Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

Consumer grievance: a marketers atlas
Writing about consumer grievance came from a couple of things. I was watching a lecture by professor Robert Reich at Stanford and it reminded me of Edelman‘s 2025 Trust Barometer report ‘Trust and the Crisis of Grievance‘.

Edelman’s annual report is a barometer, a global snapshot of who and what consumers trust. As long as I can remember Edelman’s report into trust of institutions has been in decline, but the 2025 report highlighting consumer grievance marked a perceived acceleration.

TL;DR
- Why it matters: Most brands treat consumer complaints as a customer service headache to be managed by a chatbot. That is a massive commercial misstep. Grievance is not an admin burden; it is a raw, unvarnished map of what your audience actually cares about.
- What is changing: We are seeing the rise of a distinct global grievance culture. When trust in traditional institutions wobbles, consumers direct their frustration at the brands they buy from. If you look closely at these grievances, you see the exact gaps where your business is failing to deliver on its promise.
- The big picture: Two distinct trust economies now exist. There is the formal, corporate version presented in annual reports, and the real-world version lived by your customers. When the gap between the two grows too wide, the goodwill sitting on your balance sheet evaporates.
Global grievance

In the report Edelman posited that trust in institutions was no longer a universally shared civic resource. Around the world, it had become a luxury commodity that is heavily segmented by income and social class.

Putting my cards on the table

You the reader should question my interpretation as an enquiring mind. With that in mind, it makes sense to understand my starting viewpoint as I started to go through the subject matter. I agreed with the essence that Edelman’s research has captured. And the bifurcation of the economy is being baked into marketing plans that I have worked on over the past few years.

I have my doubts about their methods. I believe that their motives are good admittedly moderated by commercial considerations, but I did find myself questioning the techniques used and data transparency.

I set out to find high quality research that validated, or challenged the concept of consumer grievance.

Edelman’s original approach was triggered by the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’. The survey’s structural model was built upon the mid-1990s theories of Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that institutional trust was primarily driven by upward mobility, structured legal systems, and guaranteed economic prosperity.
The Trust Barometer’s original respondents was restricted to “opinion leaders” or “opinion elites”. That mean’t highly affluent college-educated people aged 35 to 64 with high media consumption and active engagement in public policy. The demographic that prospective Edelman clients would sit neatly within.

Technological and economic change saw Edelman move to a general population sample. They also moved from telephone interviews to online surveys. The number of respondents increased from 1,300 in five countries to 36,000 respondents.

2020 saw a change in survey design that broke the idea of ‘to do what is right’ into two attributes:
- Competence
- Ethical behaviour
Business did well on competency but less well in ethical considerations. Government, media and NGOs were viewed as lacking in both . Edelman compensated for this by studying proximal trust and employee trust.

Edelman introduced the concept of ‘trust brokering’ – an organisations capacity to support dialogue and bridge social divides.

The Genesis of Global Grievance

With a flair for drama and storytelling Edelman’s Trust Barometer links the decline of trust and the genesis of consumer grievance back to the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference held in the city. While a wide coalition of both left and right political figures, NGOs, organised labour were there to protest against unfettered globalisation the wheels were already in motion.

…globalization is not new, but that the present era of globalization, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets and the repercussions on people. Characterized by “shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders”, globalization has swung open the door to opportunities.

Breakthroughs in communications technologies and biotechnology, if directed for the needs of people, can bring advances for all of humankind. But markets can go too far and squeeze the non-market activities so vital for human development. Fiscal squeezes are constraining the provision of social services. A time squeeze is reducing the supply and quality of caring labour. And an incentive squeeze is harming the environment. Globalization is also increasing human insecurity as the spread of global crime, disease and financial volatility outpaces actions to tackle them.

The above quote came from the introduction to the 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).

As the 1999 HDR introduction alludes, by 1999 globalisation was not new and was already happening from Japanese consumer electronics to Korean shipbuilding. Instead globalisation was moving at a pace that institutions were no longer able to keep up with it or control it.

This viewpoint is supported by Professor Reich’s lecture on the factors driving the rise voter interest in populist leaders like President Trump. Reich outlines a four decades-long trajectory marked by:
- The decoupling of productivity from wages. The US Board of Labour & Statistics paper Understanding of the labor productivity and compensation gap, considers the gap to have opened up in the 1970s. The fissure since the 1970s was also documented by the Economic Policy Institute’s work The Productivity-Pay Gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published research showed how corporate profits decoupled from employee compensation from the early 2000s on.
- The Reagan era erosion of labour bargaining power. Similar erosion also took place in the UK under the Thatcher government.
- The concentration of corporate market power. Deregulation from the 1980s on, allowed the financial and corporate sectors to become politically and economically dominant. Reich argued that this created a system average citizens perceived as rigged to favour corporations and big banks over ordinary workers. The 2008 bank bailout while ordinary citizens faced foreclosures cemented this perception. This isn’t only a western issue. 44% of China’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
- The resulting financial exhaustion of the working and middle classes. American families employed three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living. First, they simply worked longer hours. Second, women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, creating the dual-income household out of necessity. Third, the other measures reached their limit, they tapped into the equity in their homes, until 2008
The US Bureau of of Labour had three hypotheses for factors driving the labour compensation – productivity gap:

Globalisation: Increased offshoring shifted production and service activities to other countries. Consequently, income that might have previously gone to domestic workers was reallocated to intermediate purchases and foreign labour.

Increased Automation: As technological automation increases, the overall need for human labor input drops. When machines replace workers, the share of income dedicated to capital naturally increases relative to the share dedicated to labor.

Faster Capital Depreciation: Modern business capital, such as computer hardware and software, degrades or becomes obsolete much faster than the heavy machinery used in previous decades. Because these assets must be upgraded or replaced more frequently, a higher share of industry income must be diverted away from wages to cover these ongoing capital replacement costs

When the report explored specific industry sectors such as electrical power generation and supply, the divergence correlated with a fourth factor, deregulation. This happened to the US energy market in 1992.

The Energy Policy Act, 1992 created domestic competition. Incumbent local monopolies became more efficient or went under. Productivity was achieved through new technology and aggressive cost-cutting including layoffs. Workers produced far more value per hour, but because the company is fighting to keep prices low to compete, wages didn’t rise at that same rate.

Two trust economies exist

But all of these factors didn’t impact across society equally. What Edelman’s Trust Barometer acknowledged, but didn’t highlight at the time was the existence of two trust economies existing in the same space, but for different people.

The top quartile of income earners trusted the system. The bottom quartile didn’t. This was mirrored in findings by other organisations, notably the OECD’s Government at a Glance 2025 report and UNU WIDER Trust in a changing World 2025 paper.

There is a decline in governmental trust documented by the Pew Research Center Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – a consistent downward trend much longer than 1999, back as far as the mid-1960s for the American public, much earlier than Edelman’s work seems to suggest.

Business and consumer grievance

Edelman posits that businesses have become more trusted than governments. It’s a comforting anchor for a business that sells corporate reputation work. The reality may be different. The decline in government trust has merely set a very low bar according to research by Bentley University and Gallup. The rise of zero-sum thinking exemplified by Zero-sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), will sweep business attitudes along as part of systemic distrust. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posits that this zero-trust thinking has brought conflict within the US itself and driven protests around the world – globalised consumer grievance.

The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University documented an increase in political violence risk factors across the US mirroring the 1960s and early 1970s . German insurance company Allianz warned that this behaviour represented a risk to large businesses across their operations and supply chains. This is outside and separate to government military actions like the US – Iran conflict or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There are problems inside organisations as well. Employer trust has been in decline according to Edelman. The causes are diverse and amplify consumer grievance:
- Globalisation
- Automation and LLMs
- Economic conditions
Managers are supervising but failing to manage. They struggle to coach or develop their staff sufficiently.

Media sector consumer grievance

The media business is seeing the impact first hand. Fear of deliberate deception is at the cente of the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025. That fear is driving growing divisions in society and between societies, further feeling consumer grievance. According to The Reuters Institute Digital News Report of the same year these concerns about deception are driving audiences away from ‘legacy’ media companies to platforms of editorialists and opinion formers across podcasts, YouTube and other social platforms.

Edelman claims that this audience migration is down to beliefs about the motivations of media organisations. 75 percent of high-grievance respondents believe news organisations would rather attract a big audience than report what people actually need to know. 67 percent believe the media prefers to support an ideology over informing the public.

On slight glimmer from Edelman’s data was that trust in traditional media dropped by four points, versus trust in search engines dropping by five. But that delta will be cold comfort to media executives watching their business being eaten alive by technology platforms.

Goodwill on the balance sheet

Goodwill on the balance sheet of a company tries to capture brand value, the value of customer relationships and wider stakeholder trust within a business. PwC research provided some empirical evidence to support RoI on the stakeholder trust component of goodwill. But Edelman overreaches in its 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World report to try and do the same with brand value. In this case, Edelman tries to use survey responses, rather than observed behaviour data and the scientific method to try and overturn several decades of validated marketing science research.

Consumer grievance: so what?

It’s very easy to ignore consumer grievance as ethereal fiction or background noise. Being part of the solution can end up being part of the problem.

Brand purpose real talk

For some brands it make sense to pick a side, but if you do commit to the brand purpose. It may cost you, but if you really have a brand purpose, or ‘higher purpose’ as David Aaker called it, then the 30% opportunity cost in marketing effectiveness is worth it in your calculus.

Effectiveness expert Les Binet’s two question test on brand purpose makes a lot of sense:
- Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
- Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.

Brand purpose can be a struggle to retrofit. After the success of Dove being re-positioned from a functional product to the ‘real beauty’ positioning; Unilever looked to replicate the effect with varying degrees of success.

You also need to be aware of brand purpose not being global. Apple, Meta and Nike have made decisions in Asia that are vastly different to what they do in western markets. There is no coherence or congruency in their world view. Neoliberal universal values died in corporations long before they were devalued in mainstream western political discourse. Both the online world and social media will shine a spotlight on this difference. This perceived corporate hypocrisy will increase consumer grievance and reduce consumer trust in the brand to do ‘the right thing’.

You could make the argument that Apple, Meta and Nike all fail Binet’s brand purpose test.

Outside of geopolitical differences, even the most basic demographic differences can be landmines for brand purpose. It’s an accelerant for consumer grievance and one that marketers at the likes of Unilever and P&G have either ducked, or got tonally wrong.

Patagonia is arguably the most prominent brand purpose led brand, yet it faces a slew of dilemmas. You could argue that Patagonia’s self description as being ‘a work in progress‘ is at best a temporary fix with an uncertain sell-by date during a time of consumer grievance.

Brand promise

The brand promise is the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service that they are purchasing. There is a temptation to reduce costs. You see this with automated services and reduced sized packaging.

If you are transparent about the trade-off consumers will self-select and be fine with it. Telecoms companies have been doing this for years.
- Plusnet – BT’s no-frills ISP
- Voxi – Vodafone’s self service brand that comes at a discounted price
Does your consumer journey penalise behaviour instead of rewarding loyalty. if it does, that will fuel consumer grievance. Audit these friction points and act on them. Fix underlying operations-related grievances and the customer lifetime revenue will take care of itself.

You can more content on consumer behaviour here.
July 18, 2026
Moral licensing

I was thinking a lot about consumption when I came across the psychological concept of moral licensing. Doing something that is thought of as a good behaviour boosts the self image, leading to a sense of justification in a more indulgent behaviour later on.

It explains incongruity in human behaviours. One example that immediately came to mind when I first read about the concept of moral licensing occurred very early in my agency career.

Burger queen

The agency was one of an expanding number of American shops that had set up in London. I was a piss-poor excuse of client services person; but was widely read, had a sharp-thinking strategic head on my shoulders and sounded uncharacteristically authoritative in technology client presentations.

One of the London office’s senior executives was English but as part of their degree secondment had spent some time in the US. Later on, they were working in the Bay area on high technology and consumer brand accounts.

During that time, they became a Buddhist and were vegan except for the regular Big Mac meal in the office, or, going to and from a new business pitch.

Given that the global CEO functioned on sipping vodka out of a constantly topped up glass, with periodic runs to the local Starbucks for jolts of iced quadruple expressos, the Big Mac eating vegan behaviour was considered only mildly eccentric by comparison.

Wellness

While my burger queen experience is mildly amusing to recollect, moral licensing has a serious health and wellness impact. The consumer wellness market has a moral vocabulary that positions food as a “sinful” indulgence or a “purifying” virtue, and physical exercise as a moral redemption mechanism. This moral framing is a critical structural vulnerability. When wellness, nutrition, and wearable technology brands construct campaigns using moralised binaries, this trigger subconscious moral licensing.

Higher levels of moral licensing, self-licensing, or compensatory health beliefs (CHBs) are associated with elevated body weight (BMI), increased caloric intake, or heightened body image anxiety.

The fipside of this is the ‘health as an alibi’ for slim people who are often judged as excessively vain or narcissistic.

Finally research from North Caroline State University found that customer reward programmes drove long-term consumption habits. They that consumers who regularly purchased lower-calorie meals indulged more when reward opportunities occurred. They had a higher probability of trading rewards for indulgent high-calorie items and desserts. When questioned, they used their prior calorie dietary discipline to justify it.

Luxurious moral licensing

There is a well known link between relative preferences for luxury items and a previously expressed virtuous intent. This might be a donation of time or money to a charity allowing consumers to establish ‘moral’ credentials. An example that taps directly into this is Balenciaga‘s capsule collections that collaborate with the likes of the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

This boost to their virtuosity mitigates the negative feelings and anticipatory guilt typically associated with purchasing frivolous or expensive items. In research it is found to double consumer intent to purchase high-end consumer goods.

However moral licensing isn’t all plain sailing for luxury brands. There is a tension between luxury brand attributes of self-enhancement and status with moral licensing being related to self transcendence and altruism. Consumers experience the mismatch which negatively affects brand evaluation.

Moral licensing examples in advertising

Moral licensing is tapped into in indulgent advertising. A classic example is the current framing in Müller Corner yoghurts.

Moral licensing was leaned on very heavily during the golden age of TV advertising.

More information

New Data Reveals a Big Problem With Thrift Shopping | The Devil Wears Data

Atoning Past Indulgences: Oral Consumption and Moral Compensation by Thea S Schei, Sana Sheikh & Simone Schnall (2019)

Associations between Obesity and Diet-Related Compensatory Health Beliefs by Malgorzata OBARA-GOLEBIOWSKA & Katarzyna EUFEMIA PRZYBYLOWICZ (2015)

Health as an Alibi: The Virtuous Framing of Appearance Pursuits by Stephanie C. Lin, Kaitlin Woolley & Peggy J Liu (2025)

Health as an Alibi: The Virtuous Framing of Appearance Pursuits by Stephanie C Lin, Kaitlin Woolley and Peggy J Liu (2025)

Researchers Explore Strategic Licensing and the Impact of Reward Programs on Long-Term Consumption | NC State University

Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice by Uzma Khan and Ravi Dhar, School of Management, Yale University (2005)

Volunteering as a mechanism to reduce guilt over purchasing luxury items by Hyo-Jin Jeong & Dong-Mo Woo – Journal of Product & Brand management (2015)

Pinto, D. C., Herter, M. M., Gonçalves, D., & Sayin, E. (2019). Can luxury brands be ethical? Reducing the sophistication liability of luxury brands. Journal of Cleaner Production

Doing Poorly by Doing Good: Corporate Social Responsibility and Brand Concepts by Carlos J. Torelli, Alokparna Basu Monga and Andrew M. Kaikati

When will a message of social responsibility backfire? (2011) | Science Daily

July 6, 2026
2026 World Cup + more stuff

I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.

I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.

adidas has made World Cup shirts for dogs | Famous Campaigns – its a pity that they didn’t roll this out in the UK to celebrate the 2026 World Cup as well.

Branding

How many brands are there? | Europanel

Business

Publicis has built the best house on the street. Now it needs to move neighborhood | The Drum – undervalued due to poor performance by Omnicom and WPP

China

Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.

China reviews $2bn Manus sale to Meta as founders barred from leaving country | FT

Consumer behaviour

Argos sparks consumer outrage over toddler ‘influencer kit’ – Retail Gazette

Half of Gen Z Uses AI, but Their Feelings Are Souring, Study Shows | New York Times – this reminds me of consumer sentiment around email and information overload during the late 1990s and early 2000s. We’re going through a period of norming now

Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”

Design

EAGA – East Asian Graphics Archive

The interesting odd story behind the design behind house numbers.

Economics

Berkeley professor Robert Reich on the factors that he saw that brought President Donald Trump to the White House.

This War Will Make You Poorer – by Ed Elson – Prof G Media

FMCG

Danone doubles down on its area of strength in functional foods: Danone to buy meal-in-bottle maker Huel in €1bn deal | FT

Health

Battle for weight-loss supremacy shifts from jabs to pills | FT

How China is supplying America’s “biohacking” craze – GZERO Media

Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s complex role in bypassing sanctions against Russia | Le Monde – this isn’t doing what little is left of Hong Kong’s reputation any good

Hong Kong arrests hedge fund and brokerage staff in $300mn insider trading probe | FT

More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.

Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.

Silence Follows Harassment – Lingua Sinica

Hong Kong’s claw machine boom is mutating into a Pachinko-style trap | Dim Sum Daily

Hong Kong’s dying news stands tell a story of change – BBC News – I loved Hong Kong newsstands and loved the magazine racks which were brilliant. I remember religiously buying Milk magazine

Customs criticised for pursuit of outdated CD and VCD piracy | South China Morning Post

How to

I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.

Access and repair a broken disk image – The Eclectic Light Company

Ideas

Hawk shape shifting in flight may guide future drone control | Spacewar

How Wong Kar-Wai Created the Future – by Patrick Kho

Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books | Undark & Opinion | Technology Weakens Our Minds. It’s Time to Resist. – The New York Times

Innovation

‘A Cheaper Javelin’: New Anti-Tank Missile Advances Through Testing | Next Gen Defense – what’s interesting in this is the horizontal integration wth an Android application layer and the cost savings

We Need a New Science of Progress – The Atlantic

Japan

Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.

The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.

The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.

In the studio with Nigo – Japan’s premier polymath | Ft

Korea

The new food fad sweeping Korea | FT – dujjonku or Dubai cookie

Luxury

The Brand Age | Paul Graham

Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”

Materials

Chinese Titanium – by Irene Zhang – ChinaTalk

The Seasoning Company Behind Your Food Flavors Controls The Future Of AI Chips, And Supply Is Running Dangerously Low | WCCF Tech

Shipbuilding feels pinch from war-driven paint and lubricant shortage | FT

Media

Apple TV, Siri Targeted in EU Broadcaster Complaint Citing DMA Rules – MacRumors

Meta stole Sarah Wynn-Williams’s voice. It couldn’t stop her exposé | The Times – her publisher on the author of Careless People

A.I. Helps Online Ad Businesses Boom – The New York Times

UK adspend increased 6.4% in 2025 as AA/Warc updates data presentation – The Media Leader

Online

Every influencer eventually becomes a merch store | The Verge

Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.

The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.

When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.

So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background

Security

Interpol – Operation Synergia III leads to 45,000 malicious IPs dismantled and 94 arrests worldwide

The AI-driven ‘kill chain’ transforming how the US wages war | FT

Iran war lifts K-defence company offering cheap Patriot rival | FT

Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages | FT – a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.

The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.

Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

FBI is investigating breach that may have hit its wiretapping tools | The Register

Andrew Cockburn · Beware the mattress: Mossad’s Kill List

The Geopolitical Chokepoints of Artificial Intelligence | AI Supremacy

France Introduces Telecom-Based Counter-Drone Network Using 19,700 Towers to Protect Critical Assets

China Is Cracking Down on Scams. Just Not the Ones Hitting Americans | WIRED & Scam Inc has a new weapon | The Economist – Chinese organised crime run Cambodian ‘scam’ factories that use social engineering techniques are now using malware as well.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos model is dangerous enough that the company isn’t selling it. | TechBrew

Russia Hacked Routers to Steal Microsoft Office Tokens – Krebs on Security

A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….

Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify…
The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”

All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.

Semiconductors

Arm launches own AI chip in high-stakes strategy shift | FT

Google taps Intel for another round of custom network chips • The Register

TSMC’s Kumamoto Fab Upgrade: A Security-Driven Reconfiguration of Indo-Pacific Chip Competition – The Diplomat

Software

China’s AI Companies Are Going Closed Source | ChinaTalk

OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on

Axios AI+ | AI’s compute wars – pretty much what I have been talking about on the Dot LLM Era

Taiwan

There’s a Whole Lot of Taiwanese AI Winners Not Called TSMC

The PLA has stopped flying aircraft close to Taiwan – I can’t figure out why and that worries me | Drew Thompson

PC price hikes and a test for Taiwan | Ft

Technology

MacBook Neo Teardown Reveals It’s the Most Repairable Apple Laptop in Ages | Cnet

Oracle prepares for lay-offs as it hails efficiencies from AI coding tools | FT

The Debt Beneath the Dream – On my Om – Minsky moment in the offing?

AppleUnsold – The Apple products they won’t sell you

Google’s TurboQuant breakthrough is rattling memory chip stocks | Quartz

Web of no web

New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.

Wireless

At MWC, Ericsson Details AI-Native 6G Timeline – EE Times

The 6G clock ticking: Why silicon architecture for 2030 must start in 2026 – EDN

Ireland’s first mobile video call via satellite is made | RTÉ

May 3, 2026
April 2026 newsletter – 33rd edition aka ‘dirty knee’
April 2026 introduction – (33) dirty knee

This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.

In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.

However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.

In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!

This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.

A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.

Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
2. Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
3. The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
4. Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
5. Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.

My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.

Things I have been inspired by.

Supply chained

Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

Generative AI & cooking

I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.

I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.

More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.

Praykinson

I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.

CHESS

I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.

CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
- Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
- Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
- Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
- Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
- Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.

Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
- Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
- The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
Things I have watched.

My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
- As Tears Go By
- Days of Being Wild
- Chungking Express
- Fallen Angels
- Happy Together
- In The Mood For Love
- 2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.

After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.

OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
- OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
- OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.

PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.

Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).

I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.

Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.

The sales pitch.

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

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

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

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.

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

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
April 29, 2026
Rewatching Wong Kar wai
My love of films by Wong Kar wai came at a time of changing media. In the early 2000s I watched the films the first time after I got a portable multi-region DVD player and there had been a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great cost-effective way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.

I was already familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Kar wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs.

Around the same time, I ended up dating someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s one ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.

While Wong Ka wai’s filmography wasn’t the reason why I moved to Hong Kong, but it was a reason why I moved to city and had the privilege of living there for a while.

This time around I was working my way through Criterion’s World of Wong Kar wai boxset which had been bought for my birthday during COVID time.

The Wong Kar wai boxset contains:
- As Tears Go By
- Days of Being Wild
- Chungking Express
- Fallen Angels
- Happy Together
- In The Mood for Love
- 2046
As Tears Go By

As Tears Go By was released in 1988. It is one of Wong Ka wai’s most conventional films from a Hong Kong perspective. Andy Lau plays the protagonist Wah, a triad soldier. Wong borrowed from the plot line in of Martin Scorsese’s 1973 film Mean Streets in terms of the story revolving around dynamic of two friends, one of whom is irresponsible. It’s a great stylish film, but if you told me that it had been made by Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark or Johnnie To, I’d have believed you. Hong Kong cinema audiences loved it and it would be another 25 years before Wong made another film as popular with local cinema goers.

Days of Being Wild

1990’s Days of Being Wild is often considered by some to be part of an informal trilogy, the others being In The Mood for Love and 2046. Stylistically it features love, loss, similar pacing, the use of inner narratives and experiments with colour. Thematically they are sensitive to the passage of time and have a vice-like hold on emotional memory. But the threads between the characters aren’t really bought together until the next film in the trilogy. Tony Leung’s character and is given the name of ‘Gambler’ is only wordlessly introduced right at the end of Days of Being Wild. He only becomes known as Chow Mo wan in the next film: In The Mood for Love.

Leslie Cheung was ideally cast as a lost, rootless, self-absorbed drifter Yuddy in the film. Yuddy has a hole at the centre of his being that he is unable to fill. Like many dislocated Chinese in Hong Kong between the civil war and the cultural revolution he drifts.

Yuddy is described as a legless bird, only touching down with death. Critics have interpreted this as pre-1997 handover anxiety. An article published on the Hong Kong Film Critics Society website described it for me best

At the time, they were echoes of Hong Kongers’ sentiments under the looming 1997 deadline. Leslie Cheung, who has a love-hate relationship with his foster mother and after a failed mission to find his biological mother, drifts in self-imposed exile, is a metaphor for the city caught between the two sovereign states of China and England.

Set in the 60s, the film is filled with signifiers of nostalgia (props, costumes, music, scenery). Reminiscence is but a lament that the good of the present will not last. And Days of Being Wild is but an elegy for a Hong Kong caught between 1989 and 1997.

The film follows Yuddy and the trail of emotional wreckage he leaves in his wake as he looks to track down his biological mother.

Secondary threads follow Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung and Carrie Lau’s performance as Leung Fung ying. Both of whom where Yuddy’s transient love interests.

There is a scene where Yuddy looks to obtain an American passport and something about Cheung’s movement and the casual violence reminded me of Michael Madsen’s Mr Blonde in Reservoir Dogs released three years later. While Mr Blonde is nihilistic, he lacks the duality of Cheung’s character.

Leslie Cheung gives a fantastic performance on screen and his tragic death 13 years later was a serious blow to Hong Kong film-making.

Days of Being Wild wasn’t well received by Hong Kong cinema goers at the time, despite being well regarded by film critics everywhere. This adds to Wong Kar wai’s reputation as an auteur streets ahead of the local audience. Which was a view I bought into the first time around.

Having watched it again years later, I have some hypotheses as to why it didn’t do well.
- While the dislocation and drifting reflected life for many in early 1960s Hong Kong, it didn’t match the go-go economy and Lion Rock can-do spirit of Hong Kongers in the following three decades. Younger audiences wouldn’t be able to relate to it in the same way. Cinema audiences tend to be younger than the general population, so that disconnect makes a degree of sense.
- After the Sino-British joint declaration was signed in 1984, a pre-handover anxiety hung over Hong Kong. KMT supporting newspapers gradually closed down or pivoted their editorial style. Astronaut families became commonplace with upper middle class children based outside the city in Vancouver or Australia while their parents made money in the run up to handover due to the go-go environment of the time. The second passport, gave the family a bolt hole in case things went wrong after China took over. Local Hong Kong cinema goers wanted the escapism of action films, gambling movies and comedy.
- It is very different in pace as a film compared to its high-octane peers at the time from the likes of John Woo. This time I got to see the original Hong Kong trailer of Days of Being Wild – and could understand how you could go into the cinema expecting something with much more pace rather than the dream-like experience much of Days of Being Wild gives you.
- The ending came abruptly and without context.
Chungkung Express

1994’s Chungking Express is two locations and views of modern Hong Kong. Trading hub Chungking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui and the Midnight Express takeaway restaurant in Lan Kwai Fong. While it is a romantic comedy of sorts and varies in pace, it also has the qualities of what we now expect in a Wong Kar wai film. The focus on time, distance and emotional memory – but with a much lighter touch than Days of Being Wild.

The film is anthology of two stories with retail worker Faye being the one serendipitous point of connection that holds both stories together.

Takeshi Kaneshiro plays alongside fellow Taiwanese actress Bridget Lin in the first story. He is estranged from his girlfriend May relying on calls to her parents and tins of pineapple which is her favourite food.

In the second story tells of how Cop 663, played by Tony Leung is left by his air stewardess girlfriend and acquires a stalker while getting over his old love.

Both stories caught the urban energy of 1990s Hong Kong and resonated better with audiences. What is more remarkable is how fast the film was made in an improvisational way with guerrilla film making techniques. Its looseness was by design as Wong tried to mirror Haruki Murakami’s writing style on screen. The film was shot in a two-week break from editing Ashes of Time.

The film brought Faye Wong to an international audience and cemented Wong Kar wai’s arthouse credentials.

The film feels very now in terms of its style and even the use of old technology like camcorders and pagers on screen doesn’t pull you out of the film in the way I might have expected.

Fallen Angels

1995’s Fallen Angels was a surprise to me the first time I watched it. In some ways it goes back to As Tears Go By in its exploration of Hong Kong’s organised crime world. You have Wong Kar wai’s use of loose narrative, colour, tight spaces and urban energy.

Compared to As Tears Go By it’s a slower paced film. It makes what now comes across as innovative use of close up wide angle photography that makes it look as if its shot on an iPhone decades before the modern iPhone came out. It also feels computer game-like in the action sequences. I can also understand why it has been compared to music videos in terms of style. Parts of the action sequence reminded me of Point Break in terms of the camera viewpoint. While it feels ‘intimate’ because of its claustrophobic shots, local cinema audiences didn’t relate to Fallen Angels.

There is a duality to the film. Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Police Officer Ho Chi moo badge number 223 in Chungking Express. In Fallen Angels he is Hoo Chi moo, convict number 223.

There are wider Wong Kar wai touches, in mid 20th century artefacts from 1960s Hong Kong architecture to the Enicar illuminated wall clock in the assassins base.

(Enicar was a historic Swiss watch brand that was best known across Asia and China. The brand name is now owned by Wah Ming Hong who had been their distributor in China since the 1930s. One of my first memories of Hong Kong was giant building wrapping adverts for Enicar and another former Swiss, now Hong Kong watch company Solvil et Titus).

Watching it this time, I had a nagging feeling that something had changed and sure enough when I searched online. I found out that the film had been extensively cropped shot by shot and recoloured by Wong Kar wai in 2020, not always for the better.

Happy Together

Happy Together was released in 1997 and is still a highly regarded example of New Queer Cinema alongside the like of Querelle.

As a work out of Hong Kong it’s remarkable. Hong Kong as a society is conservative and there is a don’t ask, don’t tell aspect to the treatment of the LGBTQI community in Hong Kong. Legislation is more advanced than Hong Kong society at large.

Leslie Cheung was an ideal protagonist known for being a champion of the avant-garde and having on-screen characters that experimented in different forms and levels of masculinity.

Happy Together‘s themes of displacement, exile, and the repeated line “Let’s start over” mirrored loneliness, heartbreak, the collective uncertainty and “fretful wanderlust” of Hong Kongers at the time. The film came out in Hong Kong just two months prior to the handover of Hong Kong to China.

Happy Together was released with a Category III rating, meaning only those 18 and above can watch it. Primarily this was down to Hong Kong’s greater latitude for violence rather than sex on-screen. Wong Kar wai’s eye and treatment on camera means that Argentina feels rather like Hong Kong in the film.

In The Mood For Love

For many people, 2000’s In The Mood For Love is the gateway drug to Wong Kar wai films. I think that the Cantonese title ‘Flower-like Years’, ‘the prime of one’s youth’ suits the film better. It’s the second film Wong’s informal trilogy, after Days of Being Wild.

The contrast in pacing between In The Mood For Love and the previous film mirrored the move from frantic kinetic energy of colonial Hong Kong living on borrowed time to an oppressive study in stillness focused on longing for the past post-handover. Wong admitted in interviews that the hotel room number, 2046, where the protagonists get together to write represented the final year of Hong Kong’s ‘guaranteed‘ autonomy. The Shanghainese dialect spoken, outfits and food reflected Hong Kongers nostalgia for the post-civil war era of migration to Hong Kong as time of pain and hope.

We are properly introduced to Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan character. Su Li zhen, played by Maggie Cheung adds the real line of continuity. We know it’s 1962, and probably at least a few years since Days of Being Wild. On one level their fortunes have improved, Su now works as a secretary for a shipping company; Chow is a journalist. They are both unhappily married and find solace in each other’s company.

It’s like David Lean’s Brief Encounter but with the colour and latent emotion dialled up through copious amounts of hallucinogen. The loneliness, missed connections, the weight of time, regret, longing and rootlessness feel even more intense in this film than any of Wong’s previous films. The also a sharp contrast with the licentious and violent elements in Wong’s previous films.

I remember watching it the first time and being blown away by it visually without taking in the plot, performance and nuance layer throughout. I then revisited my old DVD copy several times later on.

Wong lays out their collective journey of discovery in finding out that their respective partners are having an affair. This builds the closeness and tension them, as does the martial arts serial that they write together.

(This always struck me as a nod the popularity of Hong Kong based authors like Liang Yusheng and Louis Cha who worked as newspaper journalists, before going on to write serials published in newspapers and magazines. Eventually their works would be adopted in Hong Kong films including Wong Kar wai’s own The Eagle Shooting Heroes and Ashes of Time; and TV series in Hong Kong, Taiwan and communist China).

In The Mood For Love redefined the way male main actor roles were portrayed in Hong Kong cinema allowing greater character depth than was previously the case with gun fu, wuxia and action comedies. It gave the post-handover Hong Kong film industry a much-needed creative shot in the arm before the ‘China-Hong Kong’ joint ventures finally bled it dry.

In The Mood For Love seemed to be the ground zero for Hong Kong mid 1960s nostalgia, such as the G.O.D ‘Bing Sutt Corner’ redesign of the Starbucks branch on Duddell Street in the central district of Hong Kong. Others got in on the act, 7-Eleven released a set of ‘Old Hong Kong’ phone charms.

Writing this post, I went back to find out what I had written about the phone charms.

There is a wider trend of nostalgia in the city which 7 Eleven Hong Kong is tapping into.

It is interesting because it reflects a widely held view that the bright new future offered by mainland China isn’t bright, attractive or desirable. This will likely cause trouble in Hong Kong for China in the future; if it rolls out from the cultural zeitgeist into political aspects of Hong Kong life.

There are times when I wish I was wrong.

Nothing jarred from memory when I rewatched In The Mood For Love, but I had forgotten the documentary footage of President De Gaulle visiting Cambodia near the end.

2046

After In The Mood For Love, 2046 follows Chow Mo wan as he attempts to get Su Li zhen out of his system. The story also connects with Days of Being Wild with Carina Lau’s character still being heart-broken over the death of Yuddy, years later.

There is a line in Tony Leung’s monologue that encapsulates 2046 the central plot premise really well.

“Love is all a matter of timing, it’s no good meeting the right person too soon or too late. If I’d lived in another time or place then my story might have had a very different ending” – Tony Leung’s character Chow Mo-wan in 2046

2046 captured post-Handover disillusionment, a community that realises its own ephemeral nature. Hong Kong’s specialness appears as suffering according to Stephen Teo – and I think he got it right.

…a visually ravishing work that’s downright apocalyptic in its suffocating sense of dread and despair. – David Pountain, Little White Lies

I finished the boxset, drained in a good way, but also disappointed, not in Wong Kar wai’s work but in the Hong Kong it now exists in. As it was once my home, I felt broken.
April 9, 2026