Howto as a category morphed out of a few things. I learned about the power of helpful content from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. A second aspect of it was my natural inclination to share useful hacks.
I started writing this blog to explore the media so that I could advise clients so its roots were in the howto mentality. Over time, I built up a certain amount of authority based on the content that I shared here. This resulted in work for Econsultancy, teaching MBA students at a private Spanish university and a number of agency jobs.
Howto content tends to come when I am sharing skills and I have been developing AND that these skills can be easily codified into an article or two. I have also shared my personal workflow that I use to try and make sense of the world through online resources.
Many of the skills that I developed doing that came from a pre-social platform dominated world. Before Instagram told us how to look and TikTok told us what to think. And back when Google was actually useful, well more useful than it seems to be now.
I even wrote a couple of guides on how to get the most out of Google, but most of the advice won’t work any more as the platform did away with many shortcuts in favour of telling you which is the nearest coffee shop with free wifi.
The reason why howto ended up being one word rather than how to was down to the early version of Wordpress that I started to blog on and my lack of expertise more than anything else.
Victor O. Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement was originally written in 1962, there was no internet and television was emergent in terms of being an advertising format that copywriters would be working on. I bought it as part of several books during CoVID and am slowly working through my reading pile now.
Schwab looked to write a straight forward guide for copywriters of the time. Schwab focuses heavily on the psychology of advertising to elicit the right kind of reaction from the consumer.
This psychology is something that modern marketers have had to relearn through marketing science. Yet Schwab was quoting academics, rigorous market research surveys and psychology studies 50 years earlier.
Schwab’s style throughout the book is to show examples that work and why they work. Despite Schwab teaching copywriters about media that would be seen as largely irrelevant now, the lessons are still invaluable.
Each chapter is clearly set out and has questions at the end of the chapter is that the reader can reflect on what they’ve learned and apply their thinking. There is also an exercise or two so that you can apply what you’ve learned from the chapter.
Performance marketing
The mail order copywriting section in How to Write a Good Advertisement is particularly interesting because of its focus on what we’d now call performance marketing. Schwab talks about performance marketing copywriters having to become hard nosed in nature. By hard nosed, Schwab described a mindset as a single-minded focus on the sale.
This section also covered testing in a way that would feel very familiar to online advertising practitioners now.
Conclusion
While Schwab doesn’t give you models, frameworks or mnemonics to aid retention or learning of principles, relying instead on trying to build muscle memory of the student copywriter.
You can find out more about How to Write a Good Advertisementhere.
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition
Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.
When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.
For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.
This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.
Right, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.
Election-winning opacity in influencer relations
I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.
What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.
Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.
‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.
I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.
Chart of the month.
Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.
The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.
Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.
I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.
I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.
Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?
What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.
It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.
Things I have watched.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.
I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.
PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.
Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.
Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.
Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe
2001 Nightsis a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.
Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.
I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.
When The Last Sword Is Drawnis a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.
The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).
Useful tools.
Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac
I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
August 2025 introduction – duck and dive (25) edition
This is the 25th edition of Strategic Outcomes. The first edition was quickly bashed out in a hotel room. And people signed up, and kept coming back. As I write this August 2025 has been a weird month with the weather throwing all the seasons at once at us from storms to heatwaves.
The bingo call for 25 – ‘duck and dive’ would have been equally appropriate descriptor for 2025 to date – with massive changes across current affairs, the economy and culture. It seemed to make more sense than calling this a ‘silver edition’.
25 evokes memories a of childhood Irish card game played with my Uncle and Granny on the formica top of the farmhouse kitchen table. Something I frequently did during August nights after a day’s work cleaning up after animals, feeding livestock and other tasks.
For this month’s musical accompaniment I can recommend St Etienne Take Me To The Pilot produced by Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, which hits different to previous St Etienne records.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
From the changing nature of motorsport fandom to do clients actually care about WPP’s organisational changes and new CEO?
Hacks for moving city, from my time uprooting my life from London to Hong Kong and back again. These were and edited version of notes from an email I wrote years ago for a acquaintance who was moving to Shenzhen, soon after I had made the jump to Hong Kong. He is no longer with us, you may get some value out of them.
Books that I have read.
I am currently reading David McCloskey’s Moscow X. The slow reading pace is more down to me rather than the accessibility of the book which is up to McCloskey’s usual high standards.
Things I have been inspired by.
Escalating trade tensions
GLG shared a discussion on escalating global trade tensions. I had a number of takeaways from it.
US trade war with China has devolved into a dangerous stalemate where neither side can back down without losing face.
The core conflict stems from China’s state-led industrial policy clashing with the rules-based system. The Trump administration’s rhetoric triggered China’s historical “century of humiliation,” making compromise politically difficult.
Key takeaways from the discussion:
China’s top demands aren’t about tariffs.
Respect is paramount: China’s first demand for restarting talks is that the Trump administration speaks to them with respect and stops insults.
Sovereignty is key: China insists on discussing Taiwan, which it views as its “most important and most sensitive issue”.
The U.S. is overstretched.
Not enough negotiators: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has only about 250 total employees.
Outsourcing is unworkable: Using pro bono law firms to assist raises problems with security clearances and conflicts of interest.
The non-China strategy is different.
A softer tone: The administration’s approach to allies like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam is more ‘measured’.
Quick deals: preliminary agreements with these nations that focus on tariff reductions, while punting more complex issues negotiations down the road.
Sector-specific US risks loom large.
Technology: export controls on advanced chips and dumping of Chinese-made legacy chips used in cars and white goods.
Autos: Highly integrated supply chains that cross borders, are very vulnerable to tariffs.
Pharmaceuticals: Tariffs on generic drugs could become unprofitable and cause them to disappear from the U.S. market.
But there was more interesting takeaways in the report that paint a more nuanced picture:
The “Learning Gap” is the real barrier.
The primary reason AI pilots stall is that most systems don’t retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.
While 70% of employees prefer AI for simple tasks like emails and summaries, 90% choose a human colleague for complex projects because of the learning gap.
Buy, don’t build.
Internally developed tools fail twice as often as COTS ones.
The data shows a clear winning strategy: pilots built through strategic partnerships with external vendors are twice as likely to reach full deployment as those built internally (a 66% success rate versus 33%).
Companies are making misplaced bets.
An estimated 70% of AI investment is directed at high-visibility sales and marketing functions.
The highest and clearest ROI in underfunded “back-office” areas. Some firms are saving $2-10 million annually in customer service and document processing.
These three points are good news for consultants, productivity suite vendors and enterprise software companies that really understand their clients workflow pain-points.
Chart of the month.
Actually two charts. The first one is a decline in conscientiousness. Depending who you believe this could be down to our always-on lives thanks to social media and smartphones, OR, a victim of the broken social contract that young adults (aka generation z) feel has happened.
A corresponding decline in US consumers reading for pleasure tends to imply a smartphone-related effect rather than broken social contract as cause. Also broken social contracts are depressingly common generation-by-generation.
Things I have watched.
The Iron Prefect was a film that I watched purely on the basis of a talk Alex Cox gave as part of the special features on the Blu Ray. The film is an account of a Fascist-era official sent to combat the Sicilian mafia who ends up finding how endemic and self-defeating his mission is. It is based on the story of Cesare Mori and some of his most famous acts such as the siege of Gangi. Cox talked about its similarity to The Mattei Affair – which I can see to a certain extent, in terms of the themes explored. The film features Claudia Cardinale and Giuliano Gemma – two greats of Italian cinema. But the real star is the scenery.
Hong Kong Hong Kong is a tragic romantic triangle about mainland migrants with a social realism bent. It was shot in 1983, but didn’t have the escapism of more popular films in the Hong Kong box office at the time.
The film is similar in feel to the likes of the kitchen sink dramas of 1960s kitchen sink dramas like This Sporting Life, and John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City. It shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema than western audiences were used to. It came out the same time as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Jackie Chan’s Project A. Hong Kong Hong Kong benefited from the free flow of rostered actors attached to TVB – the dominant broadcaster being able to work for Shaw Brothers film productions. Protagonist Alex Man, like other stars of his era including Chow Yun-fat and Simon Yam Tat-wah came through TVB’s acting school that nurtured talent from all walks of life from first-jobbers, to former models and policemen.
Man brought experience from television and stage roles to his film performances which makes Hong Kong Hong Kong more powerful.
Finally 1980s the city of Hong Kong itself plays a fantastic role to the drama. From the opening tracking shot taken somewhere above Kennedy Town to the composite buildings and Shangri-La Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui – to migrant slums that were being dismantled as public housing improved. Hong Kong has continually changed from an architectural point of view, though the pace has slowed recently. Some of the shots pulled at me deep inside as only a home you deeply cared about can.
An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty featured Alex Man as a classic wuxi swordsman. The star is Pat Ha Man-jing who would have been 18 or 19 at the time. The film feels more ‘Japanese’ chambara romance than your usual Hong Kong film. Ha’s cleavage is on display – which is unusual as the Hong Kong film industry is more socially conservative. Violence is ok, but risqué films like Sex and Zen with a category III rating often had Japanese actresses in them like Mari Ayukawa and Rena Murakami. The Japanese actresses appeared because of the stigma in Hong Kong society affected actresses careers more than their male counterparts AND the ongoing popularity of Japanese adult films in Hong Kong.
An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty shows the two sides of Shaw Brothers productions: great actors and inventive cinematography on one side, together with cheap skating on set design like giant marine plywood panels.
Shaw Brothers had been wounded by the founding of Golden Harvest, he power of the studio system was waning, the Hong Kong new wave movement was taking off and soon ‘mainland collaborations’ would dismantle much of the ecosystem that made Hong Kong cinema great.
I really wanted to like Butterfly on Amazon Prime Video. It had a great cast including Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo and Charles Parnell. It was shot on location in South Korea. It had an interesting take on the privatisation of intelligence operations. But it felt empty and definitely less than the sum of its parts, which is a shame given how well Amazon did on its Tom Clancy adaptions. Butterfly was let down by poor storytelling.
Useful tools.
Yet another LLM. Anara was something I have trialled a little and found useful due to its heavier weighting towards citing research papers compared to the other main LLMs out there. Useful for account planners as another tool in our arsenal to be used in parallel with the more mainstream tools out there, rather than as a substitute.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my August 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for an indian summer, despite some of August already feeling autumnal.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
One of my work colleagues is moving city, so I dug out my dusty notes on what I learned from the process of moving from London to Hong Kong and back again and thought I would share it for future travellers.
I benefited from going back and forth to Ireland, so resolved to make different mistakes to my parents loading our cars up to the gunnels.
I presume that you will be doing your own research that is destination-specific. There is usually a plethora of guides, subreddits, forums and websites. If you want to realise how far you are away from being one of the 1%, I can recommend the Hong Kong section of the Asiaxpat Forum as a way of finding out how the global elite live and the problems that they face.
One of the things that you first face in consideration about moving city is what to take with you. If you are filling a removal van, everything is going. if you are moving city, to the far side of the world. You start filtering things down very fast.
Pack enough clothes for two weeks of office work and weekends. I had a couple of North Face basecamp duffel bags for this. They are robust and I’ve owned my set since the mid-2000s. Since then they went to the US and around Asia for work several times.
Get plastic office moving crates and security tie-wraps for the rest of your stuff that will be going by sea. They are stackable and more resilient to water than the cardboard boxes moving companies would usually give you.
Label the crates clearly. Laminate the labels and attach them to the crates
Keep a list of each crates content, this will help you with any customs forms
Pack a collapsable porter’s trolley in one of the crates. Your back will thank you.
Take enough medicines for at least a month, it will take time to find a family doctor.
Bring stuff that has memories.
Only use a Kindle for leisure reading.
Don’t bring anything that you can buy in a local supermarket including:
Cleaning products
Toiletries
Kitchen cupboard staples
Household basics like plates, cutlery etc
Over the counter medicines like cold remedies and multi-vitamins
Make a list in advance of travelling of the things that you need to do when you arrive. You will miss things off on this list. But what the list does is provide a sense of security that you can then work through.
You can still sort out your UK tax affairs from abroad, which makes moving city slightly easier to do.
Finance
If you don’t have one already get an American Express card before you even think about travelling. They make it really easy to get a credit card in your new country based on your previous countries Amex history.
In terms of banking, if I was going to do it all again I would have gone with Standard Chartered rather than HSBC as my bank when moving city from London to Hong Kong. But HSBC are better than nothing.
A big shout out first of all to Rob Estreitinho who inspired this post full of ideas for strategists. I have built on his work. Some of the suggestions are what works for me or Rob and may not work for you – but give them a try.
Ideas
Read widely – thank goodness my Irish emigrant parents instilled in me the Irish love of reading. My Dad was an apprentice at 14, but has never given up a love of books if he had the chance. My Mum reads less with the lethargy of age creeping up on her, but they both seeded the idea of reading widely to me.
Get an RSS reader – find middle-aged people who used the net back in the early 2000s to early 2010s seriously and mention Google Reader to them and watch them go misty-eyed longing for forgotten online halcyon days. It didn’t make you depressed or hate yourself. While Google Reader is long gone, the underlying technology that enabled it is very much alive. It’s called RSS and Atom – same, same but different. All the RSS readers work along similar ideas; over time you find good sites, you follow them and get more good content from as they update. My tool of choice is Newsblur. But if you want to continue to rely TikTok, Twitter and Truth Social – you do you.
Your bookmarks are gold – on the bookmark bar of my browser I have a range of tools. I use Pinboard to keep every bookmark I have used in my work life for a long time. I go back through them to find quality content to start from for insights when kicking off a project. Anything you get elsewhere will be filtered through context and algorithm rather than quality. I also have a hard drive of old reports that I can go through and over-stuffed bookshelves.
Read weirdly – As a child I read everything in my Uncle’s farm house from the Connacht Tribune , Irish Farmers Journal to Old Moore’s Almanac and Ireland’s Own. Later on, one of the great privileges for me of going to college and then going to university, was the opportunity pick up odd books that would never have otherwise read. I would also browse County Books – a discount book store which allowed me to pick up unrelated academic books like Paul Stoneman’s Handbook of the Economics of Innovation and Technological Change – which is still invaluable today. Using an RSS reader and following other’s recommendations provides a similar opportunity. Finally, subscribe to Matt Muir’s Web Curios to get the edges of the web.
Make your arguments simple. – Going through this filtration process helps make ideas stronger as well as more accessible. My Myer-Briggs type is apparently INTJ ‘the architect’ – I have a clear vision of the thing. But going simpler allows you take stakeholders with you. Ideas only gain power as they pass from person-to-person.
Now make them simpler than that. When I thought about this, it reminded me of Matt Holt, who talked about good strategy being pain. This squeezing process is more than an expression, but a process that forms the quality of an idea.
Use simple words your mum would understand, or use simple words your mum’s mum would understand – as suggestions go were curiously Ogilvian in nature. However I when thought it, they were less helpful pieces of advice than they appear. Older people tend to be more articulate and may have more arcane terms. One thing generative AI does allow us to do is test how an idea would be expressed based on a notional character. So think about simplicity, through the lens of possible audiences.
Always start with a written document – I have found the notes.app on my Mac liberating. I can take my notes with me on my iPhone. I dump in links, language, ideas in to be played with and moved around. Insights and ideation become hybridised as a process.
Know a good meme account for the category you work with. If you don’t know one start with Reddit threads and you start to get a good feel for the themes and memes coming through.
Know a really good podcast your audience would listen to. Searching for podcast recommendations and listening to them can help you get into the right headspace for a given project.
Assume every problem has a fascinating side to it. If you work in strategy there are a few parts of the job to inspire your love of it. The ability to read around a subject, discover the problem at the centre of the challenge you are working, wrestle with that kernel of truth to give creatives something to work with. The process of wrestling the problem usually unearths the fascination at the centre.
Start your presentations with a twist. If you don’t have audience interested at the beginning, you won’t hold it until the end of your presentation. In terms of my personal writing, I use the background behind the number marking the edition of the newsletter to engage the curiosity of the reader.
End your presentations with a lesson. I like this as it reminds me of the old presentation training maxim: tell’em what you are going to tell’em, tell’em it, tell’em what you just told them. Ideas like advertising get better through repetition. The end summary can be just verbal, it doesn’t need to be in slideware.
If you’re feeling spicy, end your presentations with a cautionary note. Being provocative and interesting is good, BUT know your audience before attempting this.
Don’t obsess with strategy frameworks. Strategy frameworks have their place. They are great for establishing a common language – the classic example being the marketing funnel. They’re also good at dealing with the mental blankness that comes from an empty page or screen. But they can also be modified, built-upon or thrown away depending on what solving the problem needs.
Don’t bore your client with strategy frameworks. I’d argue, don’t bore your client. Their problems should be interesting, otherwise why would they get someone like you or me to try and solve them? If we are boring the client, there’s one of three things happening: you’re not solving their problem, you’ve gone off-mission away from the problem and the likely solution or the solution doesn’t solve the problem.
Remember the audience will never read your strategy. The only exception to this is the occasional Venn diagram-based advert creative.
Don’t interrupt people, especially when they’re demonstrating passion. Do remember to record it, otherwise you might be lost in the flow and lose the insights.
Notice what people say and play it back to them. This is a classic technique that is taught to salespeople and was in Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. It provides a number of benefits:
Ensures that you’ve understood what they wanted to say and you’re clear about it. It’s easier to get an explanation now, rather than later on.
Carnegie liked it because he recognised that people liked to be understood.
Allows you to build a common vocabulary with the other person.
Start sentences with “I wonder if”. Use this sparingly, but at the right time it is a powerful way of testing ideas and directions.
Observe people, but do so discreetly and don’t weird them out:
In coffee shops
At a greasy spoon cafe or the Motorway services station
On public transport
At trade shows. What stuff gets dumped from the collection of brochures they have. What way to people navigate a client’s stand. What seems to be attracting the most attention and the least? .
Say “I don’t know yet” when you don’t know… yet.
Don’t worry about memorising everything you read. If you can retain it all brilliant, but it’s not an exam, you can go back and check references if you are unsure. Instead it’s much more important to understand the topology of the problem and the direction that a solution would need to take.
Do use index cards – one of my favourite things on Amazon is sets of index cards and steel rings to hold them together in one corner. I use this to build my written memory on a clients business and products. I find the act of writing it down helps to build memory structures. I was inspired in this by Umberto Eco’s How To Write A Thesis.
Study ways to find out about things. I am a bit of a pack rat when it comes to tools, reports etc – as are other people I know. One of the areas that strategists have been ignoring up until now, but could learn a lot on in the hobbyist world of OSINT and your local library.
Use Claude AI to explain your own argument back to you – was a recommendation of Rob, I am using Gemini at the moment and it performs a similar role. However I do see the benefit of getting a couple of sets of viewpoints to pressure test your thinking. Previously, I would have done this with colleagues like Rob Fuller or Zoe Healey – generative AI kind of fills the gap and has some serendipity in its inherent weirdness. Whatever way you do it, stress-test your ideas.
Believe people when they say you did great, if it’s written down keep a record of it for your appraisal. But don’t let your personal sense of worth be defined by your career – you are more than your job.
Write with a thicker pen – it forces your handwriting to be clearer, letter shapes better defined. But use a thinner pen when thinking about structure and interconnections. I am a great believer when listening to talks or thinking about presenting a subject to mind map it out on engineering squared paper first. From the flow of interconnections, a natural order emerges.
Write with a bigger typeface – I would focus on legibility rather than size. And no comic sans – not even in irony.
Always change to 1.5 line spacing.
Don’t cheat on your one-pagers by making the typeface smaller. With generative AI now, why would you even do this?
Have strategy pals – but not to the exclusion of types of people. Try and have a diverse social network. It’s very easy to live in an advertising and media industry eco-system and out of touch with the general public.
Cmd+S every other minute. It’s a good idea to build this up as muscle memory, even if unnecessary in services like Google Docs and Office 365. Latency rather than a software crash are the most likely killer of documents nowadays.
Take care to manage your browser tabs, if you use a social bookmarking service, you can always go back to them later.
Buy a random magazine. Your clients might be all about social platforms but magazines, have been, and still are great windows into culture. I have a stack of Japanese style magazines for inspiration and try and buy a local magazine to leaf through when travelling. They are a fountain of future ideas.
Do a walking meeting. I miss doing walking meetings, at the time I had a colleague that lived within walking distance which made the process ideal. I also realise that this is often hard to do, when your project manager has filled you up on back-to-back calls. One thing I remember doing at Unilever was dialling into conference calls on my phone and listening in while walking around my office floor at 100 Victoria Embankment. Admittedly it’s not practical to do when presentations are being shared, or when your contribution is required to be engaged as a note taker.
Breathe while you talk. You have nervous energy, you want to get it all out. Breathing slows your thinking down so those finer elements won’t slip out of your grasp. I know people who swear by Toastmasters as a help to master this.
Daydream for no good reason. We live by the tyranny of the calendar on our phones or laptops and have lost sight of the time needed to think and let ideas worm their way out of our subconscious to the conscious mind at the front of our thoughts.
Have the basics of understanding wetware. The currency of being a strategist is people. We are the voice of the customer (people), clients (who also happen to be people) rely on us to solve problems, creatives rely on our translation of noise into something they, as people, can relate to. We don’t do all that alone, so thank people who’ve helped you and be generous with compliments. It won’t kill you, generally others won’t remember what you’ve done as much as how you made them feel.
Be specific. This manifests itself in lots of ways from reflecting the client’s problem back to being single-minded in a brief given to creatives. Specificity is its own form of clarity.
Listen more than you speak. Good advice for life, not just strategy.
Write a list. Lists are useful brainstorming device, but they are also really useful for self-organisation. Post-it notes are your friends.
Write a stream of consciousness and be prepared to cut and paste it around to organise your thoughts rather like ‘fridge magnet poetry’.
Give yourself 10 minutes to write the clearest answer you can think of. Simplify it in a few seconds with generative AI. Then feel ok that you’ll probably need time to get to a simpler one and remain better when the obvious simplification comes from colleagues.
If it feels obvious, stick with it. This reminded me of Dieter Rams principles of design which extend well beyond design and into problem solving and life in general:
Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design makes a product understandable
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is thorough down to the last detail
Good design is as little design as possible
Say your argument out loud. This is part of pressure-testing your own thinking. It’s also something that generative AI services can help with as both devil’s advocate and to ‘steel man’ your own ideas.
Admit when you are wrong. Being wrong isn’t bad, it’s part of the learning process and will help you get to better ideas. A former colleague of mine used to talk about being interesting as more important than being right – there are traps in that statement but also something powerful in it.
Say “sorry” when you have to. Sorry is a powerful disarming tool. It helps you get to both interesting and right faster.
Assume the work has been thought through. Just because you don’t get it, it doesn’t mean that others haven’t come up with some interesting ideas. And even if it hasn’t been thought through quite as well as you like, what’s the lesson that can be derived from it all?
Ask questions without judgement. There are no dumb questions, just people who are left dumber due to unanswered questions.
Find reasons to build on things. I found this a bit weird when I first entered agency life. Previously I had worked in the chemical industry, which was regimented and compartmentalised in the way work was done. College was very much about individual effort to complete assignments and essays. Build on this was something that I found female colleagues used to do really well. I remember being sat in a meeting and watch each person play a reverse ‘pass the parcel’ game with an idea. When it came to say their bit in a ‘brainstorm’ they would acknowledge what had been previously said and provide their own innovation as an additional wrapper. It won pitches and increased group cohesion.
Focus on agreeing a direction, not winning arguments. While you were winning the argument, you could have been getting insights to help set that direction in the ideas.
Build a robust strategy rather than a perfect strategy. A strategy that isn’t implemented for a client, may as well not exist. A robust strategy can be optimised based on what happens in the market. The perfect strategy may not even get to market.
Be useful. If a meeting needs coffee or printing off handouts and you can do them. People may not remember what you’ve done but how you make them feel and putting them at ease when hellsapoppin’.
Say you have a clash – leave it at that. Much of what happens inside agencies runs on implicit guilt. Avoid that guilt by saying less, being prepared to not fill silences and don’t explain diary clashes.
When you have nothing to do, read. Well learn at the very least, our world and what’s demanded of us is always changing. Do a course read an article, a book chapter or listen to an audio book.
If you’re tired of reading, write. I find writing very powerful. The process of writing helps me work things out from opinions to problem solving.
If you’re tired of writing, go for a walk. I was working on a brief prior to writing this post and walked from Whitechapel station home. I let my mind wander and I got the central concept of the insight by not thinking about it during that hour’s walk.
If you’re tired of walking, take a nap. Burn out is real, it’s got even worse with project management tools that overburden strategy teams.
If in doubt, try out the Oblique Strategies. Back in 1975, electronic musician Brian Eno and multimedia artist Peter Schmidt came up with what we’d call in advertising provocations. They are particularly useful in trying to break through a mental block. You have a 100 cards about the size of a playing card in a box. Read it, think about it, have a break and come back to it and ask how it can be applied to your problem. There is also an iPhone version of it, but there is something about the tactility of the cards.
Have a healthy snack of choice – our changing workloads chained to messaging apps rather than getting out and interviewing people in focus groups has amplified the need for this advice. I would go further and say avoid the ‘pitch pizza’ – the lowest common denominator selections provided by agencies to fuel the late night efforts of its pitch teams. I have turned to trail mix, zero sugar energy drinks and even Huel at a push instead.
Break your own rules. A former colleague that I worked with at Yahoo! used to talk about ‘guidelines, not tramlines’. Breaking your own rules is about understanding why you have the rule and making a creative choice. Usually rules speed up decision-making.
Make different mistakes. We learn from mistakes, there is a value in them if you think about things in terms of a scientific methodology. But, there is nothing to be gained from making the same mistakes.
Interesting is more important than right, I alluded to this earlier but it deserves its own explanation. Interesting sparks discussions that help get to further insights. This comes from remaining constantly curious and holding a strong point-of-view. As for views, hold on tightly unless there is good evidence to the contrary and then be prepared to let go lightly. This is where I again tell you are more than your job, one of the main ideas it is important to convey in a list like this.
Have a copywriter as an ally. Working on my last brief I had got to the the human insight, but I couldn’t land the concept in a sufficiently resonant way. Going back-and-forth with the copywriter got us there.
Have other strategists as allies. They have walked similar journeys to you and might see things that you are too close on to notice. One of the greatest aspects of working with great strategists is the collegiate attitude to ideas and generosity of thoughts.
Network internally. You would think that work would shine through, but the reality is most people won’t remember what you did. Secondly, that internal networking helps understand the context that your work exists within. Finally, the internal network you have will eventually become scattered across the industry and even client side, opening up potential future opportunities.
Develop an aesthetic. I was fortunate to grow up in a house that wasn’t wealthy in terms of money, but was wealthy in terms of ideas. Part of it was down to reading and part of it was down my Dad’s deep sense of quality. I would love to say that we had less but better in terms of consumption, but we didn’t – there are no Vitra or Eames designed furnishings at my parents house. The closest I have to it is the refurbished first generation Herman Miller Aeron chair I am sitting on and vintage Ikea birch bookcase – rather than their more commonplace MDF pieces. Much of my furniture is gifted or upcycled. My sofa, was originally from the 1970s, my Dad reupholstered it and rebuilt the frame based on materials he had left over from doing his own motor caravan conversion of a Volkswagen (Typ 28) LT-35 van. The sense of quality gave me the confidence to explore my own taste in design, art, literature and cinema. Taste and a sense of what’s important is becoming more important in strategy and the creative industries.
