Abbosh, Nunes and Downes has written Pivot to the Future to alert organisations to see the major changes taking place. These are either to be leveraged or countered depending on situation Pepsi realised in 2010 that the market of the cola drinks is under threat from the health and environment activists who are gaining ground. They changed the strategic direction to keep the company going. They classified the products, which are ‘fun for you’ , ‘better for you’ and ‘good for you’. They restructured the organisation keeping continuity in mind. Sears could not hold the space in retailing against the onslaught of technology that enabled online e-commerce from the likes of Amazon.

Technology is a major disruption. There are pitfalls and the organisation has to steer away from these pitfalls.

The pivots to steer away are ‘trapped values’.

Trapped Values

These values reside in four buckets.

Society: It fails to engage profitably to solve societal issues. To illustrate, it finds difficult to cope with the environment.

Consumers: There are trapped values in under-utilised private assets. There are homes in tourist places which can be rented and cars which could be shared.

Industry: There is lack of co-operation and investment in shared infrastructure, e.g. charging stations for electric vehicles.

Enterprise: There is limited use of digital technology to transform business.

Management has to recognise that present offerings will not appealing in future. They have to innovate and embrace technology. Management has to be patient to reap the benefit. It takes time. Management has to be generous, as the customers and partners tend to benefit probably even more. They save on cost of experimentation. Management must be realistic — some investments do not work out and cost in terms of time, effort and money.

Technology standards play a great role by allowing inter-connect between various devices. They promote competition between products which comply with the standard. SEP commences when technology firms get their patented technology included as a part of an industry standard. These selected patents are termed essential for practising that standard. Thus the patent holders become SEP holders.

Technology standards come into existence in two different ways

i. A company releases technology which is adopted by other market players. It leads to the creation of a de facto standard. To illustrate, Adobe’s PDF or portable document format.

2. Sometimes standards are created by a group of organisations called SSOs or standard setting organisations. The consortia work together on a set of technical specifications or an individual product. To illustrate, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has developed global standards for information communication technologies (ICT) which cover e-commerce, mobile devices, networking media content and distribution. Similarly, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) has developed the standards for wireless local area networks (W-LAN) or Wi-Fi.

SSOs through meetings discuss on matters relating to the adoption of mutually acceptable technology rights to facilitate inter-operability.

SEP patent holders enjoy an advantage as others are keen to be licensees of SEP holders.

Patent Hold-up

An SEP holder can ask for more than the value of its patented technology. The intention is to capture the value of the standard itself. It is called patent hold-up. Companies invest lot of their resources in making their devices standard compliant. It is not easy for them to opt out of the standard.

The IP policies of SSOs are so framed that the SEP owners are encouraged to disclose patents which they consider essential before the acceptance of such standard.

FRAND

SSOs ask SEP holders to disclose all their IPR and to license their SEPs under fair, reasonable and non-discrimatory (FRAND) terms. SSOs mandate SEP holders to license their patents on FRAND terms to other SSO members and also to outside implementers. The objective of FRAND licensing is to safeguard against hold ups by EP owners after an industry has adopted a standard.

Despite FRAND, litigation arises to decide what is fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory. There may be non/incomplete disclosure by patent holders. There is non-willingness of licensees to negotiate FRAND terms in good faith.

Can the machines think like the human beings? Can they have intelligence? Allan Turing, British mathematician, developed a machine during the World War II to decode the messages of the Germans. Later after the war, they developed Turing Test to measure the intelligence of the machines. It was used to decide whether machines and computers can think like the human beings. Turing test was simple. A man on the other side of a partition asks written questions to the computer and a human being. The questioner has to identify on the basis of written answers whether the human being or computer has answered, if they could not be identified it means the computer is answering as good as the human being. It means the computer has started thinking before answering. It passes the test of artificial intelligence. It was a practical method.

The term artificial intelligence was first used in 1956 in a workshop conducted by John McCarthy and that paved the way for the research in AI.

What is intelligence? It means to understand the environment around us. It means to relate things. It means to think and then learn. All this is used to make a right decision for action. In the field of AI, all this is expected of a computer. We visualise a humanoid with intelligence when we consider AI, of course, robotics too is included in this. Then in games, we have to decide the strategy taking into consideration several factors, e.g. chess, poker etc. Here too AI can be used. Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition and Computer Vision are the branches of AI.

AI is applied in driverless autonomous cars, computerized recapitulation of a book, drawing, story writing etc. It is used to identify spam e-mail and to diagnose diseases. Many websites interact through chatbots .

AI uses computer science, statistics, language, philosophy and psychology. Machine Learning (ML) has become the buzz word. The computer here is given data inputs which makes it learn on its own. It analyses and decides Deep learning is a part of ML. It mimics the neural network of the brain. It is used mainly to comprehend language and analyze it.

In the published pulp fiction magazine boom in the US between the two World Wars, a hero emerged called Zorro. On 9th August, 1919 he appeared in All Story magazine for the first time, and has completed a century of his existence in 2019 by captivating so many through movies, comic books and crime thrillers. He gave rise to many other masked heroes.

Pulp fiction is not treated as literature, but still remains staple reading of middle and lower middle households and migrant job seekers in the cities. Lovecraft wrote such stories. H.G.Wells wrote such science fiction. Edgar’s Tarzan and John Carter’s adventure stories belong to this genre. Instead of pulp paper, such literature is now printed on glazed white paper. Zorro was created by Johnston Macculley. He was the hero of a novel The Curse of Capistrano. This hero had a black mask on the face. He fought for the oppressed. He defeated the enemies and scratched the letter Z with his sword on their chest.

In 1920, the first movie of Zorro called Mask of Zorro was released. This silent movie is available on YouTube. Don De la Vega becomes Zorro, after having black dress and a mask. Zorro appeared in the book form in Mask of Zorro published in 1924. The other Zorro like masked men who appeared in pulp fiction were Black Star, Thunderbolt, Green Ghost, The Spider, Man in Purple and Crimson Clone. Zorro, however, sustained for a long time.

Batman created by Bob Rane in 1940s was inspired by Zorro.

Later, comic books and neo-literature magazines appeared, ending the demand for pulp fiction magazines. Still every decade had a movie based on Zorro. Zorro became popular in Europe and Asia too in the 1960s. Many personalities were patterned after Zorro in comic books.

Zorro is Spanish word for a cunning and agile fox. Isabel Allende, a Chilean woman writer, wrote a big novel on Zorro in 2005.

iPhone 11 series runs on A 13 Bionic chips. It is the fastest Central Processing Unit (CPU) ever put into a smart phone. At the same time, considering its graphic capabilities, it is the fastest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Besides, it is very power-efficient. And to cap it all, it is, designed to handle ML and ‘neural networks’.

Let us first understand some electronics and microprocessor design. At Bell Telephone Labs, three physicists invented a transistor in 1948. Their names were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They shared the Nobel Prize. A transistor is a small circuit with at least three connections. The circuit uses semi-conductors which allow passage of electric current but with a higher resistance than that of metals. Many such transistors are put together to create integrated circuits (ICs). What we call microprocessors are the ICs which process instructions in a computer or a microwave or a smart TV. They are commonly called chips.

In the 1960s, Gordon Moore (co-founder of Intel) found that the number of transistors per sq. cm. in ICs was doubling every year. It came to be known as Moore’s Law. It held for a number of years before slowing down.

A13 has 8.5 billion transistors, whereas its forerunner A12 had 6.9 billion transistors. It is thus a huge advance. A13 is a smaller chip physically. Every transistor is about seven nanometres, and there are 10 million nanmetres to a centimetre.

Chips are designed to carry out computer instructions — opening and closing circuits as required. On binary system, Os and 1s are used. 1s allow the passage of current on a live circuit and no current passes on Os. Chip design involves optimisation to process efficiently the type of problems that the computer most commonly handles.

Chip manufacture consists of three differant tasks —

i. hardware design to make it small and physically efficient.

ii. work out most efficient way to solve specific problems — the logical instructions.

iii fabrication of the chip at scale.

Modern computers have CPUS and GPUS. In a smart phone, they are bundled together on the same chip. Very few companies do both chip designing and fabrication, e.g. Intel. Some do just chip design ( fabless manufacturers) e.g. APM. These license out the patents to cellphone and computer makers. There are companies who do fabrication on contract.

Apple has its own in-house chip design department. It also buys some chips for its Macs from Intel. The Bionic series powers its iPhone range. It designs the chips and then contracts out fabrication to Taiwan Semiconductors. A13 is good at image processing. It is power-efficient and enhances battery life. It is optimised to run AI algorithms. It is a gamer’s delight, a game suit called Apple Arcade. Apple TV too had come. Both are bundled into the phone. The four camera set up in iPhone provides feed which can be edited simultaneously.

iPhone 11 has the capacity to splice and edit. It can revolutionise vlogging. It is useful to create new apps

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Communication has become intrusive. There is over-communication which is unwelcome. Advertisers reach out without caring for whether the person is willing to be reached. If the message is not meaningful, it is better to desist.

Advertising grammar is so adjusted that the reducing span of consumer attention is addressed. Headlines have become catchy and the offers are click-now-or-lose. Data is used to make the offers personalised. Communication is in sync with their past behaviour and preferences. Though personalisation is good, too much of it leads to brands developing multiple personality disorder, and lose the very essence that makes them brands. Video content is the preferred mode.

Advertisers are not the academic toppers, though many are outstandingly meritorious, it is not necessary for them to fit in. What matter more is creativity. Advertising creativity is not well acknowledged.

Advertising has to be responsive in real time, and the agencies cannot spend too much time to create campaigns. They have to respond to context quickly. Advertising cannot afford to be unethical, and must be truly professional.

Advertising, especially digital, is obsessed with technology of data science, streaming, programmatic and trending. Where is talent in all this? Whose job is it to be creative? Talent is not lured into the industry. Real talent is considered pricey. How can existing talent be trained into new dimensions? They should be given breathing space to upskill.

Talent attraction and retention is a big problem. Youngsters have many options. There is a tendency to poach talent within industry. The talent pool remains small. Industry has defaulted in its responsibility of creating fresher, high-quality talent.

The US election of Donald Trump, used the digital canvassing. Election advertising played a great role. The objective is to reach the maximum number of people and influence them. Several demographic components are addressed, e.g. salaried class, businessmen, farmers etc. These days advertising goes beyond this. It takes into account the temperament of the voters. A firm called Cambridge Analytica exactly did this. It concentrated on the 17 states of the US. They collected maximum data of the people in these states. To illustrate, what cars they have used and are using, their economic condition, their purchase behaviour, their methods of entertainment. Such data is available through some companies. Another source was to get the data from Facebook. A researcher from Cambridge Analytica has developed an app to assess personalities on Facebook. This researcher was Alexander Kogan. You have to answer questions like — whether you lose temper early, whether you like to interact with people. Depending on your answers, a judgement can be made about your personality. It is called psychometry. Psychometry measured individuals on Facebook against five dimensions — openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. It is called OCEAN model. You can predict the likes, dislikes, fears, intellect based on this. It can predict the decision making of an individual under certain circumstances.

Rogan’s information collected from Facebook facilitated the design of the model by Cambridge Analytica, which was used in the elections. It was inferred who are likely to vote Trump and who are not likely to vote him. It paved the path to reach the prospective voters and the customised message which would generate a response.

To illustrate, there is one issue in all the elections, whether to have fire arm. Republicans are for it, and Democrats against it. According to OCEAN models, those with high O and N are practical and would love to have gun to protect against thieves. Those who have less O and more A, can be appealed emotionally by saying having a gun is a part of family honour, culture and traditions. Such customised messages are more effective. Trumps canvassing was based on such analysis. The information was used to influence the voters. Can technology be used like this? Is it legal? Is it moral? It was later revealed that information from social media was collected unauthorisedly. There is an issue of credibility of Facebook. Cambridge Analytica was in vortex of controversy and wound up business in 2018.

How Data Is Abused

Jamie Bartlett has written Secrets of Silicon Valley. CA allegedly mined data of 87 million Facebook users, including half a million Indians, for election campaign. His new book is The People vs Tech. Here Bartlett proposes that relentless march of technology could chip away at the pillars of democracy. At present, he is the Director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, London.

Michal Konsinki is a psychologist, who is one of the pioneers of psychographics. This is the technique that CA has allegedly used. He is the professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has developed an algorithm which registers Facebook likes and compares them to other people who have taken the personality test. Then it gives the output — what it considers your personality. It poses a risk in the wrong hands.

Psychographics is powerful and dangerous. It has the potential to manipulate people. It is powerful in close elections where relatively small margins could swing the entire election. Enough key people can be moved one way or the other. The more the data we share about ourselves, the better the technique is going to be.

Election advertising has been there but big data and micro targeting is different. Here politicians are able to send customised, personalised messages. It is like a direct talk. In propaganda, the visible party can be held accountable. Here as the message is personalised, it is difficult to fix accountability. Politics so far used to address a broad collection of people. Here an individual’s concerns and prejudices are addressed. It is divisive politics, and it is emotionally driven.

Alexander Nix, the former CEO of CA denies having used psychographics. He feels targeting and psychographics are the techniques of future.

Theresa Hong, the member of the digital arm of Trump’s presidential campaign contends that Facebook did make a difference. It is due to Facebook that Trump won. Without Facebook, they would not have reached the right people at the right place. Facebook was more important than CA to Trump campaign.

Facebook admits 87 millions users were affected by CA. Most public profiles have their data scraped. Which other companies do this? Europe wants to implement General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

What is a meme? It is difficult to explain. The earliest example in advertising is that of an Amul girl with topical, at times satirical and punny, lines on current affairs. The focus is on a twist to a recent event.

Perhaps, the copywriters of Amul had an understanding of how the world would consume information in future — in small, easily palatable bites. Memes do exactly this. They add a twist to the story.

Memes have become a sine qua non of today’s digital discourse. The word has its genesis in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976). In this book memes represented ideas, behaviours and styles that go viral. These memes are counterparts of a gene that gets transmitted from person to person. Virtual memes mimic this.

Reddit as a website made gaming and anime popular among teenagers. Memes came into picture since then. They are the smallest units of internet culture. Memes are politically incorrect. Best memes enter the mainstream social media sites after being in the chat rooms.

Memes are exploited by political parties, social media influencers, marketers and government agencies. Memes enagage users, as they are funny, clever or irreverent. They have the capacity to build a brand.

Memes encourage active participation from anyone and everyone on the Internet. They are shared, liked and commented on. This adds to their virality. They are malleable too.

Meme requires creative thinking, social thinking and brand thinking at the same time. Digital agencies may not have such talents. Advertising agencies do not understand digital. Meme marketing is thus sporadic. Memes are pithy — one or two lines of text. Such creation requires wit, humour and knowledge of what is making news. It has to be made instantly as soon as the event happens. Later the story is too old to be effective.

Lot of misinformation is likely to be converted into memes. Memes need scrutiny and are to be consumed with a pinch of salt.

Messages can be encrypted at the user level or at the server level. WhatsApp messages are encrypted at the user level, and WeChat messages at the server level. SMS messages are at the un-encrypted level. Encryption is for security. Modern encryptions use algorithms to convert message text into random characters and symbols. It can be decoded only using a key.

Symmetric encryption is one of the oldest methods. Ceaser cipher moves each letter by three. This can be used in combination with a symmetric encryption. Symmetric keys can be decipherable over time. That has led to a concept of public keys. These are asymmetric. Suppose you log in to WhatsApp. It generates a public key and a private key. The public key is visible to all. Private key is the real decoder or has encoding value. A message is sent over a public key lands up in another users system where it is decoded using private key. This is called end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and other message services use this. It used a mechanism called RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman), along with other systems. iMessage has been doing it what WhatsApp is doing now. Signal has a better standard than WhatsApp. It is the gold standard of messaging services.

WhatsApp generates metadata, and though messages calls, bites, photos and videos are encrypted, but not the metadata, and can show who you are talking to.

Telegram offers end-to-end encryption once the service is activated. And such convesations are in secret chat where messages are deleted after a specific time. Telegram, however, leaks more metadata than WhatsApp does.

Signal too has an additional feature called disappearing messages. It deleted within a few minutes or hours or days whatever is on server.

People keep back up of their chats on Google. This means that chats can be decipherable on Google server. Disappearing messages ensure that nothing gets saved on any of the servers.

Despite this, the messaging apps are not completely safe. With malware, nothing is safe. Someone can mask your private key and your public id.

Indian advertising in the beginning of the 20th century was directed to the elite in the British India. Organised advertising started in India in 1905 by B. Dultaram & co,. In 1929, J Walter Thomson ( JWT ) introduced professionalism in advertising. In those days, Hollywood actresses and celestrial models appeared in soap ads. Leela Chitnis pioneered an Indian’s endorsements of Lux beauty soap. In 1946, Bobby Kooka Air India’s commercial directory and Umesh Rao artist with JWT created a mascot-Air India’s Maharaja. The decade is 1950s marked the Indian contribution to advertising as prior to that many creatives were imported from London’s Fleet Street. R K Laxman created Gatta, a mascot for Asian Paints.

In the 1960s, Zodiac advertising by Ogilvy caught attention. Lintas created Lifebuoy ad on health platform. Wills Filter Cigarettes made for each other series was initiated. In 1966, Sylvester da Cunha, Eustaco Fernandes and Usha Katrak created ‘utterly butterly’ Amul campaign. Amul girl was created for topical punchlines.

Air India flight attendant Karen Lunel appreared in waterfall ad in 1975 and again in 1985. In 1976, Gabbar of Sholay was used to sell Britannia biscuit.

In the wake of Asian Games in 1982, colour TV was introduced in India. Epic serials Ramayana and Mahabharata were telecast. Nirma girl was used for detergents’ advertising on TV screens. Surf was sold as’ Lalita’s samajdhari’. Pan Parag’s ad with Shammi Kapoor and Ashok Kumar appeared. Mudra produced ‘ I love you, Rasna’ and ‘ Only Vimal’. Complan ad featured complan boy and girl, ie. Shahid Kapoor and Ayesha Takia.

Zakir endorsed Taj Mahal tea’ Onida devil was created in 1982. Gold Spot was the zing thing. Prestige cooker ads for ” biwi ka pyar’ and Bajaj Electrical’s ‘ jab main chhota bachcha tha made an impression. Vick’s lozenge, Maggie’s two-minute noodles and ‘Give Me Red’ were remarkable campaigns. The two-wheeler ads of Bajaj, Hero Honda and Kinetic were noticeable. Social Service advertising of ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’ too appeared. Cola Wars were fought backed by advertising. Kamsutra condom ad and Tuff shoes ad of Milind Soman and Madhu Supre too appeared Raymond’s complete Man was created. Cadbury resorted ‘asli swad zindagika’. Thums up bungee Jump ad was exciting. Coke was official sponsor of 1996 cricket world Cup. Pepsi used the line ‘nothing official about it’.

Ericcson One Black Coffee ad to indicate compact product and the famous Fevicol ads too were highly popular.

In the new millennium, Asian’s paints Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai was one of the iconic campaigns. Coca cola started Thanda Matlab Coca Cola, Maruti Suzuki emphasised its fuel efficiency (petrol khatam ni hunda). Center shock barbar commercial and ‘Dimag ki batti jalade’ for Metos appeared. Happydent featured bright teeth turning into light bulbs. Amitabh appeared in social service advertising for polio vaccination-Do boond zindagi ke. Indian tourism was promoted by an incredible India campaign. Hutchinson Essar initiated famous pug and boy campaign, later followed by Vodafone. Zoozoos the alian like Creatured appeared in 2009. Idea started ‘What an idea, Sirji’ campaign.

Surf Excel’s ‘ daag achehe hai’ campaign and HDFCStandard Life’s ‘Sar utha ke jiya’ stirred the emotional pitch, Nike featured a man playing a game in a traffic jam.

After 2010, there were many story-telling campaigns-Har ek friend zaroori hota hai for Airtel, prisonbreak by Tata Sky, Google’s story of separated friends reunited thanks to internet search.