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May 2026 newsletter – issue 34 the ”ask for more” edition
May 2026 introduction – (34)

Welcome to the 34th edition of my newsletter. This issue sees me writing this from my parent’s home in the North West of England. It’s also part of the reason why this has been published later than usual.

The change of pace in Granadaland in comparison to London was noteworthy. In bingo lingo 34 would be ‘ask for more’ – which seems to be very much on the zeitgeist at the moment. There is a general zeitgeist of dissatisfaction in the UK,

In Chinese 34, is considered an unlucky number as 4 sounds similar to the word for death and similar in nature to the number 13 in western cultures.

For this edition’s soundtrack, I went back to move forward with a mix by the late great Larry Levan playing at End Max, Tokyo in 1991. By this time the famous DJ had become a long term heroin addict and had complications due to his drug use and HIV; yet you wouldn’t know it from this set, he died the following November.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.

An analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings to try and understand what was happening beneath the big numbers in a febrile time.

From AI shamans, the Ulm School of Design, an AI reckoning and everything in between.

The 2026 World Cup marketing kick-offs and a bunch more things.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings tells a far more nuanced story than the top-line numbers.
2. High end shopping hauls are becoming a cultural phenomenon. Chanel is no longer just behind a velvet rope; but may erode brand equity
3. Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of LiveRamp and the move to orchestrating enterprise data
4. How the FT thinks marketing is being shaped by AI from production to consumer behaviour.
5. Advertising sectors apparent cycle of delusion
Things I have been inspired by.

Ipsos on sports fandom

I worked on a few sports partnerships activation whilst embedded at Google Cloud and an F1 sports partnership at a freelance engagement more recently. So my attention was immediately grabbed by this collection of research from Ipsos on sports partnerships. It shows the need for long ongoing sports partnerships and the power of a brand sponsor that is highly aligned with the sport and the team.

Nigo at the Design Museum

Nigo is a natural subject for a museum as he has assiduously curated his own life. What particularly impressed me about the Design Museum exhibition was how it made clear that Nigo’s work was a continuation of the earlier work done by the people behind Major Force and File Records: Hiroshi Fujiwara, Takagi Kan, Gota Yashiki and Toshio Nakanishi.

The Major Force crew weren’t just musicians, DJs and producers; but designers and cultural commentators with columns in Japanese magazines.

Even the name Nigo came from people in Tokyo clubs calling Tomoaki Nagao ‘Hiroshi Fujiwara Ni-go’ aka Hiroshi Fujiwara number 2.

When Fujiwara and co. finished their Last Orgy culture column in Takarajima magazine and the spin-off late night TV show, Nigo got their blessing and wrote Last Orgy 2 continuing on in Popeye magazine.

Fujiwara helped fund Nigo’s expansion into retail with the Nowhere boutique, which was the foundation for A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. More on this here, and more on the exhibition at The Design Museum here.

Chart of the month.

Ipsos looked at fans who had differing levels of fandom for a premier league football team and partner brands with different levels of brand fit with the game. Prompted recall was measured over the 2020/21 football season. While the levels changed, there was a clear correlation between the level of brand fit and degree of fandom and prompted brand recall.

Things I have watched.

I watched the rest of the original OSS 117 series of films that I didn’t watch last month. This moved the action to Tokyo and Brazil.
- OSS 117 Mission For A Killer
- OSS 1167 Mission to Tokyo
- OSS 117 Double Agent
Mission For A Killer saw Frederick Stafford take over the role of OSS 117, if you are a classic film you might recognise him from the Alfred Hitchcock film Topaz. Mission to Tokyo was the acme of the series, and a wonderful cinematic capture of the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The final film Double Agent had John Gavin take on the mantle. By which time the franchise felt like a poorer version of Hollywood, Gavin himself was a competent actor, but the creative spark in the franchise was gone. Instead it became part of a sea of sameness in western espionage cinema.

I can understand why there was a major reset, when Michel Hazanavicius rebooted the franchise. He had rich material to work with, from disclosures on what was going on with Jacques Foccart running economic sabotage, deniable military networks and regime change in the Francophone region. Even the private sector were involved, Elf the petroleum giant servicing as a covert slush fund and instrument of foreign policy as France decolonised. The scandal only broke over in the 1990s.

I got to see The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s a good but flawed film. I got into The Mandalorian, not as a Star Wars devotee, but having a deep appreciation for the spaghetti westerns and the chambara films that it subtly drew from.

The film plugs a gap in the Star Wars franchise in the cinema, so expectations were high for Star Wars fans. What you get is spectacle, an experience that would feel at home in a Disney park. So it’s entertaining. The bad points in my opinion are down to a loose plot points, having an actress of the quality of Sigourney Weaver and not using her properly.

What put salt in the wound was the trouble put into scenes that pay clumsy homage to Ray Harryhausen and Francis Ford Coppola respectively. Putting the same effort with less money into tightening up the script would have paid dividends. Maybe Disney didn’t care so long as the space was filled.

I guess the moral of the story is don’t watch this film with a cinephile.

Useful tools.

I have been a big fan of Parcel for a while, but didn’t realise until I listened to a John Gruber podcast episode that it now allows you to track Amazon deliveries as well. Given that I work from home a lot having this app makes like a lot easier to manage package deliveries.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. 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. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

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, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a 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 this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the sun when you can, don’t linger on the next long weekend being at the end of August.

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.
June 1, 2026
February 2026 newsletter – get up & run edition
February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition

I am now at issue 31, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘get up & run’. In Cantonese 31 isn’t a famous lucky number, it could considered to mean ‘life first’ implying an importance of vitality. On the plus side, it doesn’t have negative connotations of say 14 – which sounds similar to definitely die.

I was sent a mix by an old friend of mine done by Frankie Bones at Amnesia House in August 1990 – as aural history its a fascinating treasure trove and occurred a pivotal time with several genres about to fragment from the original UK scene. Now we have our soundtrack let’s get into it.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.

I appeared in the What’s In My Now newsletter talking small wallets, cheaper alternatives to Apple Studio monitors and making better use of LLMs. More here.

I gave a presentation for Outside Perspective on my Dot LLM era paper. Here is my speaking notes that I prepared as I got the presentation ready, complete with the slides at the relevant points.

I spoke to the WSJ about my dot LLM era thinking and was name-checked on their Take On The Week podcast. And I compared my research with Marc Andreessen’s of A16z 2026 AI outlook here.

I wrote a letter to the FT about Sony surrendering its home entertainment business (TVs, home audio) to Chinese TV maker TCL. While Sony’s current involvement in sectors such as elder care and insurance are worthy endeavours – what does it mean when they are more core to Sony’s identity than the home entertainment equipment that the brand built its empire on?

As well as being a concerned Sony customer, I was also thinking about what it means to a brand when it gets rid of its core raison d’être? You can read my letter here.

I was talking to a friend about classic films and suddenly Matthew Frank’s newsletter dropped in my inbox and started me down a rabbit hole exploring the idea of forgettable cinema as part of the modern public zeitgeist.

I pulled together a collection of adverts and campaigns celebrating lunar new year from across Asia and a couple aimed at the wider diaspora. As brands look to benefit from the year of the fire horse.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Publicis widening the business gap versus its rivals. A decade spent preparing their data and foundational technology for machine learning.
2. WPP’s big pivot to adapt to market conditions for the large holding companies.
3. Dentsu’s change of leadership to better control strategy and manage global capabilities.
4. What Google’s AI bet means for advertisers.
5. Michael Farmer on why reorganisation isn’t strategy, instead strategy should drive any reorganisation to meet the strategic objectives. This one proved a bit controversial, I’m not sure why.
Books that I have read.

While I have been looking forward for David McCloskey’s latest book The Persian to come out, I managed to finish The Seventh Floor. On one level The Seventh Floor is about espionage and feels very now given the new cold war. But it’s also about friendship, loyalty and personal betrayal. McCloskey doesn’t only bring expertise from a past career at the CIA, but also a deep love of the espionage novel as an art form and this novel gives a nod and a wink to the works of John Le Carré.

While the agency world is focused on the rise of AI, I decided to revisit Michael Farmer’s Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Ten years after it has been published, the diagnosis and the lessons from Farmer’s research seem to have been ignored by clients and the c-suites of holding groups. One thing I picked up on my revisiting the book was the challenge in defining strategic contribution and effort to campaigns. With creative output, Farmer managed to break down creative tasks into fixed ScopeMetric® Units (SMUs). But Farmer admitted that he couldn’t define strategy outputs in the same way because the context changed account-by-account. This makes sense given the difficulties I have had in the past when strategists were way oversold by the project management function within agencies.

Things I have been inspired by.

Insularity was the watch word of this year’s Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It was a pretty dark vision of the future. There is a huge delta between top income quartile of the population and their trust of authority and the bottom income quartile. In the lower quartile group there is little to no trust in authority figures (business, journalists, government). They only trust people like them.

Andrew Tindall published a new book for System1 based on their research and Effie data which reinforces previous publications by Orlando Wood, Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It also reinforces the importance of context as part of creativity when media and creative functions are co-joined at the hip. It’s very readable and available for free here.

Chart of the month.

The surge of US measles infections turned into a politicised debate about vaccinations, competence, why Canada’s rates were even higher and whether things were as bad as experts would have you believe?

The chart only tells part of the story.

The US CDC cites a general hospitalisation rate of about 20% (1 in 5 cases), recent years have seen significant fluctuations depending on the specific age groups and regions affected by measles outbreaks.

The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.
- 2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
- 2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.
Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.
- 2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
- 2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
- 2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.
Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

Canada’s rates are high because the population has a significant amount of unvaccinated immigrants and refugees from conflict zones and the developing world.

Things I have watched.

Thomas Harris’ Silence of The Lambs still has legs in culture. Which is why Amazon Prime Video has gone back to the universe with Clarice. The story takes place in the aftermath of the buffalo Bill killings which drove the plot of Silence of the Lambs. The storytelling is top notch with a fantastic plot twist in episode 1. It is well worth your time to at least give the first few episodes a chance.

It started off in an unpromising way, several years ago a friend left a DVD with me. They said something along the lines of they liked a number of Werner Herzog films, but that this was too weird for them. I finally got to sit down and watch Fata Morgana.

It doesn’t have a story, but is beautifully shot footage of the Sahara and Sahel in 1969 with a focus on near horizon mirages (from which the film gets its name) and features the human effect on it from vistas of oil processing equipment to barbed wire and crashed planes.

There is a poetic narration in German over the top with a range of music to flt the landscapes. It feels like a forerunner of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi made a decade later. It’s easy to watch.

I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.
- Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
- Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
- James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.
This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.

I was inspired by watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond last month to watch Danger: Diabolik. The psychadelic motifs of and dream sequences of Reflection in a Dead Diamond seemed to draw from European cinema’s brief flirtation with super spy and super villain films during the 1960s. Danger: Diabolik was Mario Bava’s and Dino DeLaurentis’ take on the French Fantômas film series.

Bava’s expertise in genre films and special effects gives Danger: Diabolik a more sophisticated look than you would give it credit. Add in the film’s 1960s modernist aesthetic, James Bond type action sequences and you have a winning film. The humour-heist plot is very of its time but still entertaining and cried out for a remake. Terry-Thomas’ character performance as a government minister in the film is one of brilliance.

Useful tools.

I was saddened to read of the demise of The World Fact Book published by the CIA. I found it invaluable as a starting point when getting up to speed on international campaigns on parts of the world that I hadn’t visited. It even helped me win some work with Telenor Myanmar back before the current military regime got back into power. According to this post on the CIA website the World Fact Book is going away.

This personal productivity playbook by CJ Casseili was interesting to read and some of you may find tips and tricks that you can apply in your own work and personal life.

Ilina Scott’s quick guide to AI tools for strategists is worth a read if you are just dipping your toe in the field.

Occasionally software comes along what doesn’t become a mainstream success, but is well loved and much missed when it disappeared. Apple’s HyperCard was one, another was Yahoo! Pipes. The idea behind Pipes has been resurrected and in its latest iteration is very useful, even in a time of AI-with-everything.

The sales pitch.

i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. 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. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

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 officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a 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 February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format.

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 Substack as well as LinkedIn.
February 25, 2026
March 2025 newsletter
March 2025 introduction

Welcome to my March 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 20th issue. Or one score, as they used to say down the Mecca bingo hall. A score is a common grouping used in everything from selling produce to indicating the scale of an accident in a news headline. In Japan, it signals legal adulthood and is celebrated with personal ceremonies.

I didn’t know that March was Irish-American Heritage month. I just thought that we had St Patrick’s Day.

Hopefully April will bring us warmer weather that we should expect of spring. In the meantime to keep my spirits up I have been listening to Confidence Man.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- I curated some of the best analyses on DeepSeek, and more interesting things happening online.
- Pharmacies are blatantly marketing prescription-only medicines. It’s illegal, there is no GLP-1 permission that allows consumer marketing of prescription-only medicines used for weight loss and weight management.
- Clutch Cargo – how a 1960s animation managed to transform production and show the power of storytelling.
- A look back at Skype. I will miss its ring tone when it shuts down in May.
- Looking at the Majorana 1 chip promising a new generation of quantum computing, generative AI production, refrigeration and an oral history of Wong Kar wai’s In the Mood for Love & 2046.
Books that I have read.
- Now and again you come across a book that stuns you. Red Sky Mourning by Jack Carr, is one such book, but not in a good way. Carr is famous because of his service in the American military which he has since parlayed into a successful entrepreneurial career from TV series to podcasts. So he covers all things tactical knowledgeably. Conceptually the book has some interesting ideas that wouldn’t feel that out of place in a Neal Stephenson or William Gibson novel. So Carr had a reasonably solid plan on making a great story. But as the saying goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Carr’s enemy was his own writing style without aggressive editing. The editing process is a force multiplier, breathing the artistic brevity of Ernest Hemingway into a manuscript and protecting the author from their own worst impulses. I found the book hard to read because I would repeatedly run up against small niggly aspects, making it hard to suspend disbelief and get into the story. Carr loves his product brands, in this respect Red Sky Mourning reminded me a lot of early Brett Easton-Ellis. Which got me thinking, who is Carr actually writing for? Part of the answer is Hollywood, Carr’s books have been optioned by Amazon, one of which was adapted as The Terminal List. I imagine that another audience would be young (privileged caucasian male) management consultant types who need a bit of down time as they travel to and from client engagements – after a busy few days of on-site interviews, possibly with a tumbler of Macallan 12 – which was purchased in duty-free. The kind of person who considers their Tumi luggage in a tactical manner. The friend who gave it to me, picked it up for light reading and passed it on with a degree of incredulity. On the plus side, at least it isn’t a self-help book. It pains me to end a review so negatively; so one thing that Jack Carr does get right is the absolute superiority of Toyota Land Cruisers in comparison to Land Rover’s products. If you have it in hard copy, and possess sufficient presence of mind, it could serve you well in improvised self-defence as it comes in at a substantial 562 pages including the glossary and acknowledgements.
- The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a classic murder mystery. A university crime club with each member named after a famous fictional detective gather to investigate a murder on an isolated island. The book slowly unravels the answer to the K-University Mystery Club’s annual trip bringing it to a logical conclusion.
- She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan was an interesting piece of Chinese historical fiction. It is less fantastic than the wuxia works of Louis Cha that dominated the genre previously. More here.
- Chinese Communist Espionage – An Intelligence Primer by Peter Mattis and Matthew Brazil tells the story of modern China through the story of its intelligence services. From the chaos under Mao purges and the Cultural Revolution to forces let loose by ‘reform and opening up’. More here.
- In the early 2000s, as we moved towards a social web, we saw a number trends that relied on the knowledge of a group of people. Crowdsourcing channeled tasks in a particular way and became a popular ‘innovation engine’ for a while. The wisdom of crowds captured the power of knowledge within nascent question and answer platforms. Prediction markets flourished online. Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner try and explain who and why these models work, particular where they rely on knowledge or good judgement. The book does a good job at referencing their sources and is readable in a similar way to a Malcolm Gladwell book.
Things I have been inspired by.

Why does humour in advertising work?

My Dad is a big fan of the Twix bears advertisement, so much so, that he repeats the script verbatim when it comes on. We know that humour works and that it’s under-used in advertising, but it would be good to have data behind that in order to support it as a suggestion to clients.

WARC have published What’s Working In Humorous Advertising which goes a good way to providing that support.

The takeouts from the report include:
- Humour as a memory hook: Comedy surprises and delights, it makes consumers stop, engage and then remember. Over time it builds into nostalgia.
- It relies on universal insights – that work across age cohorts, cultures and geographies. Its also intrinsically shareable – and not just on social platforms.
- Celebrity x humour drives fame: Well-executed humour paired with celebrity endorsements, (Ryan Reynolds being a standout example) boosting brand impact.
- Well executed humour can supercharge marketing ROI. Ads with humour are 6.1x more likely to drive market share growth than neutral or dull ads.
Accessible advertising

The Ad Accessibility Alliance have launched The Ad Accessibility Alliance Hub, which made me reflect on accessibility as a subject. I can recommend the hub as it provides good food for thought when considering mandatories for creative. ISBA’s reframing accessible advertising helps make the business case beyond the social benefits of inclusivity. The ISBA also provides links to useful assets. Finally, I can recommend Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge which provides a broader context to help think about accessible advertising as part of a system.

Social platform benchmarks

RealIQ have done great research of engagement rates across thousands of brands in a number of sectors. What we get is an engagement benchmark set across platforms and industries. We can debate the value of engagement, and the different nature of platforms, so you can’t compare across platforms.

Chart of the month.

What I could compare in the RealIQ data was the rate in change in engagement rates year-on-year. The clear losers over time were Facebook and Twitter at an aggregate level. This also explains the x-tortion (as Forrester Research described them) tactics being deployed by Twitter. Combining high rates of engagement decline and reduced reach means that Twitter doesn’t look particularly attractive as a platform vis-a-vis competitors.

Things I have watched.

Hunt (헌트) is a great Korean film. It provides a John Le Carré style spy hunt story in 1980s era South Korea prior to the move towards democracy. It’s a stylish, if brutal film that touches on parts of South Korea’s history which we in the west tend to know very little about. Hunt takes an unflinching look at the legacy of the military government as well as their North Korean rivals.

Philip Kaufman‘s The Right Stuff is a movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s account based on US post-war fighter development through to the height of the Mercury space programme. The film went on to receive eight nominations at the Academy Awards. You have an ensemble cast of great character actors who deal with the highs and lows at the cutting edge of aerospace technology. The Right Stuff is as good as its reputation would have you believe. The film captures the drama and adventure that Wolfe imbued his written account of the journey to space. As a society it is good to be reminded that if we put our mind to it the human race is capable of amazing audacious things.

Disco’s Revenge – an amazing Canadian documentary which has interviews with people from soul and disco stars including Earl Young, David Mancuso, Joe Bataan, Nicky Siano – all of whom were seminal in the founding of disco.

It also featured names more familiar to house music fans including DJ Spinna, Frankie Knuckles, Kevin Saunderson and John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez – who was key in proto vocal house productions.

The documentary also shows hip-hop was influenced by disco mixing.

Along the way it covers the fight for gay rights in the US and its easy to see the continuum onwards to house music and the current dance music scene. It’s one thing knowing it and having read the right books, but the interviews have a power of their own.

It takes things through to ‘club quarantine’ during the COVID-19 lockdown.

I hate that’s its streaming only, rather than Blu-Ray but if you can put that one issue aside and watch it. If you try it and enjoy it, you’ll also love Jed Hallam‘s occasional newsletter Love Will Save The Day.

I picked up a copy of Contagion on DVD, prior to COVID and watched it with friends in a virtual social manner during lockdown. This probably wasn’t the smartest move and I spent the rest of lockdown building my library of Studio Ghibli films instead. It’s a great ensemble film in its own right. Watching it back again now I was struck by how much Contagion got right from Jude Law’s conspiracy theorist with too much influence and combative congressional hearings.

The film makers had the advantage of looking back at SARS which had hit Hong Kong and China in 2002 – 2004. Hong Kong had already been hit by Avian flu H5N1 from 1997 to 2002. Both are a foot note in history now, I had a friend who picked up their apartment on the mid-levels for 30 percent below 1997 market rates due to the buffeting the Hong Kong economy took during this time. The only thing that the film didn’t envision was the surfeit of political leadership in some notable western countries during COVID, which would have added even more drama to Contagion, not even Hollywood script writers could have made that up.

Hong Kong film star Leslie Cheung was taken from us too early due to depression. But the body of work that he left behind is still widely praised today. Double Tap appeared in 2000. In it Cheung plays a sport shooter of extraordinary skill. The resulting film is a twisting crime thriller with the kind of action that was Hong Kong’s trademark. It represents a very different take on the heroic bloodshed genre. At the time western film critics compared it to The Matrix – since the US film was influenced by Hong Kong cinema. Double Tap has rightly been favourably compared by film critics to A Better Tomorrow – which starred Cheung and Chow Yan Fat.

Useful tools.

Knowledge search

Back when I worked at Yahoo!, one of our key focuses was something called knowledge search. It was searching for opinions: what’s the best dry cleaner in Bloomsbury or where the best everyday carry items for a travelling executive who goes through TSA style inspections a few times a week. Google went on to buy Zagat the restaurant review bible. Yahoo! tried to build its own corpus of information with Yahoo! Answers, that went horribly wrong and Quora isn’t much better. A more promising approach by Gigabrain tries to do knowledge search using Reddit as its data source. I’ve used it to get some quick-and-dirty qualitative insights over the past few months.

Digital behaviour ‘CliffsNotes’

Simon Kemp launched this year’s Digital 2025 compendium of global online behaviours. It’s a great starter if you need to understand a particular market.

Encrypting an external hard drive

I needed to encrypt an external hard drive to transfer data and hadn’t used FileVault to do it in a while. Thankfully, Apple has a helpful guide buried in its support documents. From memory the process seems to have become more complicated over time. It used to be able to be done by using ‘control’ and click on the drive before scrolling down. Now you need to do it inside Disk Utility.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my March 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the Easter break.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
March 26, 2025
February 2025 newsletter
February 2025 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my February 2025 newsletter, I hope that your year of the snake has gotten off to a great start. This newsletter marks my 19th issue – which feels a really short time and strangely long as well, thank you for those of you who have been on the journey so far as subscribers to this humble publication. Prior to writing this newsletter, I found that the number 19 has some interesting connections.

In mandarin Chinese, 19 sounds similar to ‘forever’ and is considered to be lucky by some people, but the belief isn’t as common as 8, 88 or 888.

Anyone who listened to pop radio in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s would be familiar with Paul Hardcastle’s documentary sampling ’19’. The song mixed narration by Clark Kent and sampled news archive footage of the Vietnam war including news reports by read by Walter Cronkite. 19 came from what was cited as the average age of the soldier serving in Vietnam, however this is disputed by Vietnam veteran organisation who claim that the correct number was 22. The veteran’s group did a lot of research to provide accurate information about the conflict, overturning common mistakes repeated as truth in the media. It’s a handy reminder that fallacies and trust in media began way before the commercial internet.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Zing + more things – HSBC’s Zing payments system was shut down and was emblematic of a wider challenge in legacy financial institutions trying to compete against ‘fintech startups. I covered several other things as well including new sensor technology
- The 1000 Yen ramen wall is closing down family restaurants across Japan. A confluence of no consumer tolerance for price elasticity due to inflation driven ingredients costs is driving them to the wall. Innovation and product differentiation have not made a difference.
- Luxury wellness – why luxury is looking at wellness, what are the thematic opportunities and what would be the competitors for the main luxury marketing conglomerates be successful.
- Technical capability notice – having read thoroughly about the allegations that Apple had been served with an order by the British government to provide access to its customer iCloud drive data globally – I still don’t know what to think, but didn’t manage to assuage any of my concerns.
Books that I have read.
- World Without End: The million-copy selling graphic novel about climate change by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain. In Japan, graphic novels regularly non-fiction topics like text books or biographies. A French climate scientist and illustrator collaborated to take a similar approach for climate change and the energy crisis. Their work cuts through false pre-conceptions and trite solutions with science.
- Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski. Yablonski breaks down a number of heuristics or razors based on psychological research and how it applies to user experience. These included: Jakob’s Law, Fitt’s Law, Hick’s Law, Miller’s Law, Peak-End Rule and Tesler’s Law (on complexity). While the book focuses on UX, I thought of ways that the thinking could be applied to various aspects of advertising strategy.
- I re-read Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal. Eyal’s model did a good job at synthesising B.J. Fogg’s work on persuasive computing, simplifying it into a model that the most casual reader can take and run with it.
- Kapferer on Luxury by Jean-Noël Kapferer covers the modern rise of luxury brands as we now know them. Like Dana Thomas’ Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre Kapferer addresses the mistake of globalised manufacturing and massification of luxury. However Kapferer points out the ‘secret sauce’ that makes luxury products luxurious: the hybridisation of luxury with art and the concept of ‘incomparability’. The absence of both factors explain why British heritage brands from Burberry to Mulberry have failed in their current incarnations as luxury brands.
- Black Magic by Masamune Shirow is a manga work from 1983. Masamune is now best known for the creation of Ghost In The Shell which has been turned into a number of anime films, TV series and even a whitewashed Hollywood remake. Despite the title, Black Magic has more in common with space operas like Valerian & Laureline by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières than the occult. In the book Masamune explores some of the ideas which he then more fully developed in Ghost In The Shell including autonomous weapons, robots and machine intelligence.
- Doll by Ed McBain. Doll was a police procedural novel written in 1965 that focused on the model agency industry at the time. The novel is unusual in that it features various artistic flourishes including a model portfolio and hand written letters with different styles of penmanship. The author under the McBain pen name managed to produce over 50 novels. They all have taunt dialogue that’s ready for TV and some of them were adapted for broadcast, notably as an episode of Columbo. You can see the influence of McBain’s work in the likes of Dick Wolf’s productions like the Law & Order, FBI and On Call TV series franchises.
Things I have been inspired by.

Can money make you happy?

Past research indicated that happiness from wealth plateaued out with a middle class salary. The latest research via the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania indicates that might not be the case instead, earning more makes you happier and there might not be a point at which one has enough. The upper limit on the research seems to have been restricted by finding sufficiently rich research respondents rather than natural inclination. As a consumer insight that has profound implications in marketing across a range of sectors from gaming to pensions and savings products.

AgeTech

I came across the concept of ‘agetech’ while looking for research launched in time for CES in Las Vegas (7 – 11, January 2025). In the US, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and American Association of Retired People (AARP) have put together a set of deep qualitative and quantitative research looking at the needs of the ‘aged consumer’ for ‘AgeTech’. AgeTech isn’t your Grandma iPad or your boomer CEO’s laptop. Instead it is products that sit at the intersection of health, accessibility and taking care of oneself in the home. The top five perceived age technologies are connected medical alert devices,digital blood pressure monitors, electric or powered wheelchairs/scooters, indoor security cameras, and electronic medication pill dispenser/reminders. Their report 2023 Tech and the 50-Plus, noted that technology spending among those 50-plus in America is forecast to be more than $120 billion by 2030. Admittedly, that ’50-plus’ label could encompass people at the height of their career and family households – but it’s a big number.

It even has a negative impact on the supply side of the housing market for younger generations:

The overwhelming majority (95%) of Americans aged 55 and older agree that aging in place – “the ability to live in one’s own home and community safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level” – is an important goal for them. This is up from 93% in 2023.

The Mayfair Set v 2.0

During the summer of 1999, a set of documentaries by Adam Curtis covered the reinvention of business during the latter half of the 20th century was broadcast. I got to discover The Mayfair Set much later on. In the documentaries it covered how the social contract between corporates and their communities was broken down and buccaneering entrepreneurs disrupted societal and legal norms for profit. There is a sense of de ja vu from watching the series in Meta’s business pivots to the UK government’s approach to intellectual property rights for the benefit of generative AI model building.

It probably won’t end well, with the UK population being all the poorer for it.

The Californian Ideology

As to why The Mayfair Set 2.0 is happening, we can actually go back to a 1995 essay by two UK based media theorists who were at the University of Westminster at the time. It was originally published in Mute magazine.

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, websites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA.

It reads like all these things at once:
- A prescient foreshadowing from the past.
- Any Stewart Brand op-ed piece from 1993 onwards.
- The introduction from an as-yet ghost written book on behalf of Sam Altman, a la Bill Gates The Road Ahead.
- A mid-1990s fever dream from the minds of speculative fiction authors like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson or Bruce Sterling.
What the essay makes clear is that Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are part of a decades long continuum of Californian Ideology, all be it greatly accelerated; rather than a new thing. One of the main differences is that the digital artisans no longer have a chance to get rich with their company through generous stock options.

Even Steve Jobs fitted in with the pattern. For a hippy he drove a 5 litre Mercedes sports car, parked in the handicapped spaces in the Apple car park and had a part in firing Apple’s first gay CEO: Michael Scott because of homophobia and Scott’s David Brent-like handling of Black Wednesday. It may be a coincidence that Tim Cook didn’t come out publicly as gay until over three years after Steve Jobs died.

… a European strategy for developing the new information technologies must openly acknowledge the inevitability of some form of mixed economy – the creative and antagonistic mix of state, corporate and DIY initiatives. The indeterminacy of the digital future is a result of the ubiquity of this mixed economy within the modern world. No one knows exactly what the relative strengths of each component will be, but collective action can ensure that no social group is deliberately excluded from cyberspace.

A European strategy for the information age must also celebrate the creative powers of the digital artisans. Because their labour cannot be deskilled or mechanised, members of the ‘virtual class’ exercise great control over their own work. Rather than succumbing to the fatalism of the Californian Ideology, we should embrace the Promethean possibilities of hypermedia. Within the limitations of the mixed economy, digital artisans are able to invent something completely new – something which has not beenpredicted in any sci-fi novel. These innovative forms of knowledge and communications will sample the achievements of others, including some aspects of the Californian Ideology. It is now impossible for any serious movement for social emancipation not to incorporate feminism, drug culture, gay liberation, ethnic identity and other issues pioneered by West Coast radicals. Similarly, any attempt to develop hypermedia within Europe will need some of the entrepreneurial zeal and can-do attitude championed by the Californian New Right. Yet, at the same time, the development of hypermedia means innovation, creativity and invention. There are no precedents for all aspects of the digital future. As pioneers of the new, the digital artisans need to reconnect themselves with the theory and practice ofproductive art. They are not just employees of others – or even would-be cybernetic entrepreneurs.

They are also artist-engineers – designers of the next stage of modernity.

Barbrook and Cameron rejected the idea of a straight replication of the Californian Ideology in a European context. Doing so, despite what is written in the media, is more like the rituals of a cargo cult. Instead they recommended fostering a new European culture to address the strengths, failings and contradictions implicit in the Californian Ideology.

Chart of the month: consumer price increases vs. wage increases

This one chart based on consumer price increases and wage increases from 2020 – 2024 tells you everything you need to know about UK consumer sentiment and the everyday struggle to make ends meet.

Things I have watched.

The Organization – Sydney Poitier’s last outing as Virgil Tibbs. The Organization as a title harks back to the 1950s, to back when the FBI were denying that the Mafia even existed. Organised crime in popular culture was thought to be a parallel corporation similar to corporate America, but crooked. It featured in the books of Richard Stark. This was despite law enforcement stumbling on the American mafia’s governing body in 1957. Part of this was down to the fact that the authorities believed that the American arm of the mafia were a bulwark against communism. Back to the film, it starts with an ingenious heist set piece and then develops through a series twists and turns through San Francisco. It was a surprisingly awarding film to watch.

Nakita – Nakita is an early Luc Besson movie made after Subway and The Big Blue. It’s an action film that prioritises style and attitude over fidelity to tactical considerations. The junkies at the start of the film feel like refugees from a Mad Max film who have happened to invade a large French town at night. It is now considered part of the ‘cinéma du look’ film movement of the 1980s through to the early 1990s which also features films like Diva and Subway. Jean Reno’s character of Victor the Cleaner foreshadows his later breakout role as Leon. It was a style of its time drawing on similar vibes of more artistic TV ads, music videos, Michael Mann’s Miami Vice TV series and films Thief and Manhunter.

Stephen Norrington’s original Blade film owes a lot to rave culture and cinéma du look as it does to the comic canon on which it’s based. It’s high energy and packed with personality rather like a darker version of the first Guardians of The Galaxy film. Blade as a character was influenced by blaxploitation characters like Shaft in a Marvel series about a team of vampire hunters. Watching the film almost three decades after it came out, it felt atemporal – from another dimension rather than from the past per se. Norrington’s career came off the rails after his adaption of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen did badly at the box office and star Wesley Snipes went to jail for tax-related offences.

The Magnificent Seven – I watched the film a couple of times during my childhood. John Sturges had already directed a number of iconic films: Bad Day at Black Rock and Gunfight at The OK Corral. With The Magnificent Seven, he borrowed from The Seven Samurai. It was a ‘Zappata western’ covering the period of the Mexican revolution and was shot in Cuernavaca, Mexico. The film did two things to childhood me: made me curious about Japanese cinema and storytelling. There are some connections to subsequent Spaghetti Westerns:
- Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (shot in 1964 would borrow from another Akira Kurosawa film Roshomon)
- Eli Wallach played a complex Mexican villain in both The Magnificent Seven and Leone’s The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.
- The visual styling of the film is similar to spaghetti westerns, though the clothes were still too clean, Yul Brynner’s role as the tragic hero in black is a world-away from the traditional Hollywood coding of the good guys wearing white hats (or US cavalry uniforms).
- The tight, sparse dialogue set the standard for the Dollars Trilogy and action films moving forward
- Zappata westerns were the fuel for more pro-leftist films in the spaghetti western genre. While The Magnificent Seven still has a decidedly western gaze, it took on racism surprisingly on the nose for a Hollywood film of this era.
Watching it now as a more seasoned film watcher only sharpened my appreciation of The Magnificent Seven.

Breaking News by Johnnie To feels as much about now as it when the film was shot 20 years ago. First time I watched it was on the back of a head rest on a Cathay Pacific flight at the time. Back then I was tired and just let the film wash over me. This time I took a more deliberate approach to appreciating the film. In the film the Hong Kong Police try and control and master the Hong Kong public opinion as a robbery goes wrong. However the Hong Kong Police don’t have it all their own way as the criminals wage their own information campaign. This film also has the usual tropes you expect from Hong Kong genre of heroic bloodshed films with amazing plot twists and choreographed action scenes along with the spectacular locations within Hong Kong itself. Watching it this time, I got to appreciate the details such as the cowardly dead-beat Dad Yip played by veteran character actor Suet Lam.

Useful tools.

Current and future uncertainties.

This could be used as thought starters for thinking about business problems for horizon scanning and scenario planning. It’s ideal as fuel for you to then develop a client workshop from. But I wouldn’t use something this information dense in a client-facing document. You can download it as a high resolution PDF here.

Guide to iPhone security

Given the propensity of phone snatching to take over bank accounts and the need to secure work phones, the EFF guide to securing your iPhone has a useful set of reminders and how-to instructions for privacy and security settings here.

Novel recommendations

I got this from Neil Perkin, an LLM-driven fictional book recommendation engine. It has been trained on Goodreads (which reminds me I need to update my Goodreads profile). When I asked it for ‘modern spy novels with the class of John Le Carre’ it gave me Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Chris Pavone’s The Expats and Chris Cumming’s The Trinity Six. All of which were solid recommendations.

Smartphone tripod

Whether it’s taking a picture of a workshop’s forest of post-it notes or an Instagrammable sunset a steady stand can be really useful. Peak Design (who were falsely accused of being a ‘snitch‘) have come up with a really elegant mobile tripod design that utilises the MagSafe section on the back of an iPhone.

Apple Notes alternative

I am a big fan of Apple Notes as an app. I draft in it, sync ideas and thoughts across devices using it. But for some people that might not work – different folks for different strokes. I was impressed bu the quality of Bear which is a multi-platform alternative to the default Notes app.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my February 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into March.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
February 26, 2025
October 2024 newsletter
October 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my October 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 15th issue. This is the second year that I have written about Hallowe’en sharing my Mam’s recipe for barmbrack – an Irish household standard. When I lived in Hong Kong, the locals enthusiastically adopted western Hallowe’en culture with local amusement parks Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland competing to create the scariest experience for young people and dating couples. They mixed western and local horror motifs. It’s amazing how thanks to the mass media Hallowe’en has become a global cultural event. More on that later.

As for the significance of the number 15? It seems to have deep significance in modern culture with a wide range of artists including Taylor Swift and Marilyn Manson using it as the title of songs, albums or mixtapes. Additionally, the number has some significance in Judaism. The number 10 represents the hand of God and the number 5 represents to save or rescue. If we add 10 plus five, we get 15. The symbolic meaning of 15 translates to “mercy,” which means compassion and forgiveness.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- An honest review of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 – which is as much a critique of wearables as a category, as the device itself.
- Cocaine Cowboys is a book on Irish crime, but the title is as interesting as the book in terms of its particular cultural resonance in Ireland and a reflection of the Irish experience.
- Nike changes CEO John Donahue, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to unforced self-inflicted strategic errors.
- Pagers and more things can be found here.
Books that I have read.
- Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. Lorenz’ telling is very US-orientated but an interesting account of how influencers and brands evolved their social presence adapting to platform changes such as the disappearance of Vine. Aspects that I found fascinating included how influencers accelerated their following through offline events rather similar to Japan’s idol industry and the career resilience of the Paul brothers
- The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles.
Things I have been inspired by.

Tourism Ireland: Halloween.

Tourism Ireland

Hallowe’en was a huge part of my childhood in an Irish household, bairn brack and tea, going around and collecting apples, dried fruit and hazelnuts from neighbouring houses, carving out a turnip lantern, making a papier-mâché mask, enjoying ghost stories on RTÉ radio and strange noises that came from the worsening weather and wildlife. However, America seems to have defined a lot of the narrative and globalised behaviours around the festival.

Living in Asia, I saw revellers in Hong Kong and Japan enjoy the festival and borrow heavily from Hollywood from ET to the Halloween franchise. Like Irish-American cuisine, American Halloween is based on the European traditions brought to the new world and then reinterpreted.

So I was fascinated to see Tourism Ireland’s campaign to reclaim Halloween from internally pervasive American soft power and Hollywood; going back to the festival’s pagan origins.

Meaningful patient engagement

Measuring and Demonstrating the Value of Patient Engagement Across the Medicines Lifecycle is a call to action to assess and measure patient engagement for the pharmaceuticals industry. It redefines the concept of patient-centricity – a popular concept that has become increasingly prominent and popular in the industry. (Disclosure, the paper involved a couple of former Concentric HX Wegovy launch colleagues: Fay Weston and Zoe Healey).

The Change Makers

Brand purpose has lost a good deal of unalloyed credibility in marketing circles (for some very good reasons). But that doesn’t mean that consumers got the memo. Havas’ The Rise of the Change Makers report looks at change through this lens. Like the Edelman Trust report, it has tracked the change in consumer zeitgeist over the past few years.

Social effectiveness

There was a couple of interesting research papers in the International Journal of Advertising. Firstly, digital detoxing by consumers seems to have a temporary inoculation against social media advertising when they return to using a social platform. Secondly, romance sells, or the psycho-romantic aspect of parasocial relationships sells – which should be taken into account when weighing up influencers that brands might want to partner with.

Things I have watched.

Series three of ITV’s Van Der Valk’s reboot is a sleeper series that I have enjoyed watching with my Dad. Season 4 has debuted in the US on PBS, but there is no sign of it being picked up in the UK yet.

Barry Foster

The series is based on a series of thrillers written in the 1960s by Nicolas Freeling; the first one was Love in Amsterdam. The original TV adaptation featured Barry Foster as Van Der Valk whose performance gave the original show a unique look-and-feel.

I watched some vintage Jack Ryan with a young Ben Affleck playing the CIA analyst in an adaption of The Sum of All Fears. This version is usually overlooked in favour of the modern TV series and the Harrison Ford films. Alan Bates played a delicious villain; an Austrian politician with far right tendencies. Bates’ character felt the most prescient of all the characters, while the thawing relationship with Russia feels further away with each passing week. Unfortunately, the franchise was left on the shelf for a while after this film was made; Ben Affleck made a good Dr Ryan and Liev Schreiber was a good foil as character John Clark – the real muscle in Tom Clancy’s books.

Amazon Prime Video has some sleeper films if you dig around. Deliver Us From Evil is a respectable Korean action film with the classic ‘tragic hero’ plot line popularised in Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. While it has been compared to The Raid, there is an Old Boy feel to the violence. Much has been made of it starring Lee Jung-jae – known to global audiences for his role in Netflix’ Squid Game. It’s just under two hours of enjoyable escapism.

I rewatched Inception for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. Since then we’ve had COVID and a generative AI-filled media sphere and the film hit different. It no longer felt exceptional in the way that films like Blade Runner and the Studio Ghibli back catalogue still do.

Il Divo was one of a couple of DVDs that I bought instead of paying the Netflix tax. Il Divo appealed to me because of my love of real-life Italian intrigue, sparked by watching The Mattei Affair for the first time several years ago. I became reacquainted with it more recently again when I rewatched it. Il Divo covers the political intrigue of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular Giulio Andreotti, an Italian prime minister and failed presidential candidate. At the time Italy suffered from far left terrorist attacks and a reactionary right-wing movement that revolved a freemason lodge known as P2. Andreotti’s leadership is directly linked to a succession of deaths of enemies and associates during his career – which the film displays in an artful tableau at the beginning.

It is a very complex time in modern Italian history and the story tries to pull different strands of the story in through different vignettes. Like The Mattei Affair before it, a certain amount is left up to the audience’s interpretation.

Not television, but my current favourite show on BBC Radio 4 is Central In telligence, which is part of their Limelight drama content. I love it for a few reasons:
- I grew up with cold war-era espionage books and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, so the security services stories owned a bit of real estate in my head. Given the way things have been going over the past decade, this kind of world has been raising its head again.
- It’s a really well researched show with high production values on the history of the CIA told from the prospective of Eloise Page who joined the agency at its start and had a 40-year career.
- Fantastic voice talent. Accomplished high profile film actress Kim Cattrall who has appeared in iconic film and television roles playing both comedic and meaty characters. Ed Harris is a fantastic, but less well known actor who appeared in classic movies from The Right Stuff and Walker to portraying The Man in Black in the Westworld TV series.
Useful tools.

Downloading images on a web page

Imageye is a browser extension that helps you download all pages on a given web page. It can be handy for mood boards and social research.

Getting to Heathrow

I have had to do a bit of travel. Thankfully it has been well planned. One of the things that helped my planning and saved money is the Heathrow Express’ £10 Advanced Discounted Tickets. More details on the caveats surrounding the discount here.

Buying cheaper

MoneySavingSupermarket has a search engine of products available via Amazon Warehouse. If you’re a jobbing freelancer or just looking for something for your home – it allows you to buy that item a bit cheaper.

The sales pitch.

I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my October 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into November, but not before you’ve charged your energy levels up on Hallowe’en treats!

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!
October 30, 2024

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