I have a relatively small amount of health related posts on this blog at the moment. But it’s becoming an area that’s impossible to ignore. Health and wellness is becoming central to mainstream culture.
Anxiety and loneliness have sparked what is considered by many to be a mental health epidemic and a corresponding reduction in societal resilience.
High income countries were spending as much as 14 percent of government spending on health before the COVID pandemic. The number is likely to be even higher now.
According to an article in medical journal The Lancet, poor mental health cost the global economy approximately 2.5 trillion US dollars per year and this was expected to rise to 6 trillion by 2030.
It’s an area that can’t be ignored, because of the financial burden and size of market that the sector represents.
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic a UN report said the following:
Psychological distress in populations is widespread. Many people are distressed due to the immediate health impacts of the virus and the consequences of physical isolation. Many are afraid of infection, dying, and losing family members. Individuals have been physically distanced from loved ones and peers. Millions of people are facing economic turmoil having lost or being at risk of losing their income and livelihoods.
The report went on to recommend solutions such as:
Crafting communications to be not only effective but sensitive to their impact on the mental state of the populous
Community events looking at cementing social cohesion
Extending tele-medicine to include tele-counselling for frontline health-care workers and people at home with depression and anxiety.
I started to look at trends in March 2020 and there was a singularity developing around innovation and technology in the area, together with some interesting cossumer behaviour trends. Young adults made up a sizeable chunk of telemedicine non-users and as resistors to public health initiatives. Their much vaunted ‘online literacy’ saw them fall for the same tropes and older audiences considered more gullible like pensioners and retirees in Facebook groups
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.
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.
Motorsport fandom is strange. Back when I was a child motorsport fandom was a bunch of anoraks – literally. There was a category of clothing that you could buy from mail order catalogues and retailers like Demon Tweeks called a rally jacket. This was a coat good enough to deal with some cold wet weather branded by a car company or a tobacco brand.
Motorsport fandom, in particular single-seater race series are starting to see very different types of fans who learned their supporting ideas from the K-pop armies which are a symbiot of the artist promotion machine. While both promotion machine and fans are separate with very different tactics, they were united by a common goal to a point.
This isn’t the first time that media has brought in new fans, gaming created fans in the past. But the current motorsport fandom is interesting because of the cultural friction that it brings for drivers and legacy fans. From hate campaigns and death threats against drivers to ‘idol’ style objectification – women are demonstrating traits that would define toxic masculinity. All wrapped up in pastel tinted social media posts and Etsy products – so that makes it all fine, doesn’t it?
WPP has its next CEO – but what do clients make of heir apparent? – It’s not indifference. It’s pragmatism. Marketers like this don’t want to buy into the idea that a leadership change signals sweeping transformation. After all, Rose doesn’t start until September. Until then, they’d rather stay focused on the present, not the promise.
Ryan Kangisser, a bellwether for client perspective thanks to his proximity to them as the chief strategy officer at MediaSense, expanded on the point: “I do think that often the industry cares more about these sorts of appointments than clients do. Especially if clients have got a really solid client lead, or business lead, then they’re the people who they feel are the ones driving their business.”
What a scorcher of month it turned out to be. This edition marks the second anniversary of Strategic Outcomes.
24 or two dozen as they call it in the bingo halls, is considered be unlucky in Cantonese because it sounds like ‘easy die’. All of which made the number symbolizing a violent political thriller TV series all the more appropriate.
24 was the name of a must-see action drama that launched in the aftermath of 9/11. The show was quite prophetic in some ways given that the pilot was shot in March 2001 and production began in earnest in July that year.
Jack Bauer fought terrorist and drug cartel attacks over nine seasons and sold countless DVD boxsets outselling Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. Bauer’s ‘the ends justify the means’ approach caught the zeitgeist of enhanced interrogation and the real-time plot with political intrigue kept audiences hooked.
Much of this month for me has been dominated by generative AI in terms of the projects that I have been working on and what I have been learning on Coursera.
This month’s summery soundtrack for the newsletter comes from French DJ Folamour playing joyful house music that would be very on-point for the early to mid-1990s sets I used to play during the mid-week at the long-gone and largely unlamented Sherlocks bar and Bonkers night club in Merseyside.
New reader?
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Things I’ve written.
I have been thinking a good deal about business cards and their relevance in 2025, there maybe some reasons for optimism given wider trends happening at the moment.
Apple developer focus given last year’s problematic pivot to go big on AI.
The Hong Kong government banned a Taiwanese game Reversed Front: Bonfire. The game portrayed the Hong Kong government in a poor light alongside their Beijing counterparts. But gaming and politics aren’t as bizarre bedfellows as it would seem on the surface.
Optimising my video calling experience took me back through my past life as a DJ to find an appropriate headphone and mic solution for long work calls.
Design collaborations and other things including philosophical approaches to building machine learning systems and early smartphone demos.
Books that I have read.
I read Charles Beaumont’s A Spy At War, the follow-on to A Spy Alone which I read earlier on in the year. Beaumont’s story moves from the UK to Ukraine, tracking the lines between Russian corruption and what the Russian intelligence services would call the ‘useful idiots’ of right leaning populist politics. Beaumont doesn’t disappoint with this second story related to his Oxford spy ring, the unnerving aspect of it all is how similar many of the characters seem to public figures. I will let you draw your own conclusions on that.
Things I have been inspired by.
Cartier exhibition
I got to go to the Cartier exhibition at the V&A museum. At first I was thinking about passing it by when I looked at the exhibition catalogue. The photography seemed flat and lacking in lustrousness. The exhibition needed to be seen in person to appreciate the art of the jeweller and gemologist respectively.
Mid-year trends
Dan Frommer and the team at The New Consumer & consumer goods focused investor Coefficient Capital dropped their mid year trends presentation which is free to download.
There were a number of outtakes for me
Economics
US consumer spending held steady, even as consumer sentiment fluctuated – this might be due to inflation, but you didn’t see a corresponding dip. This was also mirrored in steadily life satisfaction statistics.
Consumer price elasticity for ‘Made in America’ products is low.
Marketing
97% of US consumers surveyed knew it was Amazon Prime day before shopping – which is a phenomenal level of awareness.
98% of US consumers are aware of AI. Which adds more credence that AI’s place in culture is similar to that of the web and the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s – even amongst people who aren’t actually using it. It is consistently in 0.25% of news coverage since the launch of ChatGPT.
Awareness of Ozempic was at 58%, Viagra was at 62% – which says a lot about the power of long-term brand building.
Pets
Pets are 40 percent of male respondents best friend, but 40% of women view pets as their child.
Chart of the month.
Smart Communications released a report looking at health CX and patient attitudes. There was a considerable variation between consumers by age on trust in AI across both concerns about data privacy and the overall ethics involved. But a majority of consumers in every age group thought that AI would maintain or improve health communications channels.
Things I have watched.
Networkas a 1976 film was quite prescient. It covers the tension between network television’s quest for eyeballs and the ‘just the facts’ era of Walter Cronkite and his team at CBS Evening News. We have a network executive who sees views in the breakdown of a news reader at the twilight of his career. It also feels like an allegory on modern day influencers and the tyranny of slavishly following the algorithm.
Inspired by an article in the Financial Times, I rewatched Barry Lyndon for the first time in years. The first time I watched it was out of curiosity for a few reasons
It’s based on the 19th century novel of an Irish hero who bounces through various adventures and eventually dies in a debtors prison.
It was similar in concept, if not in execution to the ‘cinéma du look’ movement that I have watched and written about previously in this newsletter. Conceptually ‘‘cinéma du look’ and Barry Lyndon share a common concept, both were looking to replicate an aesthetic. ‘Cinéma du look’ was inspired by the golden age of TV advertising and music videos, Barry Lyndon was inspired by 18th century art.
Barry Lyndon like the later cinéma du look films were critiqued for putting style over plot lines. And like cinéma du look, Barry Lyndon has become more appreciated with age. The stylistic aspects of Barry Lyndon have appealed to TikTokers and gained new life. I hope the same happens for cinéma du look works that equally deserve the exposure.
When I was a child, my time was spent split between living on my uncle’s farm in Ireland and the Mersey basin which was a thriving petrochemical hub with giant silver cathedrals to human ingenuity and process engineering. Climate change wasn’t in the public zeitgeist. You would see the stack flares as you drove past plants at night and the mercury discharge lamps dotted along inspection walkways.
Friends Dad’s worked abroad in the petrochemical industry or in the north sea. It was adventure, it had a hint of danger. That was solidified in my mind when I saw Hellfighters, where John Wayne cosplayed as an analogue of Red Adair. The film is basically an oilfield western BUT to six year old me – giant oil fires seemed cool. Wayne’s character Chance Buckman was an undisguised portrayal of Red Adair and Red Adair Co. Inc even down to Adair’s signature red overalls.
Yes its got misogny and it’s exactly the same as every other John Wayne film from the 1960s in terms of plot and pacing. Wayne even used many of the same co-stars over-and-over again.
To my more practiced eye as a former plant process operator turned ad man; parts of oilfield scenarios are a bit hokey. However, the modernist design aesthetic, spectacle and the fire portrayed in the film continues to impress all these years later. The engineering and plant portrayed in the film means that it’s one of those movies my Dad and I watch together, most of the time talking about the equipment used and other minutiae of the film.
As a film it also does a good job of documenting the oil infrastructure of the Texas panhandle in the 1960s.
If I had any criticism it is that the film needs a good reprint with a 4K re-scan. I can also recommend Red Adair: An American Hero which was his authorised biography – we had a well-thumbed copy in control room of plant I briefly worked in prior to college.
Useful tools.
Image format conversion
For long time Mac users the go to tool for image conversion is Lemke Software‘s GraphicConvertor. Thorsten Lemke is a legend in the Mac software community, supporting his application since the mid-1990s; back when being a Mac user was an endangered species. I remember first getting a copy on a Mac computer magazine disc in college and found it invaluable ever since. Even now it supports obscure image formats that you won’t have seen in decades like PICT. However if you don’t have access to your own machine and software, a couple of online web services I can recommend at a pinch are SVG to PNG and CloudConvert.
Visualisation tool
I have just started playing with MyLens AI and it’s conceptually interesting enough for me to recommend experimenting with it yourself.
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.
Ok this is the end of my July 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for the rest of the dog days of summer.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Apple development changes was at the forefront of Apple’s WWDC keynote for 2025. I think that the focus on Apple development changes were happening for a few reasons:
Apple got burned announcing sub-standard AI offerings last year.
The new translucent interface is divisive.
The multi-tasking iPad was interesting for power users, but most usage is as a communal device to consume content.
Apple has a number of small on-device models that do particular things well. Which is why Apple needs to get developers on-board to come up with compelling uses.
The Mac still has great hardware, passionate developers and a community passionate about great life-changing software. Apple development focus was coming home.
Hydrogen power and hydrogen fuel cells have been around for decades. Hydrogen power fuel cells as an invention were invented in the 19th century. The modern hydrogen fuel cell was refined before the second world war and have been used in NASA’s space programme since Project Apollo. The space programme’s use of hydrogen power inspired General Motors to create a hydrogen fuel cell powered van in 1966. By the late 1980s, BMW had developed a hydrogen-powered engine which it trialled in its 7-series vehicles a decade later.
By the mid-2010s there were four hydrogen power passenger cars using fuel cells: Honda Clarity, Toyota Mirai, Hyundai ix35 FCEV, and the Hyundai Nexo. BMW is collaborating with Toyota to launch another four models next year.
In addition in commercial vehicles and heavy plant Hyundai, Cummins and JCB have hydrogen power offerings. JCB and Cummins have focused on internal combustion engines, while Hyundai went with hydrogen fuel cells. The aviation industry has been looking to hydrogen power via jet turbines.
Hydrogen power offers greater energy density and lower weight than batteries. Unlike batteries or power lines, hydrogen can be transported over longer distances via tanker. So someplace like Ireland with wind and tidal power potential could become an energy exporter.
The key hydrogen power problem has been investment in infrastructure and an over-reliance on batteries. Batteries bring their own set of problems and a global strategic dependency on China.
Toyota is now warning that if there isn’t imminent international investment, that China will also dominate the supply chain, exports and energy generation in the hydrogen economy as well. It feels like me reaching a historic point of no return.
Skincare you can wear: China’s sunwear boom | Jing Daily – A jacket with a wide-brim hood and built-in face shield. Leggings infused with hyaluronic acid to hydrate while shielding skin from the sun. Face masks with chin-to-temple coverage. Ice-cooling gloves designed to drop skin temperature. In China, UV protection apparel isn’t just functional — it’s fashionable, dermatological, and high-tech. Once a niche category for hikers or extreme sports enthusiasts, China’s sunwear market has exploded into a $13 billion category blending climate adaptation, anti-aging culture, and the outdoor lifestyle wave. While other apparel segments slow, the sunwear sector is projected to reach nearly 95.8 billion RMB ($13.5 billion) by 2026 expanding at a CAGR of 9%, according to iResearch.
MACAU DAILY TIMES 澳門每日時報Beware of Li Kashing’s supersized value trap – But as the initial excitement starts to fade, investors are growing nervous, wary of a billionaire family that has a poor track record on shareholders’ returns. The Li clan takes pride in the myriad of businesses and markets it operates in. But what kind of value-add can a diversified conglomerate offer when globalization is out of favor and geopolitical risks are on the rise? CK’s de-rating has accelerated since Trump’s first term, with the stock trading at just 35% of its book value even after the recent share bump. The complex business dealings have made enterprise valuation an impossible task. In a sign of deep capital market skepticism, CK seems to have trouble monetizing its assets. Its health and beauty subsidiary A.S. Watson is still privately-held, a decade after postponing an ambitious $6 billion dual listing in Hong Kong and London. Softer consumer sentiment in China, once a growth market, has become a drag. Last summer, CK Infrastructure did a secondary listing in the UK, hoping to widen its investor base. – Rare direct criticism of CK Hutchison’s conglomerate discount.
Ghost in the Shell’s Creator Wants to Revisit the Anime, But There’s One Problem – Production I.G’s CEO Mitsuhisa Ishikawa—who produced both Ghost in the Shell films—spoke at the event. Ishikawa revealed a key obstacle preventing a third film: finances. He explained that Innocence had an enormous budget, estimated at around 2 billion yen (approximately $13 million), with profits reaching a similar figure. However, the film was planned with a ten-year financial recovery period, and even after 20 years, it has yet to break even.
‘Gucci’s 25% sales collapse should shock no one’ | Jing Daily – “Gucci is so boring now.” “They’ve lost all their confidence.” “It feels desperate — just influencers and celebrities.” Comparing Gucci’s bold, visionary eras under Tom Ford and Alessandro Michele and today’s safe, uninspired iteration reveals a stark contrast. That classroom moment reflected a broader truth: Gucci’s Q1 2025 is not a temporary dip. It’s the result of a deeper structural identity crisis — arguably one of the worst brand resets in recent luxury history.
