FMCG or fast moving consumer goods sprang out of the mass industrialisation. Brands sprang up originally as a guarantee of quality. Later on as these brands needed to be promoted, we saw the foundation of the what we think of as modern marketing and advertising.
Today media and entertainment takes up an increasing amount of the household spend, as does housing, but FMCGs are a crucial part of their essential and disposable income spend.
They have nostalgia wrapped up in them, distinctive aromas, taste and packaging designs. From the smell of my Granny using so much Pledge on the TV that I was surprised it didn’t burst into flame to the taste of Cidona and texture of Boland’s Fig Roll biscuits in my mouth.
The sound of their advertising jingles was the soundtrack of my childhood. Digital advertising is largely rationale, it lacks the fluent devices that provide the centre to advertising and made FMCG advertising iconic. Fluent devices like the Peperami ‘Animal’, the M&M characters or the Cadbury Smash robots were embedded in deep marketing research. FMCG brands still sponsor the best research in marketing science.
I had the good fortune to work inhouse at Unilever and agency-side for their brands. I also managed to work on Coca-Cola and Colgate during my time in Hong Kong.
I was thinking a lot about consumption when I came across the psychological concept of moral licensing. Doing something that is thought of as a good behaviour boosts the self image, leading to a sense of justification in a more indulgent behaviour later on.
It explains incongruity in human behaviours. One example that immediately came to mind when I first read about the concept of moral licensing occurred very early in my agency career.
Burger queen
The agency was one of an expanding number of American shops that had set up in London. I was a piss-poor excuse of client services person; but was widely read, had a sharp-thinking strategic head on my shoulders and sounded uncharacteristically authoritative in technology client presentations.
One of the London office’s senior executives was English but as part of their degree secondment had spent some time in the US. Later on, they were working in the Bay area on high technology and consumer brand accounts.
During that time, they became a Buddhist and were vegan except for the regular Big Mac meal in the office, or, going to and from a new business pitch.
Given that the global CEO functioned on sipping vodka out of a constantly topped up glass, with periodic runs to the local Starbucks for jolts of iced quadruple expressos, the Big Mac eating vegan behaviour was considered only mildly eccentric by comparison.
Wellness
While my burger queen experience is mildly amusing to recollect, moral licensing has a serious health and wellness impact. The consumer wellness market has a moral vocabulary that positions food as a “sinful” indulgence or a “purifying” virtue, and physical exercise as a moral redemption mechanism. This moral framing is a critical structural vulnerability. When wellness, nutrition, and wearable technology brands construct campaigns using moralised binaries, this trigger subconscious moral licensing.
Higher levels of moral licensing, self-licensing, or compensatory health beliefs (CHBs) are associated with elevated body weight (BMI), increased caloric intake, or heightened body image anxiety.
The fipside of this is the ‘health as an alibi’ for slim people who are often judged as excessively vain or narcissistic.
Finally research from North Caroline State University found that customer reward programmes drove long-term consumption habits. They that consumers who regularly purchased lower-calorie meals indulged more when reward opportunities occurred. They had a higher probability of trading rewards for indulgent high-calorie items and desserts. When questioned, they used their prior calorie dietary discipline to justify it.
Luxurious moral licensing
There is a well known link between relative preferences for luxury items and a previously expressed virtuous intent. This might be a donation of time or money to a charity allowing consumers to establish ‘moral’ credentials. An example that taps directly into this is Balenciaga‘s capsule collections that collaborate with the likes of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
This boost to their virtuosity mitigates the negative feelings and anticipatory guilt typically associated with purchasing frivolous or expensive items. In research it is found to double consumer intent to purchase high-end consumer goods.
However moral licensing isn’t all plain sailing for luxury brands. There is a tension between luxury brand attributes of self-enhancement and status with moral licensing being related to self transcendence and altruism. Consumers experience the mismatch which negatively affects brand evaluation.
Moral licensing examples in advertising
Moral licensing is tapped into in indulgent advertising. A classic example is the current framing in Müller Corner yoghurts.
Moral licensing was leaned on very heavily during the golden age of TV advertising.
AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).
The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.
The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.
Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
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”.
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.
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
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.
This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.
In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.
However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.
In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!
This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.
Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.
My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.
Things I have been inspired by.
Supply chained
Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Generative AI & cooking
I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.
I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.
More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.
Praykinson
I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.
CHESS
I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.
CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.
Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
Things I have watched.
My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.
I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.
This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
As Tears Go By
Days of Being Wild
Chungking Express
Fallen Angels
Happy Together
In The Mood For Love
2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.
After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.
OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.
PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.
Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).
I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.
Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.
The sales pitch.
I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.
With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives and new business pitches to sports partnerships.
My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.
The Strategic Toolkit:
Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.
Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.
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 copywritingby 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.
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.
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.
