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.

  • May 2025 newsletter

    May 2025 introduction – two little ducks (22) edition

    Welcome to my May 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 22nd issue. 22 is known in bingo halls and the Spanish national lottery as two little ducks.

    Double Duck

    In France, 22 is the equivalent of 5-0 in the English speaking world as slang for the police. 22 is an important number for people who believe in numerology. In Hong Kong, 22 is associated with good fortune. This is down to the number sounding similar to ‘easy’ or ‘bright’ in Cantonese.

    I hope that you are tricked into thinking I am bright based this newsletter, so let’s jump in. Inspired by catching up with my old DJing partner Griff, this month I enjoyed the unashamedly joyous pumped-up sounds of Blackpool’s AZYR at the Boiler Room x TeleTech Festival in 2023. In particular the transition at the end of the set between Frankyeffe – Save me and Infectious! – I need your lovin’. (Extra trainspotter points if you knew that Infectious! is a homage / remake of N.R.G’s The Real Hardcore from a year earlier). Wear your headphones, it might be divisive playing the set out loud in the office. More bangers from AZYR here.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Predicting market share through share of search volume and what the rise of AI likely means.
    • Reaching a precipice in hydrogen power and trends in Chinese skincare amongst other things.

    Books that I have read.

    • Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. Williams account of her time in Facebook had become the most discussed book of the spring in my social circle. I wrote a long review of it here.
    The Road to Conscious Machines
    • The Road to Conscious Machines by Michael Wooldridge examines the profound cultural impact of generative AI, which is currently experiencing a surge in both its cultural influence and practical applications. Drawing parallels to the internet’s transformative impact in the mid-to-late 1990s, where it permeated various aspects of society and fostered rapid adoption, Wooldridge traces the evolution of generative AI as a phenomenon that emerged gradually over the past half-century. Throughout the book, Wooldridge provides a comprehensive historical overview of AI, including the periods of research stagnation known as AI winters. This historical perspective equips readers with a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of AI, enabling them to approach AI adoption with a well-informed perspective.
    • As I finish this newsletter during the bank holiday weekend, my light reading is Rogue Asset by Andy McDermott. McDermott comes from a long line of British authors like Jack Higgins, Len Deighton, Frederick Forsyth and Mick Herron who provide novels aimed at a shrinking pool of readers – men. At least, if one is to believe what’s said in the media. Rogue Asset hinges on the premise that the UK has a unit which assassinates the countries enemies on a regular basis. Think somewhere between The Troubles era Det and the modern deep state trope. Our hero is snared into the plot by being discovered on the run thanks to his online behaviour – which is attributed to GCHQ; (but isn’t as mysterious as it sounds because of the programmatic advertising technology stack). So far so good for what it is. I will let know if it goes downhill as a read next month.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Mmrytok

    Limitations are often the mother of invention. That seems to be the theory behind mmrytok. Mmrytok allows you to do one post a day. It doesn’t support HTML formatting, it doesn’t allow you to link out and doesn’t have a newsfeed. So it’s easy-to-use because it’s less sophisticated than Geocities was. In this respect it is to social media and blogs what Punkt is to smartphones. In an always-on social time, I have found it liberating to use. You can see my page here. I heard of Mmrytok thanks to Matt Muir’s great newsletter Web Curios.

    No, AI isn’t making you dumber

    Australian documentary maker ColdFusion put together an interesting video essay on How AI is making you dumber.

    Yes, you could argue that under certain attributes the population isn’t as smart as they have been in the past. Just last month I shared an article by John Burn-Murdoch. In the article he shared data of a longitudinal trend across countries and age-groups struggling with concentration, declining verbal and numerical reasoning. The problem with Burn-Murdoch’s article vis-a-vis the ColdFusion video is the timeline.

    His article charts a decline further back than the rise of generative AI services. Mia Levitin in an essay for the FT attributed the decline in reading to the quick dopamine hits of social media content.

    A college professor interviewed by The Atlantic put the decline in reading amongst his undergraduate students put it down to a practice in secondary education of atomising content. Pupils in high schools were assigned excerpts, poetry and news articles to read, but not complete books. This has impacted the size of vocabulary and grasp of language that students starting university now have.

    James Gleick

    This isn’t new territory, James Gleick in his book Faster documented the massive acceleration of information through the late 20th century and its effects on the general public. The underlying accelerant was described by Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants as the technium – a continuous forward progress due to a massively interconnected system of technology.

    There were concerns in research as far back as the late 1980s that television could be adversely affecting children’s reading comprehension and attention spans.

    TL;DR – with generative AI you could become dumber, if you use it unwisely – but the problem lies with all of us and what we chose to do with our personal agency.

    CIA advertise for Chinese spies

    The CIA commissioned a couple of high production value adverts that they’ve been running on social media channels. The adverts are designed to encourage Chinese government employees to come forward as an agent. The sales pitch is about taking control.

    CIA China advert

    A translation of the Chinese tagline: ‘The reason for choosing cooperation: to become the master of (one’s own) destiny‘. More details from the FT about the campaign here, and here’s the two executions currently running on YouTube.

    It remains to be seen if the campaign will be effective. The Chinese Ministry of State Security managed to roll-up the CIA’s spy network back in 2010-2012. Up to 30 informants in China were executed.

    Montirex

    montirex

    Merseyside sports-inspired lifestyle brand Montirex have published a film telling the brand story from its origins to the present day. The brand is expanding beyond its Merseyside roots to get national and international sales.

    Trust, attitudes and use of artificial intelligence

    A 2025 global study covering some 48 countries was conducted by KPMG in association with the University of Melbourne. Some key insights from the report. Consumer generative AI is being used instead of enterprise options by workers. Generative AI adopters still have self-perceived low AI skills but that doesn’t slow their adoption. There is higher adoption and trust rates in emerging markets than in developed markets.

    Pro and anti-trust AI issues solidifying

    Year-on-year we are seeing an increase in both distrust and trust for specific AI use cases, indicating that it is becoming a polarising subject. The lowest trust levels is in tech-savvy Finland. More here.

    Chart of the month. 

    McDonald’s Restaurants saw a decline in sales. This was down to low income consumers spending less, while middle class earners still weren’t going into McDonalds. Normally when there is a recession, McDonalds should benefit from the more well-off trading down to McDonalds. Instead, fortunes have diverged into a ‘k-shaped’ recession. Lower income earners are hit, while middle classes aren’t. What Axios called the ‘McRecession‘.

    McDonald's quarterly sales growth

    Things I have watched. 

    Tony Arzenta (also known as Big Guns). The film is an early 1970s gallo film. French star Alain Delon appears in this classic retribution story based in Milan. As Tony Arzenta, Delon exacts revenge on the former bosses who killed his family by accident in a botched assassination attempt to prevent him from retiring.The film uses a wintry Milan as a good atmospheric backdrop for the action that plays out in a series of shoot-outs and car chases. It’s John Wick before it was even conceived. Delon brings a tension that other stars of the era like Charles Bronson failed to do in similar roles. As Arzenta’s targets flee across Europe, he goes through Germany and Denmark to catch up with them.

    Sansho the Bailiff – as a film Sansho the Bailiff comes encumbered with a weight of praise. It is highly rated by film critics and Martin Scorsese had it as one of his must-watch films for young film makers. Director Kenji Mizoguchi assembled an ensemble cast of Japanese actors to tell a story of family hardship and poverty. Kazuo Miyagawa is key to the the production, providing a signature look to the cinematography. There is a tension between the emotional rollercoaster of the story and the reflective nature of the scenes portrayed – I don’t want to say too more, except that even the character actors like Kikue Môri (who plays a pivotal role in the plot as a priestess) are amazing in the film.

    Warfare – I was a bit leery of watching Alex Garland’s Warfare after watching Civil War which was strong on aesthetics and emotion, but weak in terms of the creative conceits involved in making the story work. Warfare is the collective accounts of a US military unit during a two-hour fire fight. The story is told from multiple perspectives in real-time. The film captures the stress and boredom of inaction as well as what you would normally expect from this kind of film.

    Useful tools.

    Reddit Answers

    Reddit Answers – alternative to Gigabrain that I recommended back in March. Like Gigabrain, Reddit Answers looks like the kind of knowledge search product that we failed to build at Yahoo! twenty years ago (or NORA as Microsoft has been calling the concept for the past few years). Reddit Answers is powered by Google Vertex AI.

    Process online data like its peak web 2.0 all over again

    While WordPress installations come with RSS enabled as standard and is something that can then be disabled, many types of sites aren’t RSS enabled. And where they are the web devs will often disable it just because. RSS app will create an RSS feed for websites that don’t have it. This allows you to pull it into data processing using something like Pipes. RSS app starts at $9.99 per month and goes up to $99.99 a month. Pipes starts at free and goes up to $79 per month.

    The sales pitch.

    I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency.

    now taking bookings

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements in Q4 (October) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my May 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and I hope you enjoyed the last bank holiday until August.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Careless People – A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn Williams

    Careless People has been a much-discussed book in the circles that I am involved in. In the book, Wynn Williams outlines her career at Facebook / Meta in what was at the time a nascent public policy team. The term careless people is a highly appropriate reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

    Careless People

    While I was reading Careless People, The Great Gatsby was having a moment. It was the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby’s publication, and the ‘careless people’ quote was considered apropos for the times we are living in, in particular the Trump administration’s actions.

    “They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

    Anyway, back to Careless People, Wynn Williams outlines her experience from pitching to Facebook for a role that didn’t exist but was needed, through to navigating the global growth Facebook was undertaking at the time. The challenges that Wynn Williams faces can be broadly broken down into four areas (with specific allegations):

    • Sexism and in/out group prejudice
    • Sexual harassment (Joel Kaplan)
    • Toxic managers (Sheryl Sandberg, Elliot Schrage)
    • Poor management judgement (lying to Congress and providing assistance to authoritarian regimes)
    The money quote

    What’s interesting about the book depends on the reader. Much of the experience was relatable to my own earlier experience at Yahoo! The long days, changing priorities, travel (which was much more of a thing pre-COVID), office politics and fiefdoms, the constant unintended consequences of inventing the future. Secondly, the Facebook management have bought into what Barbrook and Cameron termed The Californian Ideology in their 1995 essay of the same name.

     “…the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”

    However, I feel fortunate to have worked with a mature leadership who knew what they didn’t know and realised that they lived in a global village. But that might be down to the fact that Yahoo! by the time I had got there had a fair share of ups and downs.

    Careless People reminded me a lot of Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, written by Jennifer Edstrom and Martin Eller. Although they are separated by some 25 years between each being written. Both books tell the story of an imperfect organisation scaling to an opportunity— I have written about Barbarians here. Wynn Williams is the better storyteller, providing a coherent and engaging path through the narrative.

    I can recommend Careless People as a good book to read, I finished it off over a bank holiday weekend whilst nursing a sprained ankle. For people in advertising and marketing it won’t be that surprising, it confirms many things that were ‘common knowledge’ in the industry. For the general public, it will be shocking given the facts that the author marshals together.

    Would I have thought reading Accidental Empires or Barbarians Led by Bill Gates in the late 1990s that Bill Gates would have transformed from the soulless ‘borg leader’ portrayed to the voice of relative reason he is today? Probably not, there might be hope for Zuckerberg at least out of the cast of characters in the book.

    Wynn Williams is now exploring the edges of policy and artificial intelligence and is likely someone worth keeping an eye on.

  • Share of search volume

    Les Binet did some sterling work thinking about share of search volume as part of his ongoing work looking at marketing effectiveness.  

    Les Binet

    In order to understand share of search volume, we have to go back to 1990 when former advertising veteran and professor John Philip Jones[i] published a paper in the Harvard Business Review[ii] and a subsequent book[iii].

    Jones’ research around the linkage between advertising and sales by looking at advertising including tools of his invention STAS (short term advertising strength)[iv] and AIC (advertising intensiveness curve). One of Jones’ key findings was the linkage between a brand’s share of voice and its market share. One of the biggest predictors of brand growth was ESoV (excess share of voice). ESoV is when a brand has a share of voice in excess of the proportion needed to maintain its market share. 

    During economic good times this might be down to an increase in brand building marketing spend, not only advertising and public relations, but also influencer and sports sponsorships with variable[v] results. 

    During recessionary times[vi], it might be maintaining brand building marketing spend when the competitors are cutting back. 

    Part of this brand building work overlaps with increasing marketing penetration through increasing the number of places where the brand is available. During the 95 percent of time that you are not in a buying mindset when you pass a product display in a supermarket it’s a billboard – doing the brand building work. 

    Jones’ findings were later validated by Peter Field and Les Binet’s work on marketing efficiency[vii], and in the summation of research[viii] from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science by Byron Sharp. 

    Share of search volume

    The clever thing that Les Binet[ix] did with share of search volume[x] was find it as a predictor on the likely time when ESoV was likely to impact with a growth in market share AND, he found that the share of search volume change mapped neatly on to market share change.  

    The challenge is that different sectors have different times between a change in share of search volume and the corresponding change in market share[xi].   

    “For mobile phone handsets, Binet further ventured, share of search leads market share “by about six months” as a performance indicator – offering marketers a chance to adapt their strategies if needed if a decline is expected.

    “If the brand … had access to the share of search data at the time, it would have had a six-month warning that share of market was about to turn around,” Binet said. “That’s an incredibly useful metric.”

    Share of search’s predictive quality for energy brands, Binet explained, was noticeably shorter, at just “nought to three months.”

    For automakers, by contrast, share of search anticipates market share by “nine to 12 months,” he said – a significant timeframe for marketers to potentially refine strategies.

    Breaking out data for Volkswagen, the auto marque, provided corroboration that sales forecasts based on share of search “are incredibly close to what actually happened,” Binet said.”

    Search considerations

    Much earlier in my career I worked on the Yahoo! Search business, back when the company had its own search technology and sold its own search advertising. One of the things that we found was that while overall search volume could be modelled accurately for the year based just on January’s search data – unexplained search volume peaks still needed to be ironed out by looking at rolling three-month values instead. 

    I found it interesting that Binet’s findings didn’t seem the same degree of ‘peakiness’ and was a much more valuable predictor once the time lag factor between share of search volume and market effects were known. 

    Share of search makes sense from a logical perspective. Many below-the-line activities have been focused on search in terms of aiding SEO to increase share of market opportunity, rather than an explicit appreciation of the impact on the share of search volume and consequently change in market share. My friend James Warren used to talk about public relations and related earned media activities such as organic social media as ‘offline SEO’. This thinking was incorporated into Interpublic’s ‘inline’ concept[xii].

    Future search

    Share of search volume is complicated by a number of factors that are down to changing consumer behaviour. 

    Google’s focus on mobile upended the precision that we could search with and what we could search for, out went Boolean operators that could track down a highly relevant web page from 12 years ago. But we could now find the nearest coffee shop with wi-fi. YouTube[xiii] due to its explanatory content became the second largest search engine globally (excluding China). 

    A good deal of product search has migrated to sites like eBay, Walmart[xiv] and Amazon[xv]. Part of the reason being is that their site search is good enough, they have a wide range of stock and speedy delivery. Amazon also benefits from Amazon Prime which drives customer purchase, but isn’t without controversy[xvi].

    Social and generative AI have unlocked new challengers to Google. Search on social platforms has become the go-to approach for many young people. Google acknowledged this when asked by Business Insider[xvii].

    “we face robust competition from an array of sources, including general and specialized search engines, as well as dedicated apps.”

    The move to social is about tapping what we called back in my Yahoo! days ‘knowledge search’[xviii]. Search startups like Gigabrain have tried to tap into this market by providing a better search function of Reddit forums. 

    Finally, the move towards consumer usage of generative AI tools based on large language models has created new competitors to Google including Perplexity and ChatGPT Search. Google itself has adopted LLMs in its own search offering and seen an increase in both revenue and profit from search advertising[xix].

    Share of model vs. share of search volume

    In order to try and understand new LLM-driven search, innovator agencies like Jellyfish and Deft[xx] have looked towards understanding share of model. Share of model tries to understand how LLMs perceive a given brand, in a similar way to the way SEO rankings held a similar place in search engine marketing. Like SEO, they look to understand whether the brand has sufficient optimisation of their digital properties to feature in recommendations by the models. 

    What share of model doesn’t give us is the consumer insight provided by share of search volume. Share of search volume is consumer behaviour driven and advertising influenced; share of model is algorithmic behaviour driven and training influenced. 

    [i] John Philip Jones profile (United Kingdom) WARC

    [ii] Jones, J.P., (1990) Ad Spending: Maintaining Market Share (United States) Harvard Business Review

    [iii] Jones, J.P. (1995) When Ads Work: New Proof That Advertising Triggers Sales (United States) Jossey Brass

    [iv] Hansen, F., Olsen, J.K. STAS and Other Short Term Advertising Effect Measures (United Kingdom) WARC

    [v] Siu, A. (February 2025) The Honey scandal is a ‘wake-up call’ for the creator industry’s affiliate partnerships

    [vi] (2023) The power of excess share of voice (United Kingdom) Thinkbox

    [vii] Binet, L., Field, P. (2013) The Long and the Short of it: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies (United Kingdom) Institute of Practitioners in Advertising

    [viii] Sharp, B. (2010) How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know (United Kingdom) Oxford University Press

    [ix] (2020) Share of search can predict market share (United Kingdom) WARC

    [x] Binet, L. (2021) Share of Search (United Kingdom) Les Binet channel on YouTube

    [xi] (2020) Share of search can predict market share (United Kingdom) WARC

    [xii] Warren, J. (2008) Back to school (United Kingdom) PR Week (republished on PR 2.0)

    [xiii] (2010) YouTube Revenue Approaching $1 Billion Per Year [REPORT] (United States) Mashable

    [xiv] Levin, M.R., Lowitz, J.N. (November 2020) Grocery Drives Walmart Online Orders (United States) Consumer Intelligence Research Partners LLC (CIRP)

    [xv] Evans, B. (2023) Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business (United Kingdom) Benedict Evans

    [xvi] Stoller, M. (2021) Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie (United States) BIG by Matt Stoller

    [xvii] Delouya, S. (2022) Nearly Half of Gen Z Prefers TikTok and Instagram Over Google Search (United States) Business Insider

    [xviii] Carroll, G.M.S. (2021) Yahoo Answers (United Kingdom) renaissance chambara

    [xix] Morris, S. (2025) Alphabet shares gain as Google search boots profits (United Kingdom) Financial Times

    [xx] Crocombe, I. (2025) Share of Model (United Kingdom) Deft

  • April 2025 newsletter

    April 2025 introduction – key to the door (21)

    Welcome to my April 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 21st issue.

    21 marks a transition to full adulthood in various countries, hence ‘keys to the door’ in bingo slang. In Chinese numbers, symbolism is often down to phrases that numbers sound like. 21 sounds like “easily definitely fine” – indicating an auspicious association with the number.

    For some reason this month I have had Bill McClintock’s Motor City Woman on repeat. It’s a mash-up of The Spinners – I’ll be Around, Queensrÿche – Jet City Woman and Steely Dan – Do it Again. It’s a bit of an ear worm – you’re welcome.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Cleaned up copy of an interview I did as a juror for the PHNX Awards. More here.
    • From the challenges faced by Apple Intelligence to drone deliveries and designing in lightness.
    • I thought about how computing tends towards efficiency along the story arc of its history and its likely impact on our use of AI models.

    Books that I have read.

    Currently reading
    • The Leftover Woman by Jean Kwok. The book is a complex thriller. The story is straight forward, but the books covers complex, fraught issues with aplomb from misogyny, the male gaze to the white saviour complex.
    • The Tiger That Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot focused on the use of numbers in the media. But it’s also invaluable for strategists reading and interrogating pre-existing research. As a book is very easy-going and readable. I read it travelling back-and-forth to see the parents.
    • A Spy Alone was written by former MI6 officer Charles Beaumont. I was reminded of the dreary early 1970s of George Smiley’s Britain in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the tone of the book. However A Spy Alone is alarmingly contemporary, with oblique references to UK infrastructure investments in the UK attached to a hostile foreign power, private sector intelligence, open source intelligence a la Bellingcat, nihilistic entrepreneurs and a thoroughly corrupted body politic. Beaumont’s story features a post cold-war spy ring in Oxford University echoing the cold war Cambridge spy ring. Beaumont touches on real contemporary issues through the classic thriller, in the same way that Mick Herron uses satire.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Big brand advertising isn’t as digital as we think.

    Trends in TV 2025 by Thinkbox threw up some interesting data points and hypotheses.

    • Advertising is eating retail property. A good deal of search and social advertising gains is not from traditional advertising, but traditional retailing, in place of a real-world shop front. This is primarily carried out by small and medium-sized enterprises. I imagine a lot of this is Chinese direct-to-consumer businesses. 80% of Meta’s revenue is not from the six largest advertising holding companies.
    • Viewership across video platforms both online and offline have stabilised in the UK. (Separately I heard that ITV were getting the same viewership per programme, but it’s been attenuated with the rise of time-shifted content via the online viewership.

    World views

    WARC highlighted research done by Craft Human Intelligence for Channel 4 where they outlined six world views for young adults. While it was couched in terms of ‘gen-z’, I would love to see an ongoing inter-cohort longitudinal study to see how these world views change over time in young people. This would also provide an understanding of it it reflects wider population world views. BBH Labs past work looking at Group Cohesion Score of gen-Z – implies that this is unlikely to be just a generational change but might have a more longitudinal effect across generations to varying extents.

    Anyway back to he six world views outlined:

    • ‘Girl power’ feminists. 99% identified as female. About 21% of their cohort. “While they’re overwhelmingly progressive, their focus tends to be on personal goals rather than macro-level politics. They underindex heavily on engagement with UK politics and society.”
    • ‘Fight for your rights’. 12% of cohort, 60% female, educated and engaged with current affairs. “Although they consider themselves broadly happy, they believe the UK is deeply unfair – but believe that progress is both necessary and achievable.”
    • ‘Dice are loaded’ are 15% of their cohort. 68% female. “Feeling left behind, they perceive themselves to lack control over their future, and are worried about finances, employment, housing, mental health, or physical appearance.”
    • ‘Zero-sum’ thinkers comprise 18% of their cohort. Over-index at higher end of social-economic scale, gender balanced. “…they lean toward authoritarian and radical views on both sides of the political spectrum.”
    • ‘Boys can’t be boys’ are 14% of the cohort and 82% male. Supporters of traditional masculinity.
    • ‘Blank slates’. 20% of their cohort, all of them male. “They aren’t unintelligent or unambitious, but they pay little attention to matters beyond their own, immediate world. While some follow the news, their main focus is on just getting on with life”.

    More here and here.

    FMCG performance

    At the beginning of March, Unilever abruptly replaced its CEO. Hein Schumacher was out, and in the space of a week CFO Fernando Fernandez became CEO. That showed a deep internal dissatisfaction with Unilever’s performance that surprised shareholders AND the business media. Over the past decade Unilever has leaned hard into premium products and influencer marketing.

    “There are 19,000 zip codes in India. There are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them,” Fernandez said. “That’s a significant change. It requires a machine of content creation, very different to the one we had in the past . . . ”

    Fernandez wants to lean even harder into influencer marketing. But I thought that there was a delta on this approach given his goal to have higher margin premium brands that are highly desirable.

    “Desirability at scale and marketing activity systems at scale will be the fundamental principles of our marketing strategy”

    Meanwhile Michael Farmer’s newsletter had some datapoints that were very apropos to the Unilever situation.

    “…for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year. The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010. Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year). They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years. Digital and social advertising, of course, have come to dominate the advertising scene since 2010, and it represents, today, about 2/3rds of all advertising spend.”

    Mr Fernandez has quite the Gordian knot to try and solve, one-way or another.

    Automated communications and AI influencers

    Thanks to Stephen Waddington‘s newsletter highlighted a meta-analysis of research papers on the role of automation and generative AI in communications. What’s interesting is the amount of questions that the paper flags, which are key to consideration of these technologies in marketing and advertising. More here.

    LinkedIn performance

    Social Insider has pulled together some benchmarking data on LinkedIn content performance. It helps guide what good looks like and the content types to optimise for on LinkedIn. Register and download here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The FT had some really interesting data points that hinted at a possible longitudinal crisis in various aspects of reasoning and problem solving. There has been few ongoing studies in this area, and it deserves more scrutiny.

    reasoning and problem solving

    In his article Have humans past peak brain power, FT data journalist John Burn-Murdoch makes the case about traits which would support intelligence and innovation from reading, to mathematical reasoning and problem solving have been on a downward trends. The timing of this decline seems to correlate with the rise of the social web.

    If true, over time this may work its way into marketing effectiveness. My best guess would be that rational messages are likely to be less effective in comparison to simple emotional messages with a single-minded intent over time. This should show up in both short term and long term performance. A more cynical view might be that the opportunity for bundling and other pricing complexities could facilitate greater profit margins over time.

    Things I have watched. 

    Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is a film that I can watch several times over despite the film being over 75 years old now. Detective Murakami’s trek through the neighbourhoods of occupation-era Tokyo and all the actors performances are stunning. The storytelling is amazing and there are set pieces in here that are high points in cinema history. I don’t want to say too much more and spoil it for you, if you haven’t already seen it.

    Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex – Solid State Society – this is a follow on to the original GiTS manga and anime films touches directly on the challenges faced looking after Japan’s aging society. Central to the story is the apparent kidnapping over time of 20,000 children who can’t remember who their parents are. The plot is up to the usual high standard with government intrigue, technical and societal challenges.

    The Wire series one – I stopped and started watching The Wire. Films better suited my focus at the time. I finally started into series one this month. The ensemble cast are brilliant. The show is now 22 years old, yet it has aged surprisingly well. While technology works miracles, the slow methodical approach to building a case is always the same.

    How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster – is a fantastic documentary covering the career of architect Sir Norman Foster. I remember watching it at the ICA when it originally came out and enjoyed watching it again on DVD. Foster brings a similar approach to architecture that Colin Chapman brought to his Lotus cars. When we are now thinking about efficiency and sustainability, their viewpoints feel very forward-thinking in nature.

    Useful tools.

    Fixing the iOS Mail app

    You know something is up when media outlets are writing to you with instructions on how they can remain visible in your inbox. The problem is due to Apple’s revamp of the iPhone’s Mail.app as part of its update to iOS 18.2.

    So how do you do this?

    Open Mail.app and you can see the categorised folders at the top of your screen, under the search bar.

    Find each tab where an a given email has been put. Open the latest edition. Tap the upper right hand corner. Select ‘Categorise Sender’. Choose ‘Primary’ to make sure future emails from this sender are in your main inbox view.

    That’s going to get old pretty soon. My alternative is to toggle between views as it makes sense. Apple’s inbox groupings are handy when you want to quickly find items you can delete quickly. Otherwise the single view makes sense.

    Fixing mail app

    Inspiration for strategists

    Questions are probably the most important tool for strategists. 100 questions offers inspiration so you can focus on the right ones to ask for a given time.

    The sales pitch.

    I have been worked on the interrogation process and building responses to a couple of client new business briefs for friends (Red Robin Ventures and Craft Associates) and am now working a new brand and creative strategy engagement as part of an internal creative agency at Google.

    now taking bookings

    If you’re thinking about strategy needs in Q4 (October onwards) – keep me in mind; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me on YunoJuno and LinkedIn; get my email from Spamty to drop me a line.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my April 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into spring, and enjoy the May bank holidays.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.

    Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.

  • Apple Intelligence delayed + more

    Apple Intelligence delayed.

    Apple announced that features showcased during the 2024 WWDC enhancing Siri would be delayed. Apple Intelligence delayed represents a serious breach of trust for Apple’s early adopters and the developer community. On its own whilst that’s rare from Apple, it’s survivable.

    Sad Mac icon

    Apple has made other FUBARs: the Newton, some of the Performa model Macintosh computers in the 1990s, the Apple Pippin, Apple QuickTake cameras and the Apple Cube computer from 2000.

    The most recent game-changing product has been the AirPod series of headphones which have become ubiquitous on the tube and client video calls. But there has been a definite vibe shift around perceptions at Apple.

    • Recent product upgrades to the MacBook Air were given a muted welcome. Personally I think Apple came out with a banger of a product: the M4 processor in the MacBook Air M1 form-factor at the Intel MacBook Air price of $999.
    • The Vision Pro goggles are at best a spoiler on the high-end market for Meta’s VR efforts, and an interesting experiment once lens technology catches up with their concept. At worst they are a vanity project for Tim Cook that have a very limited audience.
    • Conceptually Apple Intelligence told a deceptively good story. Let others develop the underlying LLMs that would power Apple Intelligence. This solution is partially forced on Apple due to the mutually exclusive needs between China and its other markets. But it also meant that Apple had a smaller AI challenge than other vendors. On-device intelligence that would work out the best way to solve a problem and handle easier problems without the latency of consulting a cloud service. More complex problems would then be doled out to off-device services with privacy being a key consideration. The reality is that Apple Intelligence delayed until 2027 because of technical challenges.

    Key commentary on the Apple Intelligence delay:

    Chungking Express.

    One of my most loved films is Chungking Express directed by Wong Ka wai. It was one of the reasons that I decided to take up the opportunity to live and work in Hong Kong. This YouTube documentary cuts together some of the oral history about the making of the film. The story of the production is nuts.

    Drone deliveries

    Interesting documentary by Marques Brownlee on the limited use cases and massive leaps in innovation going into drone delivery systems.

    Effective Marketing for Financial Services

    Les Binet presents a financial services-specific view on marketing effectiveness. It has some interesting nuances, in particular how brand building is MORE important in subscription services.

    Tony Touch set

    Tony Touch did a set for Aimé Leon Dore. It’s an impeccably programmed set.

    LUCID Air focus on efficiency

    It’s rare to hear the spokesperson for an American car company quoting Colin Chapman’s design philosophy – which he shared with Norman Foster.