Charlie Rose runs the a talk show. His show appears on the PBS network. His interviews give the public something new, without ruffling the feathers of the senior executives and celebrities that he has on his show. He is both inquisitor and coach like a defence lawyer interrogating his client at the stand. Rose studied law at Duke University.
Charlie Rose is also one of the elite. His estranged wife is the sister of John Mack, the former chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley. His current partner is Amanda Burden. Burden’s father was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune, her first husband is related to the Vanderbilt family. Her second was the head of Warner Communications. Burden was the former chairman of the city planning commission under New York’s Mayor Bloomberg. Before being a journalist, Rose worked at Bankers Trust; and continued working there for a while whilst working as a reporter on the weekend.
All this is why he has had access to all the titans of the technology sector, including Steve Jobs. So it made perfect sense that Tim Cook would sit down with him after the launch of Apple’s wearable products. Cook also used the opportunity to reiterate Apple’s new positioning on privacy that makes a virtue of the fact Apple isn’t an online advertising company.
Despite being on PBS, Rose’s interviews gain respect and become media agenda setters in their own right. Similar to the way BBC Radio 4’s Today programme influences the UK political agenda.
I found it interesting that Rose’s interview with Cook triggered so many news stories afterwards. I had at least one friend phone me to ask what I thought the significance was of Cook’s comments about television. Like me, they had been peppered with questions about when Apple’s transformation of TV was due?
I found the interview of interest only because Apple executives rarely do interviews. The questions were a temperature check and update of ones Rose had asked Steve Jobs on a previous interview. The television industry comments Cook made Apple’s position in only one respect. They acknowledged that the Apple TV business is now a bit larger than a ‘hobby’. Steve Jobs called the Apple TV a hobby at AllThingsDigital four years ago. When Cook said TV was stuck in the 1970s; Jobs had said the same thing: the current TV business model squashed innovation. My understanding of news was that it was about events that were new, surprising or noteworthy. The commentary on TV was none of these things.
The media took this to mean that Apple was going to do ‘something’. What they failed to pick up on was Cook’s comments later on where he talked about business focus. Steve Jobs had talked about all Apple’s product range could be fit on a desk, showing the level of company focus. In contrast to industry peers with thousands of SKUs (stock control units). Cook made the same comment about the entire Apple product range fitting on a desk in this interview. The people at Apple are smart enough to realise that lots of products and services are bad. But they will only address a few where they can make the most difference. (More Apple related content here).
The media saw a hook and ran with it, psychologists would call it perceptual closure. There is a temptation with a company as private as Apple to write anything. There is also the pressure of producing enough content for online. This pressure can have a few outcomes:
A temptation to ‘chunk’ content without context to create more stories out of a given bit of information
Insufficient time to research how this content fits with past statements
No longer the same level of fact-checking that one would have seen at traditional publications like The New Republic (and even then they had Stephen Glass)
I was watching a roundtable on The Future of Television hosted by the Aspen Institute in the US, whilst much of it was of limited interest; some of the conversations percolated with other things that have sat around in my head for a while:
So here are the thoughts that I was kicking around in terms of outtakes from The Future of Television discussion
The internet looks less like an atomic bomb and more like a transport medium to the content industry.
Business models not channels are disrupting media and interruption marketing as a business model is threatened. Instead a subscription style model a la HBO is more likely to be The Future of Television. The key difference is that the bundling of cable TV stations is giving way to an a la carte style option instead
Attention poverty is an issue: better not more. While there has been an interesting focus in new forms of content, the need for telling great stories is timeless. More importantly, interactively isn’t everything, lean back content still has a place. Technologist have thought that media consumption would evolve to an exclusively lean forward world.
Social is only appropriate in certain contexts
Gamification is a phrase to get marketers and designers to think again about incentivisation. Again this depends on how interested people are in lean forward content and what the benefits are in the gamefication mechanisms – usually this is some form of dopamine hit a la the Tinder interface
This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.
In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.
However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.
In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!
This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.
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.
A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.
Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.
My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.
Things I have been inspired by.
Supply chained
Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Generative AI & cooking
I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.
I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.
More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.
Praykinson
I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.
CHESS
I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.
CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.
Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
Things I have watched.
My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.
I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.
This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
As Tears Go By
Days of Being Wild
Chungking Express
Fallen Angels
Happy Together
In The Mood For Love
2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.
After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.
OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.
PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.
Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).
I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.
Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.
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 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, 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.
Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
Disclosure: a long time ago I worked for a forerunner of Burson and WPP’s dedicated agency for Colgate; Red Fuse. During that time I was based out of Hong Kong.
Later on, I won the Huawei consumer devices AOR business from my old colleagues in Hong Kong.
I know Burson’s current CEO Corey duBrowa from even further back in my agency life, we share a love of the Wu Tang clan.
What’s news?
Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into what you’re really here to read. The Times ‘news‘ that Burson is a possible candidate for sale isn’t really news. It had been eluded to previously in coverage. Coming in as a new CEO to WPP, it was inevitable would take an all-up strategic review.
Executives in the group have also discussed potential disposals as part of the new strategy, with some suggesting that Burson, its PR agency, would be the easiest to consider for sale given it sits separately from the three other divisions. – WPP to overhaul creative agency structure in strategic rethink | Financial Times (February 9, 2026)
The real news was that WPP appointed Goldman Sachs to do the work and that Burson reported a 6% decline in revenue in 2025.
The shape of the new WPP has been becoming clear for a number of months.
WPP Production was basically the same direction of travel as Hogarth with a new brand. Hogarth was a new brand in itself, and didn’t have the depth of brand equity that Young & Rubican (Y&R Brands) or J Walter Thompson (JWT) had.
WPP Open – AI stuff. Some of which is ‘self-service’ to tap into smaller clients and some of which seems to sit in WPP Production.
WPP Media – which seems to be a rebrand of GroupM, like WPP Production it makes complete sense.
WPP Creative – puts the creative brands under one line item where it used to be under Y&R Brands, JWT, Ogilvy etc. The past structure was as much down to WPP’s history of acquisition as it was to strategy. Much of this work had been done under Mark Read, this seemed to be as much about cleaning up the accounting processes as anything else. PR agencies would nominally fit underneath.
Why would WPP sell Burson?
A successful sale of Burson would provide WPP with funds to use elsewhere. This could fulfil two purposes; reducing debt or reinvesting in WPP’s business and technology transformation. Burson is a business that could be packaged up, sold to the right buyer or floated in a public offering.
The downsides would be a loss of integrated pitch power, and a smaller global footprint for back-office resources.
Obviously a few questions come up about who would be a buyer and would WPP want to spend the time listing Burson as a separate business?
It also makes strategic sense
When I worked at WPP, the PR agencies outside of Ogilvy weren’t integrated very tightly to their creative agency counterparts. You had a similar distance between the likes of Golin and McCann Erickson at IPG too. So the loss of integrated pitch power less than it would at first appear.
PR is an umbrella term for two broad functions, marketing communications and management functions. Management functions would include:
Internal communications including around change management.
Legal and compliance, for instance around financial communications for a public company.
Stakeholder engagement including the investor community, local communities and government.
That isn’t an exhaustive list but it covers the major areas. There is more synergy between these areas and management consultancies than there are with WPP’s offerings. WPP has already sold FGS last year. FGS is a financial communications specialist.
The ‘management functions’ is more of a boutique offering and can come with risks as Bell Pottinger found out to their cost.
It’s arguably even more risky in a volatile political environment that yo-yos between different forms of political populism.
The other side of PR: marketing communications is earned media. That side of PR has been shaken up by several factors:
Decline in the mainstream media.
Search, generative AI and social algorithms as tastemakers.
The creator economy.
Brand media: led by the technology industry who published their news directly via blog posts.
In the past creative agencies thought about talkability, which was earned impact from advertising creative. Now creative agencies think about campaigns even more in terms of earned impact, including earned first approaches and WPP agency Ogilvy has managed to integrate its PR function into this process.
Specialist agencies tap into the creator economy and it’s been well documented by senior leaders in PR like Stephen Waddington how the PR industry missed the SEO opportunity.
PR agencies have looked to redefine themselves. The world’s largest PR firm, Edelman calls themselves a ‘global communications firm’ to help it position itself against management consultancies and advertising agencies.
The question WPP would have been asking themselves would have been: do they really need Burson when a lot of its function is now being done by media and creative agencies?
What does Burson gain or lose from leaving WPP, one way or the other?
Burson and its previous constituent agencies have been part of a conglomerate for the past quarter of a century that wasn’t focused on their business. WPP’s former CEO Sir Martin Sorrell used to talk about WPP primarily being a ‘media investment’ business for its clients. Helping them make the most effective, efficient investments in advertising for its clients.
Burson could be allowed to chart its own course, with less constraints put upon the business.
Burson would lose access to shared services over time, having to reorganise:
IT support
Offices
Time-tracking
Finance
Employee and at least some client contracts
New business prospecting
Client contracts where the work is shared with WPP agencies
Over time Burson could rebuild partnerships and capabilities that it would have previously had through WPP.
There is a bigger question about whether the natural consequence of the structural bifurcation of modern PR into ‘management’ and ‘marketing communications’ specialists leaves room for a large full service generalist agency like Burson.
The industry itself is splitting rapidly between highly specialised management consultancy style operations handling the C-suite, and earned-first creative shops driving marketing communications. The traditional, full-service generalist model that Burson and its ancestors helped invent is finding it harder to operate in the middle ground. For example, Edelman, the PR industry’s bellwether fell below the $1 billion fee income mark in 2024, a 5% global decline.
If the world’s largest PR firm is struggling to make the integrated generalist model work, it may be that the model itself might be broken?
Who may want to buy Burson?
Private equity (including supporting a management team buyout)
I think that Burson would be a tough sell for an informed private equity (PE) firm. PE firms tend to look for business with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 10%.
Here are some estimates that are why I came to this conclusion and I may be wrong.
Global Industry CAGR (2024–2030) is projected at 6.1% to 6.4%, although some aggressively optimistic estimates suggest up to 10.5%. That is based around assumptions on digital transformation and AI-driven services being fully integrated.
Looking at historic data from PRovoke Media’s global top 250 PR firms (2015 – 2023), CAGR was typically between 3.5% and 5%. These numbers maybe a bit optimistic due to currency fluctuations. (During CoVID, 2020 was flat and there was a sharp rebound in 2021.)
Burson’s constituent agencies BCW and H+K were running somewhere around 3.5 – 4% CAGR.
The outliers are AxiCom and ASDA’A who are Burson’s tech specialist brand and its Middle East agency presence – both operating in high growth sectors. They had CAGR somewhere between 12 – 14%.
This is the reason why PE has focused on specialists in the healthcare area or financial communications like FGS Global where the growth rate and margins are higher than normal.
Given the length of time that Burson has been within WPP, the consolidation that the business has been through merging:
Burson-Marsteller
Cohn & Wolfe
Hill and Knowlton (H+K)
JeffreyGroup
WPP likely trimmed out any organisational ‘fat’ which leaves little if any efficiency gains to be made by an acquiring PE firm.
When these firms were all separate it’s not like WPP were generous at the best of times. I heard allegations of bonuses either cancelled , or like pay rises constantly pushed out as aggressive cash management and cost reduction with junior and mid-level staff taking the brunt of this process.
Another PR agency network
Another PR agency network purchasing Burson may gain some operational efficiencies by de-duplicating the back office business processes from finance to HR departments.
But given that Burson is the world’s number two agency by fee income according to Provoke Media and PR Week; it is unlikely to be acquired by another PR network.
If the current number one Edelman bought them, they would run into antitrust issues and this would put them on the radar of the Trump administration in the US. Given the progressive leaning content of their Trust Barometer research, Edelman may end up creating its own business crisis.
Omnicom are likely too wrapped up in consolidating their purchase of Interpublic to attempt it. Even if they did make an offer, WPP may not be inclined to sell to a direct rival.
Publicis and Havas both have their focus on larger growth opportunities elsewhere and PR are much smaller parts of their business.
Most of the rest of the largest global agencies in the PR industry are either industry specialists like Real Chemistry and Invizio Evoke (health), FGS Global, APCO and Brunswick (financial communications) or national champions like Germany’s mc Group.
Conducting a leveraged buyout (LBO)of Burson would be unattractive due to the cost of debt servicing versus Burson’s CAGR. So this would make financing for a management buyout (MBO) challenging too.
Spin out or spin-in
From a PR agency perspective Burson has a good quality management team at the top. Someone like Corey duBrowa, who has previously worked at major corporates like Google and Starbucks. If the business was spun off or floated like Next15 Group, it could make sense on the London Stock Exchange.
Retail investors would be likely to give the best return for WPP. However, an IPO would take a major effort and a good deal of time to make happen that doesn’t feel like the kind of cadence that the WPP Elevate28 plan / platform wants to move at.
A spin-in might make some sense. Merge Burson with a publicly listed company (for instance Next15 or Stagwell) and then WPP sell down their shares over time. WPP maybe able to securitise its shares in such a way that it gets its (diminished) return upfront and a financial partner gradually sells down the shares with a view to making a profit on the money it paid WPP versus the price it gets on the stock market.
Clients get a vote too
Clients get a vote too. If the future of Burson affects client team morale, capacity or make-up they are likely to head for the door. The agency intellectual capital is their practitioners.
We saw a client exodus happen during the protracted acquisition of IPG by Omnicom with 3.5 percent drops in year-on-year revenue and peaked as high as 10% on a quarterly basis in markets like Australia.
Maintaining the client base will require a swift disposal process that doesn’t have Burson people keeping one eye on LinkedIn and the jobs section of PR Week or Ragan PR Daily.
Omnicom is desperate to rejuvenate its business and stealing unhappy Burson clients would be an easy win. Publicis is a high-performing group of agencies already and boutique shops live for ‘giant-killing’ new business pitches. Havas had a healthy PR business that would provide an alternative for any unhappy Burson clients.
The Human Cost of Structural Change
The current speculation surrounding Burson reflects a broader structural shift across the industry. For the professionals within the agency, many of whom have spent years managing complex briefs for major clients, this period of uncertainty will be unsettling.
Burson’s current position is not a reflection on the capability of its staff. It is the logical outcome of the continuing bifurcation of modern PR.
The sector is dividing between specialist management consultancies advising the C-suite and agile creative shops leading marketing communications.
The traditional generalist model, is finding the middle ground smaller and tougher than it used to be.
WPP’s wider strategy is now firmly anchored in technology and integrated creative solutions.
Operating independently or with private equity backing, Burson would have the operational freedom to determine its exact shape in this new market. Stepping away from a holding company structure is sometimes the clearest route to finding the necessary focus. The talent remain in place; the immediate requirement is a business model aligned with current market realities.
The idea of forgettable cinema came to me while reading Matthew Frank’s newsletter for The Ankler where he repeated a thought exercise that one of his colleagues posed.
Name five films of this decade that will go down as classics.
Okay, I’m waiting.
…still waiting.
I consume cinema the way members of Soho House were famed for consuming gak. Also given my movie tastes, you may disagree with what I think of as classics.
My answer would be:
Sinners – vampires in 1920s America amidst a slice of pre-civil rights life in the deep South
The Boy and the Heron aka (How do you live?) – A Studio Ghibli film, like everything from Studio Ghibli it’s a masterpiece. Just watch it in Japanese with English subtitles as the English dub is awful.
The Order – Jude Law as an FBI field agent in 1970s American Mid-West hunting white supremacists.
The Goldfinger – A retelling of a financial scandal in Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s. It draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal. It saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. The names had to be changed for legal reasons as the main protagonist George Tan was still alive when the film went into production.
The Old Woman with the Knife – A film adaptation of a Korean novel about a skilled female assassin coming up to pensionable age. It is a thriller that also addresses an aging Korean society and the invisibility of older people.
Bonus
Oppenheimer – Robert Oppenheimer biopic by Christopher Nolan that is visually amazing and does some interesting things with the storytelling.
But the point of the thought experiment was the most films now are forgettable cinema and most normal people would have struggled to name five future classic films.
They are watched by millions – yet never become part of culture. This idea of forgettable cinema used to be a novel idea with only the occasional blockbuster; notably the Avatar series, falling into this category.
Now Matthew Frank argues that forgettable cinema applies across all film making output. He described the phenomenon as ‘Cinemanesia’.
Why do we have forgotten cinema?
The problem might not be the films or the film making, but the change to discover and rediscover films. Frank posits that this is down to the way we now consume media.
Pre-Netflix, we had:
Repeat showings at the cinema, the most prominent example of this for Londoners would be the ‘sing-a-long’ screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
There is comfort and familiarity in their repetition. Just in the same way that adverts build mental models, fame and salience in our heads through repeated exposure – classic films do too.
Yet we have got to a point where storied film actor / director Robert Redford was better known amongst young adults as the person in the ‘nodding with approval’ man GIF as internet meme, than his film career. The GIF came from Redford’s performance in Jeremiah Johnson.
By comparison Netflix provides us with a conveyor belt of entertaining enough content. We don’t get to build that depth of relationship through repetition. The business model for TV was different. The right films on the right channel had people tuning in because they wanted the familiar.
Instead what we have now is the video algorithmic equivalent of the Spotify playlist or the shuffle play of an Apple iTunes library. Like the music our relationship is largely broken – we can choose something that suits our mood or a broad range of interests.
For most of the time the movies and shows aren’t culture shifting.
Hellhound as a case in point.
Others like Korean drama Hellbound (지옥) have cultural relevancy for a brief while before disappearing again.
I have used Google Trends as a quick and dirty way of showing this phenomenon.
Google Trends isn’t search volume, but the rate in change of search volume and web search volume is an indicative rather than absolute measure of consumer interest.
Channeling my inner Marshall MacLuhan: we have forgettable cinema because the medium is disappearing the message.
All is not completely lost yet.
All is not completely lost. I am a member of Letterboxd, which acts as a sort of ‘movies watched’ diary for me, (you can find my profile here). The Letterboxd community hosts challenges for its members like the Criterion challenge that encourages members to watch films from the Criterion collection in each of several different categories. It’s dynamic is reminiscent of the photowalks and meet-ups that built a real world community around Flickr the photo-sharing site and helped many develop an interest in photography.
