https://www.itv.com/hub/7-63-up-uk/2a1866a0001
‘Give me a child and I will show you the man.’
That old Jesuit or ancient Greek aphorism is alive and well. I’m at 56 and UPward myself and one of my classmates, George Devine’s funeral, was on Wednesday. Arthritis creeps around my bones, but I’m still gloriously alive. When I went to school Mrs Boyle taught us that 9 x 7 = 63 (UP). My life has been in eight instalments, but I’ve followed the nine episodes of this soap opera and read into it things I already know. Class is alive and flourishing in Britain as it was in 1964; a half-hour documentary made by Granada, a World in Action, looked at the state of the nation through children’s eyes.
The villains of the series, as in life, have always been to me the upper classes. I’m like that old priest in Father Ted that when drink is mentioned his eyes glaze and he jumps out of his chair. With me it’s Tories. Fucking, Tory scum.
The first series (7UP) shows us three boys representative of that class, aged 7, Andrew, Charles and John. They are shown singing Waltzing Matilda in Latin. In their posh English accents they also boast about what newspapers they read. The Financial Times and Guardian. And tell the viewer exactly what prep school. public school and universities they will attend. And this all comes to pass with Biblical accuracy. A world away from North Kensington, Grenfell Tower, the same rich South Kensington, London borough, where these boys hailed from.
The exception to the rule was Charles. We see him in 21 UP, long hair, hipster, telling the viewer how glad he didn’t go to Oxford or Cambridge and attended Durham University instead. And he was glad of that because it gave him a different view of the world. Ho-hom. He does not appear in the subsequent programmes. Being educated at the right schools and having the right connections, of course, he went on to become something big in Channel 4, something big in film and theatre and threatened to sue his fellow documentary maker Michael Apted for using his image. This shows no class at all. Apted being one of those national treasures, like David Attenborough. Imagine, for example, a beluga whale suing Attenborough for impinging on his right’s images and all because of a bit of plastic.
Andrew went on to become a partner in his solicitor’s firm at 31, by that time he’d married outside his class to a good Yorkshire lass, plain Jane and they had two sons, Alexander and Timothy. His firm was taken over by a larger corporation and he regretted spending so much time at work, but in his modest way, admitted those were the choices he made. I quite liked Andrew.
I detested his and my namesake John. Of all the upper-class twats that little Tony wanted to punch, he would have been my prime candidate. I hated everything about him. The way he looked and sounded. His pronouncements that (Luton) car workers with their fabulous wages could afford to send their children to public schools. His life went exactly to the book, his pronouncements, aged 7 UP, realised. He became a Queen’s Council and gained his silk robe. He married the daughter of a former ambassador to Bulgaria and admitted his great grandfather, Todor Burmov, had fought against the Turks to gain independence and had been Prime Minister. No surprise, the gone, gone, gone girl, Teresa May, who attended the same Oxbridge institution, and helped create the hostile environment for immigrants didn’t exactly rush to deport him. John had the wrong accent, the right register of the Queen’s English, fabulous social connections and the pasty-white colour of skin favoured by immigrant officials. Two of his friends were Ministers in the Government. Even Nigel Farage, the ex-Etonian, would have complained if John had suddenly been napped and put on a flight to Sofia, but then a strange thing happened. I didn’t mind John so much, and actually admired him.
He was one of the few that didn’t tell the viewer whether he had family or not. The reason he kept appearing in subsequent programmes was to promote a charity that helped disabled and disadvantage citizens in Bulgaria. He admitted modestly that he’d worked hard. While that usually would have me thinking nobody had worked harder than coal miners who’d powered the Industrial Revolution and paid in silicosis and black death, or Jimmy Savile who prided himself on being a Bevin boy and working (hard) down the pits and incredibly hard with his charity work and had other interests. John mentioned his mother had needed to work to send him to public school, in the same way that tens of millions of mothers have to work to put food on the table. John gained a scholarship to attend Oxford University, with the inference he was poor. I’m not sure if his mother was a Luton car worker, but I’m sure she didn’t work as a cleaner in a tower block in South Kensington. I didn’t exactly like John, but I understood him better, which is the beginning of knowledge.
I guess like many other viewers I identified with Tony, this tiny kid from the East End of London, his dad a card-shark crook and he looked to be going the same way. Larger than life Tony from 7 UP was a working-class cliché. He was never going to make anything of school. Left at 15 and he tells you early he yearned to be a jockey. He was helping out at the stables and got a job there. I know how he feels. I wanted to play for Celtic and trained with the boy’s club at 15. Trained with Davie Moyes, Charlie Nicholas on the next red gravel training pitch. Clutching my boots in a plastic bag I wasn’t even good enough to be molested by Frank Cairns, although he did give me a passing, playful, punch in the stomach. I guess he was aiming lower down and the lower league. Tony in a later UP series told us he’d ridden in a race against Lester Piggot. He wasn’t good enough, and is big enough to admit it.
Tony with his outdated attitude to women. The four Fs. Fuck them, forget them and I can’t remember the other two. Debbie sorted that out. She gave him three kids and now he’s got three grandkids. Tony admitted he’d had an affair. Tony, plucky London cabbie, having done The Knowledge, as did his wife and son. A spell in Spain trying to work out as a property broker. I guess, I should have guessed. Tony admitted he’d voted Tory all his days and now he wasn’t sure. More of a Farage man. Fuck off Tony.
Tony got a bit heated when he thought Apted had accused him of being a racist. ‘I’m a people’s man,’ he said. ‘You know me.’
Then he talks about the Arabs, in the same way you’d talk about poofs and Paki shops. The Arabs were the only ones that were helping him make money. It wasn’t Uber, that was ripping him off, but Labour that were taking everything and giving nothing back. Fuck off Tony, read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and find out what part of Mugsborough you’ve moved to. Yet, there were his daughter, something that had gone wrong. Sometimes we’ve got to realise that although we circle the wagons, as Tony claimed, only a community can save us.
The old lies are made new again.
Let’s look at the girls from the same social background as Tony. My kind of people. Straight as a die, Lynn, attended the same primary school as Jackie and Sue. Married for 40 years. Two daughter and two granddaughters, Riley, only two-and-a-half ounces at birth. God bless the NHS. Lynn whose first job was in a mobile library. Lynn, who loved kids and loved helping kids to read. Then she worked in Bethnal Green in the library. Under the Tories, of course, we don’t need libraries; we don’t need women like Lynn. Her job was redundant. She was redundant. RIP.
Jackie was always the mouthy one in the triumvirate of girls pictured together. She told Apted he wasn’t asking her the right kind of questions and patronising them – which he was, a product of his own class. Jackie, first married of the group. First divorced. Said she didn’t want children, but had three boys and ended up in a council estate in Scotland, but separated from the father of the two of them, but still in love and in touch with him. Jackie, who had rheumatoid arthritis and told the camera, and David Cameron, if he thought she was fit for work then he should show her what kind of job. Disabled, she was classified as not disabled enough and fit for work. Tory scum. Here it is in person. Public policy without humanity and based on a lie. No great surprise the suicide rate on those deprived of benefits has rocketed. I wonder what Farage, who has never worked and continues to draw a hefty stipend from rich fools and from the European Parliament he wants to destroy thinks about that. We know what he thinks. He thinks what rich people tell him. Jackie can speak for herself. Speak for us.
Sue can think for herself too. She got married to have children and had two kids, but divorced their father because she didn’t love him. Karaoke singer, she met Glen and they’ve been engaged for twenty years or more. She works as head administrator in the law faculty of Queen Mary, University of London. She’s thinking about retirement and does a bit of acting and singing. A working class life, made good. But she worries that the world we’re passing on to her children and our children isn’t as good. Doesn’t have the same level of opportunity and social mobility. She’s right to be worried.
Bruce, representative of the middle class, who when he was 7 UP claimed to have a girlfriend in Africa that he probably wouldn’t see again and wanted to be a missionary, always had that look on his face as if he’d missed something. His father, perhaps, in Southern Rhodesia. Bruce was beaten at public school. He freely admits it and agonised whether Christianity was an outdated doctrine and whether it was liveable. I wonder about that too. I see the façade and under the façade more façade. The devil seems to me more real than any god and Jesus whose only weapon was love. Yeh, I like Bruce. For a start, although he was public school and went to Oxford to study Maths, he was never a Tory. He taught maths to children in Sylhet, Bangladesh and in the East End of London (Tony’s old school, if I remember correctly). Late in life he married and had two sons.
Peter, who went to the same school in Liverpool as Neil, was also representative of a different strand of the middle class. Both boys claimed they wanted be astronauts, but Neil hedged his bets and claimed he would be as equally happy being a bus driver. Peter went to university, got a degree and took up teaching. The greatest moment of his life was, he claimed, the 1977 Tommy Smith goal for Liverpool in the European Cup Final in Rome. No mention of his marriage or his teaching career. He dropped out of the 7 UP series after being targeted by the Daily Hate Mail and other right-wing publications for criticising Thatcherism. He later re-appeared, in 56 UP, having remarried and hoping to promote his burgeoning musical career. He claimed to be happy working in the Civil Service. Good rate of pay, good pension. He must be ecstatic now that Mo Salah and Liverpool have given him another greatest moment of his life in Bilbao. Anyone that sees through Thatcherism has walked in my shoes and I love my team, Celtic in the same way he loves Liverpool.
Neil never became an astronaut or bus driver. He did go to study in Aberdeen University, but dropped out in the first year and at 21 UP was living in a squat in London and working as casual labour on building sites. Neil makes for good television. Contrast the bright, beautiful and confidant seven-year-old boy with what he’d become, a shifty-eyed loner, with obvious what we’d term now, mental health problems, or as he admitted depression or problems with his nerves, madness. At 28 UP he was living in a caravan in Scotland. Then he was living in Orkney. Neil never fulfilled his boyhood potential. But I guess that’s true of us all. Then somehow, in that long curve on life he seemed to be making a comeback. 42 UP he’s living with Bruce and later becomes a Liberal Democrat councillor in Hackney. 56 UP he’s moved again to middle England as well as being a councillor is a lay preacher in the Eden district of Cumbria. Able to administer all the rites of the Church of England, apart from communion. 63 UP he’s living in northern France, a house in the countryside he’s bought with money inherited from his parent’s estate. Neil has become a squire. Like me he hoped to have written something people would want to read.
Nick, educated in a one room school house in the tiny village of Arncliffe, in the Yorkshire Dales, a farmer’s son, who went to Oxford and gained a doctorate in nuclear physics, is a story of meritocracy and upward mobility. He didn’t want to run the farm, he said, perhaps his brother that was deaf, could inherit the farm. Nick wanted to change the world. A fellow student at Oxford commented that he didn’t associate Neil’s Northern accent with intelligence. He was right, of course, intelligence has nothing to do with accent, and upward mobility has nothing to do with meritocracy. Nick’s comments that Teresa May would never have become Prime Minister if she’s gone to an obscure polytechnic would have at one time seemed inflammatory. But Nick lives and teaches in Wisconsin-Madison. Before Trump, and the moron’s moron continual twittering, nothing has ever been the same again. Nick had a son with his first wife and later remarried Cryss. But in 63 UP he admits to having throat cancer. He’s intelligent enough to know what that mean.
In 56 UP, Nick admitted having long conversations with Suzy, who had appeared in eight of the nine episodes, but not in 63 UP. Suzy when asked about the series when she was a chain-smoking, twenty-one-year old, thought the series pointless and silly. By that time her father had died, she’d dropped out of school and been to Paris to learn secretarial skills. Her upper-class background true to form meant she was a pretty enough catch. She duly married Rupert, a solicitor and prospered as a housewife and mother of two girls and a boy. After 28 UP she glowed with good health.
Symon and Paul were the bottom of the heap in the first series of 7 UP in 1964. Symon was the only mixed race kid in the programme. His mother was white. He missed her when he was in the home. She just couldn’t cope with him, but later they became close.
Symon went to work in Wall’s freezer room. He had five kids and was married by 28 UP. He wanted to be film star. He didn’t know what he wanted to do. At 35 he was divorced and remarried. He remarried a childhood sweetheart. They met in the laundrette. She had a kid and they had a son. They fostered hundreds of kids over the years. If you take away the money Symon has been the biggest success story and has given the most.
Symon and Paul kept in touch and they reunited in 63 UP in Australia where Paul lived. He emigrated, following his father down under. Paul worked in the building trade. He was always one of the shy ones in the programme. He went walkabouts with his wife Susan, who thought him handsome and that he had a nice bum. They had a couple of kids and stacks of grandkids. Their daughter went to university. The first of their family to enter an institution of higher learning. Paul and his wife work together in a retirement home.
The 7 UP series tells us about ourselves. When it began the Cuban Missile Crisis had been played out the threat of nuclear annihilation had passed. Or so we thought. With global warming and tens of millions of migrants on the move, the threat of nuclear annihilation is more likely, but for a different reason, because countries divert rivers and tributaries and claim them as their own.
The jobs that each one did will be redundant. Self-driving cars mean taxing will be for the birds. Amazon are already delivering by drone. Any kind of administration is child’s play for artificial intelligence. The bastion of law and medicine is based on pattern recognition. We can expect the new Google to run our health service, or what’s left of it. Nick, the nuclear engineer, might not have much of a future. The future is green, totally green. Those Arab states that rely on the mono-crop of oil will become bankrupt almost overnight, like a Middle-Eastern Venezuela. Russia has long been bankrupt, but without oil it implodes. Let’s hope it doesn’t take the rest of us with it. Money flows from the poor to the rich at an increasing. rate, like an ever-growing, speeded up, Pacman creating new wealth and eating it up more quickly. We are left with dysfunctional politics, tyranny and chaos. The centre cannot hold. Our homes will be battery powered. Plants and trees are already solar powered. They shall become our new cathedrals. Scotland should be green by then. That’s something a celticman appreciates.
A rise in data flow
Noika can push themselves into making a great phone they’ll still not challenge Apple dominance, because it’s largely a luxury good, but they will pick up those not prepared to pay large amounts of cash for what is essentially a brand. Price elasticity is a factor here.
Explaining data-flow trends
Your experience of global data flows
Manyika et al. (2016a) suggest that data flows primarily enable the movement of goods, finance, services and people.
I’ve not got an organisation. As a writer I’m a sole trader. Dependent on the trade whims of organisations of publishing, which are dominated by the Amazon algorithm. Amazon are what global capital is about. They hold profit in offshore havens. They pay neglibile amounts of tax. They piggyback on economies while reaping vast rewards. Yet, I indirectly, work for them. They determine how much my labour is worth. The starting price for writing, as content, is zero, and doesn’t rise much above it for most writers. Amazon are great service providers. This translates how they deal nationally and internationally and provide products at rock-bottom prices. Hidden costs are exported to tax payers and suckers without leverage.
How big might data services get?
Graphs are good, but part of the mystique of big data. zetabytes? how much is that? I could google it, but it really makes not a great deal of difference. These numbers seem to have no reality in my life, yet in the internet of things it will be the oil of finance and decision making. Companies will know more about individuals than ever before and not just their credit history, but their likes and dislikes. Advertising is about selling fear -for example of missing out on a great offer – and I’m sure we’ll be manipulated, but massaged and made to feel good about being stupid. It’s happening now. I’m pretty dumb and even I know that.
Marketing and marketing research challenges
Regulating the digital market place
I believe in government, not just in defence of the realm, but in defence of the citizen. Lets face it these monopolies can slay us because we have no leverage. They have money and power and don’t mind pushing us about. Look at Ireland’s ministers turning down around 13 billion euros in compensation because they didn’t want to offend Apple. I’ll take it, if nobody else wants it.
Where insight becomes interference
One of the benefits of mass surveillance is it’s relatively cheap. as storing information moves towards zero all that data sits in silos ready to be unpicked by the next generation of pattern-recognition software. The more frightening prospect is the working class lost the propaganda war against the rich and to be poor is not only to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent, but more than this – expendable. Terrorist threats fuel a convenient backlash of if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to be worried about.
How do you feel about data collection?
I use google. So they know everything about me. That’s the price I pay for being lazy and not using other software. Google (and I’m talking as if it’s one person) and most other companies gather information which they make money out of . Facebook, knows pretty much everything about me too. Amazon ditto. These are monopolies with vast leverage. They plan to run our roads and cars in the future and run healthcare companies. Increasingly, in the new digital age there’ll be literally nowhere to hide. The future is digital, but at the cost of widespread surveillance, which is already happening and dystopia.
Trends that will shape customer insights
Throughout this course you have read about how research and analysis via digital platforms, increasingly incorporating software with complex algorithms, is helping organisations to develop insights that provide them with competitive advantage. In 2012, marketers depended on data for only 11% of all customer related decisions (Spenner and Bird, 2012). However, as Shapiro (2015) suggests, the days of opinion, intuition or instinct are fast losing ground to predictive analytics based on real models of historical data.
To humanise data is quite simply advertisers being able to push a consumer’s emotional buttons. Fear is the stick they use. But with a bigger and better understanding of what will work carrot and stick can be combined to push and pull purchases. Consumers, us suckers, are the meat in the sandwich between big data, and oligarchy.
The challenge of trust in online selling: bitcoin
Bitcoin is an acceptable currency and the more acceptable it becomes the more like it is to be treated like coins of the realm and used for payment for goods and/or services. It seems to me a kind of Ponzi scheme, but like most stock market listings in which bubbles grow and grow I’m sure it will burst. The block chain arrangement of digital information is however something that could benefit more modern hardware.
Balancing the interests of sellers and buyers online: ad-blocking software
When I can be bothered I go through my facebook and twitter accounts and block ads. I try and block all ads, but it’s not realistic. I’m aware how google positions it’s paid for contact at the top of the screen. I’m also aware that the largely liberal newspapers whose heydays were the sixties where ad space was sold at a premium is now mince. Sky News is the loss making part that Disney does not want to purchase from Rupert Murdoch. News has become dictated by the interests of the rich and that saddens me. Ad-blocking software is a good thing. But the indirect costs are borne by a loss of people power and a reliance on monopoly companies to generate content at a price close to zero. Free is the bottom line. The top line is the cost is deffered and we’ll pay more later.
Setting the scene
Every organisation says it wants to understand its customers. Here, we look at what it means to go beyond this and get real, informed insight into customer wants, needs and habits.
Apple has enormous clout. The world’s most valuable company and a bigger budget than most countries to innovate with. But it’s that old Silicon Valley thing. You’re only as good as your last product. More of the same and its specs and watches were by their standards a flop. Targeting the right customer is, of course, the big thing. Win-win in terms of resources. While I believe that algorithms rule the world I’m not stupid enough to believe I’m the exception to that rule. But I find it interesting that no market research firm hit the right notes with Brexit, gains in the Labour Party or the seismic shock of the Trump presidency. You’ve got to ask the question, value for money? or shysters and looking at the entrails of chickens?
Understanding needs and behaviours
Sales and marketing information systems
Data is the new oil. The downside is the cost is often borne by a salesforce trying to push the latest widget, or extract information from a custom that needs to be translated into gobbedlygook for management targets.
Wider systems for customer management
The richest guy on the planet, Jeff Bezos, $106 billion, give or take a few million sure knows how to track sales, monitor what you buy and suggest other options and screw down on labour costs with digital tracking device that are Orwellian.
Your experience of capturing insight
It depends who you are. Another way of putting that is how big your organisation is. Google algorithms have such a vast database they they can confidently predict way way you will jump politically, sexually and sociology. Such networks, can, of course be gamed.
Approaches to gathering and assessing customer insight
Machine to machine learning is reality. Deep mind that smashed ‘go’ champions no longer relies on analytics of past performances but ‘plays’ itself. First principles, algorithms never die. In fields of health care doctors like pilots will be just along for the ride, their pay downgraded and status smashed. From cradle to grave for those with money to pay for it will be something completely different. We live in interesting times.
Customer insight delivered
In an ideal world there would be no cold callers and everything we want would arrive just in time. Data analytics does look at the websites we open up. Then google gets paid, but that doesn’t mean, as Kay suggests that we buy the product. People may read the blurb on my book, for example, that doesn’t mean they’ll buy it. Advertising is there to nudge customers off that ledge of indecision and create demand. Algorithms and analytics are less of a blunderbuss weapon, but it still shoots wide and sprays the wrong people. I’ve not doubt autonomy will come in the future with the nudges becoming firm shoves.
Market research vs customer insight
I feel a bit of a fudge here. Pattern recognition software shows who is doing what when and anticipates the movement and jumps ahead. That’s standard for any computer. The more data. The more insight. That’s why Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are kings.
The value of co-creation
Ironically, couldn’t get the video to work, said I needed flashdrive. emm. I’m more up to date with this hackathon business. Silicon Valley nerds sleeping under their desks. Here’s a quotation from an old hardware book, from way back in 2000. So it applies to the 1990s. Po Bronson. Every 1000 business plans sent to venture capitalists, 6 are accepted. Of those 6 companies, 4 will go bankrupt. Only one will go public.
Venture capitalist say all the time ‘good ideas come from referral.’
As a writer the odds are even worse.
Incorporating co-creation into your brand
Interesting. reminds me of the Japanese way of working in the 70s and 80s. Helping the company build value. Nice idea. Big concepts like transparency interest me. But it seems to me the same old faces claim innovation and leadership and put themselves first in line for rewards.
Sustaining marketing research with digital insight
Big data, getting the picture you can use. I liked the stories here. I think Lego after its great comeback success has rebounded. And digital doesn’t have an instinct. Only humans have an instinct. Although we might be wrong there too, with the success of Deep Mind in challenges with ‘go’ and ‘Jeopardy’. Perhaps the real worry is most of us are an open book waiting to be read.
Setting the scene
Location, location, location. A familiar refrain. Servants like Siri who are already in our homes will anticipate our needs before we know what we want. The power behind the throne is the ability to manipulate not cognitive intelligence, but emotional intelligence. What we think we need is not as powerful a driver as what we feel we need. For decades advertisers have sold us fear. I fear it will be a smoother ride now, with option a looking very much like option b.
Personalisation in digital marketing
Two-thirds of businesses do not have digital networks. Depends, of course, what is meant be business. My local boozer, for example, like so many other pubs is dying. Getting a digital service here is just a waste of cash. but if you look at Wetherspoons with prime city centre locations, sometimes the pub is so busy it’s quicker ordering a round of drinks and food with an app -click and collect – even though you’re in the pub. Money as a means of exchange will become largely redundant -as in Sweden- even for such small monetary exchanges and my old boozer, well, it will go to the wall. Not because of the digital revolution, but because people don’t drink as much and if they do they tend to drink at home, where it’s cheaper
The impact of interactivity
What a great read. Amazon has the richest man in the world as its head. And pay the least taxes per income per customer head. Even our glorious Queen Elizabeth, who is largely tax exempt and prone to the odd £200 million windfall from the taxpayer to renovate her old palaces shakes her head and calls them greedy tax dodging bastards. But here’s the hump. Like Waterstones, I work for Amazon. Not directly, not like one of those worker drones employed in their out-of-town warehouses whose every movement is regulated and filmed like a porn star, but indirectly. I’ve an author’s page. It lies dormant, mostly. But like any good consigliere Amazon knows its cut will be there or I’ll be cut.
Your online experience and behaviour
Amazon gets almost all my business when buying books. Convenience and cost (they are cheaper and less hassle than other online retailers). I sometimes use Guardian Unlimited for books, but in those two factors they are not as good, but I like their ethical stance more. I also use West Dunbartonshire’s library service, checking my books online, and more often it’s click and collect.
Selling, usually, small stuff, like a computer screen on a local site, but this is done through Facebook. Gumtree is a backup.
I use a Google browser. I know they track my data, as does these other sites, but like many other (suckers) I weigh the cost with the benefits and they come out tops.
I blog on WordPress.com and ABCtales, both free sites. The former generates income by adding ads to user content, while the latter doesn’t.
How user feedback sustains e-commerce
That’s a great chart. humans are visual animals. we like what we see and we want it-now. Amazon is great for feeding that needs. I’ve a stack of books waiting to be read. Click and collect saved Argo. And Amazon are testing pop-up shops. But really, the high street is dead. Little drones will become big drones and direct delivery will happen soon (although soon is an elastic concept). Ironically, universities that are expanding there hardware, or in old fashioned parlance, building and expanding into more real estate like Glasgow, are in the right game, but for the wrong reasons. Just the same as General Motors made more money from finance than it did from selling cars, universities will make more from real estate than teaching. I’m online now, learning. No need to go anywhere. The old Open University model is the future. The future is now.
Amazon’s business models: a case study
As an e-commerce exemplar it’s difficult to ignore Amazon. It was launched in 1995, primarily to sell physical books online, but developed a $5 billion sales base in just eight years (Chaffey, 2014), and by 2015 had around 304 million active customer accounts worldwide (Statista, 2016a).
Maps on mobile, hitting a moving target
Interesting. I get lost in a sandpit, so any help is always welcome. Books are my love. Yep. prefer hard copy. Mostly buy from Amazon. The cheapest and most convenient. Amazon would love it’s readers to go wholly digital. The reproductive costs of producing 1 digital copy and reproducing it is negligible. Sending it to your device is negligible. Profit margins are increased. Digital is good for the pedant who is looking for that word or character and can’t quite remember where it was in the book. One click and you’re there. But, of course, Amazon et al track your every click. Click bait. They want you to buy more. And they easily work out your position better than any OS map. The future of such devices is alluded to here. Three D, or 4 D or whatever version is most compatible with whatever reality we live in. Babies born now will be the most tracked on earth.
From mobile to wearable – Apple Watch
A perceived demand. The interesting thing for me was he had to develop a prototype to test his hypothesis, which is a bit like me having to write a novel to see if it’s a novel, which is fair enough. The real bummer is having to sell it too. The user had to market (his idea) and sell it.
The growth of mobile and contactless payment
Contactless payment such as swipe and go are great for the moneyed but not so great for the unmoneyed. Those with the least are the most discriminated against.
Africa’s digital economy
I guess Sarah Palin who once thought Africa was a country might not understand that is the world’s youngest and therefore I’d guess most vibrant continent.
How mobile supports Kenya’s economy
Digital is the future and old-fashioned money as a means of exchange between consumers will, very shortly, be as old fashioned as using horses for transport.
A final example of effective personalisation
By the simple act of encouraging consumers to put a name on the packaging and share the product (in real-life and digital terms) they offered a new, innovative level of personalisation.
Setting the scene
Move fast and break things enriches the already wealthy. The Schumpeterian idea is our future for better or worse. Children born now will be the most tracked in history. In some novels only the wealthy can eradicate their digital footprint. Paradoxically, not to be known, is to be somebody. The security risk of tracking devices in our home was touched on here. It’s not just phones, but our fridges, washing machines, kettles, cups. The danger of these being hacked increases exponentially. My guess is the future will be better for many, but us poor people, the largely disenfranchised, will be more easily monitored and controlled How ironic that an old blog post from a Tory MP calling for sterilization of the poor should crop up now.
Key trends in online activity
Explaining data-flow trends
Your experience of global data flows
Manyika et al. (2016a) suggest that data flows primarily enable the movement of goods, finance, services and people.
I’ve not got an organisation. As a writer I’m a sole trader. Dependent on the trade whims of organisations like publishing, which are dominated by the Amazon algorithm. Amazon are what global capital is about. They hold profit in offshore havens. They pay negligible amounts of tax. They piggyback on economies while reaping vast rewards. Yet, I indirectly, work for them. They determine how much my labour is worth. The starting price for writing, as content, is zero, and doesn’t rise much above it for most writers. Amazon are great service providers. This translates how they deal nationally and internationally and provide products at rock-bottom prices. Hidden costs are exported to tax payers and suckers without leverage.
How big might data services get?
Graphs are good, but part of the mystique of big data. zetabytes? how much is that? I could google it, but it really makes not a great deal of difference. These numbers seem to have no reality in my life, yet in the internet of things it will be the oil of finance and decision making. Companies will know more about individuals than ever before and not just their credit history, but their likes and dislikes. Advertising is about selling fear -for example of missing out on a great offer – and I’m sure we’ll be manipulated, but massaged and made to feel good about being stupid. It’s happening now. I’m pretty dumb and even I know that.
Marketing and marketing research challenges
There’s a disjuncture between people, for example, who click on a book and those that buy a book. Amazon is good at this. And they can monitor afterwards what the reader is reading. Most books downloaded to Kindle, for example, remain unread.
Towards more insightful marketing
In an article from 2016, Rosie Hawkins (Global Director of Client Solutions at TNS) highlights five key focus areas for marketers in a rapidly changing digital landscape:
For some organisations – and in particular for their public face or brand – more work is arguably needed in order for their marketing to remain appropriate and relevant to customers.
Personalisation is a buzz word. Selling is old as the devil selling Eve an apple. Buy now. Pay later. Digital means using data to highlight which way you might jump. It saves money and time if the devil know you’re going to snack on that apple anyway and he can concentrate on somebody else waiting for paradise.
Regulating the digital market place
I believe in government, not just in defence of the realm, but in defence of the citizen. Lets face it these monopolies can slay us because we have no leverage. They have money and power and don’t mind pushing us about. Look at Ireland’s ministers turning down around 13 billion euros in compensation because they didn’t want to offend Apple. I’ll take it, if nobody else wants it.
Where insight becomes interference
One of the benefits of mass surveillance is it’s relatively cheap. as storing information moves towards zero all that data sits in silos ready to be unpicked by the next generation of pattern-recognition software. The more frightening prospect is the working class lost the propaganda war against the rich and to be poor is not only to be regarded as guilty until proven innocent, but more than this – expendable. Terrorist threats fuel a convenient backlash of if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to be worried about.
How do you feel about data collection?
I use google. So they know everything about me. That’s the price I pay for being lazy and not using other software. Google (and I’m talking as if it’s one person) and most other companies gather information which they make money out of . Facebook, knows pretty much everything about me too. Amazon ditto. These are monopolies with vast leverage. They plan to run our roads and cars in the future and run healthcare companies. Increasingly, in the new digital age there’ll be literally nowhere to hide. The future is digital, but at the cost of widespread surveillance, which is already happening and dystopia.
Trends that will shape customer insights
In 2012, marketers depended on data for only 11% of all customer related decisions (Spenner and Bird, 2012). However, as Shapiro (2015) suggests, the days of opinion, intuition or instinct are fast losing ground to predictive analytics based on real models of historical data.
To humanise data is quite simply advertisers being able to push a consumer’s emotional buttons. Fear is the stick they use. But with a bigger and better understanding of what will work carrot and stick can be combined to push and pull purchases. Consumers, us suckers, are the meat in the sandwich between big data, and oligarchy.
The challenge of trust in online selling: bitcoin
Bbitcoin is an acceptable currency and the more acceptable it becomes the more like it is to be treated like coins of the realm and used for payment for goods and/or services. It seems to me a kind of Ponzi scheme, but like most stock market listings in which bubbles grow and grow I’m sure it will burst. The block chain arrangement of digital information is however something that could benefit more modern hardware.
Balancing the interests of sellers and buyers online: ad-blocking software
When I can be bothered I go through my facebook and twitter accounts and block ads. I try and block all ads, but it’s not realistic. I’m aware how google positions it’s paid for contact at the top of the screen. I’m also aware that the largely liberal newspapers whose heydays were the sixties where ad space was sold at a premium is now mince. Sky News is the loss making part that Disney does not want to purchase from Rupert Murdoch. News has become dictated by the interests of the rich and that saddens me. Ad-blocking software is a good thing. But the indirect costs are borne by a loss of people power and a reliance on monopoly companies to generate content at a price close to zero. Free is the bottom line. The top line is the cost is deffered and we’ll pay more later.