Alexander Chalkidis

Category: Marketing

  • Greenwashing with a twist: come to Greece!

    Greenwashing with a twist: come to Greece!

    In the image above is a small undefined area in Central Athens as it is projected to become. In an extremely densely populated where a parking spot can cost you 100 euro a month or more. Most people just drive around until they find a space, or try to “hold” a spot using crates or their kids and spouses and other tricks.

    As you can see the cars park more or less without any plan because, well, Greece, it is an “undefined” area, much contended public space in the city is like that. But then some brave mayor thinks he has a solution! In this case to turn it into a park! The most obvious advantage is that nobody can say no to more green in a city already suffering from global warming. And better still, find a corporate sponsor. Problem solved!

    Well not really. Not at all.

    This is prime real estate in the most densely packed part of town. It is glaringly obvious that it is an absolute waste not to use the underground opportunity. I wouldn’t even suggest using it for car parking, unless it was a high rise car parking with a green park on top. Probably a center for micromobility would be best. Have charging stations for ebikes and escooters and such. Greece is sorely lacking in availability and support for these. Imagine getting out of your house, walking through a small park and going down to pick up your scooter to work instead.

    But that’s not how politics work in Greece.

    We need a quick win. Not some boring , long term, expensive actual solution. We just need something for the press releases. And the corporate sponsors love it. Like the pointless “green solar island” the VW group has been harping about for ages. This is just an excuse for PR and corporate people to get free trips to Greece as a mini holiday. So everyone looks good, feels good, gets what they want in the short term.

    Except the inhabitants of this area just lost the open space and some invaluable parking spots. Sure, go ahead, make a park. And watch it dry up when the funding does the same. We have seen it a million times.

    It is not easy or pleasurable to oppose any green park project. I remember when my local quarries started planting trees on the side of the road I was torn. They were not only illegally in dangerous places by the road but – more to the point – they were only in those places they needed to be in order to hide the quarry!

    Sometimes however we need to say no. Do it right, or don’t do it all.

  • Apple would have never made a vaccine even if it could

    Apple would have never made a vaccine even if it could

    Look at the market share. Globally Android has 73% of the mobile operating market and iOS 26%. But in Africa it is more like 83% vs 14%. Only in North America is Apple ahead. And this has repercussions which I am amazed the rest of the world puts up with.

    Unlike Google that tries to build products for humans all over the world, Apple is simply catering to its locals. It’s not just the languages it doesn’t bother including. It’s entire distribution and support is focused on the US, UK, France and a few other countries. That’s it. Apple has always acted – and still acts – as if it is a little Callifornian company that made it big. In America. And it doesn’t care about anyone else. The rest of the world can adapt to the products.

    Is it working? Sure. The profits speak for themselves. Is it good for customers? Only if you are American. Here in Greece where I live, if you have a Mac computer you are the proud third minority after Windows (84%) and Linux (9%) as Apple only has 3% market share. Good luck getting any sort of support for your product, most Mac owners struggle to find a friend that knows what they can do about any issue. And they end up paying through the nose for good tech to help them out.

    Globally OS X commands just 15% market share, even in the United States all those iPhone users aren’t buying as they total just 28% compared to 62% Windows users and even Chromebooks are making an attack and becoming popular. Yet somehow Apple isn’t irrelevant. Is it through innovation? Heck no! I would disregard their recent relative success with their own chipsets, it is a short lived fluke much like all those years when they were going to “burn Pentiums to the ground”. M1 is a party trick that fools only Apple die hards. No IT manager is falling for it because we all know Apple never sticks to anything long term. It is a marketing company, not a tech pioneer.

    Is it important? I would say that it is a problem we need to take care of. It skews the market in a big way. A bad way. There are plenty exciting technologies that get shelved behind all the media focus on Apple adding a new button to its iPhone or something equally stupid as that in Apple’s constant efforts to copy Android whilst making it look like it thought of something up on its own.

    So is Google better? Hell yeah! While Apple spends ages dreaming up of new ways to get their phones to use a different dongle that costs 80 dollars for no good reason, Google is out there making products for the entire planet. Saving lost languages. Making useful products we all use everyday like Search, Maps, YouTube and so many more applications of its advanced Artificial Intelligence that actually helps the planet. They are giving away protein databases to scientists and the infrastructure on which so much of the modern world progresses on.

    Google is global, Apple is American.

    And there is nothing wrong with being American. As long as they don’t try and sell their extremely limited in purpose and use case products to the rest of the world. In fact the way Apple refuses to follow international standards and constantly blackmails developers into their walled garden is costing the world economy every day. We live in a globalized world. Amazing collaboration such as what we witnessed recently with the COVID-19 pandemic can only be achieved though open standards and transparency.

    If Apple was into pharmaceutical vaccine and developed a vaccine, it would be ten times the price of competitors, incompatible with anything else, they would not reveal their research results and would expect everyone to pay every year for an update. So why are you letting them control the devices you use every day?

  • The Greek Freak is killing the NBA: how a wonderful person is in conflict with an organization’s core values and audience expectations

    The Greek Freak is killing the NBA: how a wonderful person is in conflict with an organization’s core values and audience expectations

    “…so ….efficient!”  The sportscaster was struggling to find the right words after the Bucks won the championship.  Giannis Antetokounmpo had some pretty impressive stats.  But other than a few blocks was he spectacular?  No, of course not.  He never is.  Despite his unique physical gifts, the man can’t even make a cool dunk.  Unless you are Greek or a Bucks fan, the game he plays is boring.  It is…European.  As an NBA fan I am disappointed.  I think Adam Silver is worried.  This game can not just be about winning and…efficiency.  

    Everyone goes on and on about how Giannis worked hard and made it through adversity.  Rightly so, it is an amazing true story and he is an awesome human being.  But I didn’t sign up for a subscription to Reader’s Digest.  I want my NBA back.  The one with the show above all, the one where players focus on giving the crowd something unique to watch.  Other than a few blocks, the Greak Freak is no freak at all.  He is boring as hell.   Ten years from now they will struggle to find anything to put in a show reel from his highlights.

    Is it important?   It is to me and it is to many of the NBA’s target demographics.  We want stars that are stars, not “amazing hard working people”.  I could go to a factory floor and watch that if I wanted to.  Antetokounmpo is an anti star.  He doesn’t hang out with other NBA players, he doesn’t train with them, he doesn’t know how to make an inspiring speech or even a fun meme.   Already in the United States, rich white parents take their kids to soccer, not basketball. Giannis may be black, but he plays like a boring white person who wins through being gifted and working hard. Admirable. Not NBA though. It will make the rift even bigger.

    In a strange way it is similar to the election of Obama.  Despite the rhetoric, a simmering racism ensured that in the next elections Donald Trump won.  There were many more racists annoyed at Obama’s presidency than could publicly vent during his tenure.  Something similar is happening now with NBA fans.  Giannis doesn’t feature in rap songs because well, he is boring, he is an anti star, he does nothing like all the true NBA stars that built the league.  True NBA fans are sad today.  We are simmering with rage.  We are not racist of course.  But we hate “efficient”, boring players like Antetokounmpo.   When Kevin Durant slogs it out alone in Game7 it is epic. He generates stories, this is what the NBA is about. Giannis has one story, always the same story as his game does nothing to add to it, it is awesome, the boy that sold trinkets at traffic lights who went to the NBA. Fantastic. Let’s make it a movie. For DISNEY, not for the NBA.

    I am Greek.  Everyone here is ecstatic.  I am sad they missed the whole point of what makes the NBA special.  He was lucky to get a ring, now just watch as he fails spectacularly to even make it past the 1st or 2nd round in the playoffs the next years. Giannis Antetokounmpo should move to a European team as soon as possible and leave our league as we like it.

  • The best thing on my holiday you can do at home

    The best thing on my holiday you can do at home

    Instagram dictates modern tourism, learn how to use it

    It was our last day in Reykjavik and we headed past the scenic old port.  To a simulator.  That’s right.  After two weeks in Iceland and a whole lot of very impressive experiences, we went to a helicopter fly-over machine.  We had been on glaciers, inside volcanos, seen more waterfalls than you can imagine exist but here we were strapping ourselves in to a typical such ride.  It moves, it sprinkles you, blows air on you and you get a completely unique new view on the sights you have already seen as well as many you will never be able to.  It also features good weather which helps explain why it took so long to film it.  At the end they offer the typical cheesy fake photos of you in front of the Northern Lights or other options for anyone with too much cash.

    If you only have fifteen minutes to experience Iceland I can think of no better way.  And you could have the same film anywhere in the world.  But the cheesy photos kill it.

    One of the reasons Iceland is so popular lately is because it is Instagramable.  You just point at any of their attractions, take a photo and can be sure of a stream of likes and comments.  That simple.  You will look good.  It is unusual.  You seem interesting and adventurous.  It stands out in their social media.  I first experienced this effect last year in Norway.

    It is much safer than it looks. To the left of my friend Shorty in this pic I took is a ledge from which you can climb onto the rock.

    This is just a rock. I can think of a thousand equally impressive views in Greece where we could add a rock like this for Instagram.  And even though thousands of people probably post the exact same photo, mine still got hundreds of likes and comments.  So why don’t we go about putting rocks for photos in more places?  Make it as safe as you want, just make sure it looks impressive.  And make it easy for the photographer to get to the right angle.  It is more important these days than the actual experience.  People don’t care how you got there, if you cheated or took a ride, nobody will check.  “Pics or it didn’t happen” only refers to the finish line, the final result.  No matter if you posed for ten minutes or waited two hours for the clouds to lift, the sun to be at the right place or whatever else you needed to do.

    I think someone has actually died falling off this rock, but it still rare considering how many thousands of people go there and pull silly stunts like me there

    In fact if I had one criticism of Iceland and the way they have set up their national parks it is that they don’t have enough photo opportunities.  Too many of those great waterfalls have fenced off the ideal semi-dangerous-looking spot or the ideal photo angle position.  Nobody has (yet) fallen off that rock in the picture.  This other one (with me jumping) I think one person did; too many think it is cool to dangle their feet off the ledge.  Why? Because someone posted it on Instagram! In a way it may actually be the Norwegian Tourist Board’s fault that person fell off.  If only they had set up the angle for photography better.  He wouldn’t have to go so close to the ledge for an impressive photo.

    Me in front of a waterfall. Not even a famous waterfall, no filters, just a good angle.

    The currency is “likes”.  No point complaining, that is how it goes.Work with it.  It is the most natural viral promotion there is.  People take the photo, others are envious and want to go get their own ultra likeable photo.  No need to chase so called “influencers”.  Instagrammable locations work like a pyramid, sucking in more and more people.  Even the ones that didn’t like or comment are opening a Google search about travelling to that destination in another tab.  Come on, admit it, you probably started back at half way through this article when you saw my picture of my friend on that rock…

    .

    (If anyone in tourism needs my help making their location more Instagrammable, feel free to contact me.)

  • Good cop – bad cop: why only Facebook is evil

    In a lot of our discussion about the future we tend to bunch Facebook and Google together.  After all they are two Goliaths that rely on advertising.  Unlike Microsoft that has spread its income sources, or Amazon who is in a different arena all together.  Grouping them together however is unfair, misleading and dangerous.

    “….the great organ of social life, the prime element of civilization, the channel through which native talent, native genius, and native power may bubble up daily…”  The quote is not from a recent Zuckerberg motivational speech but from James Gordon Bennett, who published the Morning Herald in 1835, one of the first newspapers which tried to sell an audience to advertisers.

    Facebook has a simple and similar target.  To get us to spend more time on their platform.  Wasting time?  Sure.  With fake news?  Of course.  It is the newspaper of our time and it is a tabloid newspaper for sure.  Facebook will do anything to get you to stay.  It will interrupt you and make sure you get no work done.   It will buy out other platforms like Instagram only to gradually turn them into…Facebook.  It will copy features from Snapchat with no shame if Snapchat or any future smaller company isn’t willing to be bought by Facebook.  Facebook has no purpose by definition.  Mark Zuckerberg has excelled since his college days in dreaming up new ways for people to waste time.  There is no purpose.   He simply thrives on studying your time wasting habits per se, whether it is flicking up and down a timeline, looking at photos of friends or creating controversy.  (Which his systems always reward in one way or another.)

    The opportunistic approach is best illustrated in the erratic way it deals with its customers.  Advertising on Facebook is not a science.  It can’t be.  Because they are always changing it in order to make whatever worked yesterday not work tomorrow unless you pay more.  The scandals about false video impression numbers and all the other scams Facebook has got caught for so far are just the tip of the iceberg.  The elephant in the room is that Facebook ads simply do not work as well as they want you to think they work.  Why?  Because people shop much less when they are simply wasting time.   Nobody will tell you because digital marketers are too busy taking the money you are no longer spending on “old media” and giving you fancy stats that impress you.

    Contrast that with Google.  You know, that place you go when you actually want to get things done.  When you research a product purchase.  Where you find out useful stuff about your world.  Google has a much tougher job.  They have to give you services like Google Maps which are simply so useful and so much better than any other option and then find ways to monetize them without losing the title.   Advertisers that understand the difference are much more effective for their customers.  Lazy advertisers simply give in to the marketing director who only understands Facebook ads because that is what they use every day.  A Facebook ad “impression” is in no way similar to a Google Ads “impression”.  Facebook reminds me of Nazi Germany radio wardens, people that walked the streets to corral citizens all together and force them to listen to Adolf Hitler speak on the radio.  We need shared experiences and Zuckerberg is going to give you the ones he can sell.  While Google figures out machine learning, automatic translation and organizing the world’s knowledge for everyone Facebook adds smiley faces, dislike buttons and the amazing new way to say something with a colored background.

    The way Facebook treats fake news is a wonderful illustration of its hypocrisy.  Much like the first tabloid newspapers almost two hundred years ago, it seeks out and promotes anything lurid and boisterous.  In the old days newspapers based on advertising for revenue had people in courts looking for scandal or even reported on the slave trade for effect.  Facebook today pretends to be politically correct but makes sure similar content reaches you.  And plenty of it.  It is a bit like newspapers pretending not to control the classifieds section or not carrying blame for readers’ letter in “opinion” pieces.

    In the mid 19th century, the first “trolls” were in fact journalists working for cheap newspapers in a constant effort to increase circulation so that they could sell advertising.  Some things never change…

  • Your social media “strategy” is a pile of steaming… social media

    Do you remember SEO?  Some people went around “optimising” websites.  Others sold courses on  search engine optimisation.  No, please, try to remember exactly what went on then.  You were a bit vague how “those Google things” worked.   So you outsourced.  Something worked more or less, you didn’t get fired over low rankings.  Probably because your boss didn’t understand SEO fully either.

    There is a good reason why this happened.  It is that nobody fully understands how Google works.  It is secret, personalised, it changes often and Google spends a great amount of time and effort making sure it is difficult to reverse engineer what they do.  Through it all, some of us had an attitude that is more pragmatic.  I always said “if you can tweak it that easily, Google will take it into account automatically.”  All those silly tags, the time wasted adding fields, alt texts and gobbledegook for what?  Google does a better job at figuring out which content should be shown to who than you could even imagine.  From phone usage, to browser habits, email content and million of other signals, Google’s algorithms are simply astounding.  And useful.  Yet still some people pay good money learning about SEO.  Which brings me to the current fashion:  social media training.

    A whole industry has been built around teaching you “how to succeed on Instagram” or “how to promote your business on a Facebook page”.  Friendly, trendy, graphic heavy sites, emailings, courses and videos with gurus full of a burning desire to help you “get ahead”.  Training in technology was always a challenge methodologically.  In times of rapid change such as these it is damn near impossible to stay current.  Taking a “course in social media” is essentially admission of a handicap.  You have no real projects to learn from, you lack the drive and bravery to put yourself out.   Sure, you can’t improvise with the facebook account of a Fortune 500 company, but you sure as hell can experiment with any number of other ones.  From the school committee Instagram feed to a blog about your kids’ basketball team.  The cost is zero and the experimental opportunities infinite.  Don’t read about it.  Do it!

    I started writing this article after seeing a scary directive in a pretty large corporation defining – among other things – the “correct time for Facebook posts” on their official page.  This is an excellent illustration of just how stupid “social media gurus” have made people.  Google it and you will find loads of scientific looking “papers” by “data scientists” claiming to have crunched millions of data points to “prove” when you get maximum traction.  At first it seems clear or even “obvious”.  You want to post when most people are online, more likely to see what you posted.  But wait a minute.  Those two statements aren’t even connected!

    You want to post when most people that are interested in your message are likely to see it.  Not even that.  When some people which might actually react in a way that will have a beneficial impact to your brand will somehow see your social media post.  The more you think about it, the more disclaimers you would need in order to even make sense of what exactly you are trying to achieve.  What is your brand?  Which parts of the audience do you think you will reach?  What mood will they be in at one time versus another?  How will Facebook’s algorithms react to your message at that time in relation to everything else going on when potential message recipients log in?  There is only one way to learn and – you guessed  it – that is not by going to a seminar or reading my articles.  Even if you hire me to experiment and measure for your company, as I propose you do yourself, my fine conclusions will have a very limited shelf life.  If anyone discovers a “silver bullet” for getting great traction in social media, by their very design, social media will have killed the opportunity in days or weeks at best.

    Thinking, reading, talking to people and going to seminars are all useful idea generators.  I often discover new tools from the fantastic people around me in the real and virtual world.  We all need training and we all need mechanisms to make us rethink what we do.  People like me should be paid vast amounts of money to help others in this noble cause.  We can all improve in ways to test our hypotheses. But there is only one way to take responsibility and that is directly.  Don’t hide behind management gurus for things you can quite easily test out and know yourselves.   Until Facebook, Google and everyone else change the parameters that is.  Which they have probably done 5-6 times in the time it took you to read this article.

    My point precisely!

     

     

  • In praise of fake profiles

    If you are in sales or marketing and above 25 years of age, you are probably wrong.  The assumptions you base your decisions on are severely limited.  We often thank our kids for ideas, for keeping us “in touch”, but it is much much more complicated a matter.  And extremely important.   I have hundreds of fake profiles.   Not sure if “fake” is the correct term.  I pretend to be someone I am not as a form of market research.  In fact it is often the first thing I do when presented with a new project.

    It starts with a fake Google account.  This is vital.  Search results are personalized.  You will never get it all perfect, but if you at least persuade it that you live wherever you are researching and then make sure you do Google searches logged in from this fake Google profile, the world you are seeing will be a little more like your target.  Sign up for whatever products and services you are looking for from this signed in Chrome browser.    You have to try and live the part.

    With Facebook things are even more dangerous.  That person in marketing you think is “up to speed with all this new stuff”, well, just isn’t.   If I have a really successful Instagram account, or a very active personal Facebook profile I only see what that particular profile’s take on the world is.   Some days I might whiz through multiple profiles to check up on them, just housekeeping.  Hard to describe just how different it feels to be in each newsfeed.  Some are simply based in different locations, with friends from a particular island or city.  Age differences are even more stunning.  The same political event which fills your friends’ timelines when you are 50, doesn’t even appear when you are 16.

    It isn’t fashionable anymore, but I always make sure my fake people have a website, blog or other public trove of information on whatever topic I am researching.   This gives me unique insights into what people are looking for.   It is the “honeypot” approach.  In content marketing it is easier to just start testing ideas like this.  And when the first organic google searches land my way, it is like Christmas day!  Somebody wrote what they wanted to know in Google and came to me, fake me, this particular person.  Why?  How?  What cyberspace hole did I fill with what I just did?

    If anything, building a fake profile is a humbling experience.  Because you realize just how complex a web social beings like humans create.  We earn trust.  Slowly.   A “follow” by a 13 year old is a very, very, very different action to a “follow” by a 60 year old.  He then posts what he just had for breakfast without thinking about it, while the senior citizen is carefully crafting a comment as if he is writing to the Economist.

    Marketing people are often fooled by their own brand.  In the case of social media they are also sidetracked by their personal profiles and habits.  These are extremely dynamic, immature new mediums, still jostling for position, changing architecture and interfaces.   There is no agreed way to assess them, no specific assigned meaning to what we all do with them.  So get off your high horse and mingle with the natives.

  • Jesus, fig trees and checking your car brakes

    “Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!”

    Immediately the tree withered.”     – Matthew 21:18-22

    Israel_Bethany_Stone_church_with_silver_domeThe excerpt is well known, the explanation less so.   Most religious researchers believe that Jesus was crucified probably on the 6th of April, 30 A.D.  Which means that when he met the above mentioned fig tree it was not meant to be in fruit anyway as it was long before summer.  However fig trees at that time produce taqsh, small hard, almond sized knobs on the plant which poor peasants were often forced to eat for lack of anything better.   If the tree has no such fig precursors it means that it will not bear fruit this season.  Jesus was not cursing the fig tree but simply announcing what any person who lived in those times would know.  After a long day walking, Jesus perhaps hoped to have a small snack, was disappointed, and thus pronounced the tree barren.

    Google searches for “fig tree” are also, as expected seasonal.  From March through until September people are more interested in it either because they want to plant a fig tree, or take care of a fig tree.  A modern day Jesus could see the following pattern of seasonality in Google searches:

    figly datachart seasonality of google searches for fig tree c 2015 figly

    That green line is the amount of searches (U.S.) for “fig tree”.  Every year they spike from March to September.  But what is that blue line which follows them so closely?  It is the google searches for “brake caliper”!    In fact the correlation is extremely high at r=0.9069.  Similar in seasonality, yet not so exact in volume are searches for “paint code”, “oil filter”, “valve adjustment”, “oil drain” and “gear oil”.  It seems that as Americans come out of winter they have two things in mind:  fixing their car and tending to their fig trees!

    Here is the full excerpt from the book “Hard Sayings of the Bible”, (Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Peter H. Davids, F. F. Bruce, Manfred Brauch)

    “The problem is most satisfactorily cleared up in a discussion called “The Barren Fig Tree” published many years ago by W. M. Christie, a Church of Scotland minister in Palestine under the British mandatory regime. He pointed out first the time of year at which the incident is said to have occurred (if, as is probable, Jesus was crucified on April 6th, A.D. 30, the incident occurred during the first days of April). “Now,” wrote Christie, “the facts connected with the fig tree are these. Toward the end of March the leaves begin to appear, and in about a week the foliage coating is complete. Coincident with [this], and sometimes even before, there appears quite a crop of small knobs, not the real figs, but a kind of early forerunner.  They grow to the size of green almonds, in which condition they are eaten by peasants and others when hungry.

    When they come to their own indefinite maturity they drop off.” These precursors of the true fig are called taqsh in
    Palestinian Arabic. Their appearance is a harbinger of the fully formed appearance of the true fig some six weeks later.

    So, as Mark says, the time for figs had not yet come. But if the leaves appear without any taqsh, that is a sign that
    there will be no figs. Since Jesus found “nothing but leaves”—leaves without any taqsh—he knew that “it was an ab-
    solutely hopeless, fruidess fig tree” and said as much. But if that is the true explanation of his words, why should anyone trouble to record the incident as though it had some special significance? Because it did have some special significance. As recorded by Mark, it is an acted parable with the same lesson as the spoken parable of the fruitess fig tree in Luke 13:6-9.

    In that spoken parable a landowner came three years in succession expecting fruit from a fig tree on his property, and when year by year it proved to be fruidess, he told the man in charge of his vineyard to cut it down because it was using up the ground to no good purpose. In both the acted parable and the spoken parable it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the fig tree represents the city of Jerusalem, unresponsive to Jesus as he came to it with the message of God, and thereby incurring destruction. Elsewhere Luke records how Jesus wept over the city’s blindness to its true well-being and foretold its ruin “because you did not know the time of your visitation” (Lk 19:41-44 RSV). It is because the incident of the cursing of the fig tree was seen to convey the same lesson that Mark, followed by Matthew, recorded it.”