Tis the Season

It's most definitely that time of year. I was out in Central London last night and stumbled across the opening of the Carnaby Street Christmas lights replete with free cocktails (too strong, tasted synthetic, threw mine away), DJ, a steel drum band and discounts in shops, bars and restaurants in the area. I've never seen it that busy so they were clearly doing something right. My friend and I tried to eat in one of the many local restaurants, but by the time we got there, the wait time was more than 45 minutes so we wandered further into Soho and found somewhere else.

But it's not just Christmas Lights that signal the festive season. It's the battle of the Christmas TV ad. I do love a good Christmas advert. One that tells a story, that is a short film and doesn't oversell the brand they're advertising.

I haven't seen a clear winner yet unlike previous years, and there have been no tear-jerkers yet, but there are some contenders nevertheless.

Very - Get more out of Giving



Debenhams, You Shall Find Your Fairytale Christmas starring Ewan McGregor



M &S Paddington Bear and the Christmas Visitor (I have a soft spot for Paddington!)



Argos, Ready for Take Off




The Vodafone Christmas Love Story with Martin Freeman. Parts 1 - 3 are great. Am eagerly awaiting part 4. Will he get the girl?



And of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without an entry from John Lewis with Moz The Monster



Although these may not be as strong as previous years efforts, they're still beautifully crafted with high production values. Please can we see more of that all year round whether that's on digital or on TV?

Day 10/30 NaBloPoMo

The 25 Most High Tech Cities in the World

The Shard. London's tallest building.

A Facebook friend posted this article today from the World Economic Forum about the world's most high-tech cities. I don't think there are many surprises in there and London comes up as the number 3 behind San Francisco and New York. That's good to know as a Londoner and working in and around tech.

The article makes for interesting reading and highlights the tech strengths of the cities it lists. It's great to see how well represented Europe is. There's also good representation in the USA and Asia. Cities in Africa, Australia and South America don't make the top twenty five.

The article also reiterates that world populations are becoming ever more urban. It's something I'm aware of. It's certainly happening in the UK. The regions are suffering as London grows. The tension between London and the rest of the country also grows. As someone who regularly spends time in the regions as well as London, I can feel the difference. It's like I'm living two lives sometimes. My London life and my Midlands life.  I note this quote from the article:

'In less than 35 years, the World Health Organization (sic) estimates that two-thirds of the world population will be living in urban areas (PDF) . That's an additional 2.5 billion people. The cities that will flourish the most are those that rely on cutting edge technologies and create opportunities for people to develop new ones.'

How the world will sustain another 2.5 billion people, I really don't know. I imagine we'll have to learn to live in smaller homes and using a smaller environmental footprint. As for transport to get that extra 2.5 billion people moving around - be that country to country or a commute to work, that's a whole load of extra traffic fumes unless we move to cleaner energy sources. I rather like breathing. And having spent time in hospital with breathing difficulties, I know first-hand how debilitating it is and how particles in the air are really bad news for our lungs.

As for the comment about cutting edge technologies... that's making me go 'hmmm'. What's important is to make sure that things work surely? We need reliability and consistency of service and things working and not just cutting-edge technology. We need to be able to roll services out and not have them in isolation. We need, I hate to use the cliche, but 'joined-up thinking'. We absolutely need to make things better and we need innovation to drive that. And we definitely need to experiment. We probably don't do enough of that as start-ups, entrepreneurs and investors are usually chasing the money above all else. We also need a population who are educated and have the skills to drive this forward. That's a huge challenge to know what and how to teach our children, teens and young people when their lives will be so vastly different in a short space of time and we're educating them for jobs that don't even exist yet.

I'm thinking we're possible now in a post-app world with the rise of AI, machine learning and robots. And that has major implications when it comes to privacy, security, ethics and unintended consequences. I don't think success is limited to being cutting edge.

Counting up, I've spent time in 10 of the top 25 cities, albeit a few of them before the massive growth of tech in the last 15 years or so. How about you?

Day 9/30 NaBloPoMo

Showing up

Woody Allen famously said that 80% of success was simply showing up. The older I get, the truer I think that sentiment is. And as Martin Bihl points out, it's certainly true of advertising. And I would say, it's (sadly) especially true of how online and mobile advertising currently works. A lot of advertising works simply by being there when your competitor isn't.

I'm consistently disappointed with the dismal quality of a lot of advertising, the volume of advertising messages via all channels and the desperation of ad networks to sell their inventory, of ad agencies wanting to buy eyeballs and of advertisers clutching at straws to make us buy something we really don't need. 

As an early mobile marketing pioneer, I'm also frustrated at the lack of innovation when it comes to mobile advertising in particular. We have all these wonderful, unique qualities to a mobile phone in terms of location, convenience, uniquely personal, and many other sensors and we just use them for analytics that then drives more dismal advertising to our screens, whatever screen that may be. Where are the new ways to connect with customers beyond pushing them a bunch of unwanted messages? Where are the nifty ways to improve on customer service to help us retain customers? There has to be a better way than sending relentless 'buy me' emails, surely?

When I started at ZagMe with Russell Buckley 17 years ago, and my younger and less experienced of life, really thought we could change the advertising world for the better by being more relevant, increasing the quality of advertising whilst decreasing the volume of it. I guess greed, desperation and a lack of imagination got in the way and, instead we have the online advertising model of advertising shoehorned on to a tiny screen.

Martin's post on the topic of advertisers showing up is well worth a read and he says it much better than I can. Check it out here.

It's not all bad though. We are seeing some quality TV adverts on our screens in the UK. The current Warburton's advert, Pride and Breadjudice, with Peter Kay is a particular favourite of mine. 

Day 8/30 NaBloPoMo

Children, their mobile habits and the new Monqi phone

It's weird to think that a mobile phone has been a major part of my communications life for the last 17 years. It's weird to look back at how I used to communicate and what my attitude was to telephony and technology. It's also weird to note how my chosen methods of communication have largely switched from voice to digital text based - email, blogging, social media, messaging. It's even weirder to think that some people have never used a 'dial' on a phone, think that it's perfectly normal to have a video call or to share photos that disappear moments after you've taken them. Nevertheless these things have happened.

I had a press release land in my inbox this morning. It's to promote a new smartphone, Monqi, aimed at children and parents being sold exclusively at Carphone Warehouse. The phone has a tracking app and parental controls. Their marketing team have put together quite a cute video showing a Granddad being taught how to use his smartphone by his grandson. It's a couple of minutes and it does give us a glimpse into the technology generation gap.



The press release goes further about their research and tells us by the age of 14, the average child will have sent more than 35k texts, 30k WhasApp messages and spent more than three sold weeks on video chat. The teenager will also have spent the equivalent of six months looking at their phone during that period, averaging 135 minutes use a day. Young people also spend over an hour a day browsing social media sites. They also expect a quick response to everything - typically within 15 minutes.

This does beg the question around what the long-term effects might be of such heavy phone use. I'm also wondering what behaviours or activities it's replacing. And for sure, parents need to be monitoring this and also their own behaviour as most of these habits are inherited by children from parents and other adults. Both adults and children in the survey said they were spending over two hours a day on their phones, with adults admitting that was too long. With children getting their first smartphone on average by the age of 10, and parents routinely using tablet devices and phones to keep their toddlers amused, these screen habits start young and die hard. I think we could all do with trying to find the right balance between screen time and other activities.

Other stats from the results revealed that 60%of  under-14s said their phone is the first thing they check in the morning and last thing at night. 40%  youngsters said they would feel 'lost' without their smartphone for a day with only 7% believing they would feel 'free' or 'relieved' without it.

Young respondents said the best thing about their smartphones was being able to stay in contact with friends and family, and playing games. That last one I have trouble with. There's not a lot of difference between some mobile games and the psychology behind a slot machine. The mindless manipulation of a screen with the reward being bright shiny lights and some noise.

Psychologist Dr Becky Spelman commented on the findings: "The survey found that children invest a great amount of importance in the ability to stay connected – checking their smartphones before bed and as soon as they wake in the morning.“Some parents may be alarmed by this, comparing their children’s experiences to their own childhood when technology was not as prevalent.“Panic is not the solution, nor is denial. It is inevitable that your child will use technology, so it’s your job to help them navigate the digital waters safely, and set boundaries."

"The survey also found that there are benefits to kids having a smartphone - parents can track their child’s location and have peace of mind knowing that they can be contacted if a problem arises.“This gives the youngster a new found independence – which is so important in an age of cotton-wool-parenting.”

Hmm, I'm not sure about the tracking and the cotton wool parenting thing. Kids will be able to outsmart a grown up trying to track them on a phone. But hey, maybe this generation is different in that their attitudes to being tracked has changed. Maybe the phone tracking thing has finally found its time and place in Monqi? A parent of today's 10 year old may be in their mid thirties and has spent most of their life with digital tools of some kind so their attitudes will be different from my generation.

I've written about a previous service doing something similar back in 2012 and prior to that, there were a number of devices and phones trying to do a very similar thing but in a less sophisticated mobile media world. I didn't think much of any of them if I'm honest.

Will Monqi do any better as they can offset the tracking element with access to games and communication channels to connect with their friends? I think they may have cracked it finally. The phone looks quite snazzy. We're in different digital culture with a new generation of parents and our phones can do a lot more than 5, 10 or even 15 years ago when the whole 'child tracking' thing started. Time will tell.

Sample size 1000. Research was commissioned by Monqi Smartphone. Source of information, and additional findings is here.

Day 7/30 #NaBloPoMo done

Maps, Open Data and the Call for Cleaner Air

Screenshot of the Clean Air Merton Map of Air Quality results across Merton, London.

Those of you who know me personally, know that I've suffered with allergic rhinitis (that's hay fever triggered by more than just pollen) since I was a child. After a hiatus from symptoms in my teens and early twenties, a spell working in fashion retail in Knightsbridge with our store doors open all day and the relentless stop-start traffic outside caused my allergic rhinitis to return with a vengeance and it has never yet relented. This summer, during the heatwave week when NOx levels were exceptionally high in London I suffered, what I now know was an asthma attack. I had a worse one a few weeks later and ended up in hospital in the urgent care unit hardly able to breathe. Both attacks probably triggered by air pollution. This isn't trivial. That second asthma attack was very frightening indeed. I read someone describing an asthma attack as feeling like you're drowning in air. That pretty much sums it up.

Reading around the topic of asthma and pollution, I discovered that my local area is a hotspot for pollution and registered twice the legal levels of NOx in recent tests. It's a busy main road, there's a roundabout and lots of traffic lights and there's a lot of traffic that stops and starts causing much of the pollution. There are roads just like that all over London and up and down the country. I knew that parts of London had problems with air pollution, but I didn't realise how close to home it is. Air pollution is an issue which respects no boundaries.

As a result, I'm all for having cleaner air to breathe and luckily for me there are people already working towards this in my local area from several different community groups. They've teamed up and shared their air quality results with those of the council and mapped them on Google Maps. It makes for interesting reading. You'll need to be looking at Wimbledon, Mitcham and Morden to see the results. The black markers are over the legal NOx levels, the yellow markers are not far off the legal levels and the blue markers (there are only 2 of them across the borough) are well below the legal levels.

That's pretty depressing. The area where I live has lots of green space. I live within walking distance of Figge's Marsh, Mitcham Common, Ravensbury Park, Morden Hall Park, Tooting Common and Beddington Park. Yet still we're suffering. The picture will be similar up and down the country.

Mitcham Cricket Green Community & Heritage has lots of action points to improve air quality in Merton and one hopes that both normal citizens as well as those in authority in local government and business take note and take action.

The good news is that this data is  open data and therefore public which means anyone can see it and contribute to it. A big thank you to the contributors and administrators. This is important work and necessary to help us understand the impact we are having on our own environment. If we know what we're dealing with, we can find solutions. Let's all work towards having cleaner air to breathe.

Day 6/30 NaBloPoMo

Big questions for Big Tech

I've been participating in a discussion on a friend's Facebook page in the last few days. He's frustrated about the content he sees on Facebook, is blaming it on the algorithms and as a result wants to quit Facebook save for keeping a profile live so that he can be messaged by friends and family.

Fair enough, you might say. I know more than a few people who 'don't do Facebook'. I respect their reasons although it makes including them in a conversation tricky when they're not there. It's like trying to have a conversation with your mates in the pub and one of them is not with you.

I pointed out that one of the reasons I use Facebook is that I'm able, to a certain degree at least, to customise what I do and don't see. I do tell Facebook about the adverts I do and don't like. I turn people and pages off and on as I see fit. I've turned off nearly all mainstream news sites - the constant barrage of war, pestilence and famine is overwhelming when there's very little I can do about it and it was just making me feel depressed.

But there is a bigger discussion point and that's how Facebook polices the content shared on its service, especially in light of the allegation of Russian manipulation of voters in the US election - specifically by manipulating Facebook and the distribution of fake news content there.

I know fake news goes on. I do check my sources more often than not. I rarely take things as read when a friend posts a headline. Equally, I try to understand the bias, left or right, of TV and print media too. That takes time and effort. And most of the time, most of the people can't be bothered to do that or don't know that they could or should be doing that.

But coming back to the Russian fake news manipulation thing... that is actually a very big deal. It raises questions of ethics, what should and shouldn't be allowed to be published and how it's policed. This video from Professor Galloway is definitely worth a couple of minutes of your time.



h/t George Nimeh of Nimeh & Partners.

See also this article from the FT 'Ukraine says it warned Facebook of Russia fake news in 2015'.

Day 5/30 NaBloPoMo 2017