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.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. Zhang is a senior legal academic who works at the University of Hong Kong, which until recently got a front row seat to China disputes with both the European Union and the United States. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter if it was viewed to fall under the purview of ‘state secrets’. With the new security law that has come in, definitions have been left deliberately vague and wide-reaching.
So why is Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism of interest?
If like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Around the time I worked on one client, they were shamed on the evening TV news and some of their staff disappeared for questioning by the authorities. They then reappeared months later looking haggard and worn out. It is new important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines.
Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. The rise of antitrust was as much down to bureaucratic politics of the Chinese government.
What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit.
Zhang talks about how regulatory hostage taking and public shaming was a tool of the regulatory authorities from early on.
The book then looks at foreign reactions to Chinese government from EU investigations to current US-China trade restrictions and discusses how China weaponised its regulatory frameworks making ‘hostage taking’ trans-national in nature.
Last of it’s type?
Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. More on Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism here. More book reviews here.
Welcome to my March 2024 newsletter which marks my 8th issue.
I am glad that I have moved to the eighth issue. In between St Patrick’s day happening in March, and the number 8 being lucky according to the Chinese in a good place – I figure its a good omen for this issue. 8 symbolises prosperity, joy and infinity. In Chinese pricing strategy 8 holds a similar role to 9 in western markets, so $58, $88 and $688 are frequent pricing points.
St Patrick’s day is particularly lucky for one Chinese city above all others: Yiwu in Zhejiang province is often called Christmas town. In reality it’s a city selling ‘small commodities’ better known to you and I as tat. The Christmas town epitaph came from it being the centre for the global Christmas decorations trade. It’s also where most of the St Patricks Day decorations are made including the leprechaun hats popularised around the world by Irish pubs.
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.
Razors for strategists – how we can apply the principle of philosophical razors to aid faster solutions for client work, while also bearing in mind their limitations.
AI two-step – corporate leaders reluctant to admit AI-related job losses.
Books that I have read.
A Hacker’s Mindby by veteran technologist Bruce Schneier provides a guide to the different way people have found loopholes to ‘hack’ systems. Schneier is trying to write a social movement book,, but while it’s interesting enough to read on a plan, it will be harder for it to get people moving as he intends.
I picked up this book from Scheltema book store just off Dam Square in Amsterdam during a work trip, with a bit of time-off bolted on the end. Browsing the English language book section of foreign book stores often gives recommendations that you wouldn’t otherwise look at. Tales from the Cafe: Before the Coffee Gets Cold is book two of a four-book series by Japanese author Toshikazu Kawaguchi is difficult to characterise in terms of genre. It’s a time travel novel with distinct rules that keep its universe coherent. It’s a book that is suitable for children, but not aimed at children- in this respect its more like the childhood books that I read growing up than are popular now as the ‘young adult’ genre. It’s about love lost, but not a romance novel – the love covered is a mix of loneliness of a widower, an orphaned child and a past romance. There is something delightful about the book, especially as it captures the minutae of everyday Japanese life.
Historian Dan Jones portrayal of medieval wars in his Essex Dogs series is very well written and accessible. It’s an ideal holiday read, if you can handle the grim subject matter. The Wolves of Winter is a richer story with greater intrigue in the plot line.
Back in the early 1990s chaos theory was very much in the public zeitgeist in a rather similar way to the internet from the late 1990s to early 2000s and artificial intelligence now. I have noticed mentions of chaos theory has started to pop up again as an idea in email newsletters. Fluke Chance, Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters resurrects chaos theory as an analogy and hypothesis for everything from global politics to emotion-driven behaviours. The author Dr Brian Klaas is a social scentist by training and has taken a few leaves out of the Malcolm Gladwell school of writing with stories to pull in the audience. I would liked to see a bit more evidence-based findings in the book. But it is a good read.
Things I have been inspired by.
TheOrangeblowfish, a Shanghai design-led agency did an amazing retail / out of home activation for Arc’teryx museum on what looks like a 3D OOH execution a la Ocean Outdoor’s Deepscreen sites in the UK.
Oliver’s white paper on How Brands Can Build Customer Trust looks at how brands can communicate about sustainability in their marketing. It’s a nice first step as a discussion document. There are a few areas I would like them to explore further:
Tonality on sustainability communications is immensely important, given the rise of climate despair amongst some consumers.
The gains earned by behavioural science are argued about, with practitioners relying on models that are often seen as overly complex and stacking of marginal gains. It has footholds in trying to drive meaningful changes in health, where small gains on paper mean a big change in lives saved, or made better. This LSE discussion on how it can be used to make democracy work better was interesting, especially given how many elections will be taking place in 2024.
Finally this paper on the polarisation of popular culture is likely to affect the way marketers think about product choice, media and culture over time. Media buying itself becomes a political act, beyond advertising on overtly political media channels and indicates a widening of the lived experience gap in society. We could see this already in the UK with Brexiter favoured brands.
Things I have watched.
The Knockdown – A Chinese drama where a Chinese Communist Party team goes to investigate a business and runs into widespread corruption. The corruption is centred around a fishmonger who gets tired of thugs and the grind of graft – he then reinvents himself as a gangster within the system. While it’s not Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, it is a good insight into how the Chinese government wants to see itself.
Flic Story – Alain Delon plays a detective pursuing a dangerous criminal in post-war France. This is based on the true story of criminal Emile Buisson who terrorised France. I did wonder whether the roof top chase scenes influenced Jackie Chan’s classic Hong Kong film Police Story in terms of plot and tension rather than his acrobatic skills?
Season 1 of Mr Inbetween had been recommended to me for years, people would rave on about it in the same way you hear about Breaking Bad or The Wire. A friend eventually sent me there copy on Blu-Ray. It has elements of Man Bites Dog about it – which makes sense when you find out it was originally adapted from Scott Ryan’s The Magician – a short fly-on-the-wall rockumentary film about a Melbourne underworld enforcer and occasional killer. Unlike Man Bites Dog – the violence is used sparingly in between the tedium of everyday life and office politics. Helen Mirren had apparently recommended it widely at the time. I am looking forward to season 2 which reputedly takes a darker turn.
Useful tools.
Sensia AI
Sensia AI is an interesting set of tools for consumer brands to easily monitor satisfaction and potential problems with their products and that of their competitors quickly, with ease and efficiently. Sensia analyses diverse data, from online reviews to e-commerce; offering useful insights. I was looking at it for consideration with regards an FMCG project that didn’t come off in the end. If you are interested. Check out some sample reports here, and if it looks of interest – contact Iris Chung.
Passport Online
I am an Irish citizen. The Irish government’s process to renew my passport and passport card via an online service was really easy. The service is called Passport Online and I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
Untranslatable
Not necessarily something that you would use day-to-day; but definitely of interest during digging into market research transcripts or transliteration of campaigns across different markets and languages. Untranslatable is a dictionary of idioms and expressions. The creators are native speakers, so you get the different cultural nuances.
New ways of using Miro
If you work in brand or connections planning or have thought customer experiences you’ve probably heard of Milanote, Miro or Mural. They also came to the fore with COVID-19 as virtual workshops became much more of a thing. Recently, I have been experiencing new user cases for these platforms. To present:
Creative briefs.
Sharing creative with clients.
A quick folder that holds key documents and shows the links between them.
Zettelkasten
Trying to build that vast mental model to then wrap into a narrative for clients. Vicky Zhao revisits the analogue technique of Zettelkasten. Your mileage may vary. It does remind me of the way I use social bookmarking as a data bank and mind maps as a creative process in writing. I can also recommend Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis for similar organisation ideas.
The sales pitch.
Now taking bookings for strategic engagements from April, or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my March 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and watch out for any April fools tricks being attempted on you.
Don’t forget to get in touch, share and subscribe!
Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
I eagerly anticipated reading A Hackers Mind, being a long-time follower of Bruce Schneier’s blog. A Hackers Mind caters to the well-informed individual. Schneier commences by defining what constitutes a hacker, delving into the essence of hacking and its widespread prevalence.
Subsequently, Schneier takes us on a journey into a hackers mind, guiding us through fundamental hacks targeting:
ATMs (automatic teller machines or cash machines)
Casinos
Airline frequent flier miles
Sports systems
Financial networks
The legal realm
Politics
Through these examples, Schneier aims to illustrate the parasitic nature of hacks on the systems they target, offering various techniques to impede or render them unfeasible. In doing so, he makes a broader socio-political statement about how the very foundation of the economy and society is continuously ‘hacked’.
The implication is that power lies in a hacker’s mind being applied to the systems that govern our lives. And that with the right mindset and ‘hack’ the ordinary person can turn the tables on those in power.
When this happens it makes great film or television. (A classic example of this would be ITV’s People vs. Post Office which told the story of postmasters combating wrongful prosecutions due to software defects. The reality was that in that particular case, it actually took the media coverage around the TV drama being shown to actually start moving the needle.)
Schneier in his book recognises that over time societies have evolved to become more equitable over time. He also attributes late stage capitalism to the hackers mindset, mixed with resources and technical capability in law or finance. The book is designed to wake the public up with a view to them also developing a A Hackers Mind and hacking the system back to equilibrium.
It’s an interesting light read, but I think VR pioneer and author Jaron Lanier writes better books focusing on the inequities inherent in the intersection of technology, culture and society. A great example of this is his book Who Owns The Future?
I don’t think Schneier gets close to inspiring his desired outcome with A Hacker’s Mind, but if you want something above the usual airport reading then it gets a thumps up from me, but it won’t be staying on my book shelf for me to re-read it at a later date. For more book reviews and recommendations go here. For recommendations of non-fiction books in particular go here.
Welcome to my February 2024 newsletter which marks my 7th issue. I hope that your year of the dragon is off to a great start.
The number 7 is a bit of a mixed bag, depending on how you look at it. In the old testament, the 7th heaven is where God’s throne is, alongside the angels. It had been considered a place of happiness, hence Gwen Guthrie’s Seventh Heaven. In Mandarin, the number is considered generally a positive thing, the number is a homophone for ‘arise’ and ‘life essence’. But that’s only half the story.
Indications of 7’s unlucky nature include the seventh month in the lunar calendar being a ‘ghost month’. In Cantonese, it is a homophone for a vulgar way of saying penis. I hope your February wasn’t a dick of a month.
For film buffs it’s almost 28 1/2 years since the transgressive crime thriller Seven was released. It was a break out hit and became the seventh highest grossing film of 1995, behind Die Hard with a Vengeance, Toy Story and Apollo 13. It beat out other films like Braveheart in box office earnings, but Braveheart ran away with the Oscars.
Let’s hope that feng shui master Michael Chiang is correct in terms of the positive energies from the year of the dragon.
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.
FOOH – and the ethical and marketing challenges it presents with a thought experiment harking back to the golden age of pornography.
Technonationalism – how current technological developments mirror the cold war and the 20th century Asian economic miracle.
Innovation signalling – how innovation is used by brands for show, rather than for genuine progress.
Pipes by Yahoo – a remarkable web service that also causes us to reflect on the post modern web of today.
Hong Kong measurements – how something as simple as measurement units are a melding of culture, history, modernity and politics in a time of change.
Y2K was always more than a fashion phase, but it seems to have faded from the zeitgeist which means the fashion takes have no context. Here’s a bit of context for you.
Books that I have read.
What the Taliban Told Me by Ian Fritz. Fritz writes really, really well, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have been able to complete his personal memoir about his upbringing, service in Afghanistan onboard an AC-130 gunship and depression. In some ways it reminded me of Jarhead – Anthony Swofford’s memoirs of his life up to the time of being in the US Marines during the first Gulf War. Swofford’s book came out a decade and a half after his service. Fritz’ book feels much more immediate and without the flashes of humour and beauty that was in Swofford’s book.
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China by Leta Hong Fincher. This was originally written in 2016, but has been updated to incorporate changes over subsequent years. It shows how government policy, ethnographic-nationalism, law enforcement, the legal system, collective punishment and community pressure is applied on modern women. I still find the content covering domestic violence shocking. This isn’t the China of Mao where in theory women hold up half the sky, instead it seems to be on a trajectory that would eventually see it closer to Mao’s view of China’s population, or Ceaușescu’s Decree 770 and other associated pro-natalist laws. This is a world away from the equally oppressive one-child policy, which had been brought in to deal with population related problems from the Mao-era.
The Big Book of Cyberpunk edited by Jared Shurin. I am huge fan of cyberpunks better known authors: William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling. This collection of 100+ stories written by authors from 25 countries is a mixed bag, but that’s no bad thing.
Things I have been inspired by.
J Walter ThompsonWunderman Thompson VML Intelligence launched their annual Future 100 report. It’s a great read and its continuity over the years makes it stand apart from the plethora of trends reports that get published every year. Their trends which intersect luxury and health are particularly interesting:
Althluxe
Bioharmonizing spas
Longevity resorts
Idyllic idleness
Author Cory Doctorow’s essay for Locus magazine plays devil’s advocate in considering the future of the crypto-based ecosystem and artificial intelligence is well worth a read. Doctorow speculates on what kind of bubble artificial intelligence is likely to become and the effect that its deflation may have. He draws on the outcomes of tech bubbles in the past including the dot com bubble and the telecoms bubble that accompanied it.
Just Conecting published a report on what seems to work on LinkedIn. It’s an interesting snapshot of what works at the moment, I am sure things will change over time as the algorithm evolves. Much of the focus seems to be orientated towards personal branding over business brands.
Over at Japan House, I marvelled at the exhibition Ainu Stories: Contemporary Lives by the Sara River. The Ainu are native to Japan’s northern islands and have survived for millenia in the extreme cold. Historically they were discriminated against, but now there is an appreciation of their culture. The art pieces on display are unique in their design, but share the attention to detail one sees in other Japanese work.
The Science Museum has an amazing exhibition on: Zimingzhong 凝时聚珍: Clockwork Treasures from China’s Forbidden City. Prior to the opium wars, UK craftsmen created fantastic clockwork-powered creations that were given as gifts to the emperor of China. The exhibition finishes on June 2, 2024. I went during Chinese new year. I came away with a refreshed appreciation of modern watchmaking complications, in particular devices like ‘minute repeaters’.
NS Lyons magnus opus The China Convergence is read by Regina Doman. Lyons’ premise is that western systems have converged with China’s approach to governance due to the rise of the technocrat. In this respect his perspective is similar to that shared by documentary maker Adam Curtis. Like Curtis, Lyons’ The China Convergence asks uncomfortable questions of us. Are we basically a less extreme version of the same system to the presses of mass and scale?
While we’re talking China, I can recommend the China Update YouTube account that provides a concise summary of Chinese business news and economic analysis garnered from a wide range of Chinese and western business publications.
Finally, IPSOS ongoing collection of reports this time reflects on the power of nostalgia. This time focusing on youth culture from cottage-core, Barbie mania, vinyl to vintage technical clothing and streetwear and the underlying drivers behind it. Why Nostalgia Is So ‘Fetch’ Right Now by Samira Brophy is well worth a read.
2023 Global Trends Report by ACROSS Health is a great census of healthcare professional media preferences and insight into omnichannel communications trends for pharmaceutical marketing. It is good reading and indicates that pharma clients who have an excessive efficiency bias and want to go to digital-only customer journeys will be left behind by peers taking a mixed approach.
Things I have watched.
Agent Hamilton – Carl Gustaf Hamilton is a Swedish answer to James Bond or Jack Ryan. Hamilton was the main character in a series of books written by a former investigative journalist, Jan Guillou, who served time in Sweden for exposing illegal intelligence operations. Guillou wrote the first Hamilton book in 1986 and the last one in 2012.
Blake and Mortimer – if you’re a fan of TinTin, you’ll like Blake and Mortimer as both come from the French -Belgian comic tradition. This cartoon series is based on the adventures of an eminent Scottish scientist and a British military intelligence officer in mid-century Europe. It’s nice light entertainment and I can recommend the graphic novels as well of which there are now 30+ stories including the Before Blake and Mortimer off-shoots. The authors have also wrote other excellent series like XIII.
Useful tools.
Audio Hijack 4.3
Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack has been a mainstay on my Mac for far more years than I care to mention. It was great for everything from recording conference talks to putting together quick and dirty talk tracks that concepting films can be cut too. Version 4.3 features OpenAI’s Whisper transcription software that can cater to transcribing dozens of languages. I have found it better than tools like Otter.ai for me.
Krisp
Krisp.ai is a freemium service providing intelligent noise cancellation, call transcripts and meeting notes all in one. It works with Teams, Google Meetup, Slack and Zoom.
Obsidian
Just like Evernote back in the day, Obsidian has become a bit of a cult app for those that find it really useful. At its heart, it is a note taking and writing application. It will sync between desktop and mobile devices, but that costs $8/month – which is expensive. I haven’t been using it beyond a quick trial, as I have a well-defined set of tools that I use and Obsidian didn’t really slot in well. But I can appreciate the value of it to others. One thing I would be leery of, if you are moving to Obsidian is the cottage industry in snake oils salespeople hawking the ‘ultimate’ online course for Obsidian. Instead check out Obsidian’s own community pages of courses.
Todoist
Todoist is a shareable to do list that places it somewhere between quick and dirty project management and personal productivity. I am giving it a try following a recommendation from a friend. It’s not about whether products like this are good or not, but usually if it fits into your style of working, so your mileage may vary.
Welcome to my January 2024 newsletter which marks my 6th issue – bringing us to a half dozen issues in total. Here’s a quick video introduction that I recorded with HeyGen.
Dozen as a word in the English language comes from the french douzaine – meaning an assembly of 12 things of the same nature. This in turn was derived from roots in Latin. Weirdly enough the use of dozen plunged to a nadir in 1983 and then enjoyed steady growth to reach its most recent peak in 2018.
The sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. But each day is getting slightly more daylight here in London and in a few months we could be complaining about the heat.
Watch Registry – how a confluence of EU regulations and surging crime has driven a new category of online service.
Pebble – micro-blogging service Pebble went under in November last year. Here’s what we lost.
Loneliness – its impact and some of the solutions that are evolving to address it.
Backroom – how one of my photos went around the web and ended up in an online game.
Every old idea is new again – a mix of collective amnesia and the less than perfect memory of the web means that old ideas have their time as new creative.
Books that I have read.
Over the new year, I curled up on the sofa with 2034 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis. Ackerman and Stavridis plot out a political pot boiler about what a future war with China might look like. The realpolitik of the book feels real, the main issue would be the complete passivity of smaller powers like the United Kingdom and France. The rise of India and the fall of China as a global power at the end is an interesting commentary on the current Xi-led government. The book seems to set out to do a few jobs. First and foremost it’s a call to arms about American preparedness (it isn’t prepared). Secondly, it’s a warning about over-relying on technology, over base skills like astral navigation – something that the advertising industry could learn from as we fumble forward across AI, martech and adtech in a time of declining effectiveness. But the book also irritated me and pulled me out of of the story with magical thinking in Chinese technology and having every part of a plane including an ejector seat open to being hacked and disabled. I could imagine car manufacturers leaving their safety systems open, but would have thought that the military would have been more sensible about their safety equipment.
How Did Britain Come to This?: A century of systemic failures of governance by Gwen Bevan. How Clement Attlee’s administration solved issues of minimal government in the post-war period and these solutions held up until the early 1970s. How Margaret Thatcher’s solution of markets for everything suffered from market failures over the years. All of which resulted in geography as destiny in terms of social outcomes.
Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy by Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin – an interesting portrayal of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement from the perspective of foreign journalists in the region. McLaughlin writes for The Atlantic and is based out of Singapore, Mahtani does a similar role for the Washington Post. The whole society movement of the protests is something that comes out in the books and makes me think that the authorities will have a longer term job to keep their illiberal agenda going. But on the flipside the American foreign policy looks weak and ineffective in the face of China. What most surprised me was how the authors uncovered details inside the government and the police force. Probably the most explosive allegation is that the Organised Crime and Triad Bureau of the Hong Kong Police were monitoring the WhatsApp group chat used by multiple rival gangs to organise the attack on Yuen Long train station. There is a large overlap between rural political committees in the Yuen Long area and triads. We know that the police did not prevent it, did nothing about it when it happened and conducted minimal prosecutions. Chief executive Carrie Lam was getting her news from the television rather than intelligence gathered using open source, human intelligence sources and ‘exquisite‘ means. Some members of the government related to mainland affairs seem to have had an indication of what was coming, but there is no evidence that Lam knew.
Things I have been inspired by.
Swiss International Airlines, the city of Geneva and the Grand Prix D’Horologerie de Genève did a classic PR stunt in October 2023. A flight crew member supervised by a watchmaker assembled a mechanical watch mid-flight between Geneva and New York at an altitude at 30,000 feet. In the idea you have precision, innovation, expertise, professionalism, quality and skill. A solid fusion of complementary brands, brand planning and creative ideation.
Unfortunately, the story seems to have been eclipsed by the Israel – HAMAS conflict in the Gaza region. The uncertainty of the news agenda illustrates the weakest point of a campaign relying purely on earned media.
Etsy and agency The Orchard nailed gift buying with their spot ‘Dad’. The insight that family members often don’t want gifts and are concerned about clutter or the ‘wrong type’ of gifts is on-point. There is the additional layer of thriftiness that comes from being part of an immigrant family – be they Irish or Asian.
The idea also had me reflect on the time I spent helping to sort through my late Uncle’s belongings on the family farm back home in Ireland. There were ‘new old stock’ ties still in their packaging and an Insignia aftershave / shower gel gift set from sometime in the early 1990s in his drawers. Stashed there after being gifted, but unneeded.
Thoughtful gifts are priceless.
While the ad is aimed at Christmas, I saw it as I thought about my Dad’s birthday. My own parents exhibit the traits of not wanting gifts and thriftiness. But in my case, no Etsy-sleuthing was required however, with a bit of cajoling he knew precisely what he wanted from the Toolstation catalogue. The collector gene runs deep in the Carroll family.
https://youtu.be/4VI6rgps_Bc?si=pHQpElVLc_KlDecI
The Orchard for Etsy
While a lot of London had their out of office on until January 15th, New Balance had their skates on previewing Scorpius, Rose Water and Medusa Azúl variants of the 1906R in association with Action Bronson. The clever thing that they have done is that each of the colour ways have a variation in brightness, appealing to sneaker heads of different temperaments. For me this was more exciting than Louis Vuitton’s collaboration with Timberland also announced this month.
7-Eleven Hong Kong did one of the first campaigns that merged generative AI techniques with traditional advertising production values including extensive use of green screens and wire work that would have been more at home in the fantasy martial arts films Hong Kong made famous.
4.5 billion years in an hour. A great way to bring data to life in a way that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to fathom. It also works well as a background for writing late at night as well. It did remind me of Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy for some reason, and that’s no bad thing.
I was looking at the underlying code on one of my flickr photo pages and came across this recruitment advert embedded in the code. I thought it was quite cleverly done in terms of targeting a technical audience.
A bit of a late find for me, the Computer History Museum held a 2-hour event interviewing key people in the development of the Apple Mac, in order to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its launch. There is so much that can be still learned today from their experience. You can watch it here.
Finally, Tom Coates shed more light on what we are likely to see platform-wise from a post-Twitter future.
Things I have watched.
It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions.
Something Wicked This Way Comes – Something Wicked This Way Comes was made in the UK during that many Disney fans describe as the studios ‘dark period’. From 1967 – 1984, the Disney family connection to the business was severed through deaths and a resignation. Film quality declined while shows and theme parks supported the business until Michael Eisner . Something Wicked This Way Comes has a fantastic cast including blaxploitation starlet Pam Grier, Broadway and Hollywood veteran Jason Robards and a young Jonathan Pryce, now better known as David Cartwright, former spook and River Cartwright’s grandfather in Slow Horses. The film is based on a book by Ray Bradbury. The film has a similarly surreal nature to Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
I sat and watched Wild Palms. I hadn’t watched it all the way through previously and I found it much more rewarding to watch than similar shows like Twin Peaks. There is that slight dissonance and discomfort you have watching it that reminded me of reading JG Ballard’s works.
The Criterion Collection released a sympathetic digital remastering of Frederico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. With a lot of similar projects the work adds little, but The Criterion Collection are no ordinary publisher and the film needed a lot of work. So much so, that it took donations from Gucci and government bodies to ensure that the work was done to a high standards. The results are right there on screen, the sound has had excessive background noise cleaned up as well. It isn’t excessively loud like the audio on the remaster of Sergio Leone’s crowning achievement Once Upon A Time in the West, but it does benefit from the clarity provided. The films commentary on the hollowness of the media industry is timeless as is its tour of Rome: ancient and modern.
Michael Fassbender’s Road to Le Mans – Porsche sponsored online film series that goes through Michael Fassbender’s journey to drive the Le Mans 24 hour race.
I am a huge fan of French police dramas from the 1960s to the present day and was really impressed by Netflix show Blood Coast. It features Olivier Marchal on some of the writing and directing duties. Marchal created Braquo, which ran for three seasons until 2016.
Not exactly something to watch, but the Hot Money: The New Narcos is an amazing high adrenalin podcast with the Kinahan family and the Dubai Super-cartel at the centre of it all.
Useful tools.
ABBYY Business Card Reader.
ABBYY Business Card Reader allows you to convert business cards into contacts.app entries on your iPhone or iPad – this then syncs with my Mac as part of iCloud services. While I don’t receive as many business cards as I used to, this is still a really useful time-saver.
WolframAlpha.
WolframAlpha is a handy shortcut for data points that Statista, WARC etc. doesn’t or won’t have.
Beeper.
Beeper is a multi-protocol messaging client. You can have Slack, LinkedIn, iMessage, WhatsApp and Discord all in one client. It works on both Macs and iPhones.
WaveAI Note taker.
Wave AI is an app that provides call note taking functionality using speech to text conversation. It is based on a freemium business model. Give it a try to see if it works with your style of working. An alternative to consider is Vienna Scribe, both seem to give better results than otter.ai
Portable second monitor.
When working away from the office or home, I have found a second monitor to come in handy. The one I use is from ASUS and comes with a protective cover that doubles as a stand.
Ok this is the end of my January 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Gong hei fat choy for the forthcoming Chinese new year. It will be the year of the dragon on February 10th.
