Tom Doctoroff: Paul French is wrong about China (and Tom Doctoroff)

Tom Doctoroff, CEO of J. Walter Thompson for Greater China, accepted my invitation to respond to the critique of his book by Shanghai-based writer and businessman Paul French.

In a nutshell, French said (blog posting here or video here)hat Doctoroff falsely claims a pioneering role in opening China in his book Billions: Selling to the new Chinese consumer.

The real pioneer, French said, is Carl Crow, a Shanghai adman in the 1920s and 1930s who introduced Buick and other brands to China. French recently published the book Carl Crow, a tough old China hand.

Doctoroff’s reply to French:

Thomas,

I don’t know what to say. I believe the posting is unbalanced and the tone is bully-boy cocky.

How does one respond to a sweeping statement — at least my book, on the first page, warns of “generalizations” — that yours truly is “wrong about China.”

And then he rails against me, sarcasm dripping, for having the audacity to call myself a “pioneer” when Carl Crow had already seen “everything.” He’s playing a gotcha game gone bad.

First, I have never called myself a pioneer. And, by the way, no one “took credit” (or implied involvement) for launching Buick. We did not even do that work. Bates did.

Second, Carl Crow was man of ahead of his time — yes, he was a “pioneer” and blessed with extraordinary insight and observational skill. However, he did not see “everything.”

The world has changed just a bit in 75 years.

He did not see a middle class boasting 150 million people and an auto market with 6 million passenger cars sold per year. He did not see a mass market — now penetrating the rural fringe — snapping up mobile phones and using them to transform their lives. He did not see multinational corporations setting up R&D centers and manufacturing scale on the mainland. He did not see that extraordinary release of energy that resulted from the embrace of capital markets.

For anyone to assume that “everything” has been seen before discredits that extraordinary genius of the Chinese people and their ability to adapt to an evolving world without sacrificing their enduring cultural orientation.

It also denigrates the efforts of, yes, expatriate businessmen who, while far from perfect and certainly not always noble, have done their part to make China a more dynamic place as the 21st century unfolds.

Tom Doctoroff

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Paul French: Why Tom Doctoroff is wrong about China

Shanghai-based writer/businessman Paul French rants (and froths a little) in this video about why China marketing guru Tom Doctoroff is wrong about China.

Doctoroff is CEO Greater China of J. Walter Thompson, a blogger and author of the bestselling book Billions: Selling to the New Chinese Consumer.

UPDATE: Doctoroff accepted my invitation to reply and did so in this posting: Tom Doctoroff: Paul French is wrong about China (and Tom Doctoroff)

Why is French apoplectic?

French says that Doctoroff and other current-day China gurus from the west falsely claim pioneering roles in opening up China.

In fact, the real foreign pioneer in opening China’s market to western-style consumerism was the 1920s and 1930s Shanghai adman Carl Crow.

In particular, French said Doctoroff claims to be the first to launch Buick in China (which Crow did), the first to use a woman in a car advertisement (which Crow did) as well as a few other things that Crow did first. (The title of Doctoroff’s own book - Billions - echoes Crow’s book 400 Million Consumers)

Full disclosure of the French agenda: He wrote a (great) biography called Carl Crow, a Tough Old China Hand.

I also highly recommend reading Crows own essays on China Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom. Crow’s seminal work, 400 Million Consumers, will soon be issued in reprint by the China Economic Review.

Be great to hear from Doctoroff on this!

UPDATE: Doctoroff accepted my invitation to reply and did so in this posting: Tom Doctoroff: Paul French is wrong about China (and Tom Doctoroff)

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User Generated Dubbing: American Idol in Hmong

Proof that User Generated Dubbing has now reached landlocked Laos: American Idol dubbed into Hmong.

Really amusing interpretive noises for emotion.

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Lonnie Hodge: Praise for Baidu selling search results

Unlike Google, China’s dominant search engine - Baidu - sells its results page.
Lonnie Hodge, a search engine optimization expert (see video here about his departure from academics after many years), sent over some slides about a relatively new way Baidu is selling search results: Brandlink.

For one million RMB (Roughly US$130,000), a brand - and only the brand itself - can show their logo and image with search results.

Brandlink can help companies control and develop their reputation.
“We were contacted by two companies who were Google and Baidu-bombed by a competitor via BBS and blog reference negativity (mostly fake) and both were doing a lot of damage,” Hodge said, adding that Brandlink might help mitigate this problem.

It is naive to think that Google’s results are not for sale
Google may not be directly involved in the sale of their results, but Hodge pointed out that there is a reason people pay top dollar to search engine specialists. These specialists work for the wealthiest and savviest companies to skew results. “The average SEO specialist in the US with 5 to 7 years of campaign management can command US$100,000 to US$250,000 for his/her talents. That certainly indicates an uneven playing field exists and that the results are dubious at best.”

initial results show from Baidu’s Brandlink show an improved rate of click-through

But the question remains: Are purchased search results unethical?
Hodge praised Baidu for only selling the top four results and putting a line under them and only allowing brands and government agencies to buy their own search results page.

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John Berthelsen on the future of Asia Sentinel

I recently met with John Berthelsen, the founding editor of the website Asia Sentinel to hear about the site’s plans and aspirations.

Launched in August 2006 by a group of veteran and prominent Asia correspondents (more background here), Asia Sentinel is intended to fill a void left by the closure of such publications as AsiaWeek and the weekly edition of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Slate.com meets The Far Eastern Economic Review (the weekly version)

“Regional magazine journalism is dead, so we want to fill that void,” Berthelsen said. “Our target are the more in depth investigative pieces that nobody does anymore.”

Asia Sentinel’s ideal kind of articles:

1- The inside story of Thai coup: The King and the role of Prem, his longtime advisor.

2- Murder of the Mongolian translator in Malaysia (”We’re the only ones keeping this story alive and tying it to government officials.”)

Operational details:

- 35 contributors from around the region. (Who get paid, Berthelsen said, “peanuts”)

- New stories are supposed to be posted twice per day.

- A tie-up with the International Herald Tribune gives Asia Sentinel a space for their headlines on www.iht.com

- 7,000 unique visitors per day. This is well short of the 30,000 per day which Berthelsen said would generate US$10,000 per month to make an advertising model viable.

Long-term view is for Asia Sentinel

Tie-up with a journalistic company looking for a presence in Asia. One model is to offer Asia Sentinel Consulting, along the lines of the Australian site Crickey.au, which offers a free news site, archives and paid in depth custom research.

Traffic frustrations
“We ran a great piece on the shambolic state of Indonesia’s air traffic system just one week before the Air Adam crash and it only got several hundred hits,” Berthelsen said. “Our Edison Chen coverage, on the other hand, shut down the site twice, with more than 13,000 hits in a single day.”

Other overlooked stories include a series of pieces on a US$200 million slush fund scandal related to Samsung. The top traffic topics now seem to be those involving Malaysia and politics.

Lessons learned about coverage: “Every now and then we clearly need to have sex, drugs and rock and roll.” (As of May 2, 2008, the Edison Chen story had 125,000 hits.)

View of the AsiaTimes, a website at atimes.com aimed at covering Asia news

“They are both polemical and act like a whale,” Berthelsen said. “They take in all plankton and do not practice the same standards of journalism as us.”

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Sexy User Generated Propaganda Hero for China

Lei Feng, icon of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, please meet Second Right Brother, your Web 2.0 counterpart.

Lei Feng was a selfless and modest soldier devoted to Chairman Mao who was killed by a truck backing up. Created by Mao’s government the old fashioned way - fiat of the propaganda department - Lei Feng was intended to inspire the nation as it recovered from the failures of the Great Leap Forward.

Second Right Brother (the only name we know him by) is a member of the torch security detail who for many Chinese (women) has come to embody a new handsome hero standing up to protect China’s pride. Second right refers to his position in the security detail.

His true identity remains a mystery and Chinese Internet users, many of them women, simply refer to him as You Er GeGe or 右二哥哥, literally translated as Second Right Brother.

But Second Right Brother’s good works have not gone unnoticed by obsessive sites showing his photograph, sharing stories about him and even proposing marriage.

Once this Olympic torch relay is over, Second Right Brother may find a second career in the sphere of capitalist propaganda, aka sponsorship.

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CNN, now a four-letter word in China

In continuing fallout from the travails of the Olympic torch, CNN now appears to be entering the Chinese vocabulary in a less than complimentary manner.

A university teacher here in Hong Kong reports that his Chinese students now use the expression “so CNN” to mean something that is subjective, lying and deceitful. One student admonished another “don’t be so CNN”.

(Image from the Anti-CNN website.)

UPDATE: Further evidence of the trend from a new fad in anti-CNN t-shirts reported by Danwei.

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China 2.0: User Generated Propaganda (Hip hop-style)

The Olympic Torch controversy has inspired a web 2.0 take on national pride: User Generated hip hop propaganda in support of the Beijing Olympics. (There is also a subcategory of video arguments about Tibet, this one by an American anonymized by a Groucho Marx face painted over his face.)

They have been big on Chinese platforms, like Sina for some time, and are now moving onto YouTube.

Here is a Hip Hop-style propaganda and below it Powerpoint-style Propaganda.

Hat tip to Danwei.

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William Bao Bean: China’s one child policy and the Internet

I discussed the impact of China’s one child policy on the Internet with William Bao Bean of Softbank China & India.Growing up in a one-child household makes Chinese children lonely and keen to connect, hence the obsessive use of the Internet by China’s young generation. Chinese, Bean says in this 2-minute video, are much more likely to connect with people than their counterparts in other nations.I would add to the incentives for going online the censorship of state-owned media. The low quality of the competition gives the Internet an added impetus.The implications for Internet use should be clear: Not only are there more people using the Internet in China than any other nation, but they use it with a passion seen in few other places.

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Steve Jobs on the frustrations of focus

A quote on the difficulty of focus from a recent feature in Fortune Magazine on Steve Jobs struck a chord with me.

Jobs’ frustration with focus resonates with this journalist entering business. Why? Because journalism rewards voracious dilettantism, while business rewards monomaniacal focus.

Jobs’ words below on focus were not available on the online version for some reason:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all.

It means saying no to the 100 other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

I’m actually as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done.

The clearest example was when we were pressured for years to do a PDA, and I realized one day that 90 percent of the people who use a PDA only take information out of it on the road. They don’t put information into it.

Pretty soon cellphones are going to do that, so the PDA market’s going to get reduced to a fraction of its current size. So we decided not to get into it.

If we had gotten into it, we wouldn’t have had the resources to do the iPod.

Note: I like his point, but find the example is a little disingenuous. The iPod focussed on functions that were already available on phones, but did them better.

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