Ged Carroll

Category: media | 媒體 | 미디어 | メディア

It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.

But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.

“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”

McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.

I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.

  • 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.

  • Brand building for B2B PRs

    Brand building for B2B PRs is a write up of an interview that I did with Miles Clayton of Agility PR. We talked about the importance of brand building, client challenges and techniques.

    Participants:

    • Miles: Host (Agility PR)
    • Ged Carroll

    Miles: I’d like to welcome Ged Carroll, a guru on brand building and advertising working with major tech and consumer brands. He offers insight into the world of proper advertising: campaigns we know and love, and, where the industry is leading today.

    Welcome, Ged. Could you talk through what you’re doing at the moment and your current challenges?

    Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I am currently wrapping up an engagement with Google Cloud, working with their internal creative agency as a temporary vendor contractor.

    My work focuses on brand building: out-of-home advertising, video advertising, and events. We look at how those creative experiences come to life through major trade shows and Google-hosted events. There is also sports sponsorship; for instance, the Formula E activation. Even though it’s a B2B brand, many tactics are exposed to a broader audience than just direct customers.

    Miles: That’s fascinating. Regarding brand building, something many brands under-invest in, could you explain why it is important and how it differs from brand activation or performance marketing? I’d argue performance marketing is the obsession in B2B, but why should brand building weigh higher?

    Ged Carroll: I’ll first address why brands focus on performance marketing, then explain brand building’s importance. Brands focus on performance marketing because they are measured on 90-day periods. They can simply say, “Here’s the money spent, here’s the result.” Measures include customer acquisition cost or engagement metrics along a marketing funnel. These seem like concrete measures.

    Why do brand building? Smaller B2B brands often hesitate because of what Professor Byron Sharp calls “Double Jeopardy”: smaller brands have less market penetration and less loyal customers. Consequently, small enterprise software companies have a harder time moving the needle than larger ones. The bigger you are, the better you do; it has a flywheel effect.

    What helps sell product is “mental availability.” If I think B2B PR, you want me to think “Miles.” For chocolate, you think Cadbury. For B2B software, most developers now think AWS. Fifteen years ago, that would have been Microsoft.

    Miles: I sympathise. I’ve worked with brands famous in particular markets that struggled to break into adjacent markets because they hadn’t built the brand there.

    Ged Carroll: That creates a ‘chickenand-egg’ situation: do you invest, or, try a “cargo cult” approach replicating past success? Past success was likely a confluence of luck, timing, and good practice. Many overnight successes are decades in the making.

    Huawei seemed to spring from nowhere but is four decades old. Breaking one customer, BT, made them famous. That fame cracked the market.

    Miles: Brand building is critical. You mentioned that in a typical SaaS subscription business, you should invest about 70% in brand building?

    Ged Carroll: Heuristically, for a subscription business, about 70% should go into brand building and 30% into brand activation.

    Brand building includes PR. I ask: how can we make this idea work for earned media as well? Does the campaign scale to generate “talkability”? People discussing it at the water cooler, in trade magazines, or on social media? Paid media works harder if you have talkability around it.

    Miles: Is that what is now called integrated campaigns?

    Ged Carroll: Integrated campaigns have been around for over 30 years. People used to discuss “media neutral” strategies. The core idea is that your paid media works significantly harder if the campaign generates conversation.

    Miles: That starts with great advertising principles. The book Look Out focuses on “right brain” thinking. Can we discuss the right versus left brain tussle in advertising and how to address it?

    Ged Carroll: Marketing has changed, but our thinking is hardwired by evolution. Analytical procrastination creates cognitive load. If our ancestors sat thinking, “Do I want this or this?”, a predator would have eaten them before they decided.

    Miles: By the time you selected the next iPhone, you’re dead.

    Ged Carroll: Exactly. Logical “System 2” thinking is a difficult construct, yet B2B marketers often communicate rational benefits this way. However, we evolved instantaneous “System 1” thinking, which emotions tap into. If I feel something sharp, I instantly move. That is why we don’t remember a commute unless something significant happens.

    Current advertising often treats us as rational decision-makers, but feelings have a longer-term impact. If I feel sharp stones, I build longer-term thinking to wear sandals next time. Traditionally, advertising tapped into this. Brands like Accenture or Google Cloud attach themselves to emotional events like sports, or consumer ads use storytelling to build memory structures and automatic association.

    Miles: Absolutely.

    Ged Carroll: Procurement processes try to force a rational view, but organisational load often short-circuits this. Do you care where you buy paper clips? No, you go to the fastest place. Brand building gets you onto that procurement shortlist. Furthermore, people aren’t in the mood to buy 95% of the time. Unless you build memory structures while they are inactive, you won’t be considered when they are in the market.

    Miles: Smaller companies can’t afford TV or billboards. What do you advise? I offer thought leadership and education. Tech businesses often say, “You aren’t buying now, but do you want to learn about prompts?” Is that brand building?

    Ged Carroll: It could be. But whose brand is it building? It might just build the LLM model’s brand. My mum asks me to “Ask Google” about crochet patterns. She blames the specific websites for bad patterns, not Google. She associates Google with getting what she wants.

    With thought leadership, are you building the person’s personal brand, or the company brand?

    Miles: That’s an interesting question. I often do personal brand building for the CEO or CTO to express the business vision. But below the C-suite, say a VP of Sales, is it their brand you’re building rather than the company’s? Especially given high turnover.

    Ged Carroll: Exactly. Founder-managers are different; they stay longer. Professional CEOs shipped in by VCs might only stay a few years. B2B marketers face dilemmas, not just choices. It’s about making the best choice within those dilemmas.

    Miles: There are parallels between advertising and B2B marketing, but also budget challenges. Media has changed; 15 years ago, clients bought display ads to build brand. Now, the digital tendency is toward content and performance marketing. Is business stuck in short-term goal-orientated thinking?

    Ged Carroll: It’s not strictly a B2B or B2C problem. We measure what can be coded. Ad-tech stacks are based on interactivity, not marketing science. We assume if someone does X, Y will happen—the sales funnel concept. The sales funnel is an interesting mental model, but it comes from century-old door-to-door sales and assumes rational decision-making and perfect memory through the process.

    Miles: You’re saying consistent brand building short-circuits the funnel, leading straight to the sale.

    Ged Carroll: Yes. When you want a beer, you choose Heineken because it’s in your mind. The consideration process shrinks. Brand building gets you into that consideration process much faster. Regularity is vital to reach people the 95% of the time they aren’t ready to buy.

    Miles: Look Out discusses the narrowing and fragmentation of attention. Are there ways through that?

    Ged Carroll: We have more media opportunities now, but fragmentation occurs because we have smaller gaps of consumption time to fill—like checking a smartphone on the tube. Unless you have repetition within those small gaps, you won’t build memory structures. It’s hard to make a six-second spot emotional.

    You need an integrated approach: emotion and storytelling in long-form content (like a documentary), supported by short content that directs people to it. In B2C, this is easier using brand cues: music, mascots, fonts, colors. Build those cues and stick with them. Marketers often get bored of a campaign and change it, but the audience hasn’t seen it enough. Stick with it.

    Miles: Stick with it.

    Ged Carroll: Many consumer adverts run for years. My dad’s favorite Twix advert is from 2022. Flash has used the same dog and music for five years. Great brand-building campaigns “burn in” rather than “burn out.” Performance marketing might focus on a new feature, but it relies on the brand association already built.

    Miles: It’s been a fascinating discussion crossing advertising, brand building, and B2B marketing. My big takeaway is to encourage more right-brain thinking. Thank you for your time, Ged.

    Ged Carroll: Thank you, Miles. I look forward to chatting again.

    You can watch the interview on video here.

    I gave Miles a reading list in advance of us chatting. Here it is:

  • Forgettable cinema

    The idea of forgettable cinema came to me while reading Matthew Frank’s newsletter for The Ankler where he repeated a thought exercise that one of his colleagues posed.

    Name five films of this decade that will go down as classics. 

    Okay, I’m waiting.

    …still waiting.

    I consume cinema the way members of Soho House were famed for consuming gak. Also given my movie tastes, you may disagree with what I think of as classics.

    My answer would be:

    • Sinners – vampires in 1920s America amidst a slice of pre-civil rights life in the deep South
    • The Boy and the Heron aka (How do you live?) – A Studio Ghibli film, like everything from Studio Ghibli it’s a masterpiece. Just watch it in Japanese with English subtitles as the English dub is awful.
    • The Order – Jude Law as an FBI field agent in 1970s American Mid-West hunting white supremacists.
    • The Goldfinger – A retelling of a financial scandal in Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s. It draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal. It saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. The names had to be changed for legal reasons as the main protagonist George Tan was still alive when the film went into production.
    • The Old Woman with the Knife – A film adaptation of a Korean novel about a skilled female assassin coming up to pensionable age. It is a thriller that also addresses an aging Korean society and the invisibility of older people.

    Bonus

    • Oppenheimer – Robert Oppenheimer biopic by Christopher Nolan that is visually amazing and does some interesting things with the storytelling.
    World Cup

    But the point of the thought experiment was the most films now are forgettable cinema and most normal people would have struggled to name five future classic films.

    They are watched by millions – yet never become part of culture. This idea of forgettable cinema used to be a novel idea with only the occasional blockbuster; notably the Avatar series, falling into this category.

    Now Matthew Frank argues that forgettable cinema applies across all film making output. He described the phenomenon as ‘Cinemanesia’.

    Why do we have forgotten cinema?

    The problem might not be the films or the film making, but the change to discover and rediscover films. Frank posits that this is down to the way we now consume media.

    Pre-Netflix, we had:

    • Repeat showings at the cinema, the most prominent example of this for Londoners would be the ‘sing-a-long’ screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
    • Movie marathons and midnight screenings.
    • TV re-runs.
    • TV broadcast movie ‘festivals like Moviedrome.
    • Seasonal standards shown on television, such as Holiday Inn at Christmas time.
    • Movie rental shops like Blockbuster.

    There is comfort and familiarity in their repetition. Just in the same way that adverts build mental models, fame and salience in our heads through repeated exposure – classic films do too.

    Yet we have got to a point where storied film actor / director Robert Redford was better known amongst young adults as the person in the ‘nodding with approval’ man GIF as internet meme, than his film career. The GIF came from Redford’s performance in Jeremiah Johnson.

    By comparison Netflix provides us with a conveyor belt of entertaining enough content. We don’t get to build that depth of relationship through repetition. The business model for TV was different. The right films on the right channel had people tuning in because they wanted the familiar.

    Instead what we have now is the video algorithmic equivalent of the Spotify playlist or the shuffle play of an Apple iTunes library. Like the music our relationship is largely broken – we can choose something that suits our mood or a broad range of interests.

    For most of the time the movies and shows aren’t culture shifting.

    Hellhound as a case in point.

    Hellbound_(TV_series)_title_card

    Others like Korean drama Hellbound (지옥) have cultural relevancy for a brief while before disappearing again.

    hellbound google trends data

    I have used Google Trends as a quick and dirty way of showing this phenomenon.

    Google Trends isn’t search volume, but the rate in change of search volume and web search volume is an indicative rather than absolute measure of consumer interest.

    Channeling my inner Marshall MacLuhan: we have forgettable cinema because the medium is disappearing the message.

    All is not completely lost yet.

    All is not completely lost. I am a member of Letterboxd, which acts as a sort of ‘movies watched’ diary for me, (you can find my profile here). The Letterboxd community hosts challenges for its members like the Criterion challenge that encourages members to watch films from the Criterion collection in each of several different categories. It’s dynamic is reminiscent of the photowalks and meet-ups that built a real world community around Flickr the photo-sharing site and helped many develop an interest in photography.

    More posts similar to this one.

  • AI sovereignty + more stuff

    AI sovereignty

    A post on AI sovereignty came out of one of those times when a casual conversation suddenly has you seeing the theme in your news feeds. I was having one of them conversations with a friend over a paper cup of coffee, mentioned I’d been embedded at Google and they said ‘we can’t trust the Americans with AI, the way we did with social’.

    IBM-GS

    That opens opportunities. Chinese open source models are working in Singapore government data centres, Korean cloud computing company Naver is looking beyond its own country for clients who want an alternative to US big technology. France has gone it alone with its own defence AI – as the ultimate expression of AI sovereignty.

    Apple to fine-tune Gemini independently, no Google branding on Siri, more – 9to5Mac – Apple white labelling Gemini is similar to the Google Search deal in that its outsourcing heavy compute. But also interesting in that it’s making the AI invisible, Apple has hold of the experience and so gains its own AI sovereignty.

    The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026 | ChinaTalk – Interesting discussions on China based AI platforms on their successes and challenges. By their nature, the give China defacto AI sovereignty. Risk taking and GPUs or TPUs performance seem to be the main sources of concern. A good deal of focus on squeezing out the maximum intelligence per watt rather than scaling to infinity and beyond. Tonality wise it’s refreshing down to earth in comparison to Altman et al.

    Engram: How DeepSeek Added a Second Brain to Their LLM | rewire.it | rewire.it Blog – China making major strides to move the state of the art in LLMs forward.

    How AI Destroys Institutions by Woodrow Hartzog, Jessica M. Silbey :: SSRN – interesting if alarmist paper that indicates the need for organisations to have more control over their intentional use of AI through AI sovereignty.

    ‘South Korea’s Google’ pitches AI alternative to US and China | FT – Korea has built up positive relations in the Middle East since the 1970s when they helped on major construction and engineering projects. They would be viewed positively and as a good hedge to both the US and China from a technology dependency point-of-view. Their offer is greater AI sovereignty for Middle Eastern countries in particular, you might also winning business in Central Asia as well.

    Beauty

    Dermatologists criticise ‘dystopian’ skincare products aimed at children | Skincare | The Guardian – Dermatologists have criticised an actor’s new skincare brand, calling it “dystopian” for creating face masks for four-year-olds, warning that the beauty industry is now expanding its reach from teenagers to toddlers.

    It comes as a growing number of brands are moving into the children’s, teenage and young adult skincare market. In October, the first skincare brand developed for under-14s, Ever-eden, launched in the US. Superdrug has just created a range for those aged between 13 and 28.

    A number of brands have surged in popularity among very young social-media users, creating a phenomenon known as “Sephora kids”. These children share videos showcasing beauty products from Drunk Elephant, Bubble, Sol de Janeiro and similar brands.

    China

    Apple Reportedly Canceled Orders of Chinese iPhone 17 Pro Displays | MacRumors

    Consumer behaviour

    A Theory of Dumb: Why Are IQ Scores Suddenly Falling? | Intelligencer – a century ago, if you asked someone what dogs and rabbits have in common, they might answer “Dogs hunt rabbits,” not “They’re both mammals.”Maybe, then, all the noise and novelty wasn’t rotting our minds but upgrading them. (Studies suggest that better nutrition and reduced exposure to lead may have also helped.) In any case, the Flynn effect held steady for so long and through so many apparent threats that there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t last forever, even if, someday, somebody invented a chatbot that could do homework or Theo Von started podcasting.


    Or so thought Elizabeth Dworak, now an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s medical school, when she chose the topic of her 2023 master’s thesis. She decided to analyze the results of 394,378 IQ tests taken in the U.S. between 2006 and 2018 to see if they exhibited the same climb. “I had all this cognitive data and thought, Hey, there’s probably a Flynn effect in there,” she says. But when she ran the numbers, “I felt like I was in Don’t Look Up,” the movie in which an astronomy grad student played by Jennifer Lawrence discovers a comet speeding toward Earth. “I spent weeks going back through all the code. I thought I’d messed something up and would have to delay submitting. But then I showed my adviser, and he said, ‘Nope, your math is right.’”
    The math showed declines in three important testing categories, including matrix reasoning (abstract visual puzzles), letter and number series (pattern recognition), and verbal reasoning (language-based problem-solving). The first two, in which losses were deepest, measure what psychologists call fluid intelligence, or the power to adapt to new situations and think on the fly. The drops showed up across age, gender, and education level but were most dramatic among 18-to-22-year-olds and those with the least amount of schooling.

    The surprising truth about who the loneliest generations are – BBC News – interesting read that matches up with research I did for a consumer brand brief that didn’t happen in the end. I wrote about it more here.

    How Hustle Culture Got America Addicted to Work – Business Insider – in America, the long, steady march toward a more leisurely future came to an abrupt halt. Today, according to the international economic database Penn World Table, the German work year is an astonishing 380 hours shorter than ours — which means that Germans work almost 10 weeks less than we do every year.

    Even stranger, Americans began to glamorize their lack of free time. As the boomer generation reshaped society in its own image, it brought its ’60s, countercultural ethos to the workplace — transforming the staid, conformist office into a vessel of self-expression. Work became the central means by which you undertook to live your best life, follow your passion, and change the world. As Goldman bankers and Google idealists alike began to toil through the nights and weekends that previous generations had fought so hard to secure for them, mental-health professionals bemoaned the rise of what became known as “hustle culture.” Working long hours was suddenly the ultimate status symbol, a peculiarly American form of humblebrag. In 2017, a clever marketing study found that if you told an American you worked long hours, they assumed you were rich. If you told an Italian the same thing, they assumed you were poor.

    Waymo Has Come for the Kids in Los Angeles – The New York Times – “Here, it is not unusual for families to have multiple children attending different schools far from home. School buses, if you are deemed eligible, are limited to dropping off and picking up children at locations and times that are often unhelpful. The city bus, if there is somehow a direct route to school, comes with its own set of risks that can make parents uneasy.

    Ms. Rivera, a psychiatric social worker, is stuck at work until 6 p.m. most days, while her husband, who installs and repairs glass, comes home even later.

    The couple struggles to coordinate their jobs and their three children. They tried Uber, and Lyft, but found that those drivers tended to cancel after discovering their riders were minors. They turned to HopSkipDrive, a service geared toward students, but the drivers had to be scheduled in advance, and would leave if children were late.

    Then, a few months ago, Ms. Rivera and Alexis did a test run with Waymo.

    “It was the only option where I was like, ‘Oh my God, she can order a car, nobody’s in there, she can unlock it with her phone,’” Ms. Rivera, 42, said. “I know she’s going to be safe and she’s going to get home.” – interesting use case

    Culture

    How hip-hop is shaping the fight for Taiwan’s future | Dazed

    Design

    The Designer’s Playbook for AI Products | by Dára Sobaloju | Bootcamp | Dec, 2025 | Medium – the old rules still apply mostly

    Economics

    The Art of Slowing Down: Why the UAE’s Growth Story Is Now Impossible to Ignore – Intern Pierre

    The Incidence of Tariffs: Rates and Reality Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman (University of Chicago) – the prinicpal burden seems to be on US industry and highlights the difficulty in trying to unwind global supply chains through tariffs

    Gadgets

    How Oura Ring Capitalizes on Gen Z Women’s Health and Wellness | Vogue

    Why are MP3 players making a comeback? | Dazed – also sound quality, in particular the iPods with the Wolfson DACs

    Ideas

    Nobody knows how large software products work | sean goedecke

    Korea

    Chinese chipmaker CXMT in crosshairs of South Korean prosecutors over Samsung tech leak | South China Morning Post

    South Korea’s consumer agency to order SK Telecom to compensate 58 hacking victims – TradingView — Track All Markets

    Luxury

    Chinese luxury goes local | WARC – High-end Chinese brands are stealing a march on their Western rivals with homegrown labels that appeal to more discerning local consumers who are looking for luxury items that feel tailored to them. China’s $49bn luxury market is “changing fast”: ecommerce sales at jeweller Lapou Gold, for instance, have surged more than 1000% in the first three quarters of this year compared with two years ago. Songmont, a Chinese brand that claims to have ‘experiential’ designer bags, has grown its online sales 90% while Gucci online bag sales in China have fallen 50%, according to the Business Times. – This was inevitable when you had so many talented (and a number of mediocre) Chinese people being brought through the likes of Central St Martins.

    Six thousand new perfumes in 2025: Why manufacturers are flooding the market

    Marketing

    Coca-Cola CMO Manolo Arroyo on WPP, AI and a new era for media | The Drum – Coca-Cola’s marketing ecosystem was sprawling and complex. The business was working with approximately 6,000 agency partners globally, while the majority of its multi-billion-dollar media budget was allocated to traditional channels. Arroyo wanted fewer partners, deeper integration and a shift towards digital-first execution at scale.

    That ambition led to the consolidation of Coca-Cola’s global advertising account into WPP and the creation of Open X, a bespoke unit designed to manage the brand across markets and disciplines. Nine studios were established in key regions, housing a mix of Coca-Cola employees, WPP staff and specialist partners.

    “It’s a marketing factory,” says Arroyo. “There are more than 2,000 employees of Coca-Cola and more than 2,000 employees of WPP […] and ultimately it’s enabled us to move from a company that in 2019 was investing close to 75% of our paid media on traditional TV, to a company that’s going to end up this year putting 70% of all our paid media on digital, particularly social and influencer led, marketing. For us, it’s our new TV.”

    Materials

    Drones: Decoupling Supply Chains from China | Royal United Services Institute

    Media

    How DVDs and CDs are becoming cool again in the age of streaming – The Washington Post – artefacts are memories and are imbued with meaning in a way that streaming can’t be.

    Online

    Techrights — Baidu and Yandex Have Overtaken Microsoft in Asia | Techrights

    Security

    Outcry after French army chief’s ‘prepared to lose children’ warning | Le Monde – “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to deter the Moscow regime from trying its luck by going further,” said Mandon. “What we lack, and this is where you have a major role to play, is the strength of spirit to accept suffering in order to protect who we are.”

    Paying tribute to French forces deployed worldwide, he added: “If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children, to suffer economically because defense production will take precedence, then we are at risk.” – I don’t think that the west is ready or able to face Russia or China because of this. The war is lost before its fought

    SOF, AI, and Changing Western Conceptions of War | Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University – Each generational shift in technology impacts military operations. Consequently, a shift in military training, command, and promotion structure should follow. Much of the conversation surrounding AI makes it seem like an unprecedented esoteric concept. While this is partly true, the same was said about steam engines during the Industrial Revolution. Simply put, AI is the next technological breakthrough and there will be more after it. As Clausewitz stated, the character of war changes, not the nature of war. A willingness to adapt while following strategic tenets will enable us to weather the storm and thrive in AI generation warfare. Failure to do so will only bring obsolescence while America’s adversaries gain global hegemonic status. Proper implementation of AI will result in faster decision making, more accurate intelligence, improved resource allocation, better spatial awareness, more effective messaging, and more impactful strategies. The key to reaching this level of success is SOF. SOF is uniquely equipped and trained to implement AI quickly and effectively, delivering results that can be scaled to the rest of the military. 

    A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code | WIRED – Phreeli, the phone carrier startup is designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.

    Waking the Sleeping European Giant – by Matthew C. Klein | The Overshoot – “Europe” as a geopolitical entity does not exist. Instead of a strong and independent continent capable of securing the lives and freedoms of its citizens, Europe is divided into dozens of countries, all of which are too small individually to stand up to external threats. The problem is compounded by the mismatch between where the military resources can be found and where they are most needed. There is relatively little overlap between the places with the balance sheet capacity (mostly in the north), the places with the productive capacity (mostly in the center), the places with the largest populations of otherwise unoccupied fighting-age men (more in the south), and Europe’s front lines (largely, although not exclusively, in the east).

    Thailand’s tilt toward China tests treaty alliance with US | Defense News

    Software

    AI agents and the 90% problem – by Kyle Chan

    Exclusive | Meta Buys AI Startup Manus for More Than $2 Billion – WSJ

    Bending Spoons raids the digital graveyard for paranormal returns | FT – businesses in the Bending Spoons stable: AOL, the dial-up internet service that had been most recently attached to Yahoo, and Evernote, the virtual scratch pad. – alongside Vimeo and Brightcove with Eventbrite due to join them

    Geek Squad Agents reflect on 20th anniversary of Y2K – Best Buy Corporate News and Information

    The Politics Of Superintelligence

    Wireless

    China Issues First Penalty for Starlink Use in Territorial Waters | GCaptain

  • Shin Woo-seok

    Korean director Shin Woo-seok seems to be on a tear at the moment. Like American directors Spike Jonze and Hype Williams, his music videos for the likes of K-pop group New Jeans mean that is work now has a global audience.

    Shin’s videos are interesting because they have such a strong style. The closest analogue that I can think of in the west are Chris Cunningham and Hype Williams. Shin Woo-seok is one of the few true auteurs currently in film.

    One of the key themes that have been running through his work is the idea of urban fairytales. These are a mix of Korean storytelling together with Korea’s odd relationship with christianity.

    A quick detour on christianity and Korea.

    Korea has about 15 million christians, just under 6 million of them are catholic. While there was knowledge of christianity from China, it took off in the 19th century and growth was modest prior to 1945.

    Christian churches played a key role in building out educational institutions and provided a social circle to people moving into the cities from the countryside or another city. Whereas buddhist temples would be in places of natural beauty, churches were urban. Christianity in Korea also has its issues including evangelical protestant sects clashing with buddhists.

    All of this means that Korean society has a synthesis of confucianism, buddhism, protestantism and catholicism.

    Urban fairytale storytelling

    Shin Woo-seok combines effective elements of Korean storytelling that you see in 16-episode Korean dramas. But in films and music videos.

    • Power gap relationships (for instance handsome but aloof CEO falls for young pretty employee, child and guardian, religious figure and believer)
    • Troubled family life including nasty in-laws
    • Childhood trauma
    • Crazy plot twists (often in revenge-related dramas)
    • Catharsis / emotional release
    • Confession / forgiveness
    • Redemption, justice / payoff for effort put in

    All of which is underpinned by a couple of concepts:

    • Jeung: a deep bond that is enduring and may be affectionate belongingness or emotional in nature. The sense that they are your ‘people’. It’s based on everyday proximity, like eating lunch with the same work colleagues everyday or neighbours who are in and out of each other’s homes. Western analogues might be Friends or the 1990s BBC TV drama This Life.
    • Han: a kind of sorrow or lingering resentment that never leaves a character. for instance traumatic humiliation. These attenuated and stretched out for the characters. This amps up the tension and increases the pay-off at the end of the story.

    More on 16 episode Korean drama mechanics here

    • Episodes 1-4: the core hook (shocking incident, the high concept underpinning the show etc.
    • Episodes 5-8: you see into the characters lives and their personality traits come out. Relationships may deepen, the roots of secrets happen,
    • Episodes 9-12: emotional and dramatic plot twists (betrayals, separations and revelations come to the fore) sucking the emotionally invested viewer in
    • Episodes 13-15: building to emotional climax as there is a major plot reveal or showdown and audience emotional release.
    • Episode 16: plot loose ends are tied up and the aftermath of episodes 13-15.

    Shinsegae Christmas film 2024

    Shin Woo-seok’s association with New Jeans made him an obvious choice for Korean department store Shinsegae to do their Christmas film. Shin’s interpretation of what a Christmas brand film should look like is a world away from John Lewis and is a great example of his urban fairytale concept.

    No spoilers, but Hello Rudolph is an unusual take on the Santa story and making children happy.

    The Christmas Song

    This Christmas while Shinsegae had a collaboration of stars from Seoul’s equivalent to Broadway, Shin Woo-seok worked with Google Gemini on a seasonal film. Google worked with creatives around the world such as artists in Indonesia and Australia. The common theme was how AI could be used creatively. Think Apple’s Shot on iPhone campaign, but across different mediums and countries.

    Shin Woo-seok’s collaboration was the Korean part of the campaign. In The Christmas Song, Shin uses Gemini with subtlety and the lightest of touches to handle the special effects in the film.

    The urban fairytale theme comes through in this film as well and there are clear stylistic similarities between the Shinsegae and Google films.

    More Korean-related content can be found here.