networks to me is very tangible. I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley whilst at Yahoo!. Heather met me at San Francisco airport, gave me a tour of Silicon Valley and on my one night off, took me to the Sunnyvale town market and custom car show.

    Being in a strange place and being able to kick back with a friend who is a local, but at the same time gets where you are coming from was priceless. Being able to find a bar with a proper Irish fry up with black and white pudding makes her even more valuable!.

    I got to see a more human personal Silicon Valley than some of my peers who dismiss the place as being dull.

    Certainly Sunnyvale felt small, but then why wouldn’t it when most of the major employers provide most of lifes requirements on giant campuses and you can buy everything else at the out-of-town Walmart or Target store. Being a European I was reminded of the small town mythology perpertrated in US films like American Grafitti, Back the Future and ET. Having been to Sunnyvale it all made sense. More ideas related content here.