Ged Carroll

Category: on the sofa | 影評 | 영화를보고 | 映画レビュー

What does on the sofa mean? So a sofa is a couch in American parlance, or may also be called a settee or chesterfield in other English speaking parts of the world. Its the big chair in the living room that people tend to view their TV set from.

By using on the sofa as a title I wanted to imply content that I had reviewed at home rather than having gone out to watch it at a cinema or attend an event.

I have tended to review material on DVD or Blu-Ray rather than streaming media, usually because I have acquired them with an intent, whereas streaming is more like content grazing, often little more than visual wallpaper for my living room.

This section has been made up of a hodge podge of films, documentaries and anime.

Films that I have seen at festivals or on trips to the cinema are more likely to be in the out and about section. So there isn’t a consistency there in that respect.

I have covered a wide range of content here including

  • Safe House – a surprisingly good Ryan Reynolds film that isn’t a comedy one
  • Bitter Lake – I am a huge Adam Curtis fan and his work is the exception that proves my rule about streaming platforms in this section mainly because I can’t get his documentaries on disk
  • The Raid 2 – which added a bit of storytelling to the mix of The Raid.
  • The Man from Mo’Wax – a documentary about the rise, fall and reinvention of James Lavelle.
  • No blood no tears – An excellent Korean heist drama

  • February 2026 newsletter – get up & run edition

    February 2026 introduction – (31) get up & run edition

    I am now at issue 31, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘get up & run’. In Cantonese 31 isn’t a famous lucky number, it could considered to mean ‘life first’ implying an importance of vitality. On the plus side, it doesn’t have negative connotations of say 14 – which sounds similar to definitely die.

    #run

    I was sent a mix by an old friend of mine done by Frankie Bones at Amnesia House in August 1990 – as aural history its a fascinating treasure trove and occurred a pivotal time with several genres about to fragment from the original UK scene. Now we have our soundtrack let’s get into it.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    I appeared in the What’s In My Now newsletter talking small wallets, cheaper alternatives to Apple Studio monitors and making better use of LLMs. More here.

    I gave a presentation for Outside Perspective on my Dot LLM era paper. Here is my speaking notes that I prepared as I got the presentation ready, complete with the slides at the relevant points.

    I spoke to the WSJ about my dot LLM era thinking and was name-checked on their Take On The Week podcast. And I compared my research with Marc Andreessen’s of A16z 2026 AI outlook here.

    I wrote a letter to the FT about Sony surrendering its home entertainment business (TVs, home audio) to Chinese TV maker TCL. While Sony’s current involvement in sectors such as elder care and insurance are worthy endeavours – what does it mean when they are more core to Sony’s identity than the home entertainment equipment that the brand built its empire on?

    As well as being a concerned Sony customer, I was also thinking about what it means to a brand when it gets rid of its core raison d’être? You can read my letter here.

    I was talking to a friend about classic films and suddenly Matthew Frank’s newsletter dropped in my inbox and started me down a rabbit hole exploring the idea of forgettable cinema as part of the modern public zeitgeist.

    I pulled together a collection of adverts and campaigns celebrating lunar new year from across Asia and a couple aimed at the wider diaspora. As brands look to benefit from the year of the fire horse.

    ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn

    1. Publicis widening the business gap versus its rivals. A decade spent preparing their data and foundational technology for machine learning.
    2. WPP’s big pivot to adapt to market conditions for the large holding companies.
    3. Dentsu’s change of leadership to better control strategy and manage global capabilities.
    4. What Google’s AI bet means for advertisers.
    5. Michael Farmer on why reorganisation isn’t strategy, instead strategy should drive any reorganisation to meet the strategic objectives. This one proved a bit controversial, I’m not sure why.

    Books that I have read.

    While I have been looking forward for David McCloskey’s latest book The Persian to come out, I managed to finish The Seventh Floor. On one level The Seventh Floor is about espionage and feels very now given the new cold war. But it’s also about friendship, loyalty and personal betrayal. McCloskey doesn’t only bring expertise from a past career at the CIA, but also a deep love of the espionage novel as an art form and this novel gives a nod and a wink to the works of John Le Carré.

    While the agency world is focused on the rise of AI, I decided to revisit Michael Farmer’s Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Ten years after it has been published, the diagnosis and the lessons from Farmer’s research seem to have been ignored by clients and the c-suites of holding groups. One thing I picked up on my revisiting the book was the challenge in defining strategic contribution and effort to campaigns. With creative output, Farmer managed to break down creative tasks into fixed ScopeMetric® Units (SMUs). But Farmer admitted that he couldn’t define strategy outputs in the same way because the context changed account-by-account. This makes sense given the difficulties I have had in the past when strategists were way oversold by the project management function within agencies.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Insularity was the watch word of this year’s Edelman’s Trust Barometer. It was a pretty dark vision of the future. There is a huge delta between top income quartile of the population and their trust of authority and the bottom income quartile. In the lower quartile group there is little to no trust in authority figures (business, journalists, government). They only trust people like them.

    Andrew Tindall published a new book for System1 based on their research and Effie data which reinforces previous publications by Orlando Wood, Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. It also reinforces the importance of context as part of creativity when media and creative functions are co-joined at the hip. It’s very readable and available for free here.

    Chart of the month. 

    The surge of US measles infections turned into a politicised debate about vaccinations, competence, why Canada’s rates were even higher and whether things were as bad as experts would have you believe?

    The chart only tells part of the story.

    measles

    The US CDC cites a general hospitalisation rate of about 20% (1 in 5 cases), recent years have seen significant fluctuations depending on the specific age groups and regions affected by measles outbreaks.

    The “Age Factor”: The high rates in 2022 and 2024 were largely due to the virus hitting children under five—the age group most likely to develop severe complications like pneumonia.

    • 2022 – driven by an outbreak in Ohio, which had a high paediatric hospitalisation rate.
    • 2024 – remained high throughout the year with nearly half of cases affecting children under 5.

    Outbreak Size vs. Severity: In 2025, even though the total case count surged, the percentage of people requiring hospital care fell. This often happens when an outbreak moves beyond high-risk “pockets” into a broader, sometimes older, population.

    • 2023 – outbreaks in unvaccinated high-risk clusters.
    • 2025 – hospitalisation rates dropped because the virus spread to older demographics and larger, but less severe clusters
    • 2026 – infections in January had few children under 5 affected. Cases were able to be managed at home.

    Vaccination Impact: Across all these years, the vast majority (over 90%) of hospitalised patients were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.

    Canada’s rates are high because the population has a significant amount of unvaccinated immigrants and refugees from conflict zones and the developing world.

    Things I have watched. 

    Thomas Harris’ Silence of The Lambs still has legs in culture. Which is why Amazon Prime Video has gone back to the universe with Clarice. The story takes place in the aftermath of the buffalo Bill killings which drove the plot of Silence of the Lambs. The storytelling is top notch with a fantastic plot twist in episode 1. It is well worth your time to at least give the first few episodes a chance.

    It started off in an unpromising way, several years ago a friend left a DVD with me. They said something along the lines of they liked a number of Werner Herzog films, but that this was too weird for them. I finally got to sit down and watch Fata Morgana.

    It doesn’t have a story, but is beautifully shot footage of the Sahara and Sahel in 1969 with a focus on near horizon mirages (from which the film gets its name) and features the human effect on it from vistas of oil processing equipment to barbed wire and crashed planes.

    There is a poetic narration in German over the top with a range of music to flt the landscapes. It feels like a forerunner of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi made a decade later. It’s easy to watch.

    I spent a weekend with my Dad going through old VHS cassettes and on one of them we found Four Fast Guns. It is a surprisingly good Hollywood western. While not a John Ford film, it has a grittiness due to superior character development and tight storytelling reminiscent of the very best spaghetti westerns. The film was produced by an independent studio and featured three well recognised character actors as its star performers.

    • Edgar Buchanan acted alongside the likes of Clint Eastwood, James Garner, John Wayne, Cary Grant and Randolph Scott he went on to appear in several TV series that I remember watching on repeat as a child in Ireland including The Beverley Hillbillies and The Twilight Zone.
    • Martha Vickers had appeared in The Big Sleep alongside Lauren Bacall.
    • James Craig had acted alongside everyone from John Wayne to Boris Karloff.

    This gave the director much more creative freedom to make the performances pop on-screen. The climatic plot twist is very good.

    I was inspired by watching Reflection in a Dead Diamond last month to watch Danger: Diabolik. The psychadelic motifs of and dream sequences of Reflection in a Dead Diamond seemed to draw from European cinema’s brief flirtation with super spy and super villain films during the 1960s. Danger: Diabolik was Mario Bava’s and Dino DeLaurentis’ take on the French Fantômas film series.

    Bava’s expertise in genre films and special effects gives Danger: Diabolik a more sophisticated look than you would give it credit. Add in the film’s 1960s modernist aesthetic, James Bond type action sequences and you have a winning film. The humour-heist plot is very of its time but still entertaining and cried out for a remake. Terry-Thomas’ character performance as a government minister in the film is one of brilliance.

    Useful tools.

    I was saddened to read of the demise of The World Fact Book published by the CIA. I found it invaluable as a starting point when getting up to speed on international campaigns on parts of the world that I hadn’t visited. It even helped me win some work with Telenor Myanmar back before the current military regime got back into power. According to this post on the CIA website the World Fact Book is going away.

    This personal productivity playbook by CJ Casseili was interesting to read and some of you may find tips and tricks that you can apply in your own work and personal life.

    Ilina Scott’s quick guide to AI tools for strategists is worth a read if you are just dipping your toe in the field.

    Occasionally software comes along what doesn’t become a mainstream success, but is well loved and much missed when it disappeared. Apple’s HyperCard was one, another was Yahoo! Pipes. The idea behind Pipes has been resurrected and in its latest iteration is very useful, even in a time of AI-with-everything.

    The sales pitch.

     i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

    With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors.

    My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my February 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to a presentation I gave to the Outside Perspective crew, in Adobe Acrobat format. 

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • Forgettable cinema

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

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

    Okay, I’m waiting.

    …still waiting.

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

    My answer would be:

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

    Bonus

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

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

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

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

    Why do we have forgotten cinema?

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

    Pre-Netflix, we had:

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Hellhound as a case in point.

    Hellbound_(TV_series)_title_card

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

    hellbound google trends data

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

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

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

    All is not completely lost yet.

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

    More posts similar to this one.

  • January 2026 newsletter

    January 2026 introduction – (30) the dirty Gertie edition

    I am now at issue 30, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘dirty gertie’. This phrase was the nickname given in the 1920s to a statue called by La Délivrance by French sculptor Émile Guillaume.

    La Délivrance - 7

    The statue was created to celebrate the German army having being stopped before Paris in World War 1. It was originally called La Victoire – there is a matching statue in Nantes, France.

    1960s student activists claimed that you shouldn’t trust anyone over the age of 30, making a virtue of ageism. While activists were deeply suspicious, 30 in Cantonese is considered to be lucky as the number three sounds like alive or life.

    It might be winter outside, but it doesn’t need to be winter in your head thanks to Graeme Park’s Best of 2025 part 1 which is two and a half hours of goodness. Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it. 

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    Each year, I try and write an account of year as it happens. It provides a perspective on what appeared important at the time rather than in retrospect. Here’s the one I did for 2025.

    The Dot LLM Era came out of my thinking about the massive expenditure in building infrastructure and the computing power needed by AI services like OpenAI and Anthropic, asking how it will be paid for and what it means for for business, consumers, investors and technologies. 

    There was so much happening from childhood beauty product usage alarming dermatologists to corporate and national moves in AI sovereignty. So I captured some of the most interesting of them here.

    Books that I have read.

    The value of everything

    Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.

    How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. More on the book here.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Every time I get a brief that defines an audience as a generation my heart sinks a bit for several reasons. Which is why I was glad to read this Ipsos  View Point and share it as widely as possible. Generational Marketing: Breaking free from stereotypes provides research on the nuances missed by a generational approach, how we differ by age cohort and life stage, alongside what brings us together as common challenges.

    While it won’t get as much ink as Christmas or Super Bowl adverts the CIA kicked off January with another video aimed at recruiting Chinese agents. They advised them to use a VPN and Tor browser to get in touch with them online.

    Chart of the month. 

    After I came back to London after working on various brands including Colgate in Asia, I noticed that all the Colgate adverts followed a standard formula. It puzzled me: the ads were distinctive by their ‘undistinctiveness’. They had no emotion and a limited number of brand cues beyond name checks and a pack shot or two.

    If like me, you’ve ever wondered why Colgate toothpaste adverts (in Europe at least) always seem to be based around a dentist or dental nurse (who may, or may not be a generative AI) character, then Ipsos Veracity Index 2025, may have the answer.

    The Ipsos Veracity Index, is a great piece of longitudinal research launched in 1983. It does an annual poll studying change in public trust towards leading professions in Britain. Much of the headlines for this year was the low trust position scored by influencers, with just 6% of people generally trusting them to tell the truth.

    I think that number has a number of problems with it, to do with the phrase general which would invite them to think about creators they don’t follow at least as much as those that they do follow. Secondly, not all influencer types are supposed to be trusted be it being videos on e-gaming play, humour and general ‘banter’ or shock jock-type content.

    As Ipsos themselves noted, there was a tension between the declared trust level with the amount of news consumption that now happens on social channels from influencers.

    ipsos veracity study 2025

    Getting back to the Colgate question, the answer is at the top of the table. Healthcare professionals and technical experts are at the most trusted professions in the UK.

    Things I have watched. 

    The TV schedule was terrible over the Christmas period and there were only so many reruns of Jessie Stone that even my Dad can sit through. So I entertained him with a mix of streamed films, old VHS tapes, DVDs and Blu-Rays.

    Reflection in a Dead Diamond cinema poster

    Reflection in a Dead Diamond directed by Hélène Cattet and impressed the hell out of me. At its heart it’s a mystery full of illusion, delusion and deception. It oscillates between two timelines one from the late sixties on and the second as an elderly version of the protagonist in the present day. In his day, the protagonist had been a Francophone James Bond-type figure, but darker like Fleming’s novels rather than the version that we see on screen. There are also hints of modern French historical figures like Alfred Sirven and Jean-Claude Veillard. The film has a lot of French new wave motifs particularly at its beginning. I was reminded of Alain Delon’sTraitement de choc , Diabolik and the André Hunebelle directed OSS 117 series of films in the mid-1960s.

    Bubblegum Crash – no that isn’t a typo. Bubblegum Crash was a follow on from the Bubblegum Crisis manga and OVA (original video animation – made for direct to video distribution without being broadcast or shown in a cinema first) anime series. I had these on VHS tape at my parent’s house and it was fantastic revisiting them decades later. Bubblegum Crash is less serious and the artwork isn’t as good as the original series, but it’s still great cyberpunk fiction.

    It felt surprisingly fresh, wealth inequality, get rich schemes, large corporations behaving badly, an openly gay police officer, autonomous machines from robots to cars and normalised smartphone usage.

    All this from an animated series that was produced in 1991, at this time robots were stuck in car plants, AI was image stabilisation in the latest high-end camcorders and handheld mobile phones were over 20cm long in use. Cellphones were only starting to become less than a kilogram in weight with the launch of Motorola’s MicroTAC in 1989.

    Detective vs Sleuths – a Johnnie To-adjacent film that a friend in Hong Kong gifted to me. The film was directed by Wai Ka-fai who collaborated with To and co-founded production company Milkyway Image together. Detective vs Sleuths feels thematically and stylistically similar to Mad Detective which Wai co-directed with To in 2007. That similarity brought me back to happier days flying on Cathay Pacific, sipping Hong Kong-style milk tea and watching Mad Detective soon after it had came out for the first time on the airplane entertainment system.

    Without spoiling the plot, old cold cases are having new light shone on them by a series of deaths. Sean Lau plays a Nietzsche-quoting former detective with his own sanity in question.

    Production-wise, the film was shot in 2018, was in post-production until 2019 and finally released after the worst of CoVID was over in 2022. If you are a passionate Hong Kong film watcher, then you will notice the similarities with Mad Detective; but Detective vs Sleuths still holds up as a really enjoyable inventive film with a number of surprises for the audience.

    Useful tools.

    Kinopio – quick lightweight service similar to Miro and MilanNote.

    Clean Links – for iPhone, iPad and Mac cleans out tracking codes from URLs when you share them, for instance in a Slack conversation.

    Not a tool per se, but a technique that started on Chromium browsers and is now more widely supported, scroll to text fragments. Appending to the end of a URL:

    #:~:text=startWord,endWord

    When someone clicks on the link they are guided directly to a highlighted section on the page, rather than having to search or guess at what you meant. It isn’t perfect, but it’s rather good.

    Capacities – an interesting knowledge management and research app similar to Notion, Mendeley, Yojimbo or DEVONThink.

    The sales pitch.

     i am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

    With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. Most recently, I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI.

    My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

    The Strategic Toolkit:

    • Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
    • AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
    • Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).

    I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a “wholehearted” strategic lead, let’s talk.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my January 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and good luck with your new year’s resolutions. As an additional treat here is a link to my charts of the month for 2025, in PowerPoint format that you can freely use in your own presentations.

    Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

    Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • December 2025 issue 29

    December 2025 introduction – (29) rise and shine edition

    I am now at issue 29, in Chinese numerology the number 29 is viewed positively, as it symbolises a long-lasting harmonious relationship. In bingo slang 29 is referred to as ‘rise-and-shine’ – ironic given that we’re currently enjoying the least daylight in any part of the year.

    Rise and Shine

    If you’ve managed to avoid Whamageddon – well done. I did my part with last month’s recommendation for Christmas music.

    This time you can’t do much better capturing pure joy than Folamour at the Mixmag Lab in London. Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it. 

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    A quick look at the implications of the US government’s new National Security Strategy.

    Rob Belk featured me in the Rambull newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed to his newsletter yet, I recommend doing so. It’s akin to a modern-day version of The Whole Earth Catalog, filled with carefully curated tools and useful resources, but without the tie-dye elephant pants. You can check it out here.

    Books that I have read.

    • Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. I bought several books on the recommendation of friends during the COVD lockdown and am slowly whittling my way through the pile, Counterinsurgency was one of them. It’s a collection of writings by Australian academic David Kilcullen, who advised the US government from 2005 – 2006 about Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is a collection of his writings from articles in military journals repeating many of the lessons learned in the past about fighting against guerrillas to Indonesian history. I had done some campaigns in Indonesia in the past for Qualcomm and Indofoods, so was interested in the post-independence history within it at the time. More about the book here.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Due to the timing on writing the last newsletter, I missed writing about how I got to spend an evening with senior in-house marketers thanks to The Ortus Club. The evening was held at a restaurant in Mayfair sharing experience of AI in terms of its benefits, future opportunities and challenges.

    Discussion themes that resonated:

    • There isn’t a lack of enthusiasm for generative AI in the corporate world.
    • Generative AI work often isn’t checked, to the detriment of it. It’s a powerful assist but you need to trust but verify.
    • IP concerns are holding back adoption and impacting tool choice by enterprises. Legal / regulatory departments are important AI gatekeepers.
    • Picking the right AI tool for the right job, too many organisations are trying to use one AI tool for everything.

    Toyota officially unveiled their GR GT and it’s gorgeous looking. It is also a strikingly different direction to the likes of Mercedes Benz and the Volkswagen Group of companies with only useful technology allowed. its rather different to the usual automotive approach of a computer that happens to have four wheels.

    In what is fast becoming an annual end of year tradition, Iolanda Carvalho, Amy Daroukakis, Gonzalo Gregori and Ci En Lee compiled 135+ trend reports from various organisations and strategists tucked straight in. You can explore most of them using NotebookLM here.

    Chart of the month. 

    Ipsos have been doing research in conjunction with Joe.co.uk looking at all things masculinity. One of the charts that stood out for me asked about the use of dating apps.

    dating app usage

    There was a clear gender gap between app usage numbers which represented an interesting challenge for product managers. It would merit further investigation as to the why. I have a couple of hypotheses:

    • Your product didn’t engage with women as much as men.
    • Your product is a poor medium to build up a rapport.
    • Some sort of difference in on-app behaviour usage that divides genders.
    • Your product carries social baggage that means women are less likely to admit that they have used your service.

    You can see how dating app brands have tried to address this through in real life events and women move first in-app mechanisms.

    Things I have watched. 

    bullet in the head ICA rerelease poster

    I managed to get hold of Bullet In The Head on Blu Ray. While John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow. The Killer and Hard Boiled are respected by western directors, Bullet In The Head doesn’t get enough appreciation. The story of the film is almost as good as the film itself. Woo split with production partner Tsui Hark to direct his own script. Woo even self-financed the film. The film is Woo’s singular vision with influences including the Tiananmen Square student protests, Vietnam news reel footage and The Deer Hunter. Over time it had become hard to find and is under-appreciated. It’s not a perfect film because it was so ambitious in terms of its scale and there is a softness to the cinematography that you also see The Killer. Despite all that, it’s a fantastic film that I would thoroughly recommend. As a bonus, here’s a list of John Woo’s favourite films, as you can see he has impeccable taste.

    Prison on Fire is part of my on-again, off-again tour through Ringo Lam’s filmography. Made in 1987, it has ‘Big Tony’ Leung Ka-fai who plays a graphic designer working in an ad agency who is sent to prison for manslaughter. He and his prison friend played by Chow Yun-fat navigate sadistic guards and violent triad convicts.

    Prison on Fire 2 was Ringo Lam’s sequel to the first successful instalment of Prison on Fire. Chow Yun-fat returned to play his central role in the sequel, this time dealing with mainland prisoners, in addition to the usual triads and sadistic guards. In addition to the action, the film focuses much more on the relationship between Chow and his on-screen son. Given the various hot button issues in the film from a modern-day Hong Kong context:

    • Triad – prison guard collusion
    • Conflict between Hong Kong and mainland Chinese
    • Blackening the name of the disciplined services* of the Hong Kong government (coastguard, police, corrections department, anti-corruption agency etc.)

    You are unlikely to see the like of the Prison on Fire films again, they would be in contravention of NatSec aka Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

    Thief was Michael Mann’s film debut. A hard-bitten heist film with film noir vibes. James Caan plays the protagonist Frank, a professional safe cracker adept at drilling locks out or cutting the door open with a thermic lance. He partners with James Belushi who plays an alarm expert. Mann contrasts the professionalism of Frank executing heists with his awkwardness claiming the heart of his girlfriend. A lot of the tension and craft he later brought to Heat and Collateral are already on display in this first firm, for instance the way Mann shoots nighttime scenes and paces the film’s plot. Tangerine Dream give Thief an amazing soundtrack.

    Useful tools.

    I have been working on a number of video projects and we’ve been using Trint to allow a perfect transcript to be made from digital video rushes that would aid in the editing and post-production process.

    Whether you prospecting for adtech or job-hunting; Mediasense’s agency family tree makes life easier.

    If you are moving into a leadership position, Zoe Arden‘s Story-Centred Leadership: Crafting Cultures of Change is probably worth a look. The book looks at how leaders can use stories to drive change through an iterative process of  ‘listening, building, shaping, sharing and living’ their stories, rather than treating the story as a one-and-done activation. That might sound a bit new-age and your mileage may vary in terms of how it works as a tool for your leadership style. But Zoe might be on to something. Nick Chater‘s The Mind is Flat looked at neuroscience and what we know about thinking arrived at the conclusion that stories are software for the brain and Story-Centred Leadership seems to come from a similar direction. (Disclosure: Zoe worked at my first agency, back then I worked at on B2B & consumer technology and telecoms clients.)

    The sales pitch.

    I have been 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.

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

    Ok this is the end of my December 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and have a great Christmas and new year. Keep an eye out for my retrospective rundown of 2025.

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

    Get in touch if you have any recommendations, and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on Substack as well as LinkedIn.

  • September 2025 newsletter

    September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition

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

    Pick'n'Mix

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

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

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

    Right, let’s get into it.

    New reader?

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

    SO

    Things I’ve written.

    Books that I have read.

    • I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
    • Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.

    Things I have been inspired by.

    Election-winning opacity in influencer relations 

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Chart of the month. 

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

    distinctiveness

    The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.

    emotion

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Things I have watched. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Casino Lisboa

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

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

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

    Useful tools.

    Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac

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

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

    The sales pitch.

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

    now taking bookings

    More on what I have done here.

    bit.ly_gedstrategy

    The End.

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

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

    Get in touch