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.

  • September 2024 newsletter

    September 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my September 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 14th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong and dealt with Chinese accounts, the number 4 was considered unlucky, rather like 13. 14 is even worse due to it sounding so similar to ‘is dead’ or ‘will be dead’ or ‘will be certain to die’ depending on the variant of the spoken language used. In other cultures the symbolism of 14 is more nebulous at best.

    Brooklyn Beacon "tribute in light"

    September got off to an odd start, we seem to have had all the seasons, rather than settling gently into the run up to autumn. I managed to avoid traditional mooncake during mid-autumn festival celebrations that I attended. My waistline was thankful for the #ROMO (relief of missing out).

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Being on the ground in Merseyside as the Southport stabbings unfolded gave me a different perspective on things.
    • How generative AI features are affecting the Google search experience and much more.
    • Not the target demographic – or how marketers and agencies are leaving money on the table.
    • The mooncake crisis in China.

    Books that I have read.

    My reading for September 2024 slacked off a bit as real world obligations kicked in.

    • The Old Woman With the Knife worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work.
    • Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
    • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    AI proficiency.

    DLD munich 19 - Monday

    Section, the education company founded by Professor Scott Galloway has AI proficiency as a key element in its offering. They have put together research to show how low the current level of proficiency is. They consider this research a rallying cry; but the results could also be reflective of a technology adoption curve that isn’t moving at the speed of hype, which is what came through in my examination of public discussions during the summer.

    Secondly, research from the Upwork Research Institute implies a higher a higher adoption rate of generative AI, but lower success rate with the outputs generating inefficiencies rather than productivity gains. Part of the problem seems to come from organisational leadership and the way generative AI is being implemented.

    WARC have published a report which looks at What’s working in generative AI from a marketing perspective. Some of the ideas like synthetic data in market research are not quite in prime time yet and generative AI’s large carbon footprint can’t be ignored.

    Digitalisation and brands

    Harvard Business Review published research that indicated a weaker relationship between profit share and brand in certain types of businesses. On the face of it, this supports Scott Galloway’s ‘end of brand‘ hypothesis. WARC covered the research paper in depth pointing out that for each percentage gain in market share highly digitised businesses gain 0.19% increase in profit compared to 0.26% in less digital businesses. This seems to be due to a multitude of factors:

    • Efficiency gains due to digitalisation have an effect on the existing profit prior to the market share. Efficiency is the main selling point of much digital automation from CRM systems to performance advertising.
    • Market power of larger companies ( a la Google).
    • Perceptions of quality – digital-only companies might look more reputable due to the lack of real-world signals to the contrary

    Market share (and brand) still matters, but it hits different depending on the business. B2B and growth hacking business approaches gain less than consumer orientated businesses. A larger dataset of Kantar-sourced data analysed by Oxford University researchers found that better brand effects were down to ‘difference’  as in how customers see – and experience the brand – as being different enough from competitors.

    FEAST

    FEAST

    FEAST is an occasional magazine and curated set of events all about food and its ingredients. If you are a strategist working with a food or beverage client it’s well worth exploring their archive as a source of inspiration for insights given its in-depth and thoughtful arts-based approach.

    Streaming plateau

    I finally got to dive into Ofcom’s Media Nations research report. I recommend that if you are involved in the advertising-media industrial complex in any way shape or form, spend some time reading it. On the plus side, survey respondents consider accurate balanced news as a key part of the public service mandate of radio and television. Secondly during 2023, broadcast brought many of us together still for key events including the first episodes of tentpole series.

    SVoD
    Ofcom

    More dispiritingly, I realised that amongst the tentpole TV series was season 23 or I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. TV advertising revenues declined faster than online video revenues grew and subscription based video on demand take-up plateaued. It’s pure speculation on my part, but this might have been reached because COVID accelerated adoption.

    Finally, as a film fan who buys Blu-Rays of films that don’t appear on streaming services consistently, the amount of time watching DVDs and and Blu-Rays have a very small usage across all age groups. I don’t think that’s good news for arthouse and cult cinema.

    Things I have watched. 

    The Crow – less of a remake of the iconic Brandon Lee film and more of a reinvention of the franchise. It’s a good if unengaging film, many of the young adult audience I went to see it with won’t have the original or the comic books as a reference point. It has been described on other parts of the net as ‘the worst movie of the year‘. This is probably a bit unfair; there is a lot of ‘straight to Netflix’ dross out there. FKA Twigs character in the film grew on me as I watched it.

    The last time I saw The Terminator in a cinema was in a double bill with the then newly launched Terminator 2 at the then new Odeon multiplex in Bromborough. I got to see it again thanks to a 4K restoration. Despite having seen The Terminator several times on tape, DVD and Blu-Ray – this time it hit different. It hit harder and it was all down the way the screen filled my vision and the punch of the sound track. Despite in-home cinema set-ups, you just can’t get at home unless you live in a large industrial unit sized home. The analogue special effects held up surprisingly well and the plot was just as taunt as I remembered it. There was less people in the cinema than for the screening than for The Crow.

    As I write this, I have just watched episode one of the latest series of Slow Horses. It has gotten off to the high standard set by the previous series and book. Time to put on my Roddy Ho t-shirt again.

    Useful tools.

    Table Capture

    If you’ve ever tried to cut and paste a table and data from a website into an spreadsheet and then spent the rest of the afternoon parsing it in cell-by-cell you will appreciate the benefit of this browser extension.

    Humaniser for GPT created content

    If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve used services like Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini as a starting point for copy, or to summarise documents. UndetectableGPT looks at providing alternatives to ‘tell-tale’ phraseology in generative AI copy.

    Data analysis

    Groupt will take a CSV file and categorise the data including visualisation, so you only have to focus on wrapping a narrative around it to fit into the wider storytelling of your presentation.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from January 2025 onwards; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my September 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into October and crispness of a bright autumn morning!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • August 2024 newsletter – unlucky 13?

    August 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my August 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 13th issue. When I lived in Hong Kong; four was the unluckiest number. 13 featured in confucian beliefs and in tai chi. In western culture 13 has a similar reputation. The status of 13 goes all the way back to Babylonian times. A baker’s dozen contained 13 items; rather than the usual 12 items.

    This time last year, I had a daft idea to put together stuff I’ve written, read, been inspired by or have watched that I thought some people might find of interest. Along the way, I shared my Ma’s recipe for a traditional Irish Hallowe’en dish, book recommendations, articles, a review of 2023 and much more.

    Hunt Hospital Helipad
    Salem State University Archives August 18, 1987 “Boston Medical Flight helicopter using new helipad”

    I spent a good deal of August outside London to recharge and take care of family business. I am now back and getting ready for September.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • My cousin selling the ‘ancestral’ family farm back in Ireland, got me thinking about roots.
    • I explored Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs‘ and other things that I found of interest from around the web.
    • I looked at some of the themes that have emerged around generative AI in the first half of this year.

    Books that I have read.

    • The Ribbon Queen – I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis as a graphic novel writer and the publication of The Ribbon Queen was the second best news I had received this year since Ennis announced his return to The Punisher series at the beginning of 2024. With The Ribbon Queen Ennis returns obliquely to religion with a tale that sits somewhere between a police procedural and Lovecroftian fiction. Nothing is simple with Ennis and the work touches on themes like police brutality, woke culture, sex trafficking, domestic violence and ancient beliefs.
    • Part of my love reading comes from my Dad’s library of crime and espionage books. I started reading John LeCarré, Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean in primary school. Secondary school had me reading Gerald Seymour and Robert Ludlum. Seymour’s work felt more grounded and Harry’s Game during The Troubles felt especially pertinent. Despite being 82 years old Seymour still writes. I haven’t picked up a Seymour novel in decades until I got to read In For The Kill. its the third book in a franchise of Jonas Merrick – a soon-to-retire spook with a love of caravanning and frugality. As a holiday read, I really enjoyed it.
    • Richard Stark’s Parker is an anti-hero beloved of Hollywood who has appeared in film over years. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Complete Collection is a collection of graphic novel adaptions of The Score, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Seventh. Stark’s Parker is written with crisp lean copy to match the no-nonsense dark ruthless character. He is at end of America’s hard boiled noir literature like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But Richard Stark’s hero was an armed robber, not a detective. As a genre it was later revived by James Ellroy’s works from the late 1980s on. While Parker has been played on screen by a variety of actors including Lee Marvin and Mark Wahlberg – he is not a character for our times. Darwyn Cooke’s adaption of Parker to a graphic novel format is a 500+ page love letter to mid-century graphic design including vintage newspapers and petrol station maps. It’s a coffee table book that you actually want to read.
    • Qiu Xiaolong is an American crime writer, who is famous for his character Chief Inspector Chen. In his book Becoming Inspector Chen, was recommended by my friend Ian. The book feels autobiographical in nature. Like Chen, Qiu had studies TS Elliot at university, both had lived through the opening up of China post-Cultural Revolution. Their paths divert when Qiu moved to study in the US and decided to stay there after the ‘June the 4th incident‘. Qiu describes the complex relationships in families due to the Cultural Revolution and the nature of change in China during its opening up phase. The book is an implicit critique of the current Xi administration, as yet again Chen faces the imminent impact of the party machine.
    • Kara Swisher is a long-time journalist who chronicled Silicon Valley from the dot.com boom onward. In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? Swisher’s book is more engaging than Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, but lacks the wit and panache of Michael Malone’s books or Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.

    A bit of aside to the books, I found this article by Dazed Digital quite interesting. Apparently, straight men are much less likely to read novels. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction as you can probably tell if you are regular reader. If you want fiction recommendations as a start, I have some in an old post I wrote about 50 books I would recommend (scroll down to fiction).

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Quantum advertising.

    Faris Yakob had dropped a banger of an opinion piece on WARC. In quantum advertising Yakob calls out marketing management for optimising to the wrong things and believing that creativity is predictable.

    La rouge Aston Martin DB2/4
    Aston Martin DB2

    It also led me to Jeremy Bullmore’s ‘Aston Martin’ essay published by WPP as A 20th Century Lesson for 21st Century Brands.

    Return-to-office mandates

    Gartner the research house most famous for its technology reports has taken an in-depth look at return-to-office mandates beloved of large enterprises such as Apple, Amazon or Boeing and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Gartner looked at employee research and HR leaders as part of an up to date research done in May 2024. Any small gains in discretionary effort and employee engagement are wiped out by drops in intent to stay, with the implied disruption and cost cause by employee churn.

    Factors that contribute to lower intent to stay at a job

    The findings are similar to what we saw with Slack Future Forum’s Inflexible return-to-office policies are hammering employee experience scores published in 2022.

    New voices

    Zoë Mann started an initiative that would get some of the newer strategist voices heard.

    Things I have watched. 

    I haven’t watched A Clockwork Orange for a while and revisited it. I am still amazed by the way Kubrick used lighting, Beethoven and the Wendy Carlos soundtrack to such good effect. It also felt much more creative and transgressive than anything one would see at the cinema now. The modernist and brutalist architecture gives it an otherworldly quality now.

    I wanted to watch Weathering With You since it came out. I finally got to watch it. The animation is almost as rich as Studio Ghibli and the plot has some fantastical elements of it as well. But the story is grounded in the darker side of Tokyo.

    Red Neon Kabukichō Ichiban-gai Gate, Shinjuku

    The protagonist is homeless and lives in a net café near the Kabukicho gate that marks the entry to the red light district that is part of Shinjuku ward. In this respect the anime provides a realistic portrayal of a ‘freeter’ – an under-employed young person.

    Alain Delon died and I had a movie marathon with my Dad to celebrate his life: Un Flic, Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge.

    Useful tools.

    Whatfont

    Whatfont is a Google Chrome browser plugin, Safari browser extension and bookmarklet (I use the bookmarklet) that tells you what font’s are on a given web page.

    Google Analytics health check

    Yes I know GA4 is hateful, but Fresh Egg have put together a template to make a data health check easier to do. Give them your details and download their GA 4 Health Check for free.

    Decrapifying LinkedIn

    At last a compelling use case for the Arc Browser: as a LinkedIn client. Luddite LinkedIn is a ‘boost’ (think plug-in) cleans out things like AI powered elements of the LinkedIn experience.

    Better Reddit and YouTube search

    GigaBrain provides an alternative to the broken experience searching on Reddit and YouTube. It’s available via webpage and a Google Chrome browser plugin.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements, I am available for much of September. Contact me here. I am also open to discussions on permanent roles.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my August 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into September and the balmy days of an Indian summer!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • July 2024 newsletter

    July 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my July 2024 newsletter, this newsletter which marks my 12th issue. I hope the wettest part of the summer is behind me. This time last year, I didn’t set out to get to 12 issues. I thought I would try three and see where I got to. You’d think I would have had it nailed down by now, but it’s still evolving, finding its voice in an organic process. Getting to this point felt significant, I think it’s down to the weight of the number 12.

    12 as a number is loaded with symbolism. The Chinese had a 12 year cycle that they called the ‘earthly branches’ and were matched up with an animal of the Chinese zodiac.

    Chinese_Zodiac_carvings_on_ceiling_of_Kushida_Shrine,_Fukuoka

    Odin had 12 sons, the Hittites had 12 gods of the underworld. Mount Olympus was home to 12 gods who had vanquished the 12 titans. Lictors who were civil servants assisting magistrates with duties carried a bundle of 12 rods to signify imperial power. The Greeks gave us 12 member juries and both western and Islamic zodiacs have 12 signs.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Warped media constructs – what marketers and their advisers think about media channels versus what works and what should be measured.
    • I contributed to the Rambull newsletter with a selection of my favourite places in London.
    • End of culture – I disagree with some of what Pip Bingemann said about culture and advertising, but he made some interesting discussion points that I went through and annotated or knocked down.
    • A bit about the Zynternet phenomenon and interesting things from around the web.
    • A bit about BMW’s The Ultimate Driving Machine and other things that caught my interest.

    Books that I have read.

    Media Virus
    • Dogfight – Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands. The book is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works like Insanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time. (Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007). Instead Vogelstein documents developments that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document.
    • This Time No Mistakes by Will Hutton seemed to be a must-read document in the face of an imminent Labour party victory in the general election. Hutton’s The State We’re In was the defining work of wonkish thinking around policy as Labour came into power under Tony Blair in 1997. Three decades later and Labour is poised to rule again during a time of more social issues and lower economic performance. The people are poor and the economy has been barely growing for over a decade. The State We’re In was a positive roadmap of introducing long-term investment culture into British business and upgrading vocational education. This Time No Mistakes is an angrier manifesto of wider change from media and healthcare to government involvement in business. Both books outlined a multi-term roadmap for politicians. In the end, Labour didn’t deliver on The State We’re In‘s vision; this time they are even less likely to do so.
    • Dark Wire – Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life. But the story isn’t all happy endings and it does question the threats posed to services like Signal and WhatsApp if law enforcement see criminals moving there.
    • I went back and revisited Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff. Once a touchstone of public intellectuals and media wonks, it’s rather different than I remember it from the first reading I had of it at the start of my agency career. More of my thoughts on subjects covered in the book from authoritarian regimes to patient-centric medicine here.

    Not a book, but really enjoying Yaling Jiang’s newsletter Following the Yuan that looks at a mix of consumer marketing stories in China with a balanced and analytical approach. Social listening platform YouScan have an interesting insights newsletter, where you can subscribe to here.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Lean web design.

    I have been keen on lean web design, especially has web page sizes have ballooned over the past decade with little benefit in functionality. However Wholegrain Digital have taken this idea in a new direction by looking at a websites typical carbon footprint. Mine came out better than 97 percent of websites they’d tested so far.

    Crushing conformity with creativity

    Samira Brophy of IPSOS and Tati Lindenberg of Unilever were at Cannes and talked through some of the dirt is good campaigns and how Unilever switched plot lines in an inventive manner to make better campaigns that fit in with Unilever’s socially forward orientation.

    The Arsenal example that they show is a really nice twist on girl plays soccer, kit gets cleaned trope and captures the essence of fandom.

    The Future Health Index.

    Philips the former consumer electronics pioneer have surveyed healthcare leaders around the world to see what their concerns are and where they may be looking to invest in the future. It’s an interesting read. When I have worked on health clients in the past, we’ve usually focused on what the relevant prescribing healthcare professional thoughts and any patient insights we could glean.

    There was a big focus on automation (AI was a particular focus for respondents in countries with distinct healthcare challenges. However the respondents caveated the move to automation with this bit of wisdom:

    Automation can help relieve staff shortages, if used right

    The Future Health Index 2024 – Philips

    Given the old heuristic of about 70 percent of IT projects not meeting the goals set for them, one can understand why there is a degrees of healthy skepticism in leaders and the staff who work with them.

    Remote monitoring was one of the most popular areas for healthcare leaders wanting to use clinical decision support software (powered by AI). Curiously, preventative care ranked much lower.

    Finally, there was some good news for pharmaceutical companies, negotiating lower prices for drugs was pretty low down on the list for the way leaders thought that they could make financial savings. Though this was tempered in a greater interest in ‘value-based billing’.

    State of the (online) union.

    From the late 1990s onwards, Mary Meeker’s snapshot of the technology sector was a must read presentation. Meeker came to mainstream fame leading the Netscape IPO while at Morgan Stanley. Early the same year she published The Internet Report – which launched a thousand agency slide decks and was a reference for the investment community during the dot com boom.

    The themes of Meeker’s reports over the years followed the development of online:

    • E-commerce
    • Mobile internet
    • Online advertising and search
    • Rise of Chinese internet companies

    Meeker left investment banking to join VC Kleiner Perkins and eight years later set up her own venture capital firm. During COVID-19 Meeker’s internet report wasn’t published for the first time since 1995.

    Now it’s returned, you can find the latest issue here. In the meantime, while Meeker took an AI-focused approach to her latest report LUMA Partners have looked at the advertising technology ecosystem in more detail. You can find their comprehensive report here. An honorary mention to Benedict Evans’ annual presentation as well that is even more theme based in style.

    Marvel x NHS blood donation

    Disney’s partnership with NHS opens up access to a wider potential donor base.

    Things I have watched. 

    darkhearts
    Dark Hearts (Newen)

    I don’t watch BBC iPlayer all that much, but occasionally I do find some ‘gold’. Dark Hearts (or Cœurs noirs literally Black Hearts) is a French series about a team looking for terrorist weapons, terrorist schemes and French ISIS members in Iraq circa 2016. It’s got the kind of gritty tense feel of SEAL Team or Zero Dark Thirty.

    Chronos is a short film very much in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi. In Chronos the director tries to journey through thousands of years in history through the medium of timelapse photography. It’s a beautiful piece of film, but looks very ‘everyday’ now due to the time-lapse functions provided in our smartphones and generative AI services. Film-maker Ron Fricke had to build his own cameras to shoot the footage.

    Watch party

    Hong Kong cinema is in a bit of a weird place at the moment. Its most bankable stars are in their 50s and early 60s – though they are holding off aging well. Cantonese culture in general is being squeezed out by mainland media, as well as the rise of Korean and Thai cinema. The current national security laws mean that previous bestsellers like Infernal Affairs or Election can no longer be made in the territory and even a retrospective showing of them could be in a legal grey area. The Goldfinger gets around this by going back to Hong Kong’s go-go era of the 1970s and 1980s and draws on the story of the Carrian Group which went belly up in the midst of a corruption and fraud scandal saw a bank auditor killed and buried in a banana tree grove. Lawyer John Wimbush was found dead in his home swimming pool. A nylon rope around his neck tethered to a concrete manhole cover at the bottom of the pool. So The Goldfinger has a rich vein of material to mine. The Goldfinger starts off during the Hong Kong police mutiny against the ICAC. it follows the rise of Tony Leung as Henry Ching Yat-yin (presumably to avoid legal trouble with George Tan founder of the Carrian Group, who only died during COVID). Ching then has a cat-and-mouse chase with Andy Lau’s Lau Kai-yuen, an inspector of the ICAC. I enjoyed The Goldfinger immensely, CGI and green screen was used to fill in for old Hong Kong which is substantially changed over the decades since. The ‘gweilo’ in the film were over-acted which was distracting, but the Hong Kong talent was top drawer. The more fantastical aspects of it reminded me a bit of Paul Schrader’s Mishima biopic.

    The Great Silence is one of the greats of the spaghetti western genre. It was shot in a ski resort in the Dolomites and in a studio of fake snow. That alone would have made it highly unusual. The film was directed by Sergio Corbucci who was more famous for Django. Eureka’s Masters of Cinema have done a fantastic job of putting together a great print and commentary from experts including Alex Cox. It’s probably the best role that Klaus Kinski played in his considerable film career. Even though it’s a western, the underlying politics of the film make it surprisingly contemporary. That’s as much as I can say without giving the plot away.

    Useful tools.

    Better Reddit search

    Google search has become much more limited in its capability for a number of reasons. Giga uses Reddit posts as its source material for search results. It can be useful in research, beyond trying to trawl Reddit using Google advanced search.

    Mood board research

    Historically, I have been a big fan of Flickr’s image search because of its ‘interestingness’ feature. Same Energy is a tool that matches the vibe of an image that you submit with other images.

    Manifestos

    A great collection of manifestos and tools to help manifesto writing for brand planners.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my July 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into August!

    Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • June 2024 newsletter – legs 11

    June 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my June 2024 newsletter, it’s been a bit of a mad month with the European Union elections foreshadowing a rightward lurch in policy direction. The snap call for a French general assembly election and the bizarre spectacles happening in the campaign efforts of the UK general election. And before you say it, the UK general election is not a TikTok election. In the northern hemisphere midsummer (21 June 2024) – the longest day of daylight taps into something primal bringing us back to nature with campfires to meet the dusk, seasonal food and the beauty of summer on display.

    Midsummer

    This newsletter which marks my 11th issue. The number 11 is a mixed bag associated in medieval theology with the ’11 heads of error’. However there are more positive associations for those who believe in numerology. In Chinese its sonic similarity to the phrase ‘definitely fine’ gives it a positive association. For me it’s forever associated with the old bingo call of ‘legs 11’.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • Collapsing the funnel is a term that I have heard thrown around a lot on blogs, LinkedIn posts and podcasts, but what does it really mean?
    • A slower take on Apple’s iPad Pro launch
    • A few things I learned judging the 2024 UK Young Lions and Adforum PHNX advertising awards, together with a few inspiring entries.
    • The reasons why some people believe that #theinternetisdying.
    • IT director powers up and more stuff – a collection of interesting news and analysis around the web, including how AI is upending IT sales.

    Books that I have read.

    red queen
    • Nixonland by Rick Perlstein. Perlstein is an American historian with a progressive eye on history. His book name was passed around earlier on in the spring given perceived parallels between Biden and a likely second Trump administration, together with increased activism. It is one of a series of books that Perlstein wrote documenting post-second world war. Reaganland documents the Carter administration and America’s pivot to Reaganism. Before The Storm which looks at the rise of the modern American libertarian conservative moment and the decline in cross-party consensus – viewed through the lens of Barry Goldwater’s campaign to become the republican party candidate against Richard Nixon. I started reading Nixonland before the US college protests started, which gave the book added resonance.
    • Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino. The first thing that jumps off the page when reading Cinema Speculation is the deep abiding love that Tarantino has for film. Film permeated every part of his life. His Mum took him along to films at the cinema that he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to see. In this respect he was a cinema media consumer in a time when mainstream television had already eaten Hollywood the first time around. The second thing that comes through is the way his deep knowledge allows him to build connections and linkages in non-obvious ways. Something that we lose the ability to do as we mediate knowledge seeking through Google and Perplexity instead of going through library newspaper clippings and reading magazines. I then realised that was a similar red thread in Perlstein’s Nixonland. Tarantino writes how he speaks and I was able to devour the book in two sittings despite suffering from a summer cold at the time. If you like to hear someone writing passionately about the New Hollywood movement of the early 1970s, then read Cinema Speculation.
    • It was third time lucky for me with Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I was recommended the book by my friend Ian Wood and tried to read it a few times, but only really got into it at the third attempt. Once I got into it, I enjoyed it. There are the surface comparisons with Stig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (The girl with the dragon tattoo and sequels). Without giving plot spoilers I found this comparison lacking. Instead I think of it as a modern-day version of the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan-Doyle, but that view may change as I work my way through the series.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Bad Times Disco.

    Bad Times Disco put together eclectic parties bringing out music like Japan’s 1980s ‘city pop’ sound and art to secret venues.

    Vintage Disco Sound Novelty Transistor Radio, AM Reception Only, Made In Hong Kong, Circa 1970s
    Joe Haupt – Vintage Disco Sound Novelty Transistor Radio, AM Reception Only, Made In Hong Kong, Circa 1970s

    For their closing event until autumn in Hong Kong they had developed an equitable pricing policy that allows an equally eclectic crowd.

    Come join us for our season closing party on June 21st, in a spacious and very central location, filled with BTD regulars, our loving staff, and a great lineup of vinyl-centric DJs. More than a party, BTD is truly a community and we want to see all the regulars for this one. 

    * Multi-functional space layout * 

    * Special set design, group exhibit of multidisciplinary art, and more special touches * 

    * Sober friendly party * 

    Presales: 270HKD

    Phase 1: 330HKD 

    Phase 2: 380HKD 

    Last min: 420HKD

    Solidarity ticket: 500HKD. If you are a landowner, homeowner, or have generational wealth, please consider purchasing a solidarity ticket to our party and making it possible for lower-income folks to attend the party. 

    *Limited Low Income Ticket*: 150HKD – This is *only* if you are a service worker in Hong Kong, working class, or unemployed without a safety net in Hong Kong. We will trust you to choose this option for yourself if you need it. 

    Season Closing: Bad Times Disco 21/06

    Design Discoveries: Towards a DESIGN MUSEUM JAPAN.

    Japan House London has an exhibition of industrial design that reflects on the paradox of Japan having great design, but not a museum of design. Japan has a culture of good design; it’s a living thing and expected. By comparison, the celebration of good design could ironically indicate a norm of mediocre to bad product design. The exhibition runs until September.

    Digital mortality.

    David Webb is a long time activist investor in Hong Kong. I know of him by reputation since before I first went to Hong Kong and China in the mid-2000s. He has a long-running website that is invaluable for all things Hong Kong business-related – and is likely even more valuable given the recent regulatory and legal changes in the city. In a time when Hong Kong’s retail investors are disadvantaged by the large families and opaque Chinese government, Webb-Site is one of a few assets that retail investors can use for research. The site shows its late 1990s web design roots and makes extensive use of RSS to power its content.

    David has been receiving treatment for cancer since 2020 and is now thinking about how his website might live on as a crowd-sourced online database. At the moment he is looking to bring on board volunteer editors. Part of the reason for this is that the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission didn’t embrace XML data output, that sites like David’s could ingest and process. More details here on how you can get involved.

    Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth.

    Kantar’s blueprint for brand growth uses a decades worth of its client’s data to refine their approach for success. It broadly meets what you would expect from the marketing science corpus built up by the likes of Ehrensberg-Bass and the IPA. They boiled down this blueprint for brand growth into three points

    • Predispose more people – which boils down to a mix of salience and fame.
    • Be more present – which equates to marketing penetration to capitalise on the increased number of people predisposed to the brand.
    • Find new spaces – this is about innovating in communications and new ways of achieving market penetration.

    This last point is particularly interesting. Much of Kantar’s clients would be mature well-known brands so breaking out into new spaces represents a blue ocean approach, designed to move beyond the fractional gains against entrenched competitors.

    Michael Page 2024 talent insights

    Michael Page have launched their annual talents insights report. It has content on a diverse set of areas including working locations (remote, hybrid and on-site), artificial intelligence and perceived job security. TL;DR – hybrid seems here to stay, AI usage is in the minority at the moment and the majority of workers feel secure in their current roles.

    Quiet pride.

    Probably not the right section in this newsletter, it would fit better in a section of ‘things I have been disappointed by’. Campaign Asia and Campaign US ran the following article: Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month. The iPA ran a similarly themed article. I guess ‘pride washing’ of brands will be less of a problem this year, but the lack of visibility is a concern.

    The Container Store Celebrates Gay Pride
    Scott Beale

    The articles imply a wider rollback from brand purpose, indicating a hollowness to the buy-in from large corporates.

    The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”

    Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month – Campaign Asia.

    It offers a different angle on the broader issue that people like Nick Ashbury with his new book The Road to Hell have been driving at with regards the state of brand purpose.

    Things I have watched. 

    I am a bit of a Federico Fellini fan and finally got to watch Roma. Roma is semi-autobiographical in nature. It is a series of vignettes all based around the city of Rome which go from the 1930s to the 1970s and cover various parts of city life with some of the aspects such as Roman frescos turning to dust on first viewing in a millennium to a religious fashion show having an especially fantastical aspect to it. The deconstructed nature of the film is also interesting from a storytelling point-of-view.

    Delicatessen was part of a wave of dystopian movies that were produced during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Films like Richard Stanley’s Hardware and Dust Devil. Given that its French there is a distinct mid-century modernism sensibility to many aspects of it such as the vehicles use. In terms of the plot it is similar to a futuristic Sweeney Todd meets Brazil. The directing and writing team  Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro went on to make more popular films including City of Children.

    THX 1138 was George Lucas’ first professional film based on his student film. It feels modern and fresh despite being shot in the early 1970s. It captures the impersonal socially isolating aspects of modern technology. The film proper opens with Robert Duvall speaking with a system about how he is feeling echoing the nascent current use of AI for therapy. While Lucas became famous from his directing of the film, a good deal of credit is due to Walter Murch’s futurist soundscape and Lala Schiffin’s tonal soundtrack which isn’t that far away from the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson. It’s no coincidence that later on Lucas named his audio company THX.

    Murch although less well-known is a multi-Oscar award-winning film editor and sound mixer who pioneered the use of Apple’s Final Cut software in Hollywood.

    I got a good deal of my license fee’s worth of the BBC going through the 1960s Royal Shakespeare Company performances of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Edward IV and Richard III which together make up the telling through an English protestant lens of the War of The Roses. Peter Hall’s direction is spot on. I only wish that I had seen this while I was studying English literature in secondary school.

    Useful tools.

    Basic Excel formulas guide.

    Nicolas Boucher usually works with finance teams looking at adapting AI, but he put together a PDF with 21 Excel commands and examples. Some of them can be handy in digging your way through quantitative data. You can get your copy of the PDF here.

    Bookfinder

    The everything store Amazon, a fair few times hasn’t had what I wanted. There are also sound moral arguments to want to buy elsewhere, or you might want to buy cheaper. That’s where Bookfinder comes in. It is fast, has a front end that looked basic back when when Netscape Navigator was your tool for coasting on the information superhighway and surfing the worldwide web.

    LittleSnitch 6.

    If you’re a long time Mac user who can remember back when Adobe creative suite came in a box, then you might know Little Snitch. It was popular for people running bootleg copies of PhotoShop and InDesign by stopping the software from ‘phoning home’ to Adobe.

    In reality Little Snitch is so much more, it’s my go-to software firewall. It allows Mac users to retain a fine control on what goes in and out of your computer stopping dodgy connections in their tracks.

    Additional MagSafe 3 cables.

    I have a surplus of USB-C chargers now, but the move towards the MagSafe 3 charging connection on newer Macs is a great back to the future move. They are magnetically connected, allowing the connection to be broken before your laptop is dragged to the floor like the original MagSafe connectors that Apple had in two versions from 2006 to 2017.

    They got rid of it, and long time users like me moaned about it as USB-C, felt like a backwards move for mobile workers. Apple brought it back with MagSafe 3, which now works with USB-C chargers.

    Third-party MagSafe 3 cables are now available so you no longer need to pay the Apple tax of premium priced cables. My favourite is the BeckenBower USB C to Mag-Safe 3 Cable, which has worked out really well for me so far.

    Organiser.

    I work from home and usually have Bloomberg or Yahoo! Finance on in the background at a very low volume ambient noise if I am not listening to podcasts. I had the classic living room problem of hunting down remote controls to turn devices on and off. I was inspired to build on existing behaviours of looking around the TV first for the remote control and bought an organiser to hold them and a supply of spare AAA, AA batteries and the lightning cord for my Apple TV remote. The one I eventually settled on was Blue Gingko Multipurpose Caddy Organiser. It’s well made from plastic and thoughtfully designed which is why I was prepared a bit more to get something made in Korea, rather than made in China.

    Caddy for remote controls

    If you are using it for artwork or as a go pack for a workshop you can stack several on top of each other.

    The sales pitch.

    I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my June 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the dog days of summer!

    Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues. 

  • May 2024 newsletter – no. 10

    May 2024 newsletter introduction

    Welcome to my May 2024 newsletter, I hope that you’re looking forward to the spring bank holiday, unfortunately if like me you’re in the UK – then that was the last public holiday before the end of August. This newsletter which marks my 10th issue. I wasn’t certain that I would get to a tenth edition of this newsletter.

    The number ten has a high amount of cultural symbolism from the biblical ten commandments to the ten celestial (or heavenly) stems during the Shang dynasty that marked the days of their week. There were corresponding earthy branches based on 12 day groupings. While the stems are no longer used in calendars they still appear in feng shui, Chinese astrology, mathematical proofs instead of the roman alphabet, student grading systems and multiple choice questionnaires.

    New reader?

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

    Strategic outcomes

    Things I’ve written.

    • I wrote a comment that struck a bit of a nerve about being asked to do a project ‘for my portfolio’.
    • Omakase and luxury futures. In the face of all the changes facing the luxury sector, is the answer learning from the Japanese tradition of omakase?
    • April marked the 20th anniversary of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. I took a slower approach than the LinkedIn hot takes to reflect on its legacy.
    • Shutting down – when always-on becomes detrimental.
    • Mobilizing for Monuments and other things that grabbed my interest.
    • How behavioural science can help optimise the response to a coffee shop problem.
    • I saw clear parallels between car touchscreens and the changes that digital music instruments went through in terms of design and adoption.

    I have had Alex Kassian’s cover version of the Manuel Göttsching classic E2 – E4 on heavy rotation. It was released just in time for the Ibiza season and has Mad Professor remixes dubbing out the balearic vibes for all the deep house shamans.

    E2 - E4 cover

    Books that I have read.

    • After Watches and Wonders 2024, I finally managed to get the time to read Rolex Wristwatches: An Unauthorized History by James M Dowling. Dowling is the person that the pre-owned watch market goes to for authentication of really old or unusual Rolex models. His history of the company, while unauthorised, had the collaboration of early Rolex staffers. What comes out is an interesting tale of adaption. Rolex started off as a UK reseller. The company innovated due to client needs and somewhere along the way because the luxury watch manufacturing giant we know today. What becomes apparent that their success was partly down to timing, circumstance and a belief that you change nothing, unless you’re making it better. The last point is something that product managers the world over could learn from.
    • David McCloskey’s Damascus Station came highly recommended as leisure reading. My taste in espionage fiction is more towards Mick Herron and John Le Carre rather than the more action orientated. This book had enough intellect and imperfection to make me put up with the James Bond factor.
    • I am at the time of writing working my way through Nixonland by Rick Perlstein – which I started before the student sit-ins against the conflict in the Gaza strip happened. More on this book once I have finished it.
    • Pogue’s Basics: Essential Tips and Shortcuts (That No One Bothers to Tell You) for Simplifying the Technology in Your Life by David Pogue. I bought a copy of this for my Dad and re-read my own copy, I keep forgetting some of the life hacks that Pogue captured in this book. It’s a decade old and still tremendously useful.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    I like watches, the design and quality of engineering that they represent and even the sound of them ticking away, but I generally don’t enjoy Hodinkee interviews. However, when they interviewed sneaker legend Ronnie Fieg I watched it. Fieg’s story around his watches is amazing, with each watch marking a milestone.

    TML Partners and Accenture Song have done an interesting report on ‘the future of intelligent marketing performance‘ – basically CRM and e-commerce based on a impressive roundtable of marketers. What immediately struck me was how many of the problems would haven written about in a similar way a decade ago. We are constantly in a state of digital transformation, that is starting to feel more like ‘digital treading water’ now. It is due to relatively short organisation memory and lack of a ‘learning element’ in organisations.

    Back when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to work on Colgate alongside other agencies. The work that I was doing was in association with the dedicated agency Red Fuse which was the umbrella for all WPP work. I was eventually shut down from working on it by APAC senior management from my own agency at the time; due to internal agency politics that I long gave up trying to understand.

    While I was working on the project, I got to meet Jason Oke who is now in charge of global client relationships at Dentsu in New York. Jason appears on the Google Firestarters podcast discussing how to get great advertising ideas made. Some of the thoughts are timeless and echo the advice of Ogilvy on Advertising. It’s well worth listening to.

    Cultural Bleats
    BBH Singapore Cultural Bleats newsletter

    Every agency has some sort of email newsletter, but one that stands head-and-shoulders above other agencies is BBH Singapore’s Cultural Bleats. I promise you once you get past the name, it’s brilliant. The premise of the newsletter is that they put together interesting cultural things to act as useful provocations. This is exactly the kind of thinking, curation and sharing that planning and strategy teams should be doing if they aren’t over-committed on Workfront. A prime example of the kind of thing that Culture Bleats might pick up on is how rich people no longer appear to eat due to Ozempic and meal replacements like Huel.

    Dow and Procter & Gamble announced an agreement to make a proprietary way to recycle mixed plastics. I am all for improving recycling of plastics, but having a proprietary method adds complexity into a recycling system that’s already unfit for purpose. I hope that once commercialisation happens P&G will follow the example of Unilever who freely licensed its more efficient aerosol cans to other manufacturers who were interested in the technology.

    The Norwegian government published the results of its Mannsutvalgets or Men’s Equality Commission. The report goes into policies across several areas here (in Norwegian). It has some interesting findings that echo think tank thinking about the intersection of social class and opportunity outcomes.

    Some of the content around health is particularly interesting Dagens Medisin covered some of these findings, you can see a translation of their article here. However some of the findings in health did make me wonder. It notes that men in Norway live shorter lives than women and considers this to be an equality challenge. Most writing I have seen around the gender mortality gap see it as a biological given rather than a ‘gap’. It felt like greater research was needed to support this reframe in science rather than a well-meaning aspiration.

    The report calls on the Research Council in Norway to take up the challenge of improving the knowledge base on many of the issues tackled in the report. The commission acknowledged data-related challenges and wanted revised statistics / indicators for gender equality so that they reflect the equality challenges of boys and men than are currently available.

    If you have semiconductor clients and haven’t been on Malcolm Penn’s Future Horizons semiconductor industry awareness workshop, you’re in look he’s running it again on June 18th. I started my agency career working on technology hardware, gadgets and semiconductors – the Future Horizons course helped no end. I went on to work for numerous technology clients including AMD, ARM and Qualcomm.

    Finally this essay on human creativity provided a lot of fuel for thought. It pulls together a multi-variant model for why human creativity is on the wane.

    Factors included:

    • A childhood lack of free time for play and imagination. Instead children have much more regimented structural lifestyles today.
    • Massive access to more cultural artefacts than we could possibly consume from around the world at the touch of our fingers. The unknown space is now limited and so there is less opportunity to be creative within it.
    • Science and technology innovation is connecting less disparate areas of knowledge in order to make a ‘thing’.
    • Stimulation is focused rather than a wide range of stuff, rather than washing over us.

    Things I have watched. 

    I have found myself watching less Netflix over time. Then Netflix moved from getting paid through the Apple app store to wanting a direct payment and bumped the price up. So a mix of inertia and not wanting to watch a compelling show or two has meant that I have consciously uncoupled from Netflix for the time being. I will probably go back when I have a good enough reason. In the meantime, I am buying the odd Blu-Ray or DVD here and there instead. It seems that I am not the only one who has taken this approach.

    Amazon Prime Video seems to have a bipolar personality between Apple TV+ level tentpole content and a wide range of trashy films, some of which deserve the moniker ‘cult cinema’. Red Queen fits into the former category rather than the latter. It is based a series of books by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I have just started reading the book Red Queen, but the TV series is compelling. I didn’t realise that I had managed to watch four episodes in one sitting.

    I went back to watch the Alain Delon Traitement de choc aka Shock Treatment. Delon plays Dr Devilers, the proprietor of a clinic on the Brittany coast. The clinic focuses on rejuvenating tired wealthy clients with spa treatments, special diets and infusions. The middle-aged patients at the clinic are true believers and as their treatment happens they become more child-like as the rejuvenation happens. The dark side of the clinic is that the serum comes at a price. A new patient finds out what actually happens and what plays out is a French New Wave allegory that touches on similar ethical health concerns, rather like the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.

    My internet went down and I managed to work my way through The Street Fighter Trilogy starring Sonny Chiba and made famous by the Tony Scott-directed True Romance. The Street Fighter series was a key influence with Quentin Tarantino, who wrote in their role as a plot device in True Romance and had Sonny Chiba appear in his Kill Bill series. All of the films feel a bit hackneyed in a post-John Wick world, but the first instalment is hard-bitten. Given the torrent of films coming out of Hong Kong at the time, The Street Fighter films stood apart with their unflinching violence displayed on screen. They became the first film in the US to receive an X certificate for violence alone.

    Along with the Shaw Brothers boxsets and Bruce Lee’s filmography, the Street Fighter trilogy, is essential viewing for both Asian cinema buffs and martial artist movie fanatics.

    How do the sequel films stack up? The second and third film in the series have a bit more playfulness and off-kilter aspects to them similar to films of a similar age made as spaghetti westerns. Sonny Chiba’s 1974 trilogy typify the martial arts craze that swept western cinema in the early 1970s onwards. In the UK, The Street Fighter was called Kung Fu Street Fighter. The likely reasons were two-fold, a similarly named Charles Bronson film and the glut of Hong Kong martial arts films being shown.

    The Source is a French police procedural series that shows the cat and mouse game between a French Moroccan crime family and the police tasked to catch them. I am in a few episodes and really enjoying the show so far.

    Useful tools.

    Email charter

    My friend Marshall mentioned this email charter on LinkedIn. Share it with anyone you work with to improve the quality and volume of team communications. Much of it is about level setting expectations. More about the email charter here.

    Martin

    Martin is an app that integrates Claude-3, Deepgram’s Novo speech to text service and GPT-4 Turbo to interact with Google personal productivity software including Google Calendar and Gmail. Conceptually it’s a better Siri-type digital assistant. I have heard good things about it, but don’t rely heavily on Google services myself, so your mileage may vary. More details here.

    Magnet

    Magnet is a handy piece of software that keeps your desktop organised. It was recommended to me by a friend who codes software for a living. It is particularly handy for keeping ‘presence’ based channels (like Slack, Teams, Mail.app together on one screen as a ‘war room” type view and having creation on another screen. It even works if you use your screen in a vertical orientation.

    PamPam

    A service that allows you to create and share maps. You can import maps in various formats or describe it in text for PamPam to render it. Strangely useful.

    Scribd downloader

    I am not sure how Scribd managed to digest so many resources and hide them behind a paywall. But this might be the antedote if you have something specific that you need.

    The sales pitch.

    I have had a great time working on a project with GREY & Tank Worldwide. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements for a bit of time that I have in early to mid-June; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my May 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.

    Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!

    Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.