Category: tools | 工具 | 도구 | ツール

Tools like my Howto category morphed out of a few things. I learned about the power of helpful content from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. At the heart of the Whole Earth ethos was sharing useful knowledge and tools for a person. Editor Kevin Kelly kept the Whole Earth ethos alive through his involvement with The WeLL, Wired magazine and his Cool Tools blog and book.

A second aspect of it was my natural inclination to share useful things or processes. I started writing this blog to explore the media so that I could advise clients so its roots were in the idea of channels as a useful tools mentality.

The third reason was my Dad. As a child my Dad who is a mechanical fitter by trade instilled into me a deep sense of quality in things, in ideas and in people. The idea of quality as an intrinsic thing was accelerated by my career in the UK’s dying manufacturing sector prior to going to college and having read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that put words to something I had felt and been driven by. Consequently I tend to gravitate to simple, overthought and overly engineered things like a Rolex Sea-Dweller watch, Carhartt jeans or the modern Victorinox Swiss army knife. My ‘iconoclastic’ view of quality continues to drive

Tools content tends to come when I am sharing things that I have found through work or solving a problem in my personal life. I have talked about tools elsewhere too, notably Kevin Kelly’s What’s in my NOW newsletter.

January 2025 newsletter
January 2025 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my January 2025 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 18th issue. As a child 18 represented experiences denied. 18 and R18 in the UK and Ireland is broadly equivalent to Hong Kong’s ‘category III’ or the US R and NC-17 ratings. This was prior to the Marvel universe infantilising adult cinema.

18 is considered lucky in both Chinese culture and numerology. Talking of lucky, January 29th sees the lunar new year, which will be the year of the snake. According to Chinese horoscope, so 2025 should be a good year for my Chinese horoscope sign in terms of professional and financial areas. Here’s hoping.

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.
- Japan Re-Emerges + more things – if nothing else visit this post for Ulrike Schaede’s talk on Japan’s reinvention over the past four decades.
- Interpublic acquisition by Omnicom – a slow read, rather than a hot take. It got a bit of traction when I published it thanks to Stephen Waddington for sharing it on his Facebook group House of Marketing and PR
- Foreign workers + more stuf f – a mix of stuff from around the web including a documentary on how Filipino, Indonesian and Burmese domestic workers in Singapore have banded together to found a mutual support community around a shared love of roller-skating.
- CNY 2025 – a round-up of ads and observations in the run up to the year of the snake. I haven’t written this as an article on LinkedIn this year, as LinkedIn’s video embed function no longer seems to work properly in articles.
Books that I have read.
- I managed to finish The Peacock and the Sparrow – IS Berry drew on real-world events such as the Arab Spring political movements and the Fat Leonard scandal to provide a story that moves between Bahrain to Cambodia and back. There was also a universality to the book, for instance it captured that worst excesses of the expat experience that resonated with my own experience and was something I sought to studiously avoid when living in Hong Kong. I was surprised that the book implies that the post-petroleum phase of Bahrain’s development, seemed to happen so abruptly. This was at odds with the gradual decline in petroleum production that we’ve seen in North Sea oil production and mid-west oil fields prior to fracking. Bahrain is a former petro-state that has now pivoted to Gulf area tourism and related services industries.
- Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway. I am skeptical of works that look to fill in the universe created by a deceased writer. Christopher Tolkien’s efforts were as much an academic study of JRR Tolkien’s archive curated for the completist reader. Ian Fleming’s James Bond franchise was overrated when he was still alive. It didn’t merit the ten authors that have worked on expanding the book canon to date. John Gardner’s own enjoyable character Boysie Oaks, (similar to Len Deighton’s protagonist in The IPCRESS File) was overshadowed by Gardner’s stint writing Bond books. Nick Harkaway’s book pleasantly surprised me. Harkaway’s real name is Nicholas Cornwell and he was the son of David Cornwell aka John Le Carré. He literally and figuratively grew up as his father wrote the great George Smiley trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People) and the BBC adaptations. Karla’s Choice feels and reads ‘right’ and slots neatly into the Le Carré lore. I can highly recommend it as a read. Despite it being a period piece, Russia’s resurgence gives it a strong sense of zeitgeist.
- Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Harris’ book is curate’s egg. On one hand it’s is a politically left polemic by the author on how the world is based on slavery, genocide and other forms of exploitation – which manifested in the authors trauma of a privileged upbringing in Palo Alto. Amongst all this Harris manages to write a Bay Area history that surfaced nuggets that I didnt know from the range of previous books on the area that I had read. Included in them is quotes from Silicon Valley pioneer Wilf Corrigan on offshoring chip manufacturing and packaging. It’s an oddity. If you like left leaning political theory, or a history of technology buff who is prepared to wade through the editorialising it might be worth your while.
Things I have been inspired by.

The Sun Also Rises, But Not on Magazines

There are times when you reach a personal tipping point in your view on something. It can feel shocking, nauseous in a visceral way. I have only been there a few times.

With the dot com boom it was talking with financier at an incubator fund sometime in April 2000. Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ had been published a month earlier and had started to become more known if one read around enough. So I asked him how they thought that they would be making money and his response was:

Ged, I am really surprised that you asked me that. Don’t you realise, we’re trying to move at ‘internet’ time. We’ll think about monetising it later on.

With some notable exceptions like Monocle magazine, print media has been struggling.

Over the Christmas period I was reading the January / February 2025 edition of Wired magazine (published by Condé Nast). Right from unwrapping the magazine from its postage packaging something felt wrong. The magazine felt light; very light. Thankfully the print stock and graphic design was up to its usual standards. So I did a quick page count and noted the number of advertisements in the magazine.
- 88 pages
- 5 adverts from paying advertisers
- 3 adverts from Condé Nast
- 1 advert for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). The advertising space might have been donated by Condé Nast
I was alarmed at the decline. Seeing declining magazine media spend on slide ware is different to feeling it happen on a publication that you loyally subscribe to. Thankfully my other usual print magazines Monocle and Japanese style magazine HailMary don’t seem to have had a similar exodus of advertisers yet. But it put me on alert about the precarious health of magazine print adverts as a medium. Creative magazine print done right can provide experiences that TikTok can’t.
- Think about the size of visual real estate
- The tactile experience of the page which helps with memory formation
- Being able to smell a product fragrance on the page
- Sampling opportunities
- The ambient reach of re-reading or being left in a shared environment
- Creative offline to online linkages
For the right brands it offers targeted upper funnel experiences that can then be reinforced digitally.

Which brought me to Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises as I groped around in my head trying to find the words to explain what was happening to magazines as a advertising medium:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The value chains driving the creator economy.

I spent some time during Christmas reading Influencer marketing unlocked: Understanding the value chains the paper was written by 15 academics following the 12th Triennial Invitational Choice Symposium held at INSEAD’s Fontainebleau site. Having worked on influencer campaigns on and off for the past two decades I was curious to see what progress had been made in the thinking underpinning influencer marketing.

Measuring ROI is still complex, as are the challenges that influencers face balancing ‘editorial’ integrity with promotional content.

Brands continue to struggle with measuring ROI beyond short term metrics and puts a focus on engagement. Metrics on long term impact (if any), sales and profitability are insufficient. The authors recognised that there were gaps in proving causation between engagement and sales or long term brand equity.

There is still work to be done understanding the marketing impact of influencer marketing on both influencer and brands including:
- Customer acquisition, retention and lifetime value
- How can authenticity be maintained in paid promotions
There is still the tension between brands need to qcquire and develop customers vs. influencers own need to cultivate ‘follower equity’. Influencers also depend on their relationship with the platforms they exist on, which can snuff them out if they no longer fit the ad revenue created vs. the revenue the influencer gets through promotions. Platforms boost influencers until a certain point and then limit their reach to maintain control.

China’s ‘closed loop’ ecosystem was considered to be more effective. This is platforms such as Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese market twin) and Pinduoduo aka ‘together, more savings’ seem to do better due to tight integration between content and commerce. Then there is the live-streaming business which is basically QVC on social media. TikTok and Instagram Commerce are still playing catch-up. Chinese influencers are thought to have a lifecycle of up to five years, which is why MCNs use an ‘idol’ development model.

Creative consistency

Creative consistency was one of 2024’s marketing efficiency tenets thanks to research conducted by System1. System1 studied how consistency affects creative quality, stronger brands and greater profits.

When comparing the most to the least consistent brands, analysis found that a higher proportion of consistent brands reported larger sales value gain, market share gain and profit gain.

Chart of the month: decline in digital health investment

The FT published an article just prior to JP Morgan’s annual Healthcare conference. The article put some sober perspective on the current state of investment in digital health innovation.

Things I have watched.

E.T. – The Extra Terrestrial – I hadn’t seen ET since I watched it as a child in the cinema. Watching it again as an adult was like watching a different film. From the atmospheric introduction prior to the stars cape onwards, it felt emotionally heightened, with more of a direct line back to Spielberg’s earlier Close Encounters of The Third Kind in terms of look-and-feel. There were references that I didn’t get at the time (for instance takeaway pizza and Reese’s Pieces weren’t really a thing in the UK). I got to appreciate Spielberg’s use of distraction, light and colour grading as an adjunct to storytelling. Finally, the shameless product placement surprised me. 1980s America was a very consumerist society with ultra-processed food that would cause convulsions in The Guardian newsroom – but the product placement was far less subtle than modern Korean dramas. I could see why Hershey’s Reese’s Pieces got an apparent sales uplift from the film.

Bangkok Dangerous – A Thai take on Hong Kong’s ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre emblematic of John Woo films. The directors Danny and Oxide Pang are better known for horror film The Eye. Bangkok Dangerous feels more alive than its Hong Kong peers thanks to Danny Pangs editing and Oxide Pang’s over-saturated colour grading. The brothers careful use of cinematography, inventive storytelling and sparse dialogue make this debut film film feel so polished. Finally, the brothers manage to make city the star, in a similar way to Wong Ka-wai’s films in Hong Kong.

Persepolis – A film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel published in two volumes Persepolis and Persepolis 2. Persepolis tells the story of Marjane’s life from childhood in Paris and pre-revolutionary Iran, how she experienced the revolution. She was sent away by her upper middle class family to Vienna for secondary school. Afterwards she went to university in Iran, was treated for depression and attempted suicide. The story ends as it began with Marjane returning to Paris. The film is true to the graphic novel in terms of style – think a modern-day Tin Tin. Like the book, the story is an emotional rollercoaster ride. It’s subject matter feels equally relevant now, as is did when Satrapi originally wrote her story.

Useful tools.

Advertising awards list

Probably not that useful for me at the moment, but The Thought Partnership have put together a list of awards listed by entry deadline covering the whole of 2025, which should be handy for advertising, marketing and public relations agency marketers.

Adobe Acrobat Pro alternative

Adobe Acrobat Pro is a useful piece of software, but it’s not worth almost £20 / month. PDF Reader Pro gives you a lifetime licence for the same functions for a one off payment of $25.

Long term tracking

Use Apple AirTags but have battery charge anxiety because you forget when you put the battery in? I know I did for the one in my travelling IT kit bag. And I found a solution. Elevaton Lab’s TimeCapsule 10-year battery case. its a two-piece black plastic slap held together by screws. Inside a couple of Duracell AA batteries will give a decade of operation for your AirTag. Sparingly use a little bit of gasket maker on the two halves seams and LocTite Threadlocker on the screws gives you a nigh indestructible tracking module.

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my January 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into the year, and for those of you celebrating the lunar new year on January 29th 恭喜發財 (Gong Kei Faat Choy).

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

Get in touch if there is anything that you’d like to recommend for the newsletter.
January 22, 2025
October 2024 newsletter
October 2024 newsletter introduction

Welcome to my October 2024 newsletter, this newsletter marks my 15th issue. This is the second year that I have written about Hallowe’en sharing my Mam’s recipe for barmbrack – an Irish household standard. When I lived in Hong Kong, the locals enthusiastically adopted western Hallowe’en culture with local amusement parks Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland competing to create the scariest experience for young people and dating couples. They mixed western and local horror motifs. It’s amazing how thanks to the mass media Hallowe’en has become a global cultural event. More on that later.

As for the significance of the number 15? It seems to have deep significance in modern culture with a wide range of artists including Taylor Swift and Marilyn Manson using it as the title of songs, albums or mixtapes. Additionally, the number has some significance in Judaism. The number 10 represents the hand of God and the number 5 represents to save or rescue. If we add 10 plus five, we get 15. The symbolic meaning of 15 translates to “mercy,” which means compassion and forgiveness.

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.
- An honest review of the Apple Watch Ultra 2 – which is as much a critique of wearables as a category, as the device itself.
- Cocaine Cowboys is a book on Irish crime, but the title is as interesting as the book in terms of its particular cultural resonance in Ireland and a reflection of the Irish experience.
- Nike changes CEO John Donahue, as it faces unprecedented challenges due to unforced self-inflicted strategic errors.
- Pagers and more things can be found here.
Books that I have read.
- Taylor Lorenz’ Extremely Online is a history of the social web from bloggers to the present day. Lorenz’ telling is very US-orientated but an interesting account of how influencers and brands evolved their social presence adapting to platform changes such as the disappearance of Vine. Aspects that I found fascinating included how influencers accelerated their following through offline events rather similar to Japan’s idol industry and the career resilience of the Paul brothers
- The Murderers by Frederic Brown provides a criminal side view to a story in a world that one would recognise from James Ellroy‘s neo-noir crime world of Los Angeles.
Things I have been inspired by.

Tourism Ireland: Halloween.

Tourism Ireland

Hallowe’en was a huge part of my childhood in an Irish household, bairn brack and tea, going around and collecting apples, dried fruit and hazelnuts from neighbouring houses, carving out a turnip lantern, making a papier-mâché mask, enjoying ghost stories on RTÉ radio and strange noises that came from the worsening weather and wildlife. However, America seems to have defined a lot of the narrative and globalised behaviours around the festival.

Living in Asia, I saw revellers in Hong Kong and Japan enjoy the festival and borrow heavily from Hollywood from ET to the Halloween franchise. Like Irish-American cuisine, American Halloween is based on the European traditions brought to the new world and then reinterpreted.

So I was fascinated to see Tourism Ireland’s campaign to reclaim Halloween from internally pervasive American soft power and Hollywood; going back to the festival’s pagan origins.

Meaningful patient engagement

Measuring and Demonstrating the Value of Patient Engagement Across the Medicines Lifecycle is a call to action to assess and measure patient engagement for the pharmaceuticals industry. It redefines the concept of patient-centricity – a popular concept that has become increasingly prominent and popular in the industry. (Disclosure, the paper involved a couple of former Concentric HX Wegovy launch colleagues: Fay Weston and Zoe Healey).

The Change Makers

Brand purpose has lost a good deal of unalloyed credibility in marketing circles (for some very good reasons). But that doesn’t mean that consumers got the memo. Havas’ The Rise of the Change Makers report looks at change through this lens. Like the Edelman Trust report, it has tracked the change in consumer zeitgeist over the past few years.

Social effectiveness

There was a couple of interesting research papers in the International Journal of Advertising. Firstly, digital detoxing by consumers seems to have a temporary inoculation against social media advertising when they return to using a social platform. Secondly, romance sells, or the psycho-romantic aspect of parasocial relationships sells – which should be taken into account when weighing up influencers that brands might want to partner with.

Things I have watched.

Series three of ITV’s Van Der Valk’s reboot is a sleeper series that I have enjoyed watching with my Dad. Season 4 has debuted in the US on PBS, but there is no sign of it being picked up in the UK yet.

Barry Foster

The series is based on a series of thrillers written in the 1960s by Nicolas Freeling; the first one was Love in Amsterdam. The original TV adaptation featured Barry Foster as Van Der Valk whose performance gave the original show a unique look-and-feel.

I watched some vintage Jack Ryan with a young Ben Affleck playing the CIA analyst in an adaption of The Sum of All Fears. This version is usually overlooked in favour of the modern TV series and the Harrison Ford films. Alan Bates played a delicious villain; an Austrian politician with far right tendencies. Bates’ character felt the most prescient of all the characters, while the thawing relationship with Russia feels further away with each passing week. Unfortunately, the franchise was left on the shelf for a while after this film was made; Ben Affleck made a good Dr Ryan and Liev Schreiber was a good foil as character John Clark – the real muscle in Tom Clancy’s books.

Amazon Prime Video has some sleeper films if you dig around. Deliver Us From Evil is a respectable Korean action film with the classic ‘tragic hero’ plot line popularised in Hong Kong and Japanese cinema. While it has been compared to The Raid, there is an Old Boy feel to the violence. Much has been made of it starring Lee Jung-jae – known to global audiences for his role in Netflix’ Squid Game. It’s just under two hours of enjoyable escapism.

I rewatched Inception for the first time since I saw it in the cinema. Since then we’ve had COVID and a generative AI-filled media sphere and the film hit different. It no longer felt exceptional in the way that films like Blade Runner and the Studio Ghibli back catalogue still do.

Il Divo was one of a couple of DVDs that I bought instead of paying the Netflix tax. Il Divo appealed to me because of my love of real-life Italian intrigue, sparked by watching The Mattei Affair for the first time several years ago. I became reacquainted with it more recently again when I rewatched it. Il Divo covers the political intrigue of the 1970s and 1980s, in particular Giulio Andreotti, an Italian prime minister and failed presidential candidate. At the time Italy suffered from far left terrorist attacks and a reactionary right-wing movement that revolved a freemason lodge known as P2. Andreotti’s leadership is directly linked to a succession of deaths of enemies and associates during his career – which the film displays in an artful tableau at the beginning.

It is a very complex time in modern Italian history and the story tries to pull different strands of the story in through different vignettes. Like The Mattei Affair before it, a certain amount is left up to the audience’s interpretation.

Not television, but my current favourite show on BBC Radio 4 is Central In telligence, which is part of their Limelight drama content. I love it for a few reasons:
- I grew up with cold war-era espionage books and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, so the security services stories owned a bit of real estate in my head. Given the way things have been going over the past decade, this kind of world has been raising its head again.
- It’s a really well researched show with high production values on the history of the CIA told from the prospective of Eloise Page who joined the agency at its start and had a 40-year career.
- Fantastic voice talent. Accomplished high profile film actress Kim Cattrall who has appeared in iconic film and television roles playing both comedic and meaty characters. Ed Harris is a fantastic, but less well known actor who appeared in classic movies from The Right Stuff and Walker to portraying The Man in Black in the Westworld TV series.
Useful tools.

Downloading images on a web page

Imageye is a browser extension that helps you download all pages on a given web page. It can be handy for mood boards and social research.

Getting to Heathrow

I have had to do a bit of travel. Thankfully it has been well planned. One of the things that helped my planning and saved money is the Heathrow Express’ £10 Advanced Discounted Tickets. More details on the caveats surrounding the discount here.

Buying cheaper

MoneySavingSupermarket has a search engine of products available via Amazon Warehouse. If you’re a jobbing freelancer or just looking for something for your home – it allows you to buy that item a bit cheaper.

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my October 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and onward into November, but not before you’ve charged your energy levels up on Hallowe’en treats!

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!
October 30, 2024
Cocaine Cowboys + more things

Cocaine Cowboys

Cocaine Cowboys by Nicola Tallant tells the story of the Kinahan organisation. The Kinahan organisation is a group that wholesales and retails illegal drugs in association with other organised crime groups. Tellant explains how deprivation, geography and economic growth fuelled drug trafficking and abuse in Ireland. Isolated council estates and economic hardship drove a heroin epidemic. The subsequent Asian Tiger economy only uplifted young professionals who then were a ripe market for cocaine. Cocaine added to Ireland’s already difficult relationship with alcohol use and abuse.

Crime journalism such as this is popular in Ireland because it is so concentrated through blood and marriage ties. We don’t have the kind of diversity that the British criminal underworld has. This means that it’s much more ‘relevant’ to Irish society.

But the book title itself is very interesting. There is a clear parallel to the scale of the cross-border drug trade between the US and Mexico.

Irish country music star Daniel O’Donnell courtesy of TG4

But there is also an underlying western theme across Irish culture. The vast majority of us are at most a few generations from the farm. We have had hard times which is why country music appealed and even morphed into a localised genre Country and Irish popular in rural areas and amongst lorry drivers (or in American truck drivers that drive ‘semis’.)

Tallant’s stance is definitely anti-Kinahan; but the book title Cocaine Cowboys gives them the hero status and taps deeply into the mainline that the cowboy and related elements like country music have into Irish culture at home and abroad. Cocaine Cowboys might be the inspiration for the next generation to replace the Kinahans.

If you want to know more beyond the book Nicola Tallant and her colleagues at Irish tabloid the Sunday World host a podcast called Crime World.

Branding

Mozilla’s brand update gives its old T-Rex logo a fresh new look – The Verge

China

China threatens Calvin Klein owner with blacklist over Xinjiang cotton | FT

China’s first industrial leases are expiring. Will their holders renew? | South China Morning Post – it will be interesting to see what the Hong Kong tongs do

Consumer behaviour

Death of the corkscrew? Only 27% of young people in UK own one, report says | The Guardian – Prevalence of screw-top bottles and abstinence among young people blamed for falling popularity of gadget

Understanding Desire in the Age of Ozempic – The Atlantic – fascinating study in how GLP-1 treatments are not only reducing the desire for food, but also other products like alcohol and tobacco.

After peak woke, what next? The Economist – in the past decade, a form of wokeness has arisen on the illiberal left which is characterised by extreme pessimism about America and its capacity to make progress, especially on race. According to this view, all the country’s problems are systemic or structural, and the solutions to them are illiberal, including censorship and positive discrimination by race. This wokeness defines people as members of groups in a rigid hierarchy of victims and oppressors. Like the Puritans of old, adherents focus less on workable ideas for reducing discrimination than on publicly rooting out sinful attitudes in themselves and others (especially others). The Economist has analysed how influential these ideas are today by looking at public opinion, the media, publishing, higher education and the corporate world. Using a host of measures, we found that woke peaked in 2021-22 and has since receded. For example, polling by Gallup found that the share of people who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term “white privilege” was used 2.5 times for every 1m words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1m words. – Of course, woke’s failure could be viewed by proponents as a sign of deep-rooted systemic prejudice

Economics

Why Britain has stagnated? | Foundations – this reads true and hits hard. My parents came to the United Kingdom when the motorway network was being built, power stations were being constructed and the first generation of nuclear submarines were being constructed. In London the Victoria line was constructed. Now the UK struggles to build any infrastructure and its strategic industrial capabilities have been hollowed out or disappeared.

FMCG

Unilever moves on ‘sub-par’ marketing | WARC – That means consistent execution in marketing innovation, marketing quality, proposition sharpness, execution of pricing, execution of distribution. Fernandez suggested that, on a scale of 1-10, the business is currently at around six but needs to get to eight or nine (“ten doesn’t exist”). A&P spending is increasing as a proportion of revenue, from 13% in 2022, to 14.3% in 2023, and 15.1% in H1 2024. “There is an implicit recognition that our level of investment was not in line with our ambition of volume growth,” he said. That increased investment is not there to fund a growing volume of marketing content, he added. “I’m much more concerned about the quality of the stuff that we put in the market than the amount”. And that also means a focus on brand-building. “We see other people putting much more focus on promotional pricing,” he said, “but we always will prefer to invest in long-term, equity-building activities.” – CFO burns marketing teams ‘I believe our marketing was subpar”

Hong Kong

Dinner with strangers? Hongkongers craving real-world connections turn to ‘secret’ meet-ups | South China Morning Post – In a tapas restaurant in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, about 80 people are chatting away on the packed second floor, clinking glasses and sharing small plates while discussing issues ranging from mental health to childhood dreams.

Innovation

How a Chinese billionaire’s Silicon Valley splurge caught the eye of the FBI | FT

Kyoto company developing autofocus glasses for sufferers of presbyopia and other conditions | SoraNews24 -Japan News-

Luxury

Burberry shares tumble to 15-year low amid questions over its luxury brand status – Retail Gazette contrast with top-tier luxury brand trajectory: Hermès chief eyes haute couture push as Paris house rides out luxury gloom – but has to wonder about Hermès leaning even further into Chinese market.

Marketing

Is marketing entering its ‘era of less’? | WARC – based on Gartner CMO surveys marketers are increasingly being seen as cost centres and are being asked to do more with less which is affecting mar tech spend, staffing and agency spend.

Colgate-Palmolive: ‘The advertising is working’ | WARC

EZ Newswire Signs Exclusive Distribution Deal with Reuters | Reuters – sounds like a PR placement automation?

What’s fueling America’s Zyn obsession? | On Point

Innovative research that literally put people in the driver’s seat | WARC – More than half of strategists (59%) are integrating AI into their strategy development process in a cautiously progressive way. They need to identify the skills that AI can’t replace, such as getting buy-in for a strategy, and double down on them. Speedy access to research and insight (74%) and streamlining repetitive tasks (74%) are the top opportunities strategists see in leveraging AI in the strategy process.

Future of Strategy 2024: Synthetic data – speedy saviour or another example of the industry’s arrogance? | WARC – it’ll be useful when time is of the essence, and you want to ‘speak’ to people and get their thoughts on your hypotheses, ideas or campaigns. In that scenario, I can see how that approach may replace an ad-hoc focus group set up hastily in the agency’s boardroom. But we’re not here purely to understand people. If the role of communications is to move people emotionally, shouldn’t we also be here to feel people? As Richard Huntington, CSO of Saatchi & Saatchi says: “You can’t feel data.” The beauty of humans (and the beauty of ethnography) is that so often it’s not what we say that powers an ‘insight’ or a strategy, a campaign or some NPD… it’s what people don’t say. It’s the nods and winks, the gestures, the objects with meaning they have in their homes and in their lives. That texture isn’t picked up by a typical conversation – be that with synthetic data or in a focus group. These feelings that are elicited from ethnography are the special sauce that can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Break Through: How new and returning brands can grow with TV – System1 Group

The Rise of The Populist Brand – Eavesdrop

Online

The TikTok, Shein, and Temu Conundrum – by Ivy Yang – TikTok’s defence: Shein and Temu have worse privacy profiles than we do

Launch of Social Web Foundation | Social Web Foundation – set up by the great and the good of web 2.0, notably Tom Coates who brings a wealth of product expertise.

AI Training is Copyright Infringement | Initiative Urheberrecht and The Intelligence Age | Sam Altman

Security

The Netherlands will not back EU-wide screening of app messages – DutchNews.nl

The Pig Butchering Invasion Has Begun | WIRED

Technology

Qualcomm has approached Intel over buy-out | EE News Europe – antitrust related issues around the world

OpenAI Is A Bad Business | Ed Zitron – the economics of generative AI are still bad, despite improvements in hardware design.

How AlphaChip transformed computer chip design – Google DeepMind

Tools

How I Replaced Notion with Reminders, Numbers, and Notes | by Joan Westenberg – this is a prime example of what I have been hearing from other people. I have been using Notes app in particular from the get-go.

Home | LibreOffice – Free and private office suite – Based on OpenOffice – Compatible with Microsoft – I have 35 years of content saved, and LibreOffice can open them all. When you’ve been writing for years, your manuscript formats will often be obsolete (though I’ve tried to make decisions that make my poems available platform agnostic, such as using plaintext, but line breaks and stanza breaks don’t always translate well in markdown). LibreOffice is an incredible tool for opening 25 year old wordperfect files when I need them.

Web-of-no-web

Meta’s Orion smart glasses look like the future of AR – The Verge

Apple Knew Where the Puck Was Going, But Meta Skated There – the PAN or personal area network has been talked about for 20+ years. What this misses is that the Orion glasses were possible thanks to silicon carbide lens which are a non-trivial thing to manufacture at scale

October 15, 2024
September 2024 newsletter
September 2024 newsletter introduction

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

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

New reader?

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

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

My reading for September 2024 slacked off a bit as real world obligations kicked in.
- The Old Woman With the Knife worked on a number of levels for me. Firstly, I loved its portrayal of modern Korean society, from the aging population to the Confucian view of seniority that makes everyday interactions more complex than other Asian societies. Without revealing too much, the old woman in question is someone in the twilight of her career and how she is coping with new up-and-coming rivals at work.
- Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. Panic! seemed pertinent to read now. The publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro moved from my to be read pile to must read pile given everything that has been going on with generative AI over the the past couple of years that it has sat on my bookshelf. Ishiguro uses speculative fiction to explore the different kinds of love and attachment, alongside loss. From a machine learning perspective it poses interesting questions about applying observational learning rather than rules based learning in systems that are supposed to exist in the real world. Klara is an ‘artificial friend’ for a child who is going through ‘levelling up’. Levelling up could be seen as a euphemism for everything from the cramming schools popular in Asian education systems to the challenges humans face in an information heavy environment. Ultimately there is something more human and child-like in Klara’s experiences than the human co-protagonists.
Things I have been inspired by.

AI proficiency.

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

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

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

Digitalisation and brands

Harvard Business Review published research that indicated a weaker relationship between profit share and brand in certain types of businesses. On the face of it, this supports Scott Galloway’s ‘end of brand‘ hypothesis. WARC covered the research paper in depth pointing out that for each percentage gain in market share highly digitised businesses gain 0.19% increase in profit compared to 0.26% in less digital businesses. This seems to be due to a multitude of factors:
- Efficiency gains due to digitalisation have an effect on the existing profit prior to the market share. Efficiency is the main selling point of much digital automation from CRM systems to performance advertising.
- Market power of larger companies ( a la Google).
- Perceptions of quality – digital-only companies might look more reputable due to the lack of real-world signals to the contrary
Market share (and brand) still matters, but it hits different depending on the business. B2B and growth hacking business approaches gain less than consumer orientated businesses. A larger dataset of Kantar-sourced data analysed by Oxford University researchers found that better brand effects were down to ‘difference’ as in how customers see – and experience the brand – as being different enough from competitors.

FEAST

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

Streaming plateau

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

Ofcom

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

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

Things I have watched.

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

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

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

Useful tools.

Table Capture

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

Humaniser for GPT created content

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

Data analysis

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

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
September 26, 2024
August 2024 newsletter – unlucky 13?
August 2024 newsletter introduction

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

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

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

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

New reader?

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

Things I’ve written.
- My cousin selling the ‘ancestral’ family farm back in Ireland, got me thinking about roots.
- I explored Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs‘ and other things that I found of interest from around the web.
- I looked at some of the themes that have emerged around generative AI in the first half of this year.
Books that I have read.
- The Ribbon Queen – I am a huge fan of Garth Ennis as a graphic novel writer and the publication of The Ribbon Queen was the second best news I had received this year since Ennis announced his return to The Punisher series at the beginning of 2024. With The Ribbon Queen Ennis returns obliquely to religion with a tale that sits somewhere between a police procedural and Lovecroftian fiction. Nothing is simple with Ennis and the work touches on themes like police brutality, woke culture, sex trafficking, domestic violence and ancient beliefs.
- Part of my love reading comes from my Dad’s library of crime and espionage books. I started reading John LeCarré, Hammond Innes and Alistair Maclean in primary school. Secondary school had me reading Gerald Seymour and Robert Ludlum. Seymour’s work felt more grounded and Harry’s Game during The Troubles felt especially pertinent. Despite being 82 years old Seymour still writes. I haven’t picked up a Seymour novel in decades until I got to read In For The Kill. its the third book in a franchise of Jonas Merrick – a soon-to-retire spook with a love of caravanning and frugality. As a holiday read, I really enjoyed it.
- Richard Stark’s Parker is an anti-hero beloved of Hollywood who has appeared in film over years. Richard Stark’s Parker: The Complete Collection is a collection of graphic novel adaptions of The Score, The Outfit, The Score, and Slayground, The Man with the Getaway Face and The Seventh. Stark’s Parker is written with crisp lean copy to match the no-nonsense dark ruthless character. He is at end of America’s hard boiled noir literature like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But Richard Stark’s hero was an armed robber, not a detective. As a genre it was later revived by James Ellroy’s works from the late 1980s on. While Parker has been played on screen by a variety of actors including Lee Marvin and Mark Wahlberg – he is not a character for our times. Darwyn Cooke’s adaption of Parker to a graphic novel format is a 500+ page love letter to mid-century graphic design including vintage newspapers and petrol station maps. It’s a coffee table book that you actually want to read.
- Qiu Xiaolong is an American crime writer, who is famous for his character Chief Inspector Chen. In his book Becoming Inspector Chen, was recommended by my friend Ian. The book feels autobiographical in nature. Like Chen, Qiu had studies TS Elliot at university, both had lived through the opening up of China post-Cultural Revolution. Their paths divert when Qiu moved to study in the US and decided to stay there after the ‘June the 4th incident‘. Qiu describes the complex relationships in families due to the Cultural Revolution and the nature of change in China during its opening up phase. The book is an implicit critique of the current Xi administration, as yet again Chen faces the imminent impact of the party machine.
- Kara Swisher is a long-time journalist who chronicled Silicon Valley from the dot.com boom onward. In Burn Book Swisher gives us her potted history and hot takes on the people and companies that she tried to report on. I say tried because technology firms have made life difficult for journalists since blogging became a thing and they could go direct to the audience. Swisher came from an unhappy but privileged background and jumped into journalism with gusto. There isn’t anything that surprising in her reporting save how was it so late that Swisher really dialled into how toxic and nihilistic some of her subjects really were? Swisher’s book is more engaging than Fred Vogelstein’s Dogfight, but lacks the wit and panache of Michael Malone’s books or Robert X Cringely’s Accidental Empires.
A bit of aside to the books, I found this article by Dazed Digital quite interesting. Apparently, straight men are much less likely to read novels. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction as you can probably tell if you are regular reader. If you want fiction recommendations as a start, I have some in an old post I wrote about 50 books I would recommend (scroll down to fiction).

Things I have been inspired by.

Quantum advertising.

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

Aston Martin DB2

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

Return-to-office mandates

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

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

New voices

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

Things I have watched.

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

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

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

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

Useful tools.

Whatfont

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

Google Analytics health check

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

Decrapifying LinkedIn

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

Better Reddit and YouTube search

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

The sales pitch.

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

More on what I have done here.

The End.

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

Don’t forget to share, comment and subscribe!

Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
August 27, 2024