Ged Carroll

Search results for: “radio”

  • Star Wars radio dramas + more stuff

    Star Wars radio dramas

    By the 1980s, radio dramas were in decline. This is in stark contrast to the first half of the century when famous literary and comic book characters had their own shows which covered everything from science fiction and fantasy to crime and horror. Famous names like Sherlock Holmes, Count Dracula, Batman, Superman, The Spirit, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade all appeared on radio. The Star Wars radio dramas started as a project to fire interest in the genre.

    An academic at the University of Southern California looked to respark interest in radio dramas, using the local campus radio station to rejuvenate NPR Playhouse – the umbrella vehicle for radio dramas on the US National Public Radio (NPR).

    These aren't the droids you're looking for.
    These aren’t the droids you are looking for by Scott Beale

    The university students moved on from adapting short stories and suggested adapting Star Wars. Director George Lucas was an alumni of USC and helped the production licensing the music and sound effects for a nominal dollar fee. The BBC helped out in return for broadcasting rights in the UK and some of the original stars including Mark Hamill signed on as cast members.

    USC went on to dramatise two out of the three films from the original Star Wars trilogy. While they were originally multi-part series, an enterprising YouTuber has put them all together.

    Star Wars radio dramas as originally recorded:

    • Star Wars: A New Hope: originally 13 episodes (1981)
    • Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: originally 10 episodes (1983) – the BBC were not involved in this recording
    • Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi: originally 6 episodes (1996) – made by HighBridge Audio instead of NPR or USC. HighBridge had distributed the previous recordings as a recording box set and when NPR and USC couldn’t make the recordings, they stepped in to do it instead.

    The Star Wars radio dramas, alongside vintage recordings are enjoying a second life on YouTube in parallel to the increased consumer interest in podcast documentary dramas and Audible’s rejuvenation of audio books.

    Jack Ryan final season

    Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan franchise is probably the best adaptation that I have been. But all good things must come to an end and we are seeing the final season being rolled out. John Krasinski has arguably played the best version of the titular character and the writers have managed to modernise the show sympathetically. They have managed to make each season very relevant. This time Ryan is investigating a conspiracy of crime that might envelope the entire ‘black budget operations’ of the intelligence and defence communities.

    The roads lead back to Myanmar via Shan State rebels and an NGO ostensibly set up to help victims of human trafficking. I look forward to seeing where the rabbit hole goes next.

    Threads

    I am on Threads – a new micro-blogging alternative to Twitter; so far it’s been underwhelming despite the rapid climb in new members. I am also on Mastadon and Post.News.

    Godzilla Minus One

    While American adaptions of Godzilla feel grandiose and bloated in nature, Japanese adaptions by Toho Pictures have managed to refresh and take an interesting new take on the titular character in Shin Godzilla. Godzilla Minus One changes things up by setting his rampage in a post-war Japan already devastated by the United States.

  • Vintage Obscura Radio + more stuff

    Vintage Obscura Radio

    Vintage Obscura Radio – back when I used to work at Yahoo! we had an editorial team who surfaced great websites like the Liveplasma, which allowed you to discover new artists and authors based on what you liked. Or The Cloud Appreciation Society. We used to package up the best of these sites in an event called The Finds of The Year. Vintage Obscura Radio would have definitely made the cut. What is Vintage Obscura Radio? It is web radio channel that surfaces songs from YouTube that have less than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and were released before 1996.

    Tokyo neon

    It’s not powered by a machine learning algorithm, but by 70,000 music obsessed Redditors looking to surface nearly forgotten music. This takes us back to the best parts of the pre-social platform web, where there was more room for the weird and the wonderful. Vintage Obscura Radio is a pleasant distraction from doom scrolling.

    Blind Spot Monitor

    Ogilvy South Africa put together some clever in-dealership installations to bring the dangers of a vehicle blind spot to light for Volkswagen. Volkswagen were looking to promote the benefits of their IQ DRIVE system which eliminates blind spots for drivers, rather than eliminating other road users.

    Gordon Murray’s five favourite cars

    Gordon Murray designed some of the most iconic formula one cars for the Brabham and McLaren teams. He went on to design the McLaren F1 road car that preceded the current range of road cars, setting the bar for their looks, performance and handling.

    Like Lotus founder Colin Chapman, Murray likes his cars small and light. I understand why, the most dangerous and most fun car I ever owned was a Fiat 126.

    Gordon Murray’s five favourites are:

    • Lotus Elite / Lotus Type 14
    • DeTomaso Vallelunga
    • Lancia Appia with a Zagato designed and coach-built body
    • Abarth 1000GT Bialbero – a car I used to have on the wall of my bedroom as a teen. Bialbero means twin-cam
    • Alfa Romeo 1600 Junior Zagato

    Murray admits that his collection skews towards the 1960s, which was when engineers often had to work with very little.

    If

    After a particularly trying week, one of our colleagues sent around the poem If by Rudyard Kipling. I found this version recited by Dennis Hopper from sometime in what I guess is some time in 1969 through to 1971.

    Dami Lee on Studio Ghibli

    Dami talks about the world building in Studio Ghibli films and how its creativity couldn’t have come out of ‘AI’.

    Vending machine museum

    Back when I first started work, we had a single Klix coffee machine which could just about vend cups of hot or cold water dolloped into a pre-filled plastic cup of coffee mix or powdered orange. These decades old Japanese vending machines put modern western machines to shame and are mechanical wonders.

  • The return of Radio Rentals in the smartphone era

    I haven’t thought about Radio Rentals and its ilk in years. But I started to think of them again with this post. The idea came out of a couple of conversations that I had over the past few months.

    Sony Trinitron TV

    What is Radio Rentals?

    Radio Rentals is one of a number of brands (Martin Dawes, Granada, Radio Rentals DER and Rumbalows), who used to rent TVs and video recorders. Globalisation made TVs discretionary items and technology made them more reliable.

    Maturation of the smartphone market

    As of February this year Apple was sitting on a cash hoard of 178 billion US dollars, most of which is kept outside the US to ensure it doesn’t get taxed. It has made the bulk of the money from the iPhone.  However the smartphone market is changing, the growth in mature markets is slowing down dramatically, as has smartphone growth in China. The growth in developing markets is being driven by smartphones priced so low that margins are razor thin. Things are so tight that component suppliers have gone under.

    Apple is at the premium end of the market but other players are trying to migrate in that direction to which means that the middle of the market and premium products are very similar in terms of industrial design.  So if one had a cheap source of capital it would be advantageous to come up with a way to stitch in clients and making it easier to onboard clients from the competition. Rather like the TV rental business of old.

    So when Apple launched the 6S range of handsets, this wasn’t much of a surprise

    Exclusively at Apple’s retail stores in the US, customers can choose their carrier and get an unlocked iPhone 6s or iPhone 6s Plus with the opportunity to get a new iPhone annually and AppleCare+ on the new iPhone Upgrade Program with monthly payments starting at $32 (US) and $37 (US), respectively.

    From a carrier point-of-view this presents a set of mixed blessings, it decouples the handset upgrade path from the consumer’s mobile carrier plan. On the one hand carriers no longer have to foot the high cost of iPhone purchases, but iPhone customers have less of an incentive to sign up to two-year contract with the likes of Verizon or Sprint which will make their cashflow less predictable in the longer term as consumers churn contracts and carriers will have get more creative with their contract incentives.

    We may see hybrid deals of content, voice minutes and data – rather like cable companies or BTVision. Of course, having those kind of OTT bundles has implications for for their networks and the likes of HBO are probably not likely to commoditise their product prices so that bandwidth and be saved from a downward spiral.

    Apple’s move has some advantages, but isn’t without risks:

    • Moving consumers to a lease model means a degree of predictable revenues
    • It provides with a modicum of control over the market for pre-used handsets, if they use it. This huge. Think about the roles that smartphones play in our lives for a moment; they aren’t just communications devices but give an idea of status and self expression as well. Just because cheap smartphones are for sale in the developing world doesn’t means that consumers don’t want the real thing. Apple could tap into a pre-existing informal market of channels to sell pre-owned smartphones into these markets and make their competitors hurt a lot more. It would effectively dig a trench between mid-market and premium handsets and force competitors to go to lower price points
    • It raises competitive barriers against competitors. Not that many competitors have the access to easy cheap money in order to finance this kind of scheme. If it could be done profitably by third parties; we would see the  likes of ICBC and the Bank of China setting up subsidiaries to finance Huawei phone purchases. There is little to no margin in the financing itself. For investors the opportunity cost wouldn’t be worthwhile.  Given its lack of profitability the leases can’t be securitised easily to palm the risk off on institutional investors – which was how the likes of MBNA grew their consumer finance businesses. Third parties would need to get involved in areas that aren’t their strength such as a superior supply chain and channel strategy to that held by the wireless carriers to bring down the cost per handset and ensure that the handset was available near the consumer. Apple doesn’t need to make a profit on the leasing business, it just needs to not make a loss

    The risks in this move are:

    • Increased amounts of handset repairs. Many consumers today put up with cracked screens rather than having them repaired due to the cost and inconvenience involved. Going to the leasing model puts all of that back on Apple. If a third party were  to attempt it, there would be a whole service network which they would need to build out
    • Leasing agreements like this will be a magnet for organised and disorganised crime. There will be small but significant loses of handsets from false address fraud to ‘fake thefts’, Apple will be facing the kind of persistent criminal problems that face catalogue retailers to credit card companies
    • What happens when the US economy tanks and Apple faces default payments on its handset leasing programme?
    • The strategy relies on consumers seeing a continued value in regularly upgrading their handset. What led to the demise of TV rental companies was: more reliable televisions with the move from discrete components to integrated circuits, real cost reduction of TVs as they became more popular and a lack of compelling reason to upgrade once they had a colour TV. When we think about smartphones, the cost of a handset is being reduced  (at least in the Android eco-system), they are generally pretty reliable – the weak points being the easily damaged screen and chemical life of the battery and there hasn’t been significant new use cases from successive generations of handsets

    More information

    CCS Insight cuts global handset forecast | TotalTelecom
    SMARTPHONES: Price Wars Topple Huawei, ZTE Supplier
    Apple Introduces iPhone 6s & iPhone 6s Plus

    More on Apple here.

  • November 2025 issue 28

    November 2025 introduction – (28) in a state edition

    I am now at issue 28, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘in a state’. In a state or in a right state usually carried a sense of trepidation in Irish households – it usually describes an odd emotion exhibited by the person being discussed.

    In a state

    It is often associated with stupor, shock, chaos, agitation or anxiety.

    “There was a car crash just up the road; thankfully no one was injured but the driver was in a state.”

    It could also be used as a tone of disapproval for a person’s grooming and outfit.

    In Cantonese 28 has positive connotations and is interpreted as “easy to be rich” or “easy prosperity”. The pronunciation of ‘2’ (yi) sounds like ‘easy’ and ‘8’ (ba) sounds like ‘prosper’ (fa).

    This edition’s soundtrack is from The Hideout, a former boutique that used to be based in Golden Square and specialised in Japanese streetwear brands like Neighborhood, A Bathing Ape, WTAPs etc. Each Christmas time they used to have this mixtape put together by Andrew Hale on heavy rotation. Since then it’s become a seasonal go to in Chez Carroll.

    ( Hale played keyboards for Sade. He was a member of Japanese experimental supergroup Water Melon (ウォーター・メロン) alongside Gota Yashiki, KUDO, Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h, and provided soundtracks for computer games and films.) Ok, I will stop nerding out now.

    Now we have a sound track, 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. 

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    • Mico + more things – Mircrosoft’s AI companion has a bit of Clippy and a bit of Willo the Wisp (who was the brand character of British Gas) to it. But as a fluent object it’s not bad.
    • Sixt Halloween ad + more stuff – a selection of great creative from Anthropic, Sixt, Apple and Life 360.
    • Toyota FJ Land Cruiser + more stuff – Toyota’s genius move to launch a smaller footprint Land Cruiser with fantastic utilitarian details in the design. The downside is that we are unlikely to see any of them in the UK.

    Books that I have read.

    • I have been reading my Dad’s copies of Gerald Seymour’s books back when I was a child. My friend Ian introduced me to his later works and character Jonas Merrick. Crocodile Hunter explains the back story why a caravan-loving middle-aged ‘underachieving’ MI5 officer had been given so much latitude. Merrick then becomes the metaphorical crocodile hunter of the title in a game of wits with an experienced veteran of the Syrian civil war and Iraq conflicts in the environs of Canterbury.
    • 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
    • As I was reading this article in the FT How this 31-year-old made $250mn in 30 months | FT – oil trading with Russian oil. A few things crossed my mind. Amongst them being that it sounded like a pitch for prospective series two of McMafia. Will the protagonist fall out of a window from a Moscow skyscraper?

    Things I have been inspired by.

    I managed to spend some time with my long time colleague Calvin Wong on a stopover before he headed to Portugal for Web Summit.

    It might be merely a rationalisation of my own biases, after the later part of the 2010s being a lull in the creative web. 2025 seems to be spawning more creative things built on the web. My current favourite is Radiooooo shocking brand name, but an amazing site. You can navigate a map of the world, click on a country and listen to music from that country. Not only that but can select whether you are open to fast, slow tempo songs or ‘weird’. My current favourites are Japanese, Thai and Cambodian pop of the 1960s.

    The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness by Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos & Anindya Ghose is an early piece of research on the effectiveness of generative AI created visual adverts. The research had a number of findings:

    • When visual gen AI was used to modify existing ads originally created by human experts, its performance fell short of the original ads.
    • When visual gen AI was used to create ads from scratch, those ads outperformed both the human expert–created and gen AI-modified ads.
    • When everything including the product package created by gen AI in the advertisement was associated with higher ad effectiveness.
    • But consumers still aren’t fans, when gen AI involvement in ad generation is disclosed, advertisement effectiveness decreases. Disclosure is becoming a legal requirement in many markets and cramping ad effectiveness.

    These oddities could be down to how well their models performed with modified prompts, rather than a repudiation of human effort. And all of these nuances are likely to change as models are improved. This doesn’t mean that generative AI is the best advertising and packaging designers. But it does depend a lot on the aesthetic / taste of the human prompter even more.

    Verity Relationship Intelligence newly released annual report for 2025 highlighted a number of interesting take-outs from its research. The things that stood out to me were:

    • 20% growth every year since 2021 for client complaints about efficiency.
    • 58% of what clients link efficiency to is non-operational. Efficiency,
      is a partnership quality rather than a production metric – kind of like the idea of synchronicity. Increasing ‘juniorisation’ of teams, hybrid working, and smaller budgets have created an operational squeeze, while automation and rigid systems stripped back the human touch that clients value most.
    • The chasm opening up between rising client satisfaction (currently 8.0) and declining team satisfaction (7.3) in their agency team threatens work quality, client retention and employee churn. The problems stem from agency culture: little agency leadership, recognition or care.

    Chart of the month. 

    Ipsos did a 30-country survey to answer the question ‘Is Life Getting Better? comparing attitudes to 1975 versus 2025. Nostalgia is a great standby for trend reports as the past is constantly been repackaged.

    What the Ipsos report hints at is widespread dissatisfaction with current political and economic systems in Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and many Asian countries. Part of this maybe down to what Ipsos termed ‘the middle class in crisis‘. The contrary outlier was South Korea.

    As tough as the Korean economy is now, the country has made a huge step change over the past five decades: shaking off a military dictatorship and undergoing massive economic development.

    ipsos nostalgia

    The UK’s intense desire for nostalgia hints at a wider unease, what The New Statesman called the Netflixification of politics.

    Things I have watched. 

    Apple TV+ have followed up Slow Horses this season with a second adaptation of a Mick Herron novel Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is the protagonist unearthing a very British conspiracy bought about by a suspicious fire and abducted child in Oxford. It is made to the same high standard as Slow Horses and I have found it to be must-see TV.

    Dominic Cooper plays a blinder in Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier. The tangled storyline of conspiracy, paranoia and secrets reminded me of vintage TV series like 24 and The X Files. What separates The Last Frontier is the detail, its scenic shots of an Alaskan winter are beautiful.

    Useful tools.

    Koolyz is a directory / portal of online tools that I found via Matt Muir’s excellent newsletter. It helps on all the finicky tasks like compressing PDFs or moving an image from one format to another. It is also worth looking at The Creative Cheat Sheet for visual inspiration, writing and presentation building tools.

    I got to try out Hubspot‘s AEO grader here. It is a good starting point to understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini ‘see’ and ‘understand’ your brand.

    Finally LUMAscapes is a series of charts by LUMA that give you the main players in agencies, AI, OOH, martech and more categories as convenient PDFs.

    The sales pitch.

    I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my November 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Christmas. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for Christmas cake – we usually make one in November. It is then allowed to sit prior to serving at Christmas. If looked after correctly it can keep for several months. I grew up with and love fruit cake but your mileage may vary.

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

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • Tahoe + more things

    Tahoe

    Another year, another macOS. Tahoe is sensibly unambitious but it has raised some ire amongst Mac users. You can tell how unambitious Tahoe was, when CNET had to do an article showing you how common app icons have changed because you otherwise probably didn’t notice. I know I didn’t.

    Tahoe is neither here nor there as a release for me. I haven’t found features that are ‘can’t live without”. The app interface changes feel different for the sake of being different, but I quickly got used to them.

    In terms of quality it still feels a bit ‘beta’-ish but I hope that the bugs get ironed out over time.

    • The pop-up window to select my accent over the ‘o’ in my given name gets blanked out for some reason.
    • When performing certain actions, the browser chrome all turns white.

    Otherwise things have been fine so far. My anti-virus of choice launched an update soon after Tahoe came out. As has my VPN client and numerous utilities and apps that I use for work, or just keeping my Mac tuned up.

    I have a Brother mono laser printer to connect up, (as my long-suffering HP unit finally gave up the ghost after a decade of service,) which might be a bit of a trial if Reddit is anything to judge by.

    Last Week on My Mac: Tahoe’s elephant – The Eclectic Light Company – this critique points out the kind of issues with Tahoe that implies it isn’t the Macintosh operating system of Steve Jobs with its historic focus on art principles and typography right from the beginning.

    China

    From ‘guochao’ to ‘zìxìn’: China’s new era of cultural confidence | Jing Daily

    Why anti-involution feels anti-Chinese? | Following the Yuan

    Dutch seizure of chipmaker followed US ultimatum over Chinese chief | FT – the judgement paints a bit more of a nuanced picture with two independent actions. It also explicitly states that the government order is not final yet (and at that point would still be open to appeals). The actual matter involved is a (significant) breach of fiduciary duty by Zhang Xuezheng and the holding company (Yuching). Cited issues were:

    • Placing of orders to another Wingtech subsidiary in China (that is in financial trouble) far exceeding demand (such that the expectation is that a significant share of the stock would need to be scrapped as it would not be able to be used in time)
    • Replacing 3 people with banking authority (including the CFO) with 3 other people, without financial background, one not an employee of Nexperia at all. All in the context where urgent US sanctions mean that independence from China is important for continued operations of the company. The court called this “Voor een onderneming van de orde van grootte van Nexperia grenst een dergelijke handelswijze aan roekeloosheid” (“For a company in the order of size of Nexerperia these actions border on being reckless”).
    • For the replacement no motivation was provided, prompting the chief financial officer and the chief legal officer from their own fiduciary duties as directors to object (and also to ask the court to investigate/intervene)
    • Stated intent to dismiss existing directors (without motivation) or asking for mandatory consultation from the workers council.

    As to the decisions:

    • Suspension of Xuezheng as director/CEO
    • Temporary appointment of a new non-executive director (with power to make final decisions)
    • Place all (except 1) share under management/safekeeping with a lawyer
    • This all motivated by (very) signifcant breach of the fiduciary duty, not based upon an Dutch government action. The application of the Entity list on Nexperia as subsidiary was a significant contextual driver though (as in the duty to minimize corporate risks).

    Consumer behaviour

    Piper Sandler Completes 50th Semi-Annual Teen Survey | Piper Sandler – teen spending down 6 percent compared to last year. Another point was that Dr Pepper was their favourite drink ahead of Coca-Cola, which makes this activist investor’s interest even more salient: tarboard builds stake in Keurig Dr Pepper after unpopular Peet’s deal | FT

    Economics

    UK risks higher inflation becoming entrenched, IMF warns | FT

    Health

    Mirador fundraising raises hopes of revival in US biotech market | FT

    Ideas

    Everything Is Television – Derek Thompson

    Japan

    Anime activism – Matt Alt’s Pure Invention – I didn’t realise that in 1978 the president Marcos of the Philippines had banned a whole genre of anime (giant robots or mecha) due to the influence of Voltes V on Filipino student activists.

    Marketing

    Post | LinkedIn – The Future of Brand Building Begins Where Commerce Meets Creativity. – or P&G applying the radio soap opera format to the 21st century

    Stopping agency burnout: the fight against ‘insidious’ work cultures and ‘inaccurate’ timesheets – Campaign found a long-hours culture continues to exist in adland, with pitching, client demands and poor role-modelling by managers part of the equation. 

    In the current climate of staff cuts, lingering threats of AI replacing the workforce and agencies dealing with economic constraints, late working – and the chance of burnout – continues to be a risk.

    Shrinking teams can potentially lead to more demands being placed on remaining employees. WPP and Interpublic each cut thousands of staff from their global workforces in the first half of 2025, on top of headcount reductions in 2024. Last year, the collective global headcount across the “big six” holding companies declined by 1.6%, the first fall since the post-pandemic rebuild. 

    WPP boosts AI marketing with $400mn Google deal | FT – I would be concerned if they weren’t using video generators like Veo and Google Gemini – which does make me wonder what Mark Read was up to?

    On the importance of good strategic writing in using AI: AI interfaces and the role of good writing | by Nick DiLallo | Oct, 2025 | UX Collective

    Media

    Apple sued over use of copyrighted books to train Apple Intelligence | Yahoo! News

    Google designated with “strategic market status” by UK Competition and Markets Authority – The Media Leader

    Exclusive | Advertisers Push Big Tech to Adopt Standards for Transparency in Ad Sales – WSJ

    How We Automated Content Marketing to Acquire Users at Scale | Spotify Engineering – Insightful blog post from Spotify’s ML team: they implemented their own pre-ranking algorithm to select the best ad variants to deploy to their advertising channels in their user acquisition campaigns. 

    Spotify’s marketing team developed a creative production pipeline that could generate and deploy ad creatives to marketing channels based on listening habits in a geographic region. The problem they encountered was that they were generating creatives from a high-cardinality dataset, and the number of variations they were uploading to their channels was overwhelming those channels’ ability to optimize ads effectively. 

    Spotify’s solution was to build a pre-ranking algorithm using XGBoost that would determine which creatives to upload to the channels. Their ML pre-ranking model outperformed a simple heuristic model, with 4%-14% lower CPRs and 11%-12% higher CTRs. The ML model utilized a rich set of features to predict sub_percentage (the percentage of contributed subscriptions from the artist) and relative_cps_ratio (the share of the artist’s cost per subscription in the marketing campaign) for premium subscriptions, whereas the heuristic model used three fixed features. The model is retrained daily based on a defined lookback window.

    Moreover, although this was deployed before ATT, the team found that ATT didn’t impact its performance, as training relied on aggregated data.

    This obviously remains a relevant issue as advertisers scale the volume of their creative production through generative tools. While this pre-dates Meta’s Andromeda initiative for pre-ranking, it’s still likely relevant for most other channels (and, depending on the volume of creative uploaded, Meta).

    Perplexity Pauses New Advertising Deals to Reassess Ambitions | AdWeek – brands are rethinking how to spend their budgets. Chan said many advertisers are moving away from performance-focused, traditional search and towards top-of-funnel brand awareness—an area Perplexity may pursue down the line.

    Online

    US Amazon Prime Membership Finally Hits 200 Million | CIRP – Amazon Prime finally hit the 200-million-member mark in the US, after several quarters of slow, but steady growth toward that milestone.

    Note: CIRP estimates the number of individual Amazon shoppers who use Amazon Prime. That includes multiple family members for many subscribers, so this estimate is higher than the number of US households that pay for an Amazon Prime membership.

    Amazon knows the difference between Prime shoppers and paid Prime member households, so as US Prime membership approaches its limit, there may be a growing focus on bringing those numbers closer together. Amazon does not want to reduce the number of Amazon Prime membership users, but it certainly would not mind having more paid memberships associated with them. We expect Amazon to continue its efforts to attract members by emphasizing the benefits of Prime, rather than policing shopping and limiting Prime membership sharing.

    CIRP estimates 200 million US Amazon customers had a Prime membership as of the September 2025 quarter. That is an increase of about 6% from 189 million US Amazon Prime members in the September 2024 quarter and up very slightly from our 198 million member estimate last quarter.

    Retailing

    Why Did Walmart Just Buy a Shopping Mall? – The New York Times – reminds me of the local mini-shops that used to be inside Kwik Saves in many towns

    Technology

    China’s ‘Darwin Monkey’ is the world’s largest brain-inspired supercomputer | Live Science

    I had been having lunch in the Google canteen with colleagues, and then came back to my desk, checked an email newsletter and this arrived: Smartphone-powered AI predicts avocado ripeness | Newsroom | Oregon State University

    Web of no web

    Palmer Luckey’s Anduril launches EagleEye military helmet with help from buddy Zuck | The Verge

    Amazon launches Echo devices designed for Alexa+ | Amazon

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