Category: driving seat | 產品試用 | 시험 비행 | 製品トライアル

The driving seat in English has two definitions:

The seat from which a vehicle is operated.
A position of power, dominance, control, or superiority. The second naturally is derived from the first as a metaphor

I used driving seat as a metaphor about being in control, to discuss what a product is like to use. I looked at a range of products:

Skype back in 2004, before it became kludgey with a poorly designed interface under Microsoft ownership
Veoh – a video platform that was a native client and on the web that went head-to-head with YouTube. The better technology lost out
Yojimbo – a great information organisation software app by Bare Bones Software
Flip Video Camera – back before cameraphones were ubquitous flip provided an easy way to record and upload video to the web. It encouraged a lot of people to record vox pop video interviews for the nascent YouTube platform
The Bing search engine in a direct comparison to Ask.com
Sina Weibo
A retrospective on the Palm Vx PDA that was my dot.com era ride or die gadget
Early Casio G-Shock and Apple Watch smartwatches
Hemingway writing software
Casio G-Shock Frogman
A retrospective review of the Nokia n950
The Missing Manual series by David Pogue
Apple iPhone 12 Max

I have tried to avoid superlatives and give the perceptions of having lived with the products rather than having briefly tested them. Having run review programmes for Huawei and Palm, I understand how short hands-on sessions can be deceptive. Usually this isn’t by design, but due to supply issues; however it is worth bearing in mind when you read the latest review by professional pundits.

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

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

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

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

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

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.

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

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

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

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

Ipsos on sports fandom

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

Nigo at the Design Museum

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

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

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

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

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

Chart of the month.

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

Things I have watched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful tools.

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

The sales pitch.

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

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

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

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the sun when you can, don’t linger on the next long weekend being at the end of August.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
June 1, 2026
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
Pilot Parker & more inspiration

This inspiration post is a mix of things that caught my eye from Pilot Parker to HyperCard.

Pilot Parker

Pilot Parker is Malaysia Airlines mascot. I was familiar with him from the inflight duty-free catalogue. The inspiration for the film came from a moment shared by a young passenger who had flown with Malaysia Airlines. After her trip, she sent the airline a hand-drawn illustration of Pilot Parker along with a letter describing how the mascot brought her comfort during the journey. So the brand moved Pilot Parker from souvenir to fluent object.

Lemon – lime facetime call.

Apple had a week of things including more affordable devices (iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo) in a green-yellow colour. The company deleted all their TikTok account contents and then posted this video.

@apple
hello?
♬ original sound – apple

20-somethings in the ad industry lost their minds, feeling seen and considering it revolutionary that large brands have humour and can navigate culture. They then filled LinkedIn with insightful posts to let all the oldster millennials know.

Just leaving this one here, in case anyone notices. The lesson of the story is that everything old is new, especially the heuristic about being part of culture.

Retrospective on HyperCard

HyperCard was a powerful idea that didn’t have its time. I used it to run lab experiments during a brief time with Corning prior to my going to college. This video goes into real depth about what we missed.

Voice recognition is older than you think

I found this 1958 film of Victor Scheinman, at the time a high school student. He invented a solution that provided speech to text via a typewriter. It isn’t that far away from the speech recognition that I had on mobile phones from my Ericsson T39 through to my current iPhone.

In his adult life Scheinman worked with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and worked in the field of robotics in academia and the private sector. Scheinman went on to work with General Motors and Yaskawa Electric Corporation. Right up to his death Scheinman was an associate professor who still consulted at Stanford University.

Scheinman’s high school experiment shows both how far we’ve come and yet how little we’ve progressed in comparison to the hype.

Think with Google & Sir Martin Sorrell

Think with Google interviewed Sir Martin Sorrell who was entertaining and consistent on themes he has been talking for the past few years. I found it interesting that he suspects marketing science is ‘over’. I don’t agree with him in this respect because software changes faster than wetware, but Sorrell instead has the CFO view within clients.

Yet the favourite campaigns that he worked on were his work at Saatchi & Saatchi before he built WPP.

Here’s the British Airways ‘Manhattan Landing‘ campaign from 1983 that Sir Martin named as the favourite campaign that he worked on.

More marketing related content here.

April 4, 2026
March 2026 newsletter – (32) buckle my shoe
March 2026 introduction – (32) buckle my shoe

By some miracle, I have managed to make it to issue 32. Yes this is late, my excuse was reading The Persian, more on that below. In the jargon of the bingo hall 32 came up as ‘buckle my shoe’.

https://flic.kr/p/w8zyP

As I wrote this down I was reminded of a vivid memory from my early childhood. I was staying with my Granny on the family farm in rural Ireland. I would have been pre-school, maybe three years old.

Like a magpie I was attracted to shiny things, and she had a pair of shoes with gold coloured decorative elements on them. They were horseshoe-shaped buckles, but didn’t serve any function beyond aesthetics.

I managed to remove one unintentionally, it didn’t seem to take any effort. I realised it shouldn’t be off the shoe, so I returned it to her in my mind, by posting it under the closed door of her bedroom.

I forgot about it. There was more important things to do like pat the friendly farm dog and feed soda bread crumbs from the breakfast table to the couple of coal tits that would show up at the back door after every meal.

Later on, the adults got in a state when the buckle was discovered missing and one of Granny’s best pairs of shoes were now ruined. I pointed out where I had put the buckle, but it was now nowhere to be found. The second buckle was slipped off the other shoe and both shoes matched again, no one outside the household was any the wiser until you read this.

Like the missing buckle we can often no longer return, but we can adapt and move forward by shedding extraneous items that hold us back.

Beyond bingo, 32 in Chinese sounds similar to easy growth, which is considered lucky across business, relationships and in one’s personal life. It also corresponds to perseverance or staying the course in the I Ching.

This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is collated by The Found Sound Orchestra over on SoundCloud. Now that’s sorted, 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.

Reflecting on the different archetypes of people that you meet in an advertising agency new business pitch and how to deal with them.

A roundup of everything from Chinese innovation to Anthropic’s disagreement with the US Department of Defense.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Wellness as an experiential aspect of luxury. It has become a luxury currency in its own right for both genders according to a new report by Karla Otto.
2. My friend Nigel Scott analysed the future of creative agencies. He thought that AI forced the agency break even point even higher, which impacts the rise of the independents.
3. The paradox of Gucci using generative AI to market slow luxury aesthetic / lifestyle.
4. International Women’s Day was marked by some sobering research on attitudes to gender equality in the UK. There was a generational aspect to it where younger cohorts men held more traditional views than other groups and optimism for their future prospects dropped.
5. Meta was found liable in two court cases. One was about the role of social platforms facilitating human trafficking. The second was being found liable due to creating an ‘addictive’ platform. Critics now have a roadmap to seek damages and drive design changes.
Books that I have read.

The Persian by David McCloskey – this isn’t the first book that I have read by David McCloskey, but the one that I most anticipated. Espionage novels have had a revival as the global war on terror (GWoT) wound down, Ukraine, the South China Sea and Iran wound up. The timing of the book was precipitous. It came out at the end of January and events started down their path in the Persian Gulf soon after.

The book is very cleverly written. The story told from multiple perspectives:
- A Mossad department head and his staff
- A prisoner held in an Iranian jail
- An Iranian mother
Yes you get the tension of a spy novel, but you also get the portrait of flawed human characters, acting and reacting to the terrible incidents around them. In this respect, it reminded me of what the Apple TV series Tehran tried to do. McCloskey manages to humanise his characters in a way that few authors in the genre beyond John le Carré and Mick Herron in his own way.

Things I have been inspired by.

Japanese porcelain brand Hataman Touen graced the tables of the Imperial Royal Household. Their classical techniques became relevant of the modern world thanks to a collaboration with Ghost In The Shell Standalone Complex anime.

The result was a limited edition model of the Tachikoma autonomous intelligent ‘tank’ that plays a prominent role in the show.

https://www.tiktok.com/@argos/video/7577699305818000662?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7612101813533623830

I am not a big fan of TikTok, but Argos have been killing it with their ‘stockroom rave‘. The nod to raving in working class culture for over half a century from the speed-fuelled Wigan Casino all-nighters to the Boiler Room sessions today. Less so now that I work in offices, but before going to college banging tunes on Sony ghetto-blaster got me through shifts in a McDonald’s, a clothing factory and a plant hire repair workshop. And doing it all with a dash of humour.

My friend Dan Ilett‘s newsletter The Executive Summary fufils the old strategist maxim of being interesting first, being right second. Dan manages to pull both off more often than not, but he is always interesting. Sign up here.

Chart of the month.

This month due to the confluence of a client project that never happened and the latest report drop by Morgan Stanley in association with LuxeConsult, I looked into the Swiss luxury watch industry.

A few interesting trends emerge:
- Independents such as Patek Philippe and Rolex have successfully held off large luxury conglomerates LVMH and Richemont.
- Swatch Group has become a donor of market share to the other main players.
- The K-shaped market can be seen in the relative performance of Richemont’s brands. Vacheron Constantin and Cartier outperformed while IWC, Panerai and Jaeger-LeCoultre laboured in a tightening market.
- The sector-wide -3% CAGR (compound annual growth rate), was driven by economics as much as smart watches. Smart watches will exert less pressure moving forwards as they were kept and worn for longer by users.
Things I have watched.

I rewatched the original 1995 Ghost In The Shell animated film. I went in expecting for me to be thinking about the future of AI, instead the idea of the puppet master and his agent reminded me of the impact of social media and the influence that it impacts on consumers. There is one scene where a dust bin wagon driver is being questioned and is told that all his memories are false, he had been taken in by a false life. It spoke to the way people become ‘red pilled’.

Useful tools.

If like me, you have found that no matter what you do with your brightness button, your Mac’s screen is lacking, fear not Vivid is here. You don’t have to splurge on an XDR display to make it pop and keep the colour balance, Vivid is an app that doubles the brightness your display can achieve.

I am a long time fan of RSS reader Newsblur. The apps for it have recently undergone a major redesign including new features to make it even more intelligent and useful. In particular, I am really excited about a new feature that turns any website into an RSS feed that can be followed which the call Webfeeds.

We can have a larger debate about how web developers, designers and site owners have taken a backward step by not using RSS or Atom. WordPress comes with RSS built in, so you have to actively shut it down. Instead, Instead I’d like to celebrate the major level engineering that Samuel Clay and the team at Newsblur managed to achieve in developing Webfeeds as a highly usable feature within Newblur.

YouTube Search Fixer is a browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to customise search results on YouTube. Doing research and don’t want to get music videos, or avoid related searches clutter – then you don’t have to.

The sales pitch.

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

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.

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

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my March 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the joys of spring along with chocolate eggs.

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

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

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

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things I have been inspired by.

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

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

Chart of the month.

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

The chart only tells part of the story.

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

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

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

Things I have watched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful tools.

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

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

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

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

The sales pitch.

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

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.

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

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
February 25, 2026