Ged Carroll

Category: howto | 怎麼做 | 방법 | 実行する方法

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.

  • March 2026 newsletter – (32) buckle my shoe

    March 2026 introduction – (32) buckle my shoe

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

    https://flic.kr/p/w8zyP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

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

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

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

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

    Books that I have read.

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

    The book is very cleverly written. The story told from multiple perspectives:

    • A Mossad department head and his staff
    • A prisoner held in an Iranian jail
    • An Iranian mother

    Yes you get the tension of a spy novel, but you also get the portrait of flawed human characters, acting and reacting to the terrible incidents around them. In this respect, it reminded me of what the Apple TV series Tehran tried to do. McCloskey manages to humanise his characters in a way that few authors in the genre beyond John le Carré and Mick Herron in his own way.

    Things I have been inspired by.

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

    tachikoma

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

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

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

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

    Chart of the month. 

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

    swiss watches

    A few interesting trends emerge:

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

    Things I have watched. 

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

    Useful tools.

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

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

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

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

    The sales pitch.

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

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

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

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

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

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

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

  • The nine people you meet in a pitch

    The nine people you meet in a pitch came out of talking with a couple of former colleagues about recent pitches that they’d been involved in. I was thinking about how I had experienced what it was like to pitch and to be pitched to as a client.

    The tour guide's sales pitch

    Based on all that, I thought I would share some experience and expertise that might be of help.

    The nine people you are likely pitching to.

    You can think of the panelists receiving your pitch as fitting into nine behaviour archetypes.

    • The advocate
    • The complainer
    • The detail lover
    • The late comer
    • The multi-tasker
    • The narcissist
    • The skeptic
    • The spectator
    • The surpriser

    Right let’s get into this and meet the nine people.

    The advocate

    The advocate may be apparent before you are in the room for the pitch. They may have worked with the agency before and have likely advocated for the agency to be on the list. A good pitch lead with enough time will have primed the advocate with the thinking and themes that they would be sharing in the pitch.

    Or not, some people are just very agreeable in nature.

    How you’ll recognise them

    They will seem receptive and positive to everything. Pitch teams and process tends to overlook the advocate in the pitch. But they can be used to the pitch team’s advantage.

    The complainer

    The complainer may be an advocate of the existing agency, may be having their budget cut to pay for the activity that the new agency will do, or may have been left out of the early process that started the agency search.

    How you’ll recognise them

    Negative towards everything, can be mistaken for the skeptic or the surpriser.

    The detail lover

    These people usually fit into one of three categories:

    • They are currently really in the trenches and want to ensure that you can really make their lives easier
    • They are product people who are domain experts on their area: use cases, technical details and probably less likely users
    • In a highly regulated sector they could have a legal or regulatory responsibility, in pharma companies they may be called MLR (medical, legal and regulatory)

    How you’ll recognise them

    Prior the pitch these people are most likely to push an agency to put much more detail in their decks so they become lengthy and take a lot of time to create. All the while the storytelling red thread goes missing.

    In the pitch, given the volume of questioning you may mistake them for the surpriser or the narcissist. The key differences being that the narcissist won’t usually give you an opportunity to answer and the surpriser will bring completely new areas of questioning in.

    The late comer

    They turn up the meetings late. This could be personal factors such as workload and time management, or it could be an attention diverting tactic.

    How you’ll recognise them

    They turn up late, its more important to identify why they turn up late as you could actually be dealing with the narcissist, the skeptic or the surpriser.

    The multi-tasker

    This usually comes down to company culture usually rather than a character trait.

    How to recognise them

    If it’s company culture you will be likely dealing with a sea of laptop lids, or smartphone being used on the desk. Assume that they are listening, although they might be commenting and norming in real time on your presentation in a conversation thread on Google Workspace, Teams, WhatsApp etc.

    If it’s one person then it might be the sign of distraction (child minder gets in touch saying their child is running a temperature or similar). Or it could be a sign of dissonance, keep an eye out for the complainer or the skeptic

    The skeptic

    They may have similar world view to the complainer in that they would prefer the status quo. Though they may view the status quo as the least worst option rather than be an advocate for it.

    They may be:

    • Risk averse by nature
    • This may be completely new to them
    • They may have been part of a project that has gone wrong in the past

    How you’ll recognise them

    This could be tricky as they may look similar to the spectator or the surpriser. Generally statements and related questions made will seek proofs as part of the response.

    The surpriser

    The surpriser usually is a symptom of a client that doesn’t have internal alignment on their brief.

    How you’ll recognise them

    They will come in with new information, ideas and questions that may disrupt the meeting agenda and possibly the whole pitch process.

    How to deal with them as you encounter the nine people?

    General rules to work with

    Which ever of the nine people you are engaging with it’s good to remember for your own sanity that it’s generally not personal so don’t take it that way. All of the nine people archetypes are under some sort of pressure / stress. At most, you’re a non-player character in the video game that they call life.

    Given what I said about their likely personal stressors, try and empathise with what might be the root causes of their behaviour. You’ve experienced agency life and the way it can clobber you – you get similarly interesting times in most corporate environments.

    Hanlon’s razor says something to the effect of “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” You can swap out stupidity for ignorance, thoughtlessness etc. but the message remains equally valid. I know it’s tough to be empathetic in the stressful environment of a pitch but try. Engage in a positive way.

    If you are pitching an international team or a large company there is likely to be cultural differences. In my experiences large companies like Alphabet and Microsoft have their own language and world view just in the same way as the agency world has its own jargon.

    If you are pitching in another country there is another layer of cultural differences. Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map is a great primer for different country cultures. Be mindful of cultural differences and sensitivities.

    When you are making claims, assumptions or answering a question provide relevant proof where appropriate.

    However tempting it is, never get into confrontation with any of the nine people archetypes. You won’t win and you may cause friction with your colleagues that would outlive the pitch. There’s a fine line between being clever and a ̶d̶i̶c̶k̶h̶e̶a̶d̶ misanthrope.

    Specific tactics for each of the nine people portrayed.

    The advocate

    • Get them to share their feedback.
    • If you can arrange it prior to the pitch, give them a role in the meeting.
    • As a watch out they are easy to ignore because you often focused on solving for other behaviours.

    The complainer

    • Make them feel heard, for instance ask them about what is important in an agency partner.
    • Be prepared to move on, don’t get hung up on their questions.
    • Share evidence that would reassure the complainer such as case studies demonstrating competence, experience and expertise.

    The detail lover

    • Emphasise the limited time to present and ask how the additional information will aid the decision-making process.
    • Co-opt other attendees in the room by asking them who would also find the additional information valuable to included.

    The late comer

    Prior to going into the pitch, have a plan on how you will handle a delay on the pitch. Having this pre-planned will make you feel far more settled if you need to use it.

    In the pitch:

    • For the beginning of the presentation, see if you can cover the less important details first, so that late comers don’t miss out on the important items.
    • Offer to bring the late comer up to speed.

    The multi-tasker

    Dealing with the multi-tasker is down to going into the pitch with a high degree of engagement designed in that makes multi-tasking behaviour difficult to do. You need to outcompete other calls on their attention.

    The narcissist

    • Acknowledge their input, but ask for input from others. This shifts the focus away from them and puts their input in a broader context.
    • Once you know who they are, reduce their impact on the meeting by looking for other people’s input first.
    • Make them feel that their input is valued by ensuring they know that you have captured their input.

    The skeptic

    • Enquire about what causes them the greatest challenge.
    • Ask them about what good looks like from their perspective. What would help address their greatest challenge?
    • Reassure by sharing case studies, expertise and experience where similar challenges have been successfully addressed.

    The spectator

    • You need to strike a balance between engaging them to ensure that they are heard, but not putting them on the spot. Everyone’s input is crucial. Acknowledge the value of their contribution.

    The surpriser

    • Acknowledge their input, not doing so would quickly turn them to a complainer.
    • You need to make a judgement based on the situation in the room, if it makes sense to include their new input based on agreed goals. This will likely require one-or-more follow-up meeting.

  • February 2026 newsletter – get up & run edition

    February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition

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

    #run

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

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

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

    Books that I have read.

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

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

    Things I have been inspired by.

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

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

    Chart of the month. 

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

    The chart only tells part of the story.

    measles

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

    The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.

    • 2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
    • 2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.

    Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.

    • 2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
    • 2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
    • 2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.

    Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

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

    Things I have watched. 

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

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

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

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

    I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.

    • Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
    • Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
    • James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.

    This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.

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

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

    Useful tools.

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

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

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

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

    The sales pitch.

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

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

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

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

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

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

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

  • January 2026 newsletter

    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.

    La Délivrance - 7

    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. 

    SO

    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.

    The value of everything

    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 copywriting by 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.

    ipsos veracity study 2025

    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 cinema poster

    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.

    Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

    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. 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.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    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.

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

  • How to Write a Good Advertisement by Victor O. Schwab

    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 Advertisement here.

    You can find more book reviews here.