Category: consumer behaviour | 消費者行為 | 소비자 행동

Consumer behaviour is central to my role as an account planner and about how I look at the world.

Being from an Irish household growing up in the North West of England, everything was alien. I felt that I was interloping observer who was eternally curious.

The same traits stand today, I just get paid for them. Consumer behaviour and its interactions with the environment and societal structures are fascinating to me.

The hive mind of Wikipedia defines it as

‘the study of individuals, groups, or organizations and all the activities associated with the purchase, use and disposal of goods and services.’

It is considered to consist of how the consumer’s emotions, attitudes and preferences affect buying behaviour. Consumer behaviour emerged in the 1940–1950s as a distinct sub-discipline of marketing, but has become an interdisciplinary social science that blends elements from psychology, sociology, social anthropology, anthropology, ethnography, marketing and economics (especially behavioural economics or nudge theory as its often known).

I tend to store a mix of third party insights and links to research papers here. If you were to read one thing on this blog about consumer behaviour, I would recommend this post I wrote on generations. This points out different ways that consumer behaviour can be misattributed, missed or misinterpreted.

Often the devil is in the context, which goes back to the wide ranging nature of this blog hinted at by the ‘renaissance’ in renaissance chambara. Back then I knew that I needed to have wide interests but hadn’t worked on defining the ‘why’ of having spread such a wide net in terms of subject matter.

2026 World Cup + more stuff

I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.

I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.

adidas has made World Cup shirts for dogs | Famous Campaigns – its a pity that they didn’t roll this out in the UK to celebrate the 2026 World Cup as well.

Branding

How many brands are there? | Europanel

Business

Publicis has built the best house on the street. Now it needs to move neighborhood | The Drum – undervalued due to poor performance by Omnicom and WPP

China

Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.

China reviews $2bn Manus sale to Meta as founders barred from leaving country | FT

Consumer behaviour

Argos sparks consumer outrage over toddler ‘influencer kit’ – Retail Gazette

Half of Gen Z Uses AI, but Their Feelings Are Souring, Study Shows | New York Times – this reminds me of consumer sentiment around email and information overload during the late 1990s and early 2000s. We’re going through a period of norming now

Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”

Design

EAGA – East Asian Graphics Archive

The interesting odd story behind the design behind house numbers.

Economics

Berkeley professor Robert Reich on the factors that he saw that brought President Donald Trump to the White House.

This War Will Make You Poorer – by Ed Elson – Prof G Media

FMCG

Danone doubles down on its area of strength in functional foods: Danone to buy meal-in-bottle maker Huel in €1bn deal | FT

Health

Battle for weight-loss supremacy shifts from jabs to pills | FT

How China is supplying America’s “biohacking” craze – GZERO Media

Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s complex role in bypassing sanctions against Russia | Le Monde – this isn’t doing what little is left of Hong Kong’s reputation any good

Hong Kong arrests hedge fund and brokerage staff in $300mn insider trading probe | FT

More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.

Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.

Silence Follows Harassment – Lingua Sinica

Hong Kong’s claw machine boom is mutating into a Pachinko-style trap | Dim Sum Daily

Hong Kong’s dying news stands tell a story of change – BBC News – I loved Hong Kong newsstands and loved the magazine racks which were brilliant. I remember religiously buying Milk magazine

Customs criticised for pursuit of outdated CD and VCD piracy | South China Morning Post

How to

I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.

Access and repair a broken disk image – The Eclectic Light Company

Ideas

Hawk shape shifting in flight may guide future drone control | Spacewar

How Wong Kar-Wai Created the Future – by Patrick Kho

Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books | Undark & Opinion | Technology Weakens Our Minds. It’s Time to Resist. – The New York Times

Innovation

‘A Cheaper Javelin’: New Anti-Tank Missile Advances Through Testing | Next Gen Defense – what’s interesting in this is the horizontal integration wth an Android application layer and the cost savings

We Need a New Science of Progress – The Atlantic

Japan

Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.

The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.

The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.

In the studio with Nigo – Japan’s premier polymath | Ft

Korea

The new food fad sweeping Korea | FT – dujjonku or Dubai cookie

Luxury

The Brand Age | Paul Graham

Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”

Materials

Chinese Titanium – by Irene Zhang – ChinaTalk

The Seasoning Company Behind Your Food Flavors Controls The Future Of AI Chips, And Supply Is Running Dangerously Low | WCCF Tech

Shipbuilding feels pinch from war-driven paint and lubricant shortage | FT

Media

Apple TV, Siri Targeted in EU Broadcaster Complaint Citing DMA Rules – MacRumors

Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams’s voice. It couldn’t stop her exposé | The Times – her publisher on the author of Careless People

A.I. Helps Online Ad Businesses Boom – The New York Times

UK adspend increased 6.4% in 2025 as AA/Warc updates data presentation – The Media Leader

Online

Every influencer eventually becomes a merch store | The Verge

Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.

The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background

Security

Interpol – Operation Synergia III leads to 45,000 malicious IPs dismantled and 94 arrests worldwide

The AI-driven ‘kill chain’ transforming how the US wages war | FT

Iran war lifts K-defence company offering cheap Patriot rival | FT

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages | FT – a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools | The Register

Andrew Cockburn · Beware the mattress: Mossad’s Kill List

The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence | AI Supremacy

France Introduces Telecom-Based Counter-Drone Network Using 19,700 Towers to Protect Critical Assets

China Is Cracking Down on Scams. Just Not the Ones Hitting Americans | WIRED & Scam Inc has a new weapon | The Economist – Chinese organised crime run Cambodian ‘scam’ factories that use social engineering techniques are now using malware as well.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos model is dangerous enough that the company isn’t selling it. | TechBrew

Russia Hacked Routers to Steal Microsoft Office Tokens – Krebs on Security

A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….

Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify…
The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”

All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.

Semiconductors

Arm launches own AI chip in high-stakes strategy shift | FT

Google taps Intel for another round of custom network chips • The Register

TSMC’s Kumamoto Fab Upgrade: A Security-Driven Reconfiguration of Indo-Pacific Chip Competition – The Diplomat

Software

China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Source | ChinaTalk

OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on

Axios AI+ | AI’s compute wars – pretty much what I have been talking about on the Dot LLM Era

Taiwan

There’s a Whole Lot of Taiwanese AI Winners Not Called TSMC

The PLA has stopped flying aircraft close to Taiwan – I can’t figure out why and that worries me | Drew Thompson

PC price hikes and a test for Taiwan | Ft

Technology

MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals It’s the Most Repairable Apple Laptop in Ages | Cnet

Oracle prepares for lay-offs as it hails efficiencies from AI coding tools | FT

The Debt Beneath the Dream – On my Om – Minsky moment in the offing?

AppleUnsold – The Apple products they won’t sell you

Google’s TurboQuant breakthrough is rattling memory chip stocks | Quartz

Web of no web

New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.

Wireless

At MWC, Ericsson Details AI-Native 6G Timeline – EE Times

The 6G clock ticking: Why silicon architecture for 2030 must start in 2026 – EDN

Ireland’s first mobile video call via satellite is made | RTÉ

May 3, 2026
April 2026 newsletter – 33rd edition aka ‘dirty knee’
April 2026 introduction – (33) dirty knee

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
1. 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.
2. Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
3. The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
4. 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.
5. 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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
April 29, 2026
Anthropic + more things

Anthropic and the US Department of Defense defined the debate about AI for the start of March. Trying to understand the truth is murky.

The media pitches a clash of personalities between Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Anthropic’s Claude LLMs have a number of points of expertise from helping programmers develop software code more quickly to assisted decision making and automation.

Anthropic had concerns about weapons with no humans in the loop, but you could consider ‘fire-and-forget’ weapons are already the same thing. This would include the FGM-148 ‘St’ Javelin anti-tank missile successfully used by the Ukrainians or the British Brimstone air-to-ground missile.

Fire-and-forget saves lives, autonomous vehicles in areas like casualty evacuation and supply runs could save more lives. The Anthropic breakdown seems to be down to trust. Anthropic felt that its models weren’t ready for full autonomy of operation and there were also concerns about facilitating mass surveillance of Americans.

There seems to be undertones of taking action against a ‘woke’ company. Why Anthropic seemed to have been able to double down is the limited impact they claim it will have on their business.

And yes the term ‘seem’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting due to difficulty in discerning what is going on.

China

China: Quieter, more fretful than I remember – by Whipling – it’s immediately obvious there is a current vibe in China. It isn’t frantic. It isn’t charged. It appears to be a collective sigh. Pride at what’s been achieved; acknowledgement that things are going to stop improving at the speed they forever have; resignation that life will be a little bit harder hereon in; and gratitude that there are messier places around the world to live. Many terms have been thrown at interpreting elements of this current behaviour in China. “Involution”. “Lie Flat”. I’ll add another: “Eh, fine.”

Why Everyone Is Suddenly in a ‘Very Chinese Time’ in Their Lives | WIRED – As is often the case with Western narratives about China, these memes are not really meant to paint an accurate picture of life in the country. Instead, they function as a projection of “all of the undesirable aspects of American life—or the decay of the American dream,” says Tianyu Fang, a PhD researcher at Harvard who studies science and technology in China.

At a moment when America’s infrastructure is crumbling and once-unthinkable forms of state violence are being normalized, China is starting to look pretty good in contrast. “When people say it’s the Chinese century, part of that is this ironic defeat,” says Fang.

As the Trump administration remade the US government in its own image and smashed long-standing democratic norms, people started yearning for an alternative role model, and they found a pretty good one in China. With its awe-inspiring skylines and abundant high-speed trains, the country serves as a symbol of the earnest and urgent desire among many Americans for something completely different from their own realities.

‘Hermès orange’ iPhone sparks Apple comeback in China | FT

Alibaba’s Qwen App Commits ￥30B to Chinese New Year AI Giveaway Campaign | Pandaily – China’s tech giants are using the Lunar New Year — the world’s largest annual migration — to turn niche AI assistants into household names. They are betting billions that “Red Packet” marketing can do for AI what it did for mobile payments a decade ago.

Former Alibaba Executives Join Robot Leasing Platform BotShare as President and CSO – Pandaily – Li Liheng, former head instructor of Alibaba’s renowned B2B sales force known as the “China Supplier Iron Army,” has joined robot leasing platform BotShare as President. He will be joined by Wang Mingfeng (Tianxiang)—another Alibaba veteran previously responsible for management training under Alibaba’s “Three Axes” leadership framework—who will serve as Chief Strategy Officer.

BotShare officially launched in December 2025 and disclosed its seed funding round on January 15, 2026. The round was led by Hillhouse Ventures, with participation from Fosun Capital and other investors. According to Qichacha data, Agibot (Zhiyuan Robotics) holds a 55% stake in BotShare, while Feikuo Technology owns 15%. Founded in 2024, Feikuo focuses on deploying and operating robots in real-world scenarios such as cultural tourism, commercial performances, and guided exhibitions.

As a robot leasing platform, BotShare aggregates robots from multiple brands and models, offering rentals for scenarios including corporate annual meetings, livestreaming, store openings, and promotional events.

Available brands currently include Accelerated Evolution, Unitree, Zhiyuan, Zhongqing, Lingchu Intelligence, and Zhujie Dynamics, among others. Robot delivery, retrieval, and maintenance are handled by local leasing partners across different regions.

Platform data shows that within three weeks of launch, BotShare surpassed 200,000 registered users, with daily rental orders stabilizing at over 200.

Consumer behaviour

One Third of Consumers Resist AI on Their Devices | Circana

Culture

AESTHETIC SYSTEM #2: TECHNO SURREALISM

Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s Sogo mall operator seeks $1 billion loan refinancing | Jing Daily – Sogo malls, especially the flagship Causeway Bay one, have long been among Hong Kong’s prime retail destinations. However, traditional retailers like department stores have been facing even more pressure from the mainland’s growing e-commerce penetration, the rise of low-end stores and weak domestic consumer sentiment.

Lifestyle International was taken private by its chairman, Hong Kong billionaire businessman Thomas Lau Luen-Hung, in a HK$1.9 billion deal after the company warned of an at least 80% plunge in profit in the first half of 2022.

Still, Hong Kong’s retail landscape has shown signs of stabilizing. Government data indicates that retail sales rose 6.5% year-on-year in November 2025, citing improving local consumption amid sustained economic growth and increasing visitor numbers.

From Rolex to Naoya Hida: East Asia’s role in the secondhand watch boom | Jing Daily – Hong Kong leads, Taiwan sustains, Southeast Asia emerges. Across the auction house’s East Asian markets, collector behavior differs sharply.

“Hong Kong continues to drive the strongest demand in the region,” Perazzi says. As a global gateway, the city draws international bidders competing for trophy pieces — particularly Rolex and Patek Philippe — and increasingly, independents.

Taiwan, meanwhile, reflects consistency rather than spikes. “Taiwanese collectors are renowned for their long-term approach. Compared to Hong Kong’s appetite for headline-grabbing lots, Taiwan is characterized by quieter but reliable demand,” Perazzi adds.

A surprise force is Southeast Asia. Vietnam and the Philippines are now producing first-generation collectors with expanding wealth pools and few legacy constraints. “Southeast Asia has emerged as a dynamic growth region,” Perazzi says, citing a younger collector profile and faster adoption of new independents.

62% of Hong Kong Zoomers fear they can’t compete with AI: Chinese YMCA survey

Ideas

The Singularity Is Always Near – by Kevin Kelly – KK

Indonesia

Indonesian woman collapses after 140 lashes for sex and alcohol | South China Morning Post – A woman in Indonesia’s Aceh province collapsed after being caned 140 times last week for extramarital sex and drinking alcohol in one of the harshest sharia punishments on record.
The woman and her partner were struck with a rattan cane in a public park in Aceh province on Thursday as dozens watched, Agence France-Presse reported. Each received 100 lashes for extramarital sex and another 40 for consuming alcohol, according to Banda Aceh sharia police chief Muhammad Rizal. – the move to more Gulf-orientated interpretation of Islamic rule is likely to cramp globalisation in Indonesia by western firms, despite it being the most populated Muslim country and will affect service industries such as tourism

Innovation

Unorthodox ‘universal vaccine’ offers broad protection in mice | Science | AAAS

On’s Greatest Innovation Isn’t a Sneaker. It’s a Robot. | Sportsverse

Japan

Japan’s AI Affinity – Matt Alt’s Pure Invention

4 Yakuza, 4 Livers, 100+ Dead Americans; No problem. The UCLA Report You’ve Never Seen | Jake Adelstein

Luxury

What are premium Chinese brands doing for Spring Festival 2026? 🧨 | Following the Yuan

Luxury’s Overexposure Is Biting – Matter

The Wait List for a Birkin or Rolex Is Getting Shorter – WSJ – Falling resale values show that even makers of the world’s most popular luxury goods are feeling a slowdown

Marketing

Tymbals : The Agency of the Future (Circa 2026) – Nigel Scott looks at the impact of LLMs on the creative output of agencies and Kering got it wrong using AI as a creative tool: Gucci’s AI experiment is what happens when luxury forgets it’s luxury – Intern Pierre

Materials

The Cell That Didn’t Catch Fire – by Howard Yu

On’s Greatest Innovation Isn’t a Sneaker. It’s a Robot. | Sportsverse

Media

When Real Beauty Met Reddit | LBBOnline – Reddit is very underestimated, interesting to see Dove using it in this way. Also worthwhile noting that Reddit is a key training source for LLMs.

WPP Media launches framework for evaluating AI advertising capabilities – The Media Leader

Listening to “The Joe Rogan Experience” | The New Yorker – the lineage from 1960s weird fringe late night medium wave radio to the mainstream media of The Joe Rogan show

Online

Chinese internet reacts to Bad Bunny – by Beimeng Fu

Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being | PNAS Nexus | Oxford Academic

America must follow China in treating data as an asset – In 2024, China became the first country to allow enterprises to classify data as intangible assets on their balance sheets. Beijing had already declared data a “factor of production” alongside land, labour, capital and technology. The National Data Administration now oversees dozens of data exchanges. China Unicom, one of the world’s largest mobile operators, reported Rmb204mn ($29mn) in assets in its first filing under the new rules.

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell – CIA

Security

Russia targets Telegram as rift with founder Pavel Durov deepens | FT

‘Honeypots’ and influence operations: China’s spies turn to Europe | FT

Pentagon is embracing Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry | C4ISRnet

Taiwan’s Tron Future unveils AI-guided anti-armor rockets | C4ISRnet

AI-powered military neurotech: Mind enhancement or control? | C4ISRnet

The DJI Romo robovac had security so poor, this man remotely accessed thousands of them | The Verge

Economic Espionage and Innovation Restrictions by Andrew Kao & Karthik Tadepalli (University of California, Berkleley, Harvard University)

Flickr moves to contain data exposure, warns users of phishing | Security Affairs

PRC Targets NATO Frontline States | RealClearDefense

iPhone and iPad are the first consumer devices cleared for NATO ’s ‘RESTRICTED’ classification | SecurityAffairs

Technology

Apple Does Fusion. – On my Om – the architecture move is more interesting than the products.

iPhone and iPad are the first consumer devices cleared for NATO ’s ‘RESTRICTED’ classification | SecurityAffairs

Most of the major AI players went to Davos, though they weren’t the main focus due to the Trump administration. Google Deepmind founder Demis Hassabis admitted that the current AI market is ‘bubble-like’.

Beyond the Bubble: Why AI Infrastructure Will Compound Long after the Hype | KKR

Does China care about AGI? – by Kyle Chan – High Capacity

Yahoo Japan and LINE to build combined private cloud • The Register – Japan’s take on sovereign cloud

TMTB: Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) at MS TMT Key Quotes & Dario’s Choice and Anthropic’s Future | Big Technology

Web-of-no-web

Chinese robotaxis beat U.S. rivals to the Gulf – Rest of World

Wireless

Orbital geopolitics: China’s dual-use space internet MERICS

March 11, 2026
Forgettable cinema
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.
- Movie marathons and midnight screenings.
- TV re-runs.
- TV broadcast movie ‘festivals like Moviedrome.
- Seasonal standards shown on television, such as Holiday Inn at Christmas time.
- Movie rental shops like Blockbuster.
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.

More posts similar to this one.
February 8, 2026
January 2026 newsletter
January 2026 introduction – (30) the dirty Gertie edition

I am now at issue 30, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘dirty gertie’. This phrase was the nickname given in the 1920s to a statue called by La Délivrance by French sculptor Émile Guillaume.

The statue was created to celebrate the German army having being stopped before Paris in World War 1. It was originally called La Victoire – there is a matching statue in Nantes, France.

1960s student activists claimed that you shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30, making a virtue of ageism. While activists were deeply suspicious, 30 in Cantonese is considered to be lucky as the number three sounds like alive or life.

It might be winter outside, but it doesn’t need to be winter in your head thanks to Graeme Park’s Best of 2025 part 1 which is two and a half hours of goodness. 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.

Things I’ve written.

Each year, I try and write an account of year as it happens. It provides a perspective on what appeared important at the time rather than in retrospect. Here’s the one I did for 2025.

The Dot LLM Era came out of my thinking about the massive expenditure in building infrastructure and the computing power needed by AI services like OpenAI and Anthropic, asking how it will be paid for and what it means for for business, consumers, investors and technologies.

There was so much happening from childhood beauty product usage alarming dermatologists to corporate and national moves in AI sovereignty. So I captured some of the most interesting of them here.

Books that I have read.

Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.

How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. More on the book here.

Things I have been inspired by.

Every time I get a brief that defines an audience as a generation my heart sinks a bit for several reasons. Which is why I was glad to read this Ipsos View Point and share it as widely as possible. Generational Marketing: Breaking free from stereotypes provides research on the nuances missed by a generational approach, how we differ by age cohort and life stage, alongside what brings us together as common challenges.

While it won’t get as much ink as Christmas or Super Bowl adverts the CIA kicked off January with another video aimed at recruiting Chinese agents. They advised them to use a VPN and Tor browser to get in touch with them online.

Chart of the month.

After I came back to London after working on various brands including Colgate in Asia, I noticed that all the Colgate adverts followed a standard formula. It puzzled me: the ads were distinctive by their ‘undistinctiveness’. They had no emotion and a limited number of brand cues beyond name checks and a pack shot or two.

If like me, you’ve ever wondered why Colgate toothpaste adverts (in Europe at least) always seem to be based around a dentist or dental nurse (who may, or may not be a generative AI) character, then Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, may have the answer.

The Ipsos Veracity Index, is a great piece of longitudinal research launched in 1983. It does an annual poll studying change in public trust towards leading professions in Britain. Much of the headlines for this year was the low trust position scored by influencers, with just 6% of people generally trusting them to tell the truth.

I think that number has a number of problems with it, to do with the phrase general which would invite them to think about creators they don’t follow at least as much as those that they do follow. Secondly, not all influencer types are supposed to be trusted be it being videos on e-gaming play, humour and general ‘banter’ or shock jock-type content.

As Ipsos themselves noted, there was a tension between the declared trust level with the amount of news consumption that now happens on social channels from influencers.

Getting back to the Colgate question, the answer is at the top of the table. Healthcare professionals and technical experts are at the most trusted professions in the UK.

Things I have watched.

The TV schedule was terrible over the Christmas period and there were only so many reruns of Jessie Stone that even my Dad can sit through. So I entertained him with a mix of streamed films, old VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond directed by Hélène Cattet and impressed the hell out of me. At its heart it’s a mystery full of illusion, delusion and deception. It oscillates between two timelines one from the late sixties on and the second as an elderly version of the protagonist in the present day. In his day, the protagonist had been a Francophone James Bond-type figure, but darker like Fleming’s novels rather than the version that we see on screen. There are also hints of modern French historical figures like Alfred Sirven and Jean-Claude Veillard. The film has a lot of French new wave motifs particularly at its beginning. I was reminded of Alain Delon’sTraitement de choc , Diabolik and the André Hunebelle directed OSS 117 series of films in the mid-1960s.

Bubblegum Crash – no that isn’t a typo. Bubblegum Crash was a follow on from the Bubblegum Crisis manga and OVA (original video animation – made for direct to video distribution without being broadcast or shown in a cinema first) anime series. I had these on VHS tape at my parent’s house and it was fantastic revisiting them decades later. Bubblegum Crash is less serious and the artwork isn’t as good as the original series, but it’s still great cyberpunk fiction.

It felt surprisingly fresh, wealth inequality, get rich schemes, large corporations behaving badly, an openly gay police officer, autonomous machines from robots to cars and normalised smartphone usage.

All this from an animated series that was produced in 1991, at this time robots were stuck in car plants, AI was image stabilisation in the latest high-end camcorders and handheld mobile phones were over 20cm long in use. Cellphones were only starting to become less than a kilogram in weight with the launch of Motorola’s MicroTAC in 1989.

Detective vs Sleuths – a Johnnie To-adjacent film that a friend in Hong Kong gifted to me. The film was directed by Wai Ka-fai who collaborated with To and co-founded production company Milkyway Image together. Detective vs Sleuths feels thematically and stylistically similar to Mad Detective which Wai co-directed with To in 2007. That similarity brought me back to happier days flying on Cathay Pacific, sipping Hong Kong-style milk tea and watching Mad Detective soon after it had came out for the first time on the airplane entertainment system.

Without spoiling the plot, old cold cases are having new light shone on them by a series of deaths. Sean Lau plays a Nietzsche-quoting former detective with his own sanity in question.

Production-wise, the film was shot in 2018, was in post-production until 2019 and finally released after the worst of CoVID was over in 2022. If you are a passionate Hong Kong film watcher, then you will notice the similarities with Mad Detective; but Detective vs Sleuths still holds up as a really enjoyable inventive film with a number of surprises for the audience.

Useful tools.

Kinopio – quick lightweight service similar to Miro and MilanNote.

Clean Links – for iPhone, iPad and Mac cleans out tracking codes from URLs when you share them, for instance in a Slack conversation.

Not a tool per se, but a technique that started on Chromium browsers and is now more widely supported, scroll to text fragments. Appending to the end of a URL:

#:~:text=startWord,endWord

When someone clicks on the link they are guided directly to a highlighted section on the page, rather than having to search or guess at what you meant. It isn’t perfect, but it’s rather good.

Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

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. Most recently, I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI.

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 “wholehearted” strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my January 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 my charts of the month for 2025, in PowerPoint format that you can freely use in your own presentations.

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.
January 28, 2026