Category: newsletter | 通訊 | 뉴스 레터 | ニュースレター

Why a newsletter on a blog? I realise that there is a certain incongruity with the whole idea.

I had held off on turning this blog into an email newsletter, in the same way that other bloggers I respect have done over the years. This isn’t because I don’t like platforms like SubStack or the late lamented Revue that was sunset by Elon Musk owned parent Twitter.

An email newsletter constrains what I would cover and when I would cover things.

The reason for my newsletter move was inspired by LinkedIn’s newsletter platform as a way to reach people with my content that wouldn’t normally be reading a blog. It also allowed me to engage with professional peers and colleagues. I reproduce it here, because LinkedIn could sunset this functionality at the drop of a hat.

I have a formula which tries to remain true to myself and the ethos behind this blog. A wide range of items that inspired me:

Things that I have written.
Books that I have read.
Things that I have been inspired by.
Things that I have watched.
Useful tools that I have discovered.
The sales pitch. (As I have to put food on the table and pay the rent)

I do these once a month.. Spiritually, it comes from the same place as the rest of this blog:

renaissance – a range of esoteric interests covered because everything is connected and can fuel inspiration elsewhere.
chambara – originally inspired by Japanese samurai films, but keeping a weather eye on Asia for inspiration.

If there’s anything you would like to see covered by my newsletter, feel free to get in touch.

November 2025 issue 28
November 2025 introduction – (28) in a state edition

I am now at issue 28, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘in a state’. In a state or in a right state usually carried a sense of trepidation in Irish households – it usually describes an odd emotion exhibited by the person being discussed.

It is often associated with stupor, shock, chaos, agitation or anxiety.

“There was a car crash just up the road; thankfully no one was injured but the driver was in a state.”

It could also be used as a tone of disapproval for a person’s grooming and outfit.

In Cantonese 28 has positive connotations and is interpreted as “easy to be rich” or “easy prosperity”. The pronunciation of ‘2’ (yi) sounds like ‘easy’ and ‘8’ (ba) sounds like ‘prosper’ (fa).

This edition’s soundtrack is from The Hideout, a former boutique that used to be based in Golden Square and specialised in Japanese streetwear brands like Neighborhood, A Bathing Ape, WTAPs etc. Each Christmas time they used to have this mixtape put together by Andrew Hale on heavy rotation. Since then it’s become a seasonal go to in Chez Carroll.

( Hale played keyboards for Sade. He was a member of Japanese experimental supergroup Water Melon (ウォーター・メロン) alongside Gota Yashiki, KUDO, Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h, and provided soundtracks for computer games and films.) Ok, I will stop nerding out now.

Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- Mico + more things – Mircrosoft’s AI companion has a bit of Clippy and a bit of Willo the Wisp (who was the brand character of British Gas) to it. But as a fluent object it’s not bad.
- Sixt Halloween ad + more stuff – a selection of great creative from Anthropic, Sixt, Apple and Life 360.
- Toyota FJ Land Cruiser + more stuff – Toyota’s genius move to launch a smaller footprint Land Cruiser with fantastic utilitarian details in the design. The downside is that we are unlikely to see any of them in the UK.
Books that I have read.
- I have been reading my Dad’s copies of Gerald Seymour’s books back when I was a child. My friend Ian introduced me to his later works and character Jonas Merrick. Crocodile Hunter explains the back story why a caravan-loving middle-aged ‘underachieving’ MI5 officer had been given so much latitude. Merrick then becomes the metaphorical crocodile hunter of the title in a game of wits with an experienced veteran of the Syrian civil war and Iraq conflicts in the environs of Canterbury.
- 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
- As I was reading this article in the FT How this 31-year-old made $250mn in 30 months | FT – oil trading with Russian oil. A few things crossed my mind. Amongst them being that it sounded like a pitch for prospective series two of McMafia. Will the protagonist fall out of a window from a Moscow skyscraper?
Things I have been inspired by.

I managed to spend some time with my long time colleague Calvin Wong on a stopover before he headed to Portugal for Web Summit.

It might be merely a rationalisation of my own biases, after the later part of the 2010s being a lull in the creative web. 2025 seems to be spawning more creative things built on the web. My current favourite is Radiooooo shocking brand name, but an amazing site. You can navigate a map of the world, click on a country and listen to music from that country. Not only that but can select whether you are open to fast, slow tempo songs or ‘weird’. My current favourites are Japanese, Thai and Cambodian pop of the 1960s.

The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness by Hyesoo Lee, Vilma Todri, Panagiotis Adamopoulos & Anindya Ghose is an early piece of research on the effectiveness of generative AI created visual adverts. The research had a number of findings:
- When visual gen AI was used to modify existing ads originally created by human experts, its performance fell short of the original ads.
- When visual gen AI was used to create ads from scratch, those ads outperformed both the human expert–created and gen AI-modified ads.
- When everything including the product package created by gen AI in the advertisement was associated with higher ad effectiveness.
- But consumers still aren’t fans, when gen AI involvement in ad generation is disclosed, advertisement effectiveness decreases. Disclosure is becoming a legal requirement in many markets and cramping ad effectiveness.
These oddities could be down to how well their models performed with modified prompts, rather than a repudiation of human effort. And all of these nuances are likely to change as models are improved. This doesn’t mean that generative AI is the best advertising and packaging designers. But it does depend a lot on the aesthetic / taste of the human prompter even more.

Verity Relationship Intelligence newly released annual report for 2025 highlighted a number of interesting take-outs from its research. The things that stood out to me were:
- 20% growth every year since 2021 for client complaints about efficiency.
- 58% of what clients link efficiency to is non-operational. Efficiency,
  is a partnership quality rather than a production metric – kind of like the idea of synchronicity. Increasing ‘juniorisation’ of teams, hybrid working, and smaller budgets have created an operational squeeze, while automation and rigid systems stripped back the human touch that clients value most.
- The chasm opening up between rising client satisfaction (currently 8.0) and declining team satisfaction (7.3) in their agency team threatens work quality, client retention and employee churn. The problems stem from agency culture: little agency leadership, recognition or care.
Chart of the month.

Ipsos did a 30-country survey to answer the question ‘Is Life Getting Better? comparing attitudes to 1975 versus 2025. Nostalgia is a great standby for trend reports as the past is constantly been repackaged.

What the Ipsos report hints at is widespread dissatisfaction with current political and economic systems in Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and many Asian countries. Part of this maybe down to what Ipsos termed ‘the middle class in crisis‘. The contrary outlier was South Korea.

As tough as the Korean economy is now, the country has made a huge step change over the past five decades: shaking off a military dictatorship and undergoing massive economic development.

The UK’s intense desire for nostalgia hints at a wider unease, what The New Statesman called the Netflixification of politics.

Things I have watched.

Apple TV+ have followed up Slow Horses this season with a second adaptation of a Mick Herron novel Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is the protagonist unearthing a very British conspiracy bought about by a suspicious fire and abducted child in Oxford. It is made to the same high standard as Slow Horses and I have found it to be must-see TV.

Dominic Cooper plays a blinder in Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier. The tangled storyline of conspiracy, paranoia and secrets reminded me of vintage TV series like 24 and The X Files. What separates The Last Frontier is the detail, its scenic shots of an Alaskan winter are beautiful.

Useful tools.

Koolyz is a directory / portal of online tools that I found via Matt Muir’s excellent newsletter. It helps on all the finicky tasks like compressing PDFs or moving an image from one format to another. It is also worth looking at The Creative Cheat Sheet for visual inspiration, writing and presentation building tools.

I got to try out Hubspot‘s AEO grader here. It is a good starting point to understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini ‘see’ and ‘understand’ your brand.

Finally LUMAscapes is a series of charts by LUMA that give you the main players in agencies, AI, OOH, martech and more categories as convenient PDFs.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my November 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Christmas. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for Christmas cake – we usually make one in November. It is then allowed to sit prior to serving at Christmas. If looked after correctly it can keep for several months. I grew up with and love fruit cake but your mileage may vary.

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

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
November 26, 2025
October 2025 issue 27
October 2025 introduction – (27) gateway to heaven edition

I am now at issue 27, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘gateway to heaven’.

27 inspired an urban legend of the ’27 club effect’ where a ‘statistical spike’ in fatalities affected musicians, actors and other artists. However in reality there is no statistical spike though Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin all died aged 27.

In the I Ching, the 27th hexagram is associated with sufficient physical and spiritual nourishment – good advice for anyone since we’re going into winter.

This edition’s soundtrack is Coco – I Need A Miracle over Dreadzone – Little Britain put together by MH1. I used to love mashups and bastard pop in the early 2000s to 2010s, especially A plus D and their Bootie nights, which I got to see at the DNA Lounge back when I had to travel to San Francisco while working at Yahoo!. They built a whole genre of out of what would normally be trick recordings you might have played once in a DJ set like Evil Eddie Richards You Used to Salsa.

MH1 carries this on the same grand tradition as A plus D and sent me down a memory hole in my iTunes collection.

Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- Golden Mile – a collection of documentaries and films that caught my eye, from the last days of the Golden Mile complex that was a centre of the Thai diaspora in Singapore to the oral history of the Google Docs development team.
- Nvidia ban in China and more things – a selection of stuff that I found of interest online including articles on Nvidia’s fraught relationship with China as a market.
- Tahoe and more things – from the inside steer on Nexperia and the importance of strategic writing for using LLMs to Apple’s imperfect macOS Tahoe.
Books that I have read.
- Clown Town by Mick Herron is the latest instalment in the Slow Horses series of books, on which the Apple+ TV series are based. Without plot spoilers, I can tell you that it’s up to the high standards of the earlier books. Herron is as critical of the current Labour government as he was of their conservative party predecessors.
- I am just starting in on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s history of the great depression 1929. I hope to update you next month on whether it’s a book that I would recommend.
Things I have been inspired by.

I managed to spend some time with fellow former Yahoo Nick Fowden and we discussed AI futures and the altar of marketing efficiency and performance media over effectiveness and brand building.

Mercedes goes back to luxury

Mercedes-Benz put on a special event in Shanghai that looked like an attempt to reboot the brand. Star of the show was the Mercedes Vision Iconic concept car, this looked like the vehicle the relaunched Jaguar brand would want to build. The grill looked as if it came off a vintage Mercedes 600 ‘Grosser’ and was a world away from the current nadir of the car brand.

Understanding influencer payback is also about understanding the caveats, risks and current limitations in optimisation

The IPA published effectiveness data on (paid) influencers, it is is great to have this data set and shows the continued role in improving the advertising industry. You can expect to see these headlines trumpeted by influencer and PR agencies. BUT, it is worthwhile going beyond the headlines and into the deck presented. My takeouts from the data presentation:
- It’s a promising, but limited sample. However overall there seemed to some commonality in results amongst the European markets compared.
- On sample selection, the presentation itself says: “Based on sample definition, no campaigns are included where influencer spend was present but did not produce a result at some level therefore 0-25 ROI index likely to be significantly under-reported.” This is key because reading the data at face value gives an overly-optimistic picture of likely influencer campaign success.
- The data presented represents bad news for paid social campaigns in particular, and it highlights their relatively poor RoI from the Profit Ability 2 study. What it means: Expect some of the influencer spend to come from the experimental pot within the social platform advertising budget.
- Long-term multipliers for Influencers are the highest of any channel in the data, but the tiny difference between television and influencers are not significantly large to be definitive. So further research could see this relationship flip.
- The numbers are averages, but Influencer ROIs are much less likely to be ‘average’ with (high and low) extremes alongside outliers much more present (and this is with campaigns giving 0-25% RoI filtered out). There is a much higher risk in terms of spend versus reward, which a responsible agency partner should be disclosed to clients upfront. This huge variance also mirrored in the kind of results seen in Chinese social commerce campaigns as well. What it means: You can’t duplicate success and optimise in the same way as you can by using testing for TV advertising and the like. So for businesses like Unilever that are putting half their spend into influencer marketing – its a high risk endeavour with limited risk mitigation strategies.
- There isn’t intra-influencer category analysis based on follower size. Getting paid reach will still be critical, so social platforms will still win.
- The research doesn’t cover B2B sectors but subscription revenue model technology clients (Adobe, Canva, Monday.com, Grammarly etc.) may take some hope from the RoI achieved by consumer-focused telecommunications brands.
TL;DR: At the moment influencer represents the worst attributes of both earned and paid media. The uncertainty of earned media, the higher upfront cost of paid media. What it means: be wary of over-promising influencer campaign success, set realistic expectations about the likely wide variance in results. Keep an eye out as further data expands and clarifies the picture.

Chart of the month.

European attitudes to video games

This month’s chart comes from data provided by the European Commission’s Director General CONNECT (Communications Networks, Content and Technology). The breadth and quality of research that they do is really useful to people in my line of work.

The sentiment around video games is similar to what you would have seen around television in previous decades. So video games aren’t in aggregate seen as great for society, but not the complete pox on people that you would see if you ran the same survey for social media platforms.

Things I have watched.

Jean Giraud aka Moebius was a graphic novel artist drawing in the bande dessinée tradition. Moebius Redux is an hour long documentary of Giraud’s career through to the mid-2000s. In it is a who’s who of comic book legends including Stan Lee and Mike Mignola – the creator of Hellboy. It even has an amazing original soundtrack by former Kraftwerk member Karl Bartos.

I remember seeing The Satan Bug as a child and enjoying it immensely. I also read the book that it was based on as my Dad had built up a collection of Alistair McLean and I devoured them from age 11 onwards. I went back and revisited decades later to see if I would still enjoy it. I did, but for different reasons. The premise is based on the paranoia of annihilation that was a main part of the cold war zeitgeist. The wrinkle in the story is that it’s about germ warfare rather than nuclear bombs. Adult me saw the plot as ridiculous, but the cinematography, location, set design and wardrobe floored me. The high security compound of ‘Station 3’ and the various interiors were triumphs of mid-century modern design. The scenery and locations were in the California desert making it an ideal canvas for John Sturges who had previously shot Bad Day at Black Rock and The Magnificent Seven. The Satan Bug was also the start of helicopter based cinematography thanks a newly developed steady cam mechanism.

Following on in the same vein I watched The Andromeda Strain. Just six years separated from The Satan Bug, but stylistically so different. The Michael Crichton novel has a much more coherent story. Much of it is told through jargon and multi-media formats such as a computer driven plotter and a ticker tape running across the screen in the second scene of the film. Where The Andromeda Stream loses out is in its cinematography and style. The set design feels lazy compared to The Satan Bug, the cinematography is competent but workman-like.

I watched the original Russian film adaptation of Solaris. It has been years since I have seen it. Its one of them films that you can watch three times and still pick up new details. Andrei Tarkovsky focused on storytelling rather than special effects which are used very sparingly. I still love that the Soviet city of the future was footage of early 1970s Tokyo. Watching it now the film feels more deconstructed.

The last film this month is an indulgent one of mine. Searchers 2.0 is a modern-day neo western film that thumbs its nose at the Hollywood system. The story follows the revenge quest of two former child actors against their former abuser, a screen writer on the film set. Alex Cox made the film on $100,000 budget with Roger Corman as producer. UK film fans probably remember Alex Cox as the presenter of Moviedrome. he is an accomplished director, screenwriter and the author of 10,000 Ways To Die – the best guide ever written to spaghetti westerns.

Slow Horses season five has been a must-watch TV moment for me. The show runners manage to keep the essence of the books with some creative flair.

Useful tools.

Optimising for macOS Tahoe

Moving from macOS Sonoma to Tahoe meant changing up the versions of utilities I like to use. Titanium Software make OnyX, Maintenance and Deeper.
- OnyX y use of OnyX goes all the way back to 2002 and 10.2 Jaguar, various versions of it throughout that time to now. It was very good for doing startup disk related maintenance tasks.
- Maintenance provides a general performance tune-up including rebuilding databases and clearing obscure caches.
- Deeper is for fine tuning hidden settings across different applications on your Mac.
All three are donationware so be sure to give Joel what you can.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my October 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for barm brack – an Irish Hallowe’en specialism. Let me know how you got on baking it.

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

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.
October 29, 2025
September 2025 newsletter
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition

Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.

When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.

For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.

This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.

Right, let’s get into it.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- Decoding the complex and contradictory data around crime and its likely impact on consumer opinions.
- A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
- I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
- I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
- Y our Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.

Election-winning opacity in influencer relations

I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.

What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.

Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.

‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.

I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.

Chart of the month.

Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.

The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.

Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.

I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.

I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.

Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?

What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.

It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.

Things I have watched.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.

Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.

I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.

PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.

Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.

Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.

Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.

Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe

2001 Nights is a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.

Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.

I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.

When The Last Sword Is Drawn is a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.

The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).

Useful tools.

Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac

I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.

One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.

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

Get in touch
September 26, 2025
August 2025 newsletter
August 2025 introduction – duck and dive (25) edition

This is the 25th edition of Strategic Outcomes. The first edition was quickly bashed out in a hotel room. And people signed up, and kept coming back. As I write this August 2025 has been a weird month with the weather throwing all the seasons at once at us from storms to heatwaves.

The bingo call for 25 – ‘duck and dive’ would have been equally appropriate descriptor for 2025 to date – with massive changes across current affairs, the economy and culture. It seemed to make more sense than calling this a ‘silver edition’.

25 evokes memories a of childhood Irish card game played with my Uncle and Granny on the formica top of the farmhouse kitchen table. Something I frequently did during August nights after a day’s work cleaning up after animals, feeding livestock and other tasks.

For this month’s musical accompaniment I can recommend St Etienne Take Me To The Pilot produced by Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, which hits different to previous St Etienne records.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- From the changing nature of motorsport fandom to do clients actually care about WPP’s organisational changes and new CEO?
- Hacks for moving city, from my time uprooting my life from London to Hong Kong and back again. These were and edited version of notes from an email I wrote years ago for a acquaintance who was moving to Shenzhen, soon after I had made the jump to Hong Kong. He is no longer with us, you may get some value out of them.
Books that I have read.
- I am currently reading David McCloskey’s Moscow X. The slow reading pace is more down to me rather than the accessibility of the book which is up to McCloskey’s usual high standards.
Things I have been inspired by.

Escalating trade tensions

GLG shared a discussion on escalating global trade tensions. I had a number of takeaways from it.

US trade war with China has devolved into a dangerous stalemate where neither side can back down without losing face.

The core conflict stems from China’s state-led industrial policy clashing with the rules-based system. The Trump administration’s rhetoric triggered China’s historical “century of humiliation,” making compromise politically difficult.

Key takeaways from the discussion:
1. China’s top demands aren’t about tariffs.
- Respect is paramount: China’s first demand for restarting talks is that the Trump administration speaks to them with respect and stops insults.
- Sovereignty is key: China insists on discussing Taiwan, which it views as its “most important and most sensitive issue”.
1. The U.S. is overstretched.
- Not enough negotiators: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has only about 250 total employees.
- Outsourcing is unworkable: Using pro bono law firms to assist raises problems with security clearances and conflicts of interest.
1. The non-China strategy is different.
- A softer tone: The administration’s approach to allies like Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam is more ‘measured’.
- Quick deals: preliminary agreements with these nations that focus on tariff reductions, while punting more complex issues negotiations down the road.
1. Sector-specific US risks loom large.
- Technology: export controls on advanced chips and dumping of Chinese-made legacy chips used in cars and white goods.
- Autos: Highly integrated supply chains that cross borders, are very vulnerable to tariffs.
- Pharmaceuticals: Tariffs on generic drugs could become unprofitable and cause them to disappear from the U.S. market.
The state of AI in business

The Gen AI divide: state of AI in business 2025 | MIT was published and created an AI stock sell-off based on its top-line factoid: 95% of companies get zero RoI from GenAI.

But there was more interesting takeaways in the report that paint a more nuanced picture:

The “Learning Gap” is the real barrier.
- The primary reason AI pilots stall is that most systems don’t retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.
- While 70% of employees prefer AI for simple tasks like emails and summaries, 90% choose a human colleague for complex projects because of the learning gap.
Buy, don’t build.
- Internally developed tools fail twice as often as COTS ones.
- The data shows a clear winning strategy: pilots built through strategic partnerships with external vendors are twice as likely to reach full deployment as those built internally (a 66% success rate versus 33%).
Companies are making misplaced bets.
- An estimated 70% of AI investment is directed at high-visibility sales and marketing functions.
- The highest and clearest ROI in underfunded “back-office” areas. Some firms are saving $2-10 million annually in customer service and document processing.
These three points are good news for consultants, productivity suite vendors and enterprise software companies that really understand their clients workflow pain-points.

Chart of the month.

Actually two charts. The first one is a decline in conscientiousness. Depending who you believe this could be down to our always-on lives thanks to social media and smartphones, OR, a victim of the broken social contract that young adults (aka generation z) feel has happened.

A corresponding decline in US consumers reading for pleasure tends to imply a smartphone-related effect rather than broken social contract as cause. Also broken social contracts are depressingly common generation-by-generation.

Things I have watched.

The Iron Prefect was a film that I watched purely on the basis of a talk Alex Cox gave as part of the special features on the Blu Ray. The film is an account of a Fascist-era official sent to combat the Sicilian mafia who ends up finding how endemic and self-defeating his mission is. It is based on the story of Cesare Mori and some of his most famous acts such as the siege of Gangi. Cox talked about its similarity to The Mattei Affair – which I can see to a certain extent, in terms of the themes explored. The film features Claudia Cardinale and Giuliano Gemma – two greats of Italian cinema. But the real star is the scenery.

Hong Kong Hong Kong is a tragic romantic triangle about mainland migrants with a social realism bent. It was shot in 1983, but didn’t have the escapism of more popular films in the Hong Kong box office at the time.

The film is similar in feel to the likes of the kitchen sink dramas of 1960s kitchen sink dramas like This Sporting Life, and John Huston’s boxing drama Fat City. It shows a different side to Hong Kong cinema than western audiences were used to. It came out the same time as Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain and Jackie Chan’s Project A. Hong Kong Hong Kong benefited from the free flow of rostered actors attached to TVB – the dominant broadcaster being able to work for Shaw Brothers film productions. Protagonist Alex Man, like other stars of his era including Chow Yun-fat and Simon Yam Tat-wah came through TVB’s acting school that nurtured talent from all walks of life from first-jobbers, to former models and policemen.

Man brought experience from television and stage roles to his film performances which makes Hong Kong Hong Kong more powerful.

Finally 1980s the city of Hong Kong itself plays a fantastic role to the drama. From the opening tracking shot taken somewhere above Kennedy Town to the composite buildings and Shangri-La Hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui – to migrant slums that were being dismantled as public housing improved. Hong Kong has continually changed from an architectural point of view, though the pace has slowed recently. Some of the shots pulled at me deep inside as only a home you deeply cared about can.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty featured Alex Man as a classic wuxi swordsman. The star is Pat Ha Man-jing who would have been 18 or 19 at the time. The film feels more ‘Japanese’ chambara romance than your usual Hong Kong film. Ha’s cleavage is on display – which is unusual as the Hong Kong film industry is more socially conservative. Violence is ok, but risqué films like Sex and Zen with a category III rating often had Japanese actresses in them like Mari Ayukawa and Rena Murakami. The Japanese actresses appeared because of the stigma in Hong Kong society affected actresses careers more than their male counterparts AND the ongoing popularity of Japanese adult films in Hong Kong.

An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty shows the two sides of Shaw Brothers productions: great actors and inventive cinematography on one side, together with cheap skating on set design like giant marine plywood panels.

Shaw Brothers had been wounded by the founding of Golden Harvest, he power of the studio system was waning, the Hong Kong new wave movement was taking off and soon ‘mainland collaborations’ would dismantle much of the ecosystem that made Hong Kong cinema great.

I really wanted to like Butterfly on Amazon Prime Video. It had a great cast including Daniel Dae Kim, Piper Perabo and Charles Parnell. It was shot on location in South Korea. It had an interesting take on the privatisation of intelligence operations. But it felt empty and definitely less than the sum of its parts, which is a shame given how well Amazon did on its Tom Clancy adaptions. Butterfly was let down by poor storytelling.

Useful tools.

Yet another LLM. Anara was something I have trialled a little and found useful due to its heavier weighting towards citing research papers compared to the other main LLMs out there. Useful for account planners as another tool in our arsenal to be used in parallel with the more mainstream tools out there, rather than as a substitute.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for an indian summer, despite some of August already feeling autumnal.

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

Get in touch if you have any tips or thoughts.
August 28, 2025
July 2025 newsletter
July 2025 introduction – two-dozen (24) edition

What a scorcher of month it turned out to be. This edition marks the second anniversary of Strategic Outcomes.

24 or two dozen as they call it in the bingo halls, is considered be unlucky in Cantonese because it sounds like ‘easy die’. All of which made the number symbolizing a violent political thriller TV series all the more appropriate.

24 was the name of a must-see action drama that launched in the aftermath of 9/11. The show was quite prophetic in some ways given that the pilot was shot in March 2001 and production began in earnest in July that year.

Jack Bauer fought terrorist and drug cartel attacks over nine seasons and sold countless DVD boxsets outselling Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring. Bauer’s ‘the ends justify the means’ approach caught the zeitgeist of enhanced interrogation and the real-time plot with political intrigue kept audiences hooked.

Much of this month for me has been dominated by generative AI in terms of the projects that I have been working on and what I have been learning on Coursera.

This month’s summery soundtrack for the newsletter comes from French DJ Folamour playing joyful house music that would be very on-point for the early to mid-1990s sets I used to play during the mid-week at the long-gone and largely unlamented Sherlocks bar and Bonkers night club in Merseyside.

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- I have been thinking a good deal about business cards and their relevance in 2025, there maybe some reasons for optimism given wider trends happening at the moment.
- Apple developer focus given last year’s problematic pivot to go big on AI.
- The Hong Kong government banned a Taiwanese game Reversed Front: Bonfire. The game portrayed the Hong Kong government in a poor light alongside their Beijing counterparts. But gaming and politics aren’t as bizarre bedfellows as it would seem on the surface.
- Optimising my video calling experience took me back through my past life as a DJ to find an appropriate headphone and mic solution for long work calls.
- Design collaborations and other things including philosophical approaches to building machine learning systems and early smartphone demos.
Books that I have read.
- I read Charles Beaumont’s A Spy At War, the follow-on to A Spy Alone which I read earlier on in the year. Beaumont’s story moves from the UK to Ukraine, tracking the lines between Russian corruption and what the Russian intelligence services would call the ‘useful idiots’ of right leaning populist politics. Beaumont doesn’t disappoint with this second story related to his Oxford spy ring, the unnerving aspect of it all is how similar many of the characters seem to public figures. I will let you draw your own conclusions on that.
Things I have been inspired by.

Cartier exhibition

I got to go to the Cartier exhibition at the V&A museum. At first I was thinking about passing it by when I looked at the exhibition catalogue. The photography seemed flat and lacking in lustrousness. The exhibition needed to be seen in person to appreciate the art of the jeweller and gemologist respectively.

Mid-year trends

Dan Frommer and the team at The New Consumer & consumer goods focused investor Coefficient Capital dropped their mid year trends presentation which is free to download.

There were a number of outtakes for me
- Economics
  - US consumer spending held steady, even as consumer sentiment fluctuated – this might be due to inflation, but you didn’t see a corresponding dip. This was also mirrored in steadily life satisfaction statistics.
  - Consumer price elasticity for ‘Made in America’ products is low.
- Marketing
  - 97% of US consumers surveyed knew it was Amazon Prime day before shopping – which is a phenomenal level of awareness.
  - 98% of US consumers are aware of AI. Which adds more credence that AI’s place in culture is similar to that of the web and the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s – even amongst people who aren’t actually using it. It is consistently in 0.25% of news coverage since the launch of ChatGPT.
  - Awareness of Ozempic was at 58%, Viagra was at 62% – which says a lot about the power of long-term brand building.
- Pets
  - Pets are 40 percent of male respondents best friend, but 40% of women view pets as their child.
Chart of the month.

Smart Communications released a report looking at health CX and patient attitudes. There was a considerable variation between consumers by age on trust in AI across both concerns about data privacy and the overall ethics involved. But a majority of consumers in every age group thought that AI would maintain or improve health communications channels.

Things I have watched.

Network as a 1976 film was quite prescient. It covers the tension between network television’s quest for eyeballs and the ‘just the facts’ era of Walter Cronkite and his team at CBS Evening News. We have a network executive who sees views in the breakdown of a news reader at the twilight of his career. It also feels like an allegory on modern day influencers and the tyranny of slavishly following the algorithm.

Inspired by an article in the Financial Times, I rewatched Barry Lyndon for the first time in years. The first time I watched it was out of curiosity for a few reasons
- It’s based on the 19th century novel of an Irish hero who bounces through various adventures and eventually dies in a debtors prison.
- It was a Stanley Kubrick film. Barry Lyndon was made in 1975, after A Clockwork Orange and prior to The Shining.
- It was similar in concept, if not in execution to the ‘cinéma du look’ movement that I have watched and written about previously in this newsletter. Conceptually ‘‘cinéma du look’ and Barry Lyndon share a common concept, both were looking to replicate an aesthetic. ‘Cinéma du look’ was inspired by the golden age of TV advertising and music videos, Barry Lyndon was inspired by 18th century art.
Barry Lyndon like the later cinéma du look films were critiqued for putting style over plot lines. And like cinéma du look, Barry Lyndon has become more appreciated with age. The stylistic aspects of Barry Lyndon have appealed to TikTokers and gained new life. I hope the same happens for cinéma du look works that equally deserve the exposure.

When I was a child, my time was spent split between living on my uncle’s farm in Ireland and the Mersey basin which was a thriving petrochemical hub with giant silver cathedrals to human ingenuity and process engineering. Climate change wasn’t in the public zeitgeist. You would see the stack flares as you drove past plants at night and the mercury discharge lamps dotted along inspection walkways.

Friends Dad’s worked abroad in the petrochemical industry or in the north sea. It was adventure, it had a hint of danger. That was solidified in my mind when I saw Hellfighters, where John Wayne cosplayed as an analogue of Red Adair. The film is basically an oilfield western BUT to six year old me – giant oil fires seemed cool. Wayne’s character Chance Buckman was an undisguised portrayal of Red Adair and Red Adair Co. Inc even down to Adair’s signature red overalls.

Yes its got misogny and it’s exactly the same as every other John Wayne film from the 1960s in terms of plot and pacing. Wayne even used many of the same co-stars over-and-over again.

To my more practiced eye as a former plant process operator turned ad man; parts of oilfield scenarios are a bit hokey. However, the modernist design aesthetic, spectacle and the fire portrayed in the film continues to impress all these years later. The engineering and plant portrayed in the film means that it’s one of those movies my Dad and I watch together, most of the time talking about the equipment used and other minutiae of the film.

As a film it also does a good job of documenting the oil infrastructure of the Texas panhandle in the 1960s.

If I had any criticism it is that the film needs a good reprint with a 4K re-scan. I can also recommend Red Adair: An American Hero which was his authorised biography – we had a well-thumbed copy in control room of plant I briefly worked in prior to college.

Useful tools.

Image format conversion

For long time Mac users the go to tool for image conversion is Lemke Software‘s GraphicConvertor. Thorsten Lemke is a legend in the Mac software community, supporting his application since the mid-1990s; back when being a Mac user was an endangered species. I remember first getting a copy on a Mac computer magazine disc in college and found it invaluable ever since. Even now it supports obscure image formats that you won’t have seen in decades like PICT. However if you don’t have access to your own machine and software, a couple of online web services I can recommend at a pinch are SVG to PNG and CloudConvert.

Visualisation tool

I have just started playing with MyLens AI and it’s conceptually interesting enough for me to recommend experimenting with it yourself.

The sales pitch.

I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my July 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward for the rest of the dog days of summer.

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

Get in touch
July 30, 2025