Archive for June, 2010

I spent my formative years in agency life working with a senior colleague who loved champagne and fine wine - and a weakness for new shoes. Alcohol is often a good social lubricant when building relationships with influencers, but it is lethal when it is mixed with a journalist looking for a story.

Whilst Stanley McCrystal may appear has a footnote in the history of the war on terror for his championing of counterinsurgency warfare tactics in Afghanistan, his most prominent mark was made with a number of cases of BudLight Lime on a coach from Berlin to Paris.

This is where Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings got the juicy material for The Runaway General feature which nuked McCrystal’s career.

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe alcohol and public relations don’t mix. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.

Today’s Financial Times has an article covering Mark Zuckenberg’s presentation at the Cannes Lions advertising festival. In it Zuckenberg talked about four countries that Facebook doesn’t have a lead in: Japan, South Korea, Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

The authors seem to think that Zuckenberg’s remarks about ‘Now for the first time we are focused on doing some specific things in specific countries’ was aimed at conquering these markets. Facebook would need to be very careful to avoid the graveyard of previous efforts by companies like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in these territories.

All of these markets have established communities on products and services that are in many ways superior to Facebook. They have cultures and online behaviours that are markedly different than peers elsewhere, in the case of Korea there are technical standards and three out of the four countries have unique legislative environments.

As Google and Yahoo! have found to their costs, success in China may bring a backlash in their established western audiences.

The challenging geographic focus steered discussions away from other factors that maybe affecting Facebook’s slower growth:

• How have privacy concerns affected their business? How has it affected engagement levels and the user utility?
• How does the user experience suffer from negative network effects of too much noise? Try searching on a particular topic and wading through the morass of groups and pages now available
• Is Facebook now suffering from a lack of clarity of purpose as it has undergone service bloat?
• Are partners and collaborators concerned about being zucked?

This is cross-posted from my personal blog.

You may not have heard it, or it may not have clicked yet, but the “Wavin’ Flag (The Celebration Mix)” by K’nann is a huge plug for Coke and because it is charting, everyday the BBC is giving free air time to Coke’s jingle. Coke are one of the official World Cup sponsors, so their branding is already everywhere and this song is just part of their massive product promotion. In doing so, Coke gets the product placement award for the day and the BBC gets the sucker award.

The advertising is pretty obvious. Right at the beginning of the song, K’naan sings the coke jingle.

If you’re not convinced, have a listen to the very last musical section of this Christmas Coke advertisement.

The song was originally put out by the artist on his album Troubadour, before being added to a charity album for the Haiti Earthquake, but because of the overtones of national pride, it fitted pretty perfectly as an anthem for the World Cup this year. The original mix didn’t have the jingle at the beginning and the lyrics were apparently somewhat darker. However, with some slight amends and constant airplay on TV through Coke commercials, it has become the theme to this years World Cup and a singles hit (as I write this it is currently number 3 in the UK singles chart)

What confuses me is, why is the BBC playing the Coke version? Surely there can be edits that leave out the Coca-Cola jingle? I personally don’t have a problem with Coke using a clever marketing ploy, I’m more concerned that the BBC has either been duped, lazy or has an ironically disturbing lack of popular culture knowledge.

Cross posted with my personal blog.

Nate Lanxon over at Wired (UK) put forward his case for why the Nokia 3210 is the greatest mobile phone ever made. Many of his points about the 3210 certainly are valid and point to flaws in the current range of handsets by many manufacturers, Nokia included.

I personally don’t agree with Nate that those factors made the 3210 the world’s best handset. At the time when Nate was rocking a 3210 I was a dedicated Ericsson customer having first used an Ericsson EH 237 back in 1994. Their handsets had a superior build quality, usually based around a magnesium alloy chassis (apart from a PF768 I had in grey plastic) and an operating system that allowed you to modify your phone to your hearts content. I remember programming in The Prodigy’s No Good Start The Dance as my ringtone on an Ericsson I888 using a list of numbers I had found online.

The phones were also able to be accessorised with with high capacity batteries and offered early data connections via IrDA, ideal for my Palm PDA at the time. Ericsson also managed to do a decent vibration alert which served as an effective under-pillow alarm clock.

My last and best Ericsson phone was the T39. At 86 grams, the smallest lightest phone I have carried. It came with the slim and fat batteries, the fat battery providing a good weeks charge and was one of the first mainstream phones that allowed you to roam effortlessly. My previous I888 and T28 world handsets only allowed you to roam on 900 GSM networks in Europe and 1900 GSM in the US. Whilst it was small it didn’t skimp on features such as Bluetooth and voice-operated commands.

I would argue that for me the Ericsson T39 handset was the best mobile phone ever made. However I am willing to concede that at least one Nokia model could contest this. The merger between Ericsson and Sony brought about some mediocre product design: a trend that has continued to this day in terms of their industrial design if not their software on many of their models.

So I branched out to a Nokia 6310i. The Nokia 6310i has been popular with road warriors for a long time. It is robust, has a ridiculiously long battery life and was the acme of user experience design in the menu system. Because of its popularity, an eco-system has built up around accessories for the 6310i and refurbishment since Nokia no longer makes the phone. This was cross-posted from my personal blog.