Are you tired of receiving political intelligence from people who have never worked on a political campaign and couldn't tell you the electoral importance of Macomb County over Marin County?
Are you tired of being lectured by tweed-jacket academics with fancy degrees that are more impressed with speaking engagements in Aspen than helping you connect the dots?
Are you tired of not knowing if the information you are receiving is reality-based or commentary-based?
Do you have these pain points?
I know these pain points.
Working with people that dismiss the importance of politics.
Working with people that dismiss street smarts.
Working with people that dismiss reality to fit their narrative.
Here are four reasons why Team Caracal is so excited to get the China Communications Intelligence service into the wild:
Caracal knows communications and political intelligence for global business.
Caracal knows communications at the intersection of globalization, disruption, and politics.
Caracal knows how to engage the world's most politically savvy participants.
Caracal loves working with corporate communication executives.
We packaged up all this know-how and passion into the China Communications Intelligence service.
A service designed to meet the motley to-do task list that dominates the working life of a corporate communication executive, especially one whose responsibility is global.
The China Communications Intelligence service is designed by a communication executive for other communication executives - it is the only US-China service that puts communications first.
Not government relations.
Not regulatory policy.
Not business advisory.
Not diplomacy.
Communications.
We mean no slight to the many learned policy pros and sophisticated diplomats that dominate the US-China commercial relations advisory world, but succeeding in this hyper-political environment requires street smart communications.
Communications that are well informed, consistent, persuasive, engaging multiple stakeholders, and executing a street smart high-low approach.
Communications that needs to go from the think tanks of DC to the backyard picnic tables of Detroit.
Communications that needs to go from the panels of Davos to the coffee shops of Denver.
The China Communications Intelligence service will help you navigate one of the most critical commercial relationships in the world - from daily news overviews to deep-dive presentations.
Let me show what China Communications Intelligence is.
I want to send you our daily curated news overview email.
A daily news overview that is China political trend-spotting and actionable insights to help you succeed in the hyper-political US-China commercial relationship.
Sound good?
Sign up here.
-Marc
Marc A. Ross
Founder @ Caracal
Xi's halt on tutors - what's the real reason?
Local governments in China have been instructed to withhold business licenses for new tuition centers while existing ones must be registered as "non-profit institutions."
Besides being barred from offering courses during the school holidays, the tutoring platforms will also be banned from going public and raising further capital from listed firms or foreign funds.
Week in China reports nine major cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou – the biggest markets for Chinese edtechs except for Shenzhen – have been selected as pilot cities to implement the strict new guidelines.
The Financial Times reports that the tutoring crackdown provides a window into the mounting stresses and strains of middle-class life in China's big cities.
To outsiders, the world's second-largest economy can often seem relentless, immune to even the worst pandemic in a century and notching persistently significant increases in consumer spending as prosperity spreads rapidly across society.
But is this is the real reason for the crackdown, stress?
No.
Going back to the post on the waiting list to join the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing sees problems on the horizon.
China provides nine years of free compulsory education, covering primary school and junior middle school. Beyond that, tens of millions of students have to sit the zhongkao, the Senior High School Entrance Examination, and gaokao, a standardized college entrance exam held annually, to compete for positions in higher levels of education.
According to data from New Oriental, 17 million children were eligible for the zhongkao in 2019. About 10 million, or 60% of them, went on to take the gaokao. Private educational groups set out to help these students (and their parents) prepare for the brutal talent screening tests.
The underlying trends shaping China's tertiary education system for more than a decade are not necessarily as well suited to the staffing requirements of programs like the Made in China 2025 initiative.
As policymakers push for national self-sufficiency in key industrial supply chains such as chipmaking, the call for more skilled workers has become more pressing.
As a result, the government has been putting a much heavier emphasis on vocational training instead of the continuing expansion in tertiary education (aka the number of university places).
In April, as scrutiny of the off-campus tutoring schools increased to a new level of intensity, Xi Jinping called for efforts to speed up the development of a "modern vocational education system" to cultivate a new generation of high-quality, technical professionals.
Fewer humanities students and more STEM graduates - that is the reason for the crackdown.
Top 2021 Super Bowl ad, Podcasts, Ads, Pressure, Turning Pro
CEO Communications Intelligence | Weekly
1. Can you name the top 2021 Super Bowl ad?
2. Say yes to that podcast interview
3. "No one cares about ads"
4. “Pressure can create diamonds or can burst pipes."
5. Turning Pro
Brand marketing in a direct marketing world
Pop quiz:
What was the top 2021 Super Bowl ad according to USA Today's Ad Meter?
Heck, if you can name one of the top ten, I will give you bonus points.
The reason you can't remember the best ad or any ads from the big game, it's not the best tool.
It's not the best tool because it doesn't connect, make an impact, or leave a mark.
You see, brand marketing doesn't work in the direct marketing world.
Brand marketing is from a different age. A different business environment. A different communication era.
Brand marketing was created when John Wanamaker's statement "half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" worked because it could work.
It could work because advertisers created a mass broadcast communications environment to serve its needs.
Radio was created to sell ads.
Television was created to sell ads.
Brian Millar, a co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Agency, writes, "traditional advertising went after 'share of mind’–the idea was to get you to associate a brand with a single idea, a single emotion. Volvo: safety. Jaguar: speed. Coke: happiness. The Economist: success. Bang, bang, bang, went the ads, hammering the same idea into your mind every time you saw one.
"Advertising briefs evolved to focus the creatives on a single unique selling position and a single message. Tell them we're the Ultimate Driving Machine. Tell them in a thrilling way. It worked when you saw ads infrequently on television, in a Sunday magazine, or on a billboard on your morning commute."
This type of advertising worked because it was a communications environment of one to many with only a handful of vehicles to reach an audience.
But that is not today.
Today we are living in a direct marketing world powered by the WWW.
Now we have micro-media and personalized broadcast communications environment which serves the needs of the end-user.
The internet was not created for ads.
The internet is not mass media.
The Emotional Intelligence Agency conducted a study to understand what kind of content works to better understand this new communications environment. The firm found communications that used funny, practical, beautiful, and inspiring content delivers the best results.
Not surprisingly, the most successful brands do all four.
Also, not surprising, these are the adjectives used by any top storyteller.
She knows they are the best words when executing micro and personalized communications.
Yet most of us communicate using only one type of emotionally compelling content - if at all - employing brand marketing techniques that are closer to the days of Mad Men than to the present day of Laundry Service.
We still communicate like once a day, or worse, just a few times a month.
Instead of using tools that follow and engage our most active supporters in their media diet.
When it comes to the WWW and the direct marketing communications environment, being multidimensional beats being single-minded.
Surprise beats consistency.
Emotion beats fact.
Funny beats dour.
Useful beats sales.
Beautiful beats boring.
Inspirational beats directional.
The best communicators have always understood this instinctively.
By the way, USA Today's Ad Meter ranked Rocket Mortgage's "Certain Is Better" with Tracy Morgan, Dave Bautista, and Liza Koshy" as the best 2021 ad.
I don't remember the ad either.
Say yes to that podcast interview
Next time you are asked to join a podcast, say yes.
Pew reports while terrestrial radio listenership declined in 2020, the audience for online audio has grown.
In fact, NPR's weekly podcast audience nearly doubled in the past two years, from about 7 million in 2018 to about 14 million in 2020, according to data provided by the broadcaster.
Today around three-in-ten Americans ages 12 and older (28%) now say they listened to podcasts in the past week, according to "The Infinite Dial" report by Edison Research and Triton Digital.
After years of almost perfectly steady listenership, terrestrial radio ( you know AM or FM on the radio dial) saw its overall audience – not just for news – decline in 2020.
Not surprisingly, the decrease coincided with a sharp reduction in automobile use during the COVID-19 pandemic - no one comments anymore.
In 2020, 83% of Americans ages 12 and older listened to terrestrial radio, down from 89% in 2019 and 92% in 2009, according to Nielsen Media Research data published by the Radio Advertising Bureau.
CEOs will need new skills to speak in this podcast expanding world.
For your next media training, make sure podcast training is on the agenda.
"No one cares about ads" and 10 other occasionally immutable laws of advertising
DDB's regional chief creative officer Damon Stapleton outlines his own unique laws of the advertising world.
1. Nobody cares about advertising, so check your ego.
2. If no one notices your advertising, everything else is academic.
3. You must trust that the advertising will all work. Like George Michael, have some faith.
4. Would you sit next to you at a dinner party? Make sure you have something to say for people to listen to.
5. You will never see a statue of a committee.
6. Ideas are too easy to kill. And that idea you killed before might be the best idea now. Harvest all those banished ideas.
7. Consumers can tell when you have cut corners.
8. All a good ad does for a lousy product is let more people know a lousy product exists far more quickly.
9. When people use consequential, resplendent, and splendiferous words, they are often not saying anything.
10. We spend vast amounts of time thinking about how something reaches audiences - what platform, what broadcast, what format. But do we spend as much time on what we are delivering?
11. Fun and humor unlock new ways and ideas. Fun is the one ingredient that makes creativity happen.
You can read Stapleton's full B&T guest post here.
Quote of the week
“Pressure can create diamonds or can burst pipes. You’ve got to really be careful as to what kind of pressure you put on."
-- Otmar Szafnauer @ Team Principal - Aston Martin F1
Read this book
Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work
-- Steven Pressfield
CEO Communications Intelligence is strategy and actionable how to ideas to help you succeed in today’s hyper-political business environment.