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.

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
June 2025
June 2025 introduction – thee and me (23) edition

Welcome to my June 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 23rd issue or as 23 would be called in bingo halls ‘thee and me’.

Basketball legend Michael Jordan wore the number 23 on his jersey when he played for the Chicago Bulls and when he returned to basketball to play for the Washington Wizards.

At the beginning of the 20th century, 23 and 23Skidoo appeared memetically as short hand for ‘to leave’ or to be asked to leave in American English. There are no satisfactory explanations about its origin.

It went on to be referenced in American plays, a Popeye cartoon, a William Burroughs story and inspire the name of a post-punk band founded by original international Stüssy Tribe member ‘Alex Baby‘.

Burroughs inspired the ’23 enigma’ which appeared in new age and alternative literature including The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

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.
- Walsh’s of Mullingar and more things dwelt on multi-generational businesses in Ireland, memetic ideas in architecture and the political act of hacking.
- Augmented retailing – how machine learning is being used beyond efficiency to actually help customers in a customer-centric approach to customer experience.
- Living with the Casio GW-9500 Mudman watch. Or, why I am wearing an old school G-Shock when smartwatches can do so much more?
Books that I have read.
- I finished Rogue Agent by Andy McDermott. It’s an easy undemanding read, ideal for a holiday. It benefits from good pacing of the plot line and feels like it’s aimed at a British working-class male reader. It feels like it would be a good Amazon Prime or Netflix series if adapted from the novel.
Things I have been inspired by.

Walk the house

Walk the house is an exhibition at the Tate Modern by a Korean artist Do Ho Suh. The exhibition features a number of works that challenge what we think about living spaces and their sense of permanence. There is a traditional Korean house reproduced in charcoal rubbed fine paper, which captures every detail of the building’s exterior.

There is a tension between the scale and ephemeral nature of the work. The traditional Korean house also contrasted with modern apartment replicas in polyester mesh curtain material and wire supports.

The material and the extreme fidelity to detail that the artist brings gives them a dream-like quality like reliving a memory.

The exhibition is on at the Tate Modern until October and I can’t recommend it enough.

Time for some new ‘Age Thinking’

There was a moment in 2023 when the IPA Census of the UK advertising industry saw no one reach retirement age in any advertising agency. Anna Sampson was tasked with writing a report about age, systemic barriers and ageism with in the industry.

This directly impacts concerns around inclusivity, diversity and representation. It’s adversely affecting the work done for clients.

I remember listening to a creative director’s challenge in getting a production company to cast old people for a film. The production company was suggesting 40 year-olds, when what required was 70-plus.

I can also recommend Matthew Knight’s interview with Anna Sampson after the publication of the report.

What’s working in raising brand awareness?

WARC published their report What’s working in raising brand awareness, which is instant click bait to strategists. The findings in the report reinforce what we already knew from The Long and the Short of it and Ehrensberg-Bass’ How Brands Grow. It cites Research by Fospha found that brands who allocated at least 5% of their budgets to awareness and consideration saw a 22% higher return on advertising spend. When higher-awareness brands boosted their spend by 10%, they saw a 13% increase in sales.

AI’s dot com moment?

Given Mary Meeker‘s heritage in the late 1990s dot com bubble as evangelist rather than analyst – I was instinctively a bit leery of the hockey stick-shaped graphs in her new presentation on AI. The report gives good context to where many of the exponential claims. Like telecoms and the web before it, the presentation is an expression of confidence in progress, not a business model endorsement per se. Look instead at the financial results of major players in quarterly and annual filings.

Chart of the month.

Global podcast advertising growth seems to have matured based on data from WARC.

Things I have watched.

Bad Day At Blackrock – the film merges film noir with the western. It has a cast dominated by award-winning actors including Spencer Tracy as one-armed veteran with judo skills. Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin play local yahoos who try and needle a new arrival. The quality of the cast, the setting in the California high desert, a ramshackle western town and the Southern Pacific streamliner train – create an amazing film. Just ten years after the end of the second world war, Bad Day at Blackrock deals with racism against Asians. In my mind, it is John Sturges best film, but always overshadowed by his later works Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.

I first saw Le Doulos (aka The Fingerman) in an arthouse cinema in Liverpool with some art student friends. It was great to watch it again, this time in Blu-Ray. Jean-Pierre Melville directed a classic piece of French New Wave cinema noir. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Silien, a complicated character whose true place in the story isn’t revealed until the final third of the movie. Belmondo’s role lights up the screen displaying movie star looks and the hardness of a gangster. The plot is carefully doled out like a well-played poker hand with enough twists and turns that kept me on the end of my seat. It’s a masterclass in storytelling.

Useful tools.

Pocket is shutting down

Pocket was a service that was integrated into Firefox by the Mozilla Foundation that allowed the user to bookmark a web a page that was used to save articles and webpages for later. if you’re a Pocket user and looking for an alternative I can recommend Pinboard. I have been using Pinboard for the best part of 15 years, so can vouch for the service.

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 discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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

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

Get in touch
June 26, 2025
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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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‘.

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.

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.

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.
May 26, 2025
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.

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.
- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
April 25, 2025