Category: culture | 文明 | 미디어와 예술 | 人文

Culture was the central point of my reason to start this blog. I thought that there was so much to explore in Asian culture to try and understand the future.

Initially my interest was focused very much on Japan and Hong Kong. It’s ironic that before the Japanese government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative there was much more content out there about what was happening in Japan. Great and really missed publications like the Japan Trends blog and Ping magazine.

Hong Kong’s film industry had past its peak in the mid 1990s, but was still doing interesting stuff and the city was a great place to synthesise both eastern and western ideas to make them its own. Hong Kong because its so densely populated has served as a laboratory of sorts for the mobile industry.

Way before there was Uber Eats or Food Panda, Hong Kongers would send their order over WhatsApp before going over to pay for and pick up their food. Even my local McDonalds used to have a WhatsApp number that they gave out to regular customers. All of this worked because Hong Kong was a higher trust society than the UK or China. In many respects in terms of trust, its more like Japan.

Korea quickly became a country of interest as I caught the ‘Korean wave’ or hallyu on its way up. I also have discussed Chinese culture and how it has synthesised other cultures.

More recently, aspect of Chinese culture that I have covered has taken a darker turn due to a number of factors.

October 2025 issue 27
October 2025 introduction – (27) gateway to heaven edition

I am now at issue 27, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘gateway to heaven’.

27 inspired an urban legend of the ’27 club effect’ where a ‘statistical spike’ in fatalities affected musicians, actors and other artists. However in reality there is no statistical spike though Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin all died aged 27.

In the I Ching, the 27th hexagram is associated with sufficient physical and spiritual nourishment – good advice for anyone since we’re going into winter.

This edition’s soundtrack is Coco – I Need A Miracle over Dreadzone – Little Britain put together by MH1. I used to love mashups and bastard pop in the early 2000s to 2010s, especially A plus D and their Bootie nights, which I got to see at the DNA Lounge back when I had to travel to San Francisco while working at Yahoo!. They built a whole genre of out of what would normally be trick recordings you might have played once in a DJ set like Evil Eddie Richards You Used to Salsa.

MH1 carries this on the same grand tradition as A plus D and sent me down a memory hole in my iTunes collection.

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.
- Golden Mile – a collection of documentaries and films that caught my eye, from the last days of the Golden Mile complex that was a centre of the Thai diaspora in Singapore to the oral history of the Google Docs development team.
- Nvidia ban in China and more things – a selection of stuff that I found of interest online including articles on Nvidia’s fraught relationship with China as a market.
- Tahoe and more things – from the inside steer on Nexperia and the importance of strategic writing for using LLMs to Apple’s imperfect macOS Tahoe.
Books that I have read.
- Clown Town by Mick Herron is the latest instalment in the Slow Horses series of books, on which the Apple+ TV series are based. Without plot spoilers, I can tell you that it’s up to the high standards of the earlier books. Herron is as critical of the current Labour government as he was of their conservative party predecessors.
- I am just starting in on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the great depression 1929. I hope to update you next month on whether it’s a book that I would recommend.
Things I have been inspired by.

I managed to spend some time with fellow former Yahoo Nick Fowden and we discussed AI futures and the altar of marketing efficiency and performance media over effectiveness and brand building.

Mercedes goes back to luxury

Mercedes-Benz put on a special event in Shanghai that looked like an attempt to reboot the brand. Star of the show was the Mercedes Vision Iconic concept car, this looked like the vehicle the relaunched Jaguar brand would want to build. The grill looked as if it came off a vintage Mercedes 600 ‘Grosser’ and was a world away from the current nadir of the car brand.

Understanding influencer payback is also about understanding the caveats, risks and current limitations in optimisation

The IPA published effectiveness data on (paid) influencers, it is is great to have this data set and shows the continued role in improving the advertising industry. You can expect to see these headlines trumpeted by influencer and PR agencies. BUT, it is worthwhile going beyond the headlines and into the deck presented. My takeouts from the data presentation:
- It’s a promising, but limited sample. However overall there seemed to some commonality in results amongst the European markets compared.
- On sample selection, the presentation itself says: “Based on sample definition, no campaigns are included where influencer spend was present but did not produce a result at some level therefore 0-25 ROI index likely to be significantly under-reported.” This is key because reading the data at face value gives an overly-optimistic picture of likely influencer campaign success.
- The data presented represents bad news for paid social campaigns in particular, and it highlights their relatively poor RoI from the Profit Ability 2 study. What it means: Expect some of the influencer spend to come from the experimental pot within the social platform advertising budget.
- Long-term multipliers for Influencers are the highest of any channel in the data, but the tiny difference between television and influencers are not significantly large to be definitive. So further research could see this relationship flip.
- The numbers are averages, but Influencer ROIs are much less likely to be ‘average’ with (high and low) extremes alongside outliers much more present (and this is with campaigns giving 0-25% RoI filtered out). There is a much higher risk in terms of spend versus reward, which a responsible agency partner should be disclosed to clients upfront. This huge variance also mirrored in the kind of results seen in Chinese social commerce campaigns as well. What it means: You can’t duplicate success and optimise in the same way as you can by using testing for TV advertising and the like. So for businesses like Unilever that are putting half their spend into influencer marketing – its a high risk endeavour with limited risk mitigation strategies.
- There isn’t intra-influencer category analysis based on follower size. Getting paid reach will still be critical, so social platforms will still win.
- The research doesn’t cover B2B sectors but subscription revenue model technology clients (Adobe, Canva, Monday.com, Grammarly etc.) may take some hope from the RoI achieved by consumer-focused telecommunications brands.
TL;DR: At the moment influencer represents the worst attributes of both earned and paid media. The uncertainty of earned media, the higher upfront cost of paid media. What it means: be wary of over-promising influencer campaign success, set realistic expectations about the likely wide variance in results. Keep an eye out as further data expands and clarifies the picture.

Chart of the month.

European attitudes to video games

This month’s chart comes from data provided by the European Commission’s Director General CONNECT (Communications Networks, Content and Technology). The breadth and quality of research that they do is really useful to people in my line of work.

The sentiment around video games is similar to what you would have seen around television in previous decades. So video games aren’t in aggregate seen as great for society, but not the complete pox on people that you would see if you ran the same survey for social media platforms.

Things I have watched.

Jean Giraud aka Moebius was a graphic novel artist drawing in the bande dessinée tradition. Moebius Redux is an hour long documentary of Giraud’s career through to the mid-2000s. In it is a who’s who of comic book legends including Stan Lee and Mike Mignola – the creator of Hellboy. It even has an amazing original soundtrack by former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos.

I remember seeing The Satan Bug as a child and enjoying it immensely. I also read the book that it was based on as my Dad had built up a collection of Alistair McLean and I devoured them from age 11 onwards. I went back and revisited decades later to see if I would still enjoy it. I did, but for different reasons. The premise is based on the paranoia of annihilation that was a main part of the cold war zeitgeist. The wrinkle in the story is that it’s about germ warfare rather than nuclear bombs. Adult me saw the plot as ridiculous, but the cinematography, location, set design and wardrobe floored me. The high security compound of ‘Station 3’ and the various interiors were triumphs of mid-century modern design. The scenery and locations were in the California desert making it an ideal canvas for John Sturges who had previously shot Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven. The Satan Bug was also the start of helicopter based cinematography thanks a newly developed steady cam mechanism.

Following on in the same vein I watched The Andromeda Strain. Just six years separated from The Satan Bug, but stylistically so different. The Michael Crichton novel has a much more coherent story. Much of it is told through jargon and multi-media formats such as a computer driven plotter and a ticker tape running across the screen in the second scene of the film. Where The Andromeda Stream loses out is in its cinematography and style. The set design feels lazy compared to The Satan Bug, the cinematography is competent but workman-like.

I watched the original Russian film adaptation of Solaris. It has been years since I have seen it. Its one of them films that you can watch three times and still pick up new details. Andrei Tarkovsky focused on storytelling rather than special effects which are used very sparingly. I still love that the Soviet city of the future was footage of early 1970s Tokyo. Watching it now the film feels more deconstructed.

The last film this month is an indulgent one of mine. Searchers 2.0 is a modern-day neo western film that thumbs its nose at the Hollywood system. The story follows the revenge quest of two former child actors against their former abuser, a screen writer on the film set. Alex Cox made the film on $100,000 budget with Roger Corman as producer. UK film fans probably remember Alex Cox as the presenter of Moviedrome. he is an accomplished director, screenwriter and the author of 10,000 Ways To Die – the best guide ever written to spaghetti westerns.

Slow Horses season five has been a must-watch TV moment for me. The show runners manage to keep the essence of the books with some creative flair.

Useful tools.

Optimising for macOS Tahoe

Moving from macOS Sonoma to Tahoe meant changing up the versions of utilities I like to use. Titanium Software make OnyX, Maintenance and Deeper.
- OnyX y use of OnyX goes all the way back to 2002 and 10.2 Jaguar, various versions of it throughout that time to now. It was very good for doing startup disk related maintenance tasks.
- Maintenance provides a general performance tune-up including rebuilding databases and clearing obscure caches.
- Deeper is for fine tuning hidden settings across different applications on your Mac.
All three are donationware so be sure to give Joel what you can.

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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my October 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for barm brack – an Irish Hallowe’en specialism. Let me know how you got on baking it.

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.
October 29, 2025
Golden Mile + more stuff

Golden Mile complex

Singapore film makers OGS put together an hour long documentary covering the last days of the Golden Mile complex. It was a mixed use development similar to the Cityplaza development that I lived in Hong Kong. The upper levels were apartments, above a shopping centre beneath. The complex was a fantastic brutalist design that served as a hub for the Thai expat community in Singapore. While the site will be redeveloped, rebuilding the community centred around the Golden Mile will be much harder to do.

Google Docs

Tim O’Reilly pulls together through this interview the best oral history that I have heard of Google Docs. O’Reilly was the right person to do the interview, given how he was at the centre of web 2.0 hosting the conference on the scene and even publishing the books that provided guidance to the relevant developer tools and programming languages.

Toyota Series 60 Land Cruiser

This is from a great Japanese YouTube channel that interviews local car owners, asking them about the vehicle that they drive, why they drive it and what they like about it. The test drives and details in each of the vehicles is amazing. This episode is about the Series 60 Toyota Land Cruiser. The vehicle is the point at which Toyota moves from small Jeep-like vehicles to a highly reliable but full-size SUV.

Hentai Land

A Japanese documentary showing the interface between cosplay and the manga art form. The documentary shows manga artists painting models as a form of performance art.

Play School

The BBC told the back story of Play School from the actors to the educational theory behind the seminal British children’s TV programme. It ran from 1964 to 1988. It went on to influence other shows like RTÉ’s Bosco.

More related content here.

October 11, 2025
September 2025 newsletter
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition

Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.

When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.

For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.

This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.

Right, 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.
- Decoding the complex and contradictory data around crime and its likely impact on consumer opinions.
- A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
- I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
- I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
- Y our Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Election-winning opacity in influencer relations

I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.

What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.

Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.

‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.

I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.

Chart of the month.

Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.

The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.

Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.

I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.

I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.

Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?

What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.

It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.

Things I have watched.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.

I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.

PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.

Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.

Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.

Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe

2001 Nights is a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.

Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.

I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.

When The Last Sword Is Drawn is a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.

The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).

Useful tools.

Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac

I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.

One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.

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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.

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

Get in touch
September 26, 2025
Get lost in a book
I was judging global creative advertising awards, and I came across an Irish Libraries campaign to encourage readers to Get Lost In A Book.

Literature and reading is as Irish as the GAA or a glass of Club Orange. Over the years I have found it easy to get lost in a book. My parents may not have bought me every toy that I wanted from the Argos catalogue, but we had a house with books and I got a library card early on. When I would stay on the family farm, I would read a book on rare coins, old editions of The Reader’s Digest, Old Moore’s almanac, paperbacks of Irish folk tales and Irish history books. Facts About Ireland captured my imagination with its pictures of Newgrange and the Tara brooch.

Decades later and after I have written this paragraph I am heading to bed to get lost in a book before falling to sleep.

Reading as a pass-time for a good number of Irish people is something that we do. During COVID-19 in 2021, the Government of Ireland launched Ireland Reads month which encouraged people to read as it was considered to help with mental health and wellbeing. Its from this campaign that Get Lost In A Book sprang out of.

Reading seems to be on the decline in both adults and children. Of those that do read younger male cohorts seem to read more for ‘life maxing’ than for pleasure with reading material focusing solely on the works of self-improvement ‘experts’ who have varying degrees of expertise.
- Reading for pleasure has life long benefits.
- The Irish government highlighted mental health and its link to wellbeing.
- Increased vocabulary and mathematical reasoning
- A sense of personal confidence and connectedness
In 2006, The National Literacy Trust found that choice was a key factor in fostering life-long reading as a habit, allowing the reader to continue to get lost in a book. The problem now seems to be a surplus of choice via our smartphones and social platforms. Book recommendations here and here, more related posts here.
September 6, 2025
August 2025 newsletter
August 2025 introduction – duck and dive (25) edition

This is the 25th edition of Strategic Outcomes. The first edition was quickly bashed out in a hotel room. And people signed up, and kept coming back. As I write this August 2025 has been a weird month with the weather throwing all the seasons at once at us from storms to heatwaves.

The bingo call for 25 – ‘duck and dive’ would have been equally appropriate descriptor for 2025 to date – with massive changes across current affairs, the economy and culture. It seemed to make more sense than calling this a ‘silver edition’.

25 evokes memories a of childhood Irish card game played with my Uncle and Granny on the formica top of the farmhouse kitchen table. Something I frequently did during August nights after a day’s work cleaning up after animals, feeding livestock and other tasks.

For this month’s musical accompaniment I can recommend St Etienne Take Me To The Pilot produced by Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, which hits different to previous St Etienne records.

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.
- From the changing nature of motorsport fandom to do clients actually care about WPP’s organisational changes and new CEO?
- Hacks for moving city, from my time uprooting my life from London to Hong Kong and back again. These were and edited version of notes from an email I wrote years ago for a acquaintance who was moving to Shenzhen, soon after I had made the jump to Hong Kong. He is no longer with us, you may get some value out of them.
Books that I have read.
- I am currently reading David McCloskey’s Moscow X. The slow reading pace is more down to me rather than the accessibility of the book which is up to McCloskey’s usual high standards.
Things I have been inspired by.

Escalating trade tensions

GLG shared a discussion on escalating global trade tensions. I had a number of takeaways from it.

US trade war with China has devolved into a dangerous stalemate where neither side can back down without losing face.

The core conflict stems from China’s state-led industrial policy clashing with the rules-based system. The Trump administration’s rhetoric triggered China’s historical “century of humiliation,” making compromise politically difficult.

Key takeaways from the discussion:
1. China’s top demands aren’t about tariffs.
- Respect is paramount: China’s first demand for restarting talks is that the Trump administration speaks to them with respect and stops insults.
- Sovereignty is key: China insists on discussing Taiwan, which it views as its “most important and most sensitive issue”.
1. The U.S. is overstretched.
- Not enough negotiators: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has only about 250 total employees.
- Outsourcing is unworkable: Using pro bono law firms to assist raises problems with security clearances and conflicts of interest.
1. The non-China strategy is different.
- A softer tone: The administration’s approach to allies like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam is more ‘measured’.
- Quick deals: preliminary agreements with these nations that focus on tariff reductions, while punting more complex issues negotiations down the road.
1. Sector-specific US risks loom large.
- Technology: export controls on advanced chips and dumping of Chinese-made legacy chips used in cars and white goods.
- Autos: Highly integrated supply chains that cross borders, are very vulnerable to tariffs.
- Pharmaceuticals: Tariffs on generic drugs could become unprofitable and cause them to disappear from the U.S. market.
The state of AI in business

The Gen AI divide: state of AI in business 2025 | MIT was published and created an AI stock sell-off based on its top-line factoid: 95% of companies get zero RoI from GenAI.

But there was more interesting takeaways in the report that paint a more nuanced picture:

The “Learning Gap” is the real barrier.
- The primary reason AI pilots stall is that most systems don’t retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.
- While 70% of employees prefer AI for simple tasks like emails and summaries, 90% choose a human colleague for complex projects because of the learning gap.
Buy, don’t build.
- Internally developed tools fail twice as often as COTS ones.
- The data shows a clear winning strategy: pilots built through strategic partnerships with external vendors are twice as likely to reach full deployment as those built internally (a 66% success rate versus 33%).
Companies are making misplaced bets.
- An estimated 70% of AI investment is directed at high-visibility sales and marketing functions.
- The highest and clearest ROI in underfunded “back-office” areas. Some firms are saving $2-10 million annually in customer service and document processing.
These three points are good news for consultants, productivity suite vendors and enterprise software companies that really understand their clients workflow pain-points.

Chart of the month.

Actually two charts. The first one is a decline in conscientiousness. Depending who you believe this could be down to our always-on lives thanks to social media and smartphones, OR, a victim of the broken social contract that young adults (aka generation z) feel has happened.

A corresponding decline in US consumers reading for pleasure tends to imply a smartphone-related effect rather than broken social contract as cause. Also broken social contracts are depressingly common generation-by-generation.

Things I have watched.

The Iron Prefect was a film that I watched purely on the basis of a talk Alex Cox gave as part of the special features on the Blu Ray. The film is an account of a Fascist-era official sent to combat the Sicilian mafia who ends up finding how endemic and self-defeating his mission is. It is based on the story of Cesare Mori and some of his most famous acts such as the siege of Gangi. Cox talked about its similarity to The Mattei Affair – which I can see to a certain extent, in terms of the themes explored. The film features Claudia Cardinale and Giuliano Gemma – two greats of Italian cinema. But the real star is the scenery.

Hong Kong Hong Kong is a tragic romantic triangle about mainland migrants with a social realism bent. It was shot in 1983, but didn’t have the escapism of more popular films in the Hong Kong box office at the time.

The film is similar in feel to the likes of the kitchen sink dramas of 1960s kitchen sink dramas like This Sporting Life, and John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City. It shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema than western audiences were used to. It came out the same time as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Jackie Chan’s Project A. Hong Kong Hong Kong benefited from the free flow of rostered actors attached to TVB – the dominant broadcaster being able to work for Shaw Brothers film productions. Protagonist Alex Man, like other stars of his era including Chow Yun-fat and Simon Yam Tat-wah came through TVB’s acting school that nurtured talent from all walks of life from first-jobbers, to former models and policemen.

Man brought experience from television and stage roles to his film performances which makes Hong Kong Hong Kong more powerful.

Finally 1980s the city of Hong Kong itself plays a fantastic role to the drama. From the opening tracking shot taken somewhere above Kennedy Town to the composite buildings and Shangri-La Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui – to migrant slums that were being dismantled as public housing improved. Hong Kong has continually changed from an architectural point of view, though the pace has slowed recently. Some of the shots pulled at me deep inside as only a home you deeply cared about can.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty featured Alex Man as a classic wuxi swordsman. The star is Pat Ha Man-jing who would have been 18 or 19 at the time. The film feels more ‘Japanese’ chambara romance than your usual Hong Kong film. Ha’s cleavage is on display – which is unusual as the Hong Kong film industry is more socially conservative. Violence is ok, but risqué films like Sex and Zen with a category III rating often had Japanese actresses in them like Mari Ayukawa and Rena Murakami. The Japanese actresses appeared because of the stigma in Hong Kong society affected actresses careers more than their male counterparts AND the ongoing popularity of Japanese adult films in Hong Kong.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty shows the two sides of Shaw Brothers productions: great actors and inventive cinematography on one side, together with cheap skating on set design like giant marine plywood panels.

Shaw Brothers had been wounded by the founding of Golden Harvest, he power of the studio system was waning, the Hong Kong new wave movement was taking off and soon ‘mainland collaborations’ would dismantle much of the ecosystem that made Hong Kong cinema great.

I really wanted to like Butterfly on Amazon Prime Video. It had a great cast including Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo and Charles Parnell. It was shot on location in South Korea. It had an interesting take on the privatisation of intelligence operations. But it felt empty and definitely less than the sum of its parts, which is a shame given how well Amazon did on its Tom Clancy adaptions. Butterfly was let down by poor storytelling.

Useful tools.

Yet another LLM. Anara was something I have trialled a little and found useful due to its heavier weighting towards citing research papers compared to the other main LLMs out there. Useful for account planners as another tool in our arsenal to be used in parallel with the more mainstream tools out there, rather than as a substitute.

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.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for an indian summer, despite some of August already feeling autumnal.

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

Get in touch if you have any tips or thoughts.
August 28, 2025