July 2026 introduction – (36)
Welcome to the 36th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘three dozen’. And yes that’s the most uninspired yet functional bingo lingo I’ve come across on this journey so far. 36 seemed strangely appropriate as that was the temperature inside my house on the celsius scale most days this month.
There is no fancy symbolism of the homophones in the Chinese language for 36. But The 36 Stratagems are sayings and tactical manoeuvres used in areas of Chinese life from business to politics.
My personal favourite is ‘borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul‘ – take something that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one’s own purposes.
This month’s soundtrack is by Horalion who created a divine mashup of Daft Punk and Miki Matsubara. Matsubara is famous for work in city pop and anime soundtracks. Together Something About Us and 真夜中のドア〜Stay with Me sound sublime.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things that I’ve written
I explored moral licensing from agency behaviour to a global health crisis.
Consumer grievance is coming as a steady drumbeat from consumer and economic research and has an impact on marketing.
I curated things of interest from around the web including an interview from Jensen Huang in advance of his publicly support for open models and open weight LLMs as cybersecurity tools.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
- Global brand strategy has got harder with tainted national brands. Europeans are now torn between the US and China.
- Rolex’s use of chōngchǎng (paid gig workers) as a rent a crowd in Shanghai caught the attention of watch collectors around the world
- Corporate earnings skewed agency growth targets due to the artificially high values of hyperscalers.
- Hard luxury outperforms soft luxury
- A video where Les Binet endorse Byron Sharp’s line on loyalty.
Books that I have read
Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. Gnomon is a speculative fiction book set in the near future. The UK is totally surveilled by an AI. The main character Mielikki Neith is an investigator and is looking to the death of a suspect who dies in state custody. Neith explores the neural recordings of the dissident to try and work out what happened.
The recordings consist of four surreal impossible lives, but the lives are a form of hidden code designed to affect anyone exploring them. Questions then arise about the purpose of the surveillance system and whether it has undergone what could be called ‘model drift’.
It’s not the easiest book to read, but his rewarding as Harkaway takes you through the different worlds that Neith explores and her own experience in the real world.
This month I have been working my way through Dan Wang’s Breakneck. A book that looks at China’s development versus US development, written by a Chinese author who grew up in Canada. I am almost finished and it’s very readable.
The key thrust of the book is that China is a society governed by engineers and scientists, whereas the US (and by extension much of the west for that matter) is run by lawyers. In the US and the west that breaks down slightly but the point Wang makes is China asks what’s possible, the West winds its way through restrictions. I think modernism vs. post-modernism would have been more accurate short hand descriptors; as difference goes beyond government to the ‘industrial party’ and even science fiction like Liu Cixin’s TheThree-Body Problem.
Wang’s work has started to shape how I look about the ‘why’ behind the divergent approaches to LLMs and other products between the US and the west, but more on that another time.
Things I have been inspired by.
I am a long time fan of Kevin Kelly’s writing from his work with Wired magazine to the book What Technology Wants I have found his thinking right on the money. He reframes large language models as a latent space due to their massive compression of knowledge and information.
For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references.
Until recently we might have thought that all the information about a thing would take up more storage space than the thing itself. That may be true for a single thing, but not for the aggregate of all things. That is because most things share a lot of common attributes with other things. The neural nets of an LLM do a magic trick by abstracting the information of everything at once, so that it uses the myriad common relationships between things and ideas to compress and abstract them into this virtual “latent” or hidden space.
Kelly reflects on this latent space as a new form of medium, implying more potential than a productivity hack. Kelly describes this latent space as a map built in millions of dimensions making it sound like science fiction or theoretical physics.
Gig Economy in China
Inspired is the wrong word, but I was surprised and shocked to find out by a piece from Think China that 44% of the country’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
Chart of the month.
McKinsey have published a paper on Agents, robots, and us: How AI reshapes work and skills in Europe. In it, they have estimated what tasks LLMs will do well.
“Most human skills will endure, even as they are applied differently. Three-quarters of the skills sought by European employers today, including problem solving, writing, and research, are used in both automatable and non-automatable work. This overlap means they are more likely to be applied in collaboration with AI than replaced by it, at least in the near term.”
Things I have watched.
German TV series Where’s Wanda made some light watching as a Germany family manages to stay together while searching for their missing daughter. It’s got humour, creative problem solving and a giant Sasquatch-type creature. I will leave it there so I don’t give away any spoilers.
I rewatched To Live and Die in LA for the first time in years. The film was written and directed by William Friedkin, and second only to The French Connection in his filmography of outstanding films. William Friedkin was part of the New Hollywood movement, alongside figures like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich.
The screenplay was based on a book by a former Secret Service agent and documents an investigation into a talented counterfeiter. Like Michael Mann’s Thief which demonstrated how to crack a safe vault with a thermic lance, Friedkin went into detail abut the photolithographic process that counterfeiters used prior to desktop publishing. You get fantastic performances from an edgy young William Defoe and William Petersen.
I found it as enjoyable to watch as I remember but I picked up on different things, particularly the detail in Friedkin’s introduction that showed the art and grim edginess of 1980s Los Angeles with retina-burning typography, with an interesting use of fonts to give ‘place’ and the cinematography which made the city a key character.
Useful tools.
Ever done research, or tried to pull in data from a website or table and had the format go funny. You then spend an inordinate amount of time fixing it? That’s where TextSoap comes in. Its a Mac app that cleans the data that you are bringing across, It has a number of built-in cleaners or you to choice from and also allows you to create your own one using its cleaner editor.
Hookmark cleans up weblinks, this helps with bit rot since a lot of links add additional privacy related information that stops working over time.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.
With over a decade of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. Recently, I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the foundational brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for agency new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.
I focus on what actually works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I do not just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. Clients hire me to pressure-test their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.
How I help leadership teams:
- Pressure-Testing: I force-function clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, specifically in the EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I don’t just write decks; I build campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
More on what I have done here.
The End.
Ok this is the end of my July 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can. We have less than one month to wait until the next bank holiday.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
PS: Why Buzz Aldrin as this month’s picture? I try and have a photo that matches the theme, in this case 36. This photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission was from the film magazine 36/N – Trans-Lunar. A tenuous but cool link.