Welcome! I guess the first question that you have is why oprah time? Well in my last year of college I used to sit in the house that I shared with my landlord and write my essays whilst watching cable TV.
There I would be sipping tea, writing away and referencing from text books spread around me on the couch and coffee table. One of the programmes on the in the background was Oprah Winfrey. A lot of the show was just background noise. But I was fascinated by Oprah’s book club.
She’d give her take on a book, maybe interview the author. And then it would be blasted up the New York Times bestsellers list. This list appears weekly in the New York Times Book Review. Oprah’s book club was later emulated by other talk show hosts, notably the UK’s Richard Madeley and Judy Finegan.
On the high end you had Melvyn Bragg‘s South Bank Show when they profiled an author of the moment.
When I came to writing my own review of books that I’d read, I was was brought back to that time working on a sofa. Apple laptop in hand. It made sense to go with Oprah time.
You might also notice a link called bookshelf. This is a list of non-fiction books that I have kept. And the reasons why I have kept them.
If you’ve gone through my reviews and think that you’d like to send me a book to review. Feel free to contact me. Click this link, prove that you’re human and you will have my email address.
Victor O. Schwab’s How to Write a Good Advertisement was originally written in 1962, there was no internet and television was emergent in terms of being an advertising format that copywriters would be working on. I bought it as part of several books during CoVID and am slowly working through my reading pile now.
Schwab looked to write a straight forward guide for copywriters of the time. Schwab focuses heavily on the psychology of advertising to elicit the right kind of reaction from the consumer.
This psychology is something that modern marketers have had to relearn through marketing science. Yet Schwab was quoting academics, rigorous market research surveys and psychology studies 50 years earlier.
Schwab’s style throughout the book is to show examples that work and why they work. Despite Schwab teaching copywriters about media that would be seen as largely irrelevant now, the lessons are still invaluable.
Each chapter is clearly set out and has questions at the end of the chapter is that the reader can reflect on what they’ve learned and apply their thinking. There is also an exercise or two so that you can apply what you’ve learned from the chapter.
Performance marketing
The mail order copywriting section in How to Write a Good Advertisement is particularly interesting because of its focus on what we’d now call performance marketing. Schwab talks about performance marketing copywriters having to become hard nosed in nature. By hard nosed, Schwab described a mindset as a single-minded focus on the sale.
This section also covered testing in a way that would feel very familiar to online advertising practitioners now.
Conclusion
While Schwab doesn’t give you models, frameworks or mnemonics to aid retention or learning of principles, relying instead on trying to build muscle memory of the student copywriter.
You can find out more about How to Write a Good Advertisementhere.
The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy is written by Italian-American academic Mariana Mazzucato.
Background
Mazzucato’s work focuses on the intersection of innovation, economics and the role of government. Currently she is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL).
For an economics book The Value of Everything is surprisingly accessible to read. I managed to get through it’s 180 pages in just over a day.
Starting with a quick tour of economic history over five centuries, Mazzucato dissects what value actually means, its connection to statehood and how that meaning has evolved over time.
Premise
The central premise of Mazzucato’s argument is that there are problems the way market economies currently work. Those problems come from the imbalance between value creation and value extraction. The book argues that it is far too easy for those operating in the market economy to get rich by extracting value from those who actually create it, rather than by adding it themselves.
The book diagnoses the reasons for this challenge, notably how value is defined by economists, business people, governments, investors and politicians. Along the way, it touches on what Will Hutton’s The State We’re In termed ‘short-termism’. Mazzucato’s argument isn’t a new one and covers areas that have been talked about in the UK economy since the 1960s by the likes of economist Nicholas Kaldor. If you’ve watched the work of BBC documentary film maker, Adam Curtis the subject matter will feel very familiar.
Mazzucato also addresses the value imbalances in technology platforms echoing the work of Columbia law professor Tim Wu’s work from The Master Switch in 2010 to The Age of Extraction published last year.
In at the top
What makes Mazzucato different to the likes of Gary Stevenson is that the current government is at least paying lip service to her ideas, notably the idea of a mission led government. Whether or not the government can turn Mazzucato’s ideas in The Value of Everything into actionable policy and deliver on it is a discussion way beyond this book review.
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.
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Counterinsurgency was one of several books that seemed interesting and that I bought during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 which I am slowly working my way through.
David Kilcullen
David Kilcullen is a former Australian military officer, who is an academic working at University of New South Wales, Canberra. Back in 2005 he advised the US government for a year while it dealt with insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has since been advising various companies about aspects of international studies.
Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency is a collection of his writings for military and academic journals. It covers everything from a tactical guide to officers dealing with local communities to the history of Indonesia post-independence and its efforts to combat East Timorese looking to become independent.
Kilcullen’s Counterinsurgency interesting to read for several reasons:
Accessible writing: he writes really well making his subject areas very accessible to enquiring minds. For an academic, it was refreshingly jargon-free and articulated complex situations simply.
His how-to guides for US military officers serving in Afghanistan gave me an insight that I previously didn’t have from the media coverage.
As someone who had worked on Indonesian market campaigns for Indofoods and Qualcomm, knowing more about this complex country was rewarding. Kilcullen provides an accessible window into two points in the post-independence history of Indonesia.
One of the key things that I took away from Counterinsurgency was the fragility of knowledge in organisations. Much of the work that Kilcullen is doing in the first part of the book was instilling hard-won knowledge that the world’s militaries had learned from TE Lawrence tormenting the Great Arab Revolt onwards including Vietnam, various American cold war campaigns, the British in Malaya and Northern Ireland.
Militaries put a lot of effort into capturing the history of conflicts and spend a lot of time on lessons learned. This is far more effort than organisations generally put into place to learn from the likes of marketing campaigns, yet Kilcullen’s writing was valuable because that knowledge seemed to be slipping through the cracks of militaries.
If you have an enquiring mind about world affairs and history, I can recommend Counterinsurgency as a good read. Other book reviews can be found here.
November 2025 introduction – (28) in a state edition
I am now at issue 28, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘in a state’. In a state or in a right state usually carried a sense of trepidation in Irish households – it usually describes an odd emotion exhibited by the person being discussed.
It is often associated with stupor, shock, chaos, agitation or anxiety.
“There was a car crash just up the road; thankfully no one was injured but the driver was in a state.”
It could also be used as a tone of disapproval for a person’s grooming and outfit.
In Cantonese 28 has positive connotations and is interpreted as “easy to be rich” or “easy prosperity”. The pronunciation of ‘2’ (yi) sounds like ‘easy’ and ‘8’ (ba) sounds like ‘prosper’ (fa).
This edition’s soundtrack is from The Hideout, a former boutique that used to be based in Golden Square and specialised in Japanese streetwear brands like Neighborhood, A Bathing Ape, WTAPs etc. Each Christmas time they used to have this mixtape put together by Andrew Hale on heavy rotation. Since then it’s become a seasonal go to in Chez Carroll.
( Hale played keyboards for Sade. He was a member of Japanese experimental supergroup Water Melon (ウォーター・メロン) alongside Gota Yashiki, KUDO, Toshio Nakanishi aka Tycoon To$h, and provided soundtracks for computer games and films.) Ok, I will stop nerding out now.
Now we have a sound track, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
Things I’ve written.
Mico + more things – Mircrosoft’s AI companion has a bit of Clippy and a bit of Willo the Wisp (who was the brand character of British Gas) to it. But as a fluent object it’s not bad.
Toyota FJ Land Cruiser + more stuff – Toyota’s genius move to launch a smaller footprint Land Cruiser with fantastic utilitarian details in the design. The downside is that we are unlikely to see any of them in the UK.
Books that I have read.
I have been reading my Dad’s copies of Gerald Seymour’s books back when I was a child. My friend Ian introduced me to his later works and character Jonas Merrick. Crocodile Hunter explains the back story why a caravan-loving middle-aged ‘underachieving’ MI5 officer had been given so much latitude. Merrick then becomes the metaphorical crocodile hunter of the title in a game of wits with an experienced veteran of the Syrian civil war and Iraq conflicts in the environs of Canterbury.
1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
As I was reading this article in the FT How this 31-year-old made $250mn in 30 months | FT – oil trading with Russian oil. A few things crossed my mind. Amongst them being that it sounded like a pitch for prospective series two of McMafia. Will the protagonist fall out of a window from a Moscow skyscraper?
Things I have been inspired by.
I managed to spend some time with my long time colleague Calvin Wong on a stopover before he headed to Portugal for Web Summit.
It might be merely a rationalisation of my own biases, after the later part of the 2010s being a lull in the creative web. 2025 seems to be spawning more creative things built on the web. My current favourite is Radiooooo shocking brand name, but an amazing site. You can navigate a map of the world, click on a country and listen to music from that country. Not only that but can select whether you are open to fast, slow tempo songs or ‘weird’. My current favourites are Japanese, Thai and Cambodian pop of the 1960s.
When visual gen AI was used to modify existing ads originally created by human experts, its performance fell short of the original ads.
When visual gen AI was used to create ads from scratch, those ads outperformed both the human expert–created and gen AI-modified ads.
When everything including the product package created by gen AI in the advertisement was associated with higher ad effectiveness.
But consumers still aren’t fans, when gen AI involvement in ad generation is disclosed, advertisement effectiveness decreases. Disclosure is becoming a legal requirement in many markets and cramping ad effectiveness.
These oddities could be down to how well their models performed with modified prompts, rather than a repudiation of human effort. And all of these nuances are likely to change as models are improved. This doesn’t mean that generative AI is the best advertising and packaging designers. But it does depend a lot on the aesthetic / taste of the human prompter even more.
20% growth every year since 2021 for client complaints about efficiency.
58% of what clients link efficiency to is non-operational. Efficiency, is a partnership quality rather than a production metric – kind of like the idea of synchronicity. Increasing ‘juniorisation’ of teams, hybrid working, and smaller budgets have created an operational squeeze, while automation and rigid systems stripped back the human touch that clients value most.
The chasm opening up between rising client satisfaction (currently 8.0) and declining team satisfaction (7.3) in their agency team threatens work quality, client retention and employee churn. The problems stem from agency culture: little agency leadership, recognition or care.
Chart of the month.
Ipsos did a 30-country survey to answer the question ‘Is Life Getting Better? comparing attitudes to 1975 versus 2025. Nostalgia is a great standby for trend reports as the past is constantly been repackaged.
What the Ipsos report hints at is widespread dissatisfaction with current political and economic systems in Europe, Latin America, North America, South Africa and many Asian countries. Part of this maybe down to what Ipsos termed ‘the middle class in crisis‘. The contrary outlier was South Korea.
As tough as the Korean economy is now, the country has made a huge step change over the past five decades: shaking off a military dictatorship and undergoing massive economic development.
The UK’s intense desire for nostalgia hints at a wider unease, what The New Statesman called the Netflixification of politics.
Things I have watched.
Apple TV+ have followed up Slow Horses this season with a second adaptation of a Mick Herron novel Down Cemetery Road. Emma Thompson is the protagonist unearthing a very British conspiracy bought about by a suspicious fire and abducted child in Oxford. It is made to the same high standard as Slow Horses and I have found it to be must-see TV.
Dominic Cooper plays a blinder in Apple TV+ series The Last Frontier. The tangled storyline of conspiracy, paranoia and secrets reminded me of vintage TV series like 24 and The X Files. What separates The Last Frontier is the detail, its scenic shots of an Alaskan winter are beautiful.
Useful tools.
Koolyz is a directory / portal of online tools that I found via Matt Muir’s excellent newsletter. It helps on all the finicky tasks like compressing PDFs or moving an image from one format to another. It is also worth looking at The Creative Cheat Sheet for visual inspiration, writing and presentation building tools.
I got to try out Hubspot‘s AEO grader here. It is a good starting point to understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini ‘see’ and ‘understand’ your brand.
Finally LUMAscapes is a series of charts by LUMA that give you the main players in agencies, AI, OOH, martech and more categories as convenient PDFs.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my November 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Christmas. As an additional treat here is a link to my Mam’s recipe for Christmas cake – we usually make one in November. It is then allowed to sit prior to serving at Christmas. If looked after correctly it can keep for several months. I grew up with and love fruit cake but your mileage may vary.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
