It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia was interviewed by Axios. In the wide ranging interview he is advocating for open LLM models. He thinks that the benefits of closed models ties in with the benefits of scale and convenience from cloud computing infrastructure. Jensen Huang also talks about sovereign AI at an enterprise level as well as country level.
What struck me was Huang’s strong advocacy for open source and open models. He points to the central role that Linux plays today. (Android is Linux as is Google Chrome, macOS, iOS, iPadOS and tvOS all run on Darwin which is open source and relies on BSD and the Mach micro-kernel – which are also open source). He points out that open source allows inspection, customisation to harden the software and ultimately be trusted.
It one of the best interviews that I have seen where Jensen Huang is at his most articulate. It’s also interesting that the interview is so wide ranging. Huang’s last point about now being the most important time, gave me a moment for pause. Huang’s time is mediated by his staff rather than by outlook or his watch. But it also made me wonder about the nature of strategy and horizon-scanning at Nvidia.
The interview was published at a time when the media realised that Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 as an open model was competitive with US frontier models on many measures.
Contrast Huang’s viewpoint with Palantir CEO Alex Karp on CNBC. Karp discussed a growing unhappiness amongst US enterprises about the cost of accessing models from large AI companies, yet receiving ‘no value’ from the technology.
Surfing the wave
Kind of a tangential point to to Huang’s the most important time is now is about timing in technological innovation. Robert X Cringely in his book Accidental Empires made this point through the use of surfing as an analogy. If you hit a wave too early, you wipe out, if you hit the wave too late the momentum and energy has gone out of the wave. Hitting it at the right time the most important factor. It’s a timeless truth.
Film maker David Hoffman documented behind the scenes at General Magic as part of the process to make a launch video for their product. General Magic were too early to the wave as this behind the scenes footage shows.
Ladders
I like Justin Taylor’s videos because of their insightful content delivered in a snarky slacker way. In this video he uses ladders to illustrate the importance of supply chains and logistics to support US air power. Which explains why the US is restricted to predictable bases in the current Iranian conflict amongst other things.
Writing about consumer grievance came from a couple of things. I was watching a lecture by professor Robert Reich at Stanford and it reminded me of Edelman‘s 2025 Trust Barometer report ‘Trust and the Crisis of Grievance‘.
Edelman’s annual report is a barometer, a global snapshot of who and what consumers trust. As long as I can remember Edelman’s report into trust of institutions has been in decline, but the 2025 report highlighting consumer grievance marked a perceived acceleration.
TL;DR
Why it matters: Most brands treat consumer complaints as a customer service headache to be managed by a chatbot. That is a massive commercial misstep. Grievance is not an admin burden; it is a raw, unvarnished map of what your audience actually cares about.
What is changing: We are seeing the rise of a distinct global grievance culture. When trust in traditional institutions wobbles, consumers direct their frustration at the brands they buy from. If you look closely at these grievances, you see the exact gaps where your business is failing to deliver on its promise.
The big picture: Two distinct trust economies now exist. There is the formal, corporate version presented in annual reports, and the real-world version lived by your customers. When the gap between the two grows too wide, the goodwill sitting on your balance sheet evaporates.
https://flic.kr/p/2j7nUoJ
Global grievance
In the report Edelman posited that trust in institutions was no longer a universally shared civic resource. Around the world, it had become a luxury commodity that is heavily segmented by income and social class.
Putting my cards on the table
You the reader should question my interpretation as an enquiring mind. With that in mind, it makes sense to understand my starting viewpoint as I started to go through the subject matter. I agreed with the essence that Edelman’s research has captured. And the bifurcation of the economy is being baked into marketing plans that I have worked on over the past few years.
I have my doubts about their methods. I believe that their motives are good admittedly moderated by commercial considerations, but I did find myself questioning the techniques used and data transparency.
I set out to find high quality research that validated, or challenged the concept of consumer grievance.
Edelman’s original approach was triggered by the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’. The survey’s structural model was built upon the mid-1990s theories of Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama argued that institutional trust was primarily driven by upward mobility, structured legal systems, and guaranteed economic prosperity.
The Trust Barometer’s original respondents was restricted to “opinion leaders” or “opinion elites”. That mean’t highly affluent college-educated people aged 35 to 64 with high media consumption and active engagement in public policy. The demographic that prospective Edelman clients would sit neatly within.
Technological and economic change saw Edelman move to a general population sample. They also moved from telephone interviews to online surveys. The number of respondents increased from 1,300 in five countries to 36,000 respondents.
2020 saw a change in survey design that broke the idea of ‘to do what is right’ into two attributes:
Competence
Ethical behaviour
Business did well on competency but less well in ethical considerations. Government, media and NGOs were viewed as lacking in both . Edelman compensated for this by studying proximal trust and employee trust.
Edelman introduced the concept of ‘trust brokering’ – an organisations capacity to support dialogue and bridge social divides.
The Genesis of Global Grievance
With a flair for drama and storytelling Edelman’s Trust Barometer links the decline of trust and the genesis of consumer grievance back to the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organisation ministerial conference held in the city. While a wide coalition of both left and right political figures, NGOs, organised labour were there to protest against unfettered globalisation the wheels were already in motion.
…globalization is not new, but that the present era of globalization, driven by competitive global markets, is outpacing the governance of markets and the repercussions on people. Characterized by “shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders”, globalization has swung open the door to opportunities.
Breakthroughs in communications technologies and biotechnology, if directed for the needs of people, can bring advances for all of humankind. But markets can go too far and squeeze the non-market activities so vital for human development. Fiscal squeezes are constraining the provision of social services. A time squeeze is reducing the supply and quality of caring labour. And an incentive squeeze is harming the environment. Globalization is also increasing human insecurity as the spread of global crime, disease and financial volatility outpaces actions to tackle them.
The above quote came from the introduction to the 1999 Human Development Report (HDR) by the United Nationals Development Programme (UNDP).
As the 1999 HDR introduction alludes, by 1999 globalisation was not new and was already happening from Japanese consumer electronics to Korean shipbuilding. Instead globalisation was moving at a pace that institutions were no longer able to keep up with it or control it.
This viewpoint is supported by Professor Reich’s lecture on the factors driving the rise voter interest in populist leaders like President Trump. Reich outlines a four decades-long trajectory marked by:
The decoupling of productivity from wages. The US Board of Labour & Statistics paper Understanding of the labor productivity and compensation gap, considers the gap to have opened up in the 1970s. The fissure since the 1970s was also documented by the Economic Policy Institute’s work The Productivity-Pay Gap. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis published research showed how corporate profits decoupled from employee compensation from the early 2000s on.
The Reagan era erosion of labour bargaining power. Similar erosion also took place in the UK under the Thatcher government.
The concentration of corporate market power. Deregulation from the 1980s on, allowed the financial and corporate sectors to become politically and economically dominant. Reich argued that this created a system average citizens perceived as rigged to favour corporations and big banks over ordinary workers. The 2008 bank bailout while ordinary citizens faced foreclosures cemented this perception. This isn’t only a western issue. 44% of China’s workforce now work in the gig economy.
The resulting financial exhaustion of the working and middle classes. American families employed three coping mechanisms to maintain their standard of living. First, they simply worked longer hours. Second, women entered the paid workforce in massive numbers, creating the dual-income household out of necessity. Third, the other measures reached their limit, they tapped into the equity in their homes, until 2008
The US Bureau of of Labour had three hypotheses for factors driving the labour compensation – productivity gap:
Globalisation: Increased offshoring shifted production and service activities to other countries. Consequently, income that might have previously gone to domestic workers was reallocated to intermediate purchases and foreign labour.
Increased Automation: As technological automation increases, the overall need for human labor input drops. When machines replace workers, the share of income dedicated to capital naturally increases relative to the share dedicated to labor.
Faster Capital Depreciation: Modern business capital, such as computer hardware and software, degrades or becomes obsolete much faster than the heavy machinery used in previous decades. Because these assets must be upgraded or replaced more frequently, a higher share of industry income must be diverted away from wages to cover these ongoing capital replacement costs
When the report explored specific industry sectors such as electrical power generation and supply, the divergence correlated with a fourth factor, deregulation. This happened to the US energy market in 1992.
The Energy Policy Act, 1992 created domestic competition. Incumbent local monopolies became more efficient or went under. Productivity was achieved through new technology and aggressive cost-cutting including layoffs. Workers produced far more value per hour, but because the company is fighting to keep prices low to compete, wages didn’t rise at that same rate.
Two trust economies exist
But all of these factors didn’t impact across society equally. What Edelman’s Trust Barometer acknowledged, but didn’t highlight at the time was the existence of two trust economies existing in the same space, but for different people.
The top quartile of income earners trusted the system. The bottom quartile didn’t. This was mirrored in findings by other organisations, notably the OECD’s Government at a Glance 2025 report and UNU WIDER Trust in a changing World 2025 paper.
There is a decline in governmental trust documented by the Pew Research Center Public Trust in Government: 1958-2025 – a consistent downward trend much longer than 1999, back as far as the mid-1960s for the American public, much earlier than Edelman’s work seems to suggest.
Business and consumer grievance
Edelman posits that businesses have become more trusted than governments. It’s a comforting anchor for a business that sells corporate reputation work. The reality may be different. The decline in government trust has merely set a very low bar according to research by Bentley University and Gallup. The rise of zero-sum thinking exemplified by Zero-sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), will sweep business attitudes along as part of systemic distrust. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posits that this zero-trust thinking has brought conflict within the US itself and driven protests around the world – globalised consumer grievance.
The Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University documented an increase in political violence risk factors across the US mirroring the 1960s and early 1970s . German insurance company Allianz warned that this behaviour represented a risk to large businesses across their operations and supply chains. This is outside and separate to government military actions like the US – Iran conflict or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
There are problems inside organisations as well. Employer trust has been in decline according to Edelman. The causes are diverse and amplify consumer grievance:
Managers are supervising but failing to manage. They struggle to coach or develop their staff sufficiently.
Media sector consumer grievance
The media business is seeing the impact first hand. Fear of deliberate deception is at the cente of the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025. That fear is driving growing divisions in society and between societies, further feeling consumer grievance. According to The Reuters Institute Digital News Report of the same year these concerns about deception are driving audiences away from ‘legacy’ media companies to platforms of editorialists and opinion formers across podcasts, YouTube and other social platforms.
Edelman claims that this audience migration is down to beliefs about the motivations of media organisations. 75 percent of high-grievance respondents believe news organisations would rather attract a big audience than report what people actually need to know. 67 percent believe the media prefers to support an ideology over informing the public.
On slight glimmer from Edelman’s data was that trust in traditional media dropped by four points, versus trust in search engines dropping by five. But that delta will be cold comfort to media executives watching their business being eaten alive by technology platforms.
Goodwill on the balance sheet
Goodwill on the balance sheet of a company tries to capture brand value, the value of customer relationships and wider stakeholder trust within a business. PwC research provided some empirical evidence to support RoI on the stakeholder trust component of goodwill. But Edelman overreaches in its 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Brand Growth in an Insular World report to try and do the same with brand value. In this case, Edelman tries to use survey responses, rather than observed behaviour data and the scientific method to try and overturn several decades of validated marketing science research.
Consumer grievance: so what?
It’s very easy to ignore consumer grievance as ethereal fiction or background noise. Being part of the solution can end up being part of the problem.
Brand purpose real talk
For some brands it make sense to pick a side, but if you do commit to the brand purpose. It may cost you, but if you really have a brand purpose, or ‘higher purpose’ as David Aaker called it, then the 30% opportunity cost in marketing effectiveness is worth it in your calculus.
Effectiveness expert Les Binet’s two question test on brand purpose makes a lot of sense:
Would you still do it if you couldn’t publicise it?
Would you still do it if reduced your long term profits?
If the answer to either question is no, then it’s not purpose driven.
Brand purpose can be a struggle to retrofit. After the success of Dove being re-positioned from a functional product to the ‘real beauty’ positioning; Unilever looked to replicate the effect with varying degrees of success.
You also need to be aware of brand purpose not being global. Apple, Meta and Nike have made decisions in Asia that are vastly different to what they do in western markets. There is no coherence or congruency in their world view. Neoliberal universal values died in corporations long before they were devalued in mainstream western political discourse. Both the online world and social media will shine a spotlight on this difference. This perceived corporate hypocrisy will increase consumer grievance and reduce consumer trust in the brand to do ‘the right thing’.
You could make the argument that Apple, Meta and Nike all fail Binet’s brand purpose test.
Outside of geopolitical differences, even the most basic demographic differences can be landmines for brand purpose. It’s an accelerant for consumer grievance and one that marketers at the likes of Unilever and P&G have either ducked, or got tonally wrong.
Patagonia is arguably the most prominent brand purpose led brand, yet it faces a slew of dilemmas. You could argue that Patagonia’s self description as being ‘a work in progress‘ is at best a temporary fix with an uncertain sell-by date during a time of consumer grievance.
Brand promise
The brand promise is the idea of what a consumer can expect from the product or service that they are purchasing. There is a temptation to reduce costs. You see this with automated services and reduced sized packaging.
If you are transparent about the trade-off consumers will self-select and be fine with it. Telecoms companies have been doing this for years.
Plusnet – BT’s no-frills ISP
Voxi – Vodafone’s self service brand that comes at a discounted price
Does your consumer journey penalise behaviour instead of rewarding loyalty. if it does, that will fuel consumer grievance. Audit these friction points and act on them. Fix underlying operations-related grievances and the customer lifetime revenue will take care of itself.
AI reckoning as a term is a rather stark warning. Even more so when it comes from Aswath Damodaran who is a professor of finance at the Stern School of Business at NYU (New York University).
The reckoning that Damodaran is concerned about is a ‘Minsky moment‘ and represents a stark contrast to the boundless techno-optimism of Marc Andreessen.
The AI reckoning wasn’t on the mind of investors who bought into Cerebras Systems.
Cerebras Systems makes wafer sized chips with memory and processing on the same die. This reduces latency and increases speed. As cool as Cerebras Systems technology is, the company currently has sales of $510 million and was valued on its opening day of trading at $71 billion.
AI-Powered Cyberattacks | Robert Scoble and A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify.. The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.” All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
I am not a football fan, but I recognise the power that the 2026 World Cup has to move hearts and minds. This year it’s being hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States. The 2026 World Cup fan experience is shrouded in uncertainty.
https://flic.kr/p/2aqzM1j
I found it interesting that both adidas with the launch of its match ball and Panini with the launch of its sticker book both marked the start of the countdown to the 2026 World Cup season.
Chinese countryside’s quieter strains – by Yuxuan JIA – Decades of son preference have left villages full of unmarried men, driving bride prices higher and sustaining a shadow market for “Vietnamese brides” that can slide into fraud, coercion, and trafficking. Young people, especially young women, are drifting away from rural patriarchy and the obligation-heavy world of kinship and “face”, while the influencer economy and short-video apps offer fantasies of easy money to teenagers with weak school prospects.
Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men | Washington Post – “I don’t want to be too disparaging about them because they’re our Christian brothers and sisters, but worshiping in a big former supermarket with dry ice machines and a pop band, it’s not really traditional Christianity,” Father Longenecker said. His new parishioners are attracted to “very traditional worship with lots of incense and altar boys and sacred music in the traditional style.”
More NatSec | Big Lychee, Various Sectors – From the government’s press release… Safeguarding national security is a continuous endeavour with no end point. At its core this sounds like the Stalin derived Maoist principle of struggle. National security ‘enemies’ like Jimmy Lai, Chow Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho serve the same purpose as George Orwell’s character Emmanuel Goldstein in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The ever-tightening system is allegedly concerned with leaderless lone wolves, small cells and external actors – but the reality is just control in Orwell’s novel.
Revising Hong Kong’s Past – Lingua Sinica – Among the changes noted was a complete erasure of references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which was recast as “political turmoil in the late spring and early summer of 1989.” Gone from the exhibit entirely, the Ming Pao reported, is a previous image that showed one million Hong Kongers taking to the streets in 1989 in support of the demonstrators in China.
I am skeptical about ‘gurus’. However, I found this Tony Robbins video good for getting out of a period of ‘stuckness’ in my thinking. Robbin’s ideas about priming, in particular they way he links physical activity to mental exercises works and has a good deal of neuroscience behind it.
Japan loses its thirst for vending machines | FT – Tens of thousands of vending machines are vanishing from Japan, as machines that once symbolised the nation’s love of innovation are shunned in a climate of rising inflation and deepening labour shortages.
The nation’s stock of 2.2mn drinks vending machines is down 23 per cent from its bubble-era peak in 1985, according to the Japan Vending System Manufacturers Association.
The faltering economics of running a national vending machine empire were exposed when DyDo, Japan’s third biggest operator, this month said it would scrap almost 7.5 per cent of its network of 270,000 units after posting its largest ever annual loss. – what surprised me was that the vending machines weren’t digitised.
Why do men love Stone Island | FT – “Football in the late 1980s and 1990s was a heavily policed environment under surveillance, where visibility carried risk,” says Andrew Groves, professor of fashion design at the University of Westminster. “On the terraces, clothing wasn’t decoration, it was risk management. Stone Island mattered because its garments were already structured around concealment, modulation and elective visibility. The detachable badge, reversible constructions, modular hoods and certain fabric treatments enabled wearers to calibrate how legible they were, depending on context. Football casuals were not simply performing taste; they were managing recognition.”
Apple rolls out UK age checks for iPhone users | FT – interesting move, I did notice that it assumed my account was adult due to the length it had been held. It reminded me of friends who registered email addresses, domain names and even social media handles for their newly born children – and did just enough to keep the accounts alive.
The 49MB Web Page | thatshubham – Beyond the sheer weight of the programmatic auction, the frequency of behavioral surveillance was surprising. There is user monitoring running in parallel with a relentless barrage of POST beacons firing to first-party tracking endpoints (a.et.nytimes.com/track). The background invisible pixel drops and redirects to doubleclick.net and casalemedia help stitch the user’s cross-site identity together across different ad networks.
When you open a website on your phone, it’s like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
Ironically, this surveillance apparatus initializes alongside requests fetching purr.nytimes.com/tcf which I can only assume is Europe’s IAB transparency and consent framework. They named the consent framework endpoint purr. A cat purring while it rifles through your pockets.
So therein lies the paradox of modern news UX. The mandatory cookie banners you are forced to click are merely legal shields deployed to protect the publisher while they happily mine your data in the background
The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT.
Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.
A glimpse into cyber-security’s AI-driven future | The Economist – A few years ago a participant used the conference network to hack a water-treatment facility in America (Messrs Wyler and Stump are cagey about the details). Another hid behind the din of legitimate hacker traffic to attack government websites and payment systems. The noc team traced him, sent him a message reminding him that doing illegal things from Black Hat was still illegal, then watched him close his laptop and walk away. Hackers on the other side of the world try their luck too. When the registration server was switched on, attacks began at once, including traffic that appeared to originate in Romania….
Mr Stump says the noc has seen a pattern across multiple Black Hat conferences in which Taiwanese participants show up with hacked devices. “Most of [the traffic] goes back to China,” he says. ai-powered attacks by nation-states or cybercriminals are likely to intensify… The team thinks the ai race is only beginning. For Mr Wyler, the vulnerabilities discovered by Mythos, including some that have gone undetected for decades, are to be welcomed rather than feared. “We now know they’re there.”
All the same, cautions Mr Stump, the next two years will be turbulent, as more flaws will be uncovered; more breaches will occur as firms feed sensitive data into ai systems; and more insecure code will be written.
OpenAI acquires popular tech talk show for ‘low hundreds of millions’ | FT – ChatGPT-maker moves into broadcasting with deal for TBPN after it had pledged to abandon ‘side-quests’ – I think that this is trying to balance the narrative with Anthropic which is ripping ahead. In past decades you would have dumped a lot of money into a campaign run by a PR agency, but time moves on
New Internet of Things Plan Targets Global Infrastructure – Jamestown – A new action plan for the Internet of Things (IoT) increases the possibility that Chinese-built connected infrastructure in the United States could become a platform for data access, cyber pre-positioning, and attacks on U.S. cyber-physical systems in a prolonged crisis or confrontation. The plan, launched jointly by nine ministries, defines IoT as a total cyber-physical environment that links “people, machines, and things” across sensing, networks, platforms, applications, and security, and sets targets for 10 billion terminal connections, more than 50 standards, and deployment across production, consumption, and governance. The plan indicates Beijing is moving from connected devices to connected backbone systems. It reinforces the new Five-Year Plan, suggesting that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to supply not only endpoints like sensors, appliances, and vehicles but also the next generation of AI, computing, and space-ground communications infrastructure that will underpin them.
This is the 33rd edition of Strategic Outcomes, I had briefly toyed with calling it 33 1/3rd edition – but parked that foolishness as only Jed Hallam and Alec Samways would have half-heartedly smirked at a rather naff DJ dad joke.
In bingo halls ’33’ was announced as dirty knee. For generations past, this would brought up memories of organised sports like winter football games ad the more real-life social activities of playing outside with friends. According to research conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Save the Children back in 2022, only 27% of UK children now play outside.
https://flic.kr/p/392Xqw
However, other data, like the UK government’s own The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2025 update implies that number may be higher than the OnePoll research suggests. The University of Exeter published research which seems to be more in line with the UK government’s research. They found that 34 per cent of children don’t play outdoors on school days, while 20 per cent don’t play outdoors on weekends.
In Chinese culture 33 is considered to be a good number. 3 sounds similar to birth or life. Two 3s is considered to intensify or double this idea. Which seems an appropriate sentiment for spring and the beginning of the financial year. Bring it on!
This month’s soundtrack to the newsletter is a sublime 1980s disco mix by Toronto-based Japanese DJ Sakiko Nagai.
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.
A collection of inspiration from Malaysia Airlines mascot Pilot Parker to Sir Martin Sorrell.
Some thoughts how WPP might deal with its Burson dilemma.
ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
Aston Martin issued its third profit warning in a year and sold its Formula 1 naming rights for £50 million to raise cash thanks to internal delays and international tariffs.
Meta is projected to pass Google in digital advertising spend thanks to Reels, Threads and WhatsApp.
The implications of Tottenham Hotspur being relegated from the Premier League has implications beyond the pitch and into sponsor’s boardrooms.
Nike made a bold leap for the UEFA Champions League match ball contract with a bid that doubled the value of the previous Adidas contract.
Tom Roach outlined frameworks that help navigate the transition to more sustained growth once initial performance marketing channels hit saturation.
Books that I have read.
My friend Ian lent to me Ikenami Shōtarō‘s book The Killer on The Streets which is part of his Samurai Detectives series. The book follows the adventures of a 60-something retired swordsman and his son as they become embroiled in the hunt for what we’d now call a serial killer.
Things I have been inspired by.
Supply chained
Even before the current debacle in the Persian Gulf, globalisation brought logics and supply chains into high focus. Supply Chained is a new podcast with great presenters that provides top quality analysis on different aspects of global supply chains. The first episode looks at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
Generative AI & cooking
I first met Rowan Kisby a decade ago this year at 100 Victoria Embankment, back when I was contracting for Unilever on their Family Brands global range of margarines. Rowan worked for what was then MullenLowe Profero. Recently we reconnected on a shared Slack group. Rowan put together a report on the intersection of generative AI use and cooking.
I found it unsurprising that one of the behaviours consumers are doing is telling the generative AI service what they have in their fridge and asking it for dish / recipe recommendations. Back when I worked for Yahoo! we saw similar behaviours in the search box, particularly amongst US users. Reddit now gave Rowan better qualitative insights on how these results play out.
More interesting from the point of view of retailers was its ability to create and manage a shopping list for weekly groceries. The idea of a retailer or an FMCG building an AI skill (or Gem on Google Gemini) is just begging to be sold in by agencies to their clients.
Praykinson
I got to judge the amazing entries from around the world at Adforum’s PHNX awards. One campaign really stuck with me. A health campaign by Dentsu Creative Thailand and Vajira Hospital in Thailand to help people with Parkinson’s disease was smart, solution-based and had a great insight behind it. More on the project here.
https://flic.kr/p/2s6adiF
CHESS
I was listening to the MM+M podcast interview with Chris Brandow, head of account management at VCCP Health US and came across the acronym / nemonic CHESS. It comes out of thought leadership research ‘Checking the Memory Code‘ that VCCP did in conjunction with Cowry Consulting.
CHESS looks to encapsulate some of the key attributes that makes marketing creative effective. It codifies marketing science findings that you would be familiar with fromthe likes of, the IPA, System1 and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and provides it in a list that pharma clients and their agency partners can use as a RAG (red-amber-green) guide to evaluating everything from initial creative concepts through to output.
Character – what be called a fluent object elsewhere. It is a mascot or memorable element like Alexandr the meerkat from Compare The Market. It could also be a spokesperson like Tommy Lee Jones’ appearances in Boss Coffee adverts as ‘Alien Jones‘.
Humour – the power of humour used to be well known as an advertising device and in recent years has come back on trend at Cannes. It helps create talkability and memorability
Emotion – Binet and Fields established the power of emotion over rational advertising. Daniel Kahneman conveyed the power of emotional ‘system 1 thinking’ in Thinking Fast and Slow.
Surprise – the unexpected. Our enjoyment of storytelling is the process understanding which story archetype a tale belongs to. If we guess it easily it falls flat like a Dad joke, on the other hand a twist in the tale makes it memorable.
Sonic branding – jingles fell out of fashion, yet made ads memorable.
Chart of the month.
Ofcom released their 2026 Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, more here. I went back through past reports to look at smartphone only internet access, households with no access to internet and claimed usage of generative AI services.
Internet access is now at a point comparable to where broadcast television was previously.
The digital divide is now about the mode of access, with smartphones on mobile internet providing a poorer service.
https://flic.kr/p/2s69P1v
Things I have watched.
My internet went down on April Fool’s Day, so I revisited Wong Ka wai’s back catalogue. I watched the films the first time after I got a portable DVD player and there was a massive surge in video labels including Artificial Eye and Tartan publishing arthouse titles. This provided a great way to explore and experience world cinema and I gravitated towards Japanese and Hong Kong cinema.
I was familiar with traditional martial arts films and the ‘gun fu’ of John Woo. Wong Ka wai was Hong Kong’s answer to French new wave auteurs. Around the same time, I ended up going out with someone who lived in Hong Kong when we bonded over Faye Wong’s performance in Chungking Express. In a moment of delicious irony, I got to watch Wong Ka wai’s ‘western’ film My Blueberry Nights while staying in Hong Kong.
This time around I was working my way through Curzon’s Wong Kar wai boxset which was bought for my birthday during COVID time. It contained
As Tears Go By
Days of Being Wild
Chungking Express
Fallen Angels
Happy Together
In The Mood For Love
2046
More on my time watching The World of Wong Kar wai boxset here. You can enjoy most of the films listed at the Prince Charles cinema ‘The Films of Wong Kar wai season‘.
After all that I needed something a bit lighter, so I watched the Japanese film Supermarket Woman. It is a light hearted comedy caper about a middle aged woman, a poorly performing supermarket, business rivalry and a bit of skullduggery. Nobuko Miyamoto plays Hanako Inouse who brings her customer eye view to revitalising the Honest Goro supermarket. The film was written and directed by Jûzô Itami, better known for Tampopo. Supermarket Woman was made a decade after Tampopo, but both feel of the same time. Itami-san was often compared to the French new wave directors of the 1960s and I can see why.
OSS117 is a series of books and films written from the late 1950s onwards. The films were made in 1963 onwards, with a reinvention and reboot in the 2010s.
OSS 117 is Unleashed – is a French film about an American agent with French heritage who works for the CIA. Compared to the Bond franchise, its French new wave. No gadgets but a dollop of guile. It’s notable for its underwater scenes, scuba diving was new thing opening up a new world under the waves thanks to Jacques Cousteau.
OSS 117: Panic in Bangkok – is the first colour film in the series. Our hero goes to Bangkok to investigate a dead colleague who looked into ineffective vaccines.
Useful tools.
PopChar – PopChar is an old but good utility app that has been supporting Mac users since the late 1980s. You are trying to find the right emoji or symbol to type, in each font.
Beats Studio Buds + – while I usually use Shure wired earphones for most applications there are some times that wireless is handier (like reducing wired clutter on a busy desk, or listening to podcasts while cooking or folding laundry).
I was leery of the Beats brand because of their reputation of having a muddy bass sound with a poor sound stage. I was pleasantly surprised by these. They are as balanced sound as a pair of AirPods. They have reasonable noise cancellation, comparable to my old Bose earbuds. They charge on the USB-C cable as my iPhone and MacBook Pro. They are less noticeable than a pair of AirPods and still integrate into Apple’s ‘Find My’ service seamlessly.
Google Gemini app for Mac – I hope that this will help with my current tab and window juggling in Safari. I will let you know how I am getting on in a few months once I have given it a full shakedown.
The sales pitch.
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Ok this is the end of my April 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the May bank holiday.
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.
