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.
Zynternet is a portmanteau made up of Zyn and internet. If you’re reading this internet is self-explanatory, the Zyn in question is tabacco-free Skoal bandit type nicotine pouches. Zyn comes in a tin and has various flavours.
According to journalist Max Read, the Zynternet is a kind of 90s to early 2000s sports obsessed ‘lad’ type culture; but in the 2020s. There are shades of ‘white van man’ in there as well.
a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture.
Despite Read’s definition defining it as a 20 to 30-something thing, the subculture seems to bleed into 40-something Dads and draws on creators like Barstool Sports. They’re less extreme than the Andrew Tate acolytes. They care more about sports and professional golf than they do about current affairs and politics. But they’ll be voting Republican. They like college sports, sports betting, light beers and Zyn nicotine pouches.
The culture has grown prominent on the laissez-faire Musk era Twitter.
Zynternet stretch
It would be very easy to point to the Zynternet audience and draw parallels to the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And then go down a dystopian k-hole.
I’ll leave the last words to David Ogilvy for those despairing about the Zynternet:
You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.
David Ogilvy
TL;DR if you’re not reaching the zynternet, you’re probably not doing political marketing properly. More related content here.
Content or couture? Balenciaga’s 30-minute dress becomes the flashpoint of the season | Vogue Business – “It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.
“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”
Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters – yes stories like this are funny because ‘modern’ Japan with its flip phones, fax machines and floppy discs are an anachronism. But there’s a few other things to consider. There might be issues in terms of investment a la the NHS and critical systems that for whatever reason can’t be ported on to modern systems (like the problems had with security based on ActiveX).
Dumb systems also have security benefits, you can’t steal nearly as much data on even a compressed floppy disk as you can on a USB stick.
Interesting use cases for generative AI in China which sounds like a plot line from Ghost In The Shell.
Baidu – World No. 1? – Radio Free Mobile – is Baidu ERNIE really the number one generative AI service? It depends on if the numbers are true. 14 million developers, 950,000 models within the eco-system
China plays down importance of lithography tools in semiconductor challenges – Interesting report from Taiwan’s DigiTimes semiconductor trade magazine: China seems to be deliberately playing down the importance of lithography tools as it identifies the challenges for the development of its semiconductor industry in a recently published dossier.
This post on the end of culture as inspired by a presentation. Pip Bingemann of Springboards.ai presented at Cannes in Cairns – a marketing festival for Australians who wouldn’t be able to go to the Cannes Festival of Advertising. Pip’s presentation touched with things I had seen about the end of culture and had some interesting points within it. I didn’t agree with a lot of Pip said, some of it was down to nuance, but appreciated the journey that it took.
I have built the main headers around Pip’s slides, strap in for the end of culture.
What’s wrong with advertising?
Bingemann’s presentation as in praise of the disruption that (generative) AI was bringing. The thesis he put forward was that ‘machines’ had already messed up the advertising and media industries.
Advertising became self-service in nature.
There had been a move in online media to relevance over distinctiveness
We became slaves to numbers
Let’s look at those elements first.
Advertising became self-service in nature
Like the technological disruption of banking in the past with:
Postal banking
Automatic teller machines
Telephone banking
Online banking
Meta and Google’s advertising platform democratised media buying. Years ago a guy I have lost touch with used to be a manager at a McDonald’s branch in the west end of London.
Before cellphones became commonplace he had a side hustle. He used the restaurant telephone to phone up the newspapers, to book small ads. The newspapers had advertising sales teams, that he would speak to. He did it once for a friend and then word got around. Eventually, he was calling for businesses across Soho. Premium line suppliers, porn publishers and adult mail order catalogue companies. Eventually they needed the ads to be designed. This work was done alongside creating porn DVD covers and other marketing material.
He built a small successful agency off the back of it based in Soho. The agency remained in Soho until it was priced out by the fund management firms who moved in. Lots of other small businesses did the same for their plumbing business or hair salon. Their adverts would run in local newspapers across the country.
For more sophisticated ads like large print ads, television or cinema advertising; help was needed. This help got the ad ready, made sure that the publication received the artwork on time and in a format that they could use. They made sure that the artwork was presented in the manner agreed. With the likes of television, the advert might have to go through regulatory approval prior to publication.
If you were a larger brand with a national or international campaign, further help was needed in pre-testing and orchestration. Expertise might be needed to access more regulated markets while remaining on the right side of the law.
Technology allowed newspaper type adverts to be easily accessed by both agencies and brands.
TLDR: Advertising has been self-serving for decades, but I will grant that online allowed more sophisticated formats such as videos, colour photos and carousels. AND regulation has been slower to police advertising online, for instance YouTube ads don’t get the scrutiny that TV ads get.
Relevance over distinctiveness and slaves to numbers
The move to relevance over distinctiveness in online media was down to where online media was in the customer journey. It was (and for the most part still is at the bottom of the funnel).
Relevance made sense, particularly in search advertising. The first online adverts such as Craigslist classified and display ads were conceptually similar to their equivalents in the back pages of newspaper advertising. Newspaper ads were served in sections: cars for sale, homes for sale, local businesses, cinema listings, vets or pharmacies with a late closing time.
Search and many banner ad campaigns for that matter are about the last step (hopefully) before purchase. In the old pre-internet world, they would be direct mail or the direct response adverts that used to appear in magazines or the special offers beloved of shopper marketing.
Distinctiveness appeared further up in the funnel building long term memory models through brand building. It was TV advertising, radio jingles, magazine print advertising and billboards that evoked emotion and still evoke nostalgia decades later.
Saatchi & Saatchi for Gallaher
I would argue that the issue is less about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, instead it’s about short-termist mindsets facilitated by numbers. The media industry is about to double down on this error, with initiatives like the European Programmatic TV initiative. And so I can empathise with Pip’s last point about becoming slaves to numbers. It’s ironic that the PowerPoint-friendly charts used by Google search advertising to explaining its value for marketers took off and drove marketing thinking.
Technology marketing itself came from broken origins and still is basically sales strategies by another name. A good deal of what data is created is based on what technology companies can see; rather than what marketers need to measure to get the balance between long term and short term marketing needs.
This MIGHT BE about to change if marketing expert Mark Ritson is to be believed. He posits that marketing technology start-up Evidenza.AI will provide business-to-business marketers with the kind of insight previously driven by market research, but much faster. From then on he sees it doing a better job at communications and media strategy. I am trying to keep an open mind on this at the moment.
TLDR: Advertising hasn’t become about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, but instead about short-term at the expense of long-term marketing effects; partly down to technologists having a poor understanding of marketing.
Technology outputs data which marketers paid an inordinate amount of attention to; reinforcing the short term bias. Machine learning techniques now becoming available might turn this around by providing better marketing insight.
Machine learning tends towards the mean
Pip’s presentation went on asserting that machine learning tends towards the mean. Generative AI synthesises content based on what has already been done, which why Pip assumes that everything tends towards the mean. But that depends on how one uses these tools that we’ve been given.
As a strategist, I have used generative AI to knock out too obvious propositions, so I give the creative teams something interesting to work with in the creation of distinctive assets.
Apparently creative teams have been taking a similar approach in terms of ideation.
One thing I’ve heard more than once recently is how creative teams are using LLMs for brainstorms. But not quite how you’d expect… Because these algorithms answer back with the most likely predicted outcomes based on available data, you get the mean. The average. In creative terms that means the well worn “cliches”. So when starting a brainstorm or ideation session, quizzing the LLMs leads to a list of suggestions of what creative teams are generally most likely to suggest. At which point the team knows what NOT to do. The already well trodden ground. The list of the obvious. That also somehow gives a wonderfully smug angle on the use of AI in the pursuit of original work.
TLDR: generative AI will tend towards the mean, BUT that can be used creatively.
Agencies and clients screwed advertising
Pip’s slides don’t necessarily dig into the reasons why this happened. But I can put together some hypotheses and provide evidence that may indicate their validity or lack of it.
Clientside factors
Shareholder value ethos – Shareholder value the way we understand it now can be traced back to the 1960s. While Milton Friedman popularised it in an essay A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, the idea had surfaced years earlier in an opinion editorial published in Fortune magazine. The so-called Friedman doctrine became a lode star for investors and boards including the likes of ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch at General Electric. While this thinking still dominates the tyranny of the quarterly numbers that CEOs of publicly traded companies operate under; it is not the only perspective in the c-suite.
The financialisation of businesses – related to the Friedman doctrine, businesses became increasingly financialised thinking about short term financial decisions. A classic example of this is how post-regulation, legacyairlines in the US have been managed. Another example is Brazil’s private equity firm 3G Capital who managed to destroy billions of dollars in shareholder value with marketing cuts. Financialisation has definitely had an impact, but it varies from company to company. We also see it showing up on the agency side, with the move to using more freelance staff and burning out those staff that they do have. They have a fig leaf of mental health care in their talent acquisition literature, but it’s largely BS.
What gets measured gets done – Google advertising’s success was as much down to it being easy to tell a story about the marketing spend conducted on the platform as it was about effectiveness. The dashboards lended themselves to being easily reproduced in PowerPoint and spoke in the universal c-suite language of line graphs and pie charts. This was really important for Google to survive and thrive in the post dot com bust and the 2008 recession.
Marketing literacy – since before I have gone to college the c-suite was largely marketing illiterate. It doesn’t matter if they are a self-starting boy or girl made good, or minted from an Ivy League business school with an MBA. I have worked with both and they had a similar marketing knowledge level, the only thing that varied was the level of self confidence despite this gap. Neither do the management consultants that they may employ. Which is the reason why the team at 3G Capital were surprised when they cut marketing costs and destroyed brand and shareholder value.
Procurement – practices to systemise purchasing and avoid issues like nepotism and corruption have introduced a muscular procurement function who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Margins across disciplines have been squeezed to breaking point. This has led to a decline in entertainment and side benefits, my LinkedIn feed had advertising folk explaining that the cost of attending the Cannes Festival of Advertising was likely paid through budget cuts in: training, subscriptions for tools and publications and even head count. We might not have had an end of culture, but this is no longer the industry portrayed in Mad Men.
Agencyside factors
Splitting creative and media – prior to the mid-1970s creative and media buying were two departments in the one advertising agency. That allowed the free flow of research between the departments and the creative use of context as well as content. It also meant that margins had to support two management teams. Secondly, the options to best defend margins was in the media-buying side of the house, depending on how integrated into the media technology stack the the media buying agency became.
Change in north star from FMCG to technology companies – the rise of the internet completely changed the nature of marketing. Prior to the internet becoming mainstream, having FMCG experience as a marketer helped your career. In the early 2000s, Google, Yahoo! and later Facebook became the brands marketers wanted on your CV. The difference was that FMCG brands had subscriptions to the likes of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Yet American and British academia saw that most thinking from even the most prestigious schools can be boiled down to being the considered common sense opinion of tenured professors like David A. Aaker and Philip Kotler. Kotler was reportedly not interested in engaging with marketing science as consumer behaviour was too complex and difficult to model.
Relative recent awareness of marketing science. For reasons that I don’t fully understand marketing science is both old and a new phenomenon. The late Andrew Ehrensberg originally founded his Centre for Research in Marketing in the early 1990s and had been turning out marketing science academic papers for decades before that. Ehrensberg eventually moved to His work on the myth of ‘heavy consumers‘ and polygamous brand buying (smaller brands suffering a double jeopardy of fewer people purchasing them, and those that did purchase them, did so less often) was done back in the 1950s for Attwood Consumer Panel (would eventually become part of TNS). Some agency strategists knew about Ehrenberg, such as Stephen King of JWT. Some of this thinking was likely hidden by the decline of market research projects in agencies and the split between media buying and creative. In addition, Andrew Ehrenberg theorised why marketing science had a low adoption outside his center’s FMCG clients, which also encapsulated the gatekeeper role American academics played in overall mainstream academic adoption:
I also realised slowly that our kind of theorising – which at base describes and explains already-established and generalised empirical discoveries and which thus post-dicts them – was anathema to many American academic marketing colleagues. They espoused much more ambitious and complex-looking econometric procedures which never worked in practice, with the recent citation for a Nobel typically not referring to any established empirical patterns
Channels – I don’t know who thought that a video view could be just a couple of seconds, but digital platforms benefited from it. Some of the wisdom from this years Cannes Festival of Creativity was that short adverts don’t work that well as they fail to build memory structures. Somehow agencies, platforms and brands suspended belief to develop marketing campaigns that only made sense in 1980s cyberpunk fiction like Max Headroom. Even at Cannes, platforms like Tiktok believed that they operate like, and a have similar impact to a TV advert…
Research – like most strategists I have found that I am often operating with less qualitative research than I would like. One of the biggest programmes I managed to work on the research for was the global launch of a now famous weight management product. Even then we didn’t do enough interviews around the world to understand cultural nuances in play. I remember reading about strategists in the 1970s spending a good deal of time listening to focus groups hosted around the country. There was a mid-week ritual of taking a drive or a train to a city or town outside London for this research. Social listening has been touted as a possible research for product tracking and can be a useful source of consumer soundbites sometimes.
Testing – hand-in-hand with a decline in research has been a decline in types of testing. Content still gets tested, but brands and agencies didn’t test channels to the same degree. Which is why we’ve had short form ad formats for years, yet the knowledge that they’re not as good at building memory structures doesn’t seem to be embedding into clients and agency teams.
OK, but that’s advertising, what about the end of culture?
Pip claims that advertising is just one part of our world that has been under attack (from technology). Alex Murrell’s essay The Age of Average was cited as the source of this insight. Murrell makes his case on the common looks in car designs driven by developments in aerodynammic design over time, architecture and cityscapes, coffee shop styles, logos, book covers, video game franchises, packaging design and product design.
Part of the reason for the architecture was Le Corbusier and his his function over form theory of design and architecture (modernism) captured in Towards a New Architecture.
Murrell harked back to a time of distinctive cities like Victorian London. However what Murrell’s explanation overlooked was that even back in Victorian times London was becoming ‘standardised’. Chimney pots, bricks, cast-iron beams, windows and even church stained glass windows came out of catalogues. The same designs repeat over-and-over-again. The church stained glass windows went around what was then the British empire. It is a similar situation today. Buildings are made of standardised materials and design tools as we understand more about engineering.
Technology over time allowed buildings to get taller and let in more light thanks to improvements in construction, lifts (elevators) and environmental control. Where things get interesting is when governments and societies make decisions on what they want to keep or rebuild. Shanghai has preserved only a little of the Bund and few of its hutongs. Hong Kong has so far managed to keep some examples of its composite buildings. However once you get to street level you see a distinct evolving local culture despite their apparently similar skylines.
This mix of standardised components bought from a supply chain, improved engineering and regulation has also driven similarities in other products, such as motor cars which Murrell cited as an example. But again those similarities are more about operating at a macro-viewpoint. On closer examination, diversity in car culture and driving experiences start to build clear lines of distinctiveness.
And the car industry for decades has indulged in badge engineering where one vehicle truly does look like another.
Wolesley Hornet
Austin Cooper Mini
Innocenti Mini
Riley Elf
The examples I used above were all based on the Austin Mini. Wolesley was a luxury brand owned by BMC at the time. Italian care manufacturer Innocenti licensed the Mini from Austin until the agreement was cancelled by British Leyland. Lastly, the Riley Elf was a slightly more expensive alternative to Wolesley, both were owned by BMC.
General Motors were the masters of badge engineering using ‘common platforms’ as far back at 1909.
As for the complaints about logo design, books and later the web allowed influential design motifs like Neville Brody’s work at The Face, Arena and The Guardian went around the world, collected in three volumes by Thames & Hudson. His cover designs were in Tower Records stores from New York to Tokyo. Design is an industry sensitive to global influences that you see spread around the world. A second reason for the simplification and flattening of logos is the world that we now live in. Before the web logos only existed in the physical world. Digital brings common requirements:
Works in a website template that can be used globally.
Works in email headers and footers.
Works in a favicon and in a mobile app button.
One interesting point came out when Murrell (and Bingemann) looked at media where there was a coalescence of homage images and content based around a success. But these in turn created their own genres like the sweary covers on self-help books. How is this marking a low point in culture was beyond me.
I thought of genres like the European ‘gallo’ films or the European takes on the western films of which spaghetti westerns are the most well known. A lot of the films were dreadful. In the case of European westerns many of them borrowed a characters name from more successful films. So you saw ‘apparent’ franchises around ‘Ringo’, ‘Django’ and ‘Sartana’.
(Film director Alex Cox published one of the best works on the Italian western film genre 10,000 ways to die. It’s based on his university thesis and a fascinating read, if you choose to jump down that rabbit hole.)
You had a similar experience in the Asian martial arts film industry with countless variations on the the star name Bruce Lee, as the industry coped with the loss of most famous star.
This doesn’t mark the end of culture, but the manufacture of culture. What’s good or great is then strained through the filter of time and changing social attitudes.
As for the cinematic superhero cul-de-sac, there are clear parallels with the end of the western and the New Hollywood movement. This time its distribution in the driving seat rather than a new generation of directors. Like the New Hollywood movement there will be both successes and car crashes along the way and I am largely excited by it.
Bingemann also cites Adam Mastroianni’s essay Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly. Mastroianni hits on what is called a long tail. In scale-free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, because some nodes are more connected than others – so Taylor Swift will sell more because of the size of fan base she has grown over time. They have been studied since at least 1946 and Benoit Mandelbrot who is better known for his work on fractals was one of the main researchers. Wired magazine touched on it in 1998 when it published The Encyclopaedia of the New Economy written by John Browning and Spencer Reiss and the influence showed up in Wired contributor Kevin Kelly’s work New Rules for the New Economy. So one can guess that the ideas were being thrown around then.
Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote about it in a magazine article for Wired in October 2004, and turned it into a book. Algorithms in online services create bubbles and rabbit holes in different areas and surface media winners like MrBeast. But again culture has thrived despite of popular culture out of sight of the general public for decades will continue to do so. Examples include Northern Soul, punk, the Chicago house music scene, UK garage, grime, drill and donk, the long tail does not mark an end of culture.
TL:DR: Could the current culture eco-system be better? Yes, absolutely. But it isn’t broken in the way and extent that Bingemann believes. We definitely aren’t at the end of culture and it doesn’t need to be ‘saved’ by generative AI.
So what can AI do?
Bingemann believed that generative AI offers society a way out of the end of culture. So presumably it offers a way to enhance and create culture. He believes that it creates, I would finesse this a bit to say that it emulates, synthesises and combines elements to meet consumer instructions – since it is the sum of its training data.
Ironically, Bingemann bases his thesis on how surreal and abstract art represented the ‘death of traditional art’ and reinvented the meaning of art and unleashed a large amount of creativity. Traditional art didn’t die per se, there are still several artists selling realistic pieces including painting and sculptures alongside the ‘new art’ movements.
Generative AI puts tools in the hands of creatives that previously would have meant a lot of work. In the same way that desktop publishing and Photoshop reduced the cut-and-past compositing on layers of glass panels which were then photographed and image retouching done by hand in the past.
In advertising Bingemann sees five opportunities enabled by generative AI:
Move to value-based pricing (presumably based on substantially reduced cost of production). It’s what Huge tried to do with their pivot and what thinkers like Michael Farmer have been recommended. We’ll see what happens when this aspiration meets client procurement teams. I hope Bingemann is right.
Design AI around people. So far the progress has been mixed around this. We have been some companies like Klarna using ‘good enough’ generative AI to automate jobs out of existence. Adobe have taken more of a creative enablement approach. Based on my experience working on ads in the past with collaged backdrops and photoshoots for global campaigns, this could save tens of hours or more in art working.
Embrace the newcomers. Just like social and digital before it, when we had new agencies like Crayon, AKQA and Poke; Bingemann thinks that generative AI is likely to bring new businesses to the advertising eco-system.
Spend 10x more effort developing the next generation. Given that the advertising industry manages to continually churn experienced people out of the industry and no one was found to have retired last year from the industry according to the IPA – this is going to be a tall order. It would make more sense if AI was used to make advertising more representative.
Unite. Clients, agencies and technology. It’s a nice aspiration, but when clients are looking for good enough and efficient content, agencies looking for a margin and trying to put effectiveness in there as well and technology companies trying hold back their natural instinct to suck all the value to themselves, it will be a hard feat to achieve.
Bingemann argues that this is necessary for advertising, but also for creativity and considers advertising’s role to break culture rather than just reflect it. Culture and creativity will exist without advertising. Even during the Soviet Union, there was still creativity, art and culture – both mainstream and underground.
A Final Thought To Leave You On
GZero Media quoting Douglas Rushkoff (of Media Virus fame) on what generative AI means for culture moving forward.
While its not the end of culture as we know it, Springboard.ai are putting out some interesting tools that I could see competing with the likes of Julian Cole, Mark Pollard and others who are filling the ‘how to strategy’ gap for brand planners.
The IT director is seeing a return to power and its thanks to the power of hackers and AI. The smartphone, the resurgence of Apple and SaaS saw IT decisions become more organic thanks to increased access to online services that provided better features than traditional enterprise software companies and the rise of knowledge working. IT teams found management of mobile devices onerous and faced hostile users.
Michiko Fukahori of the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology at ITU TSB – 8th Chief Technology Officers (CTO) Meeting
This meant that the IT director became less important in software marketing. A decade ago marketing had pivoted to a bottom up approach of ‘land and expand’. This drove the sales of Slack, Monday.com and MongoDB.
Two things impacted this bottom up approach to enterprise innovation:
Cybercrime: ransomware and supply chain attacks. Both are not new, ransomware can be traced back to 1989, with malware known as the AIDS trojan (this had much cultural resonance back then as a name). Supply chain attacks started happening in the 2010s with the Target data breach and by 2011, US politicians were considering it a security issue. Over COVID with the rise of remote working, the attacks increased. The risk put the IT director back in the firing line.
AI governance: generative AI systems learn from their training models and from user inputs, this led to a wide range of concerns from company intellectual property leaving via the AI system, or AI outputs based on intellectual property theft.
The most immediate impact of this is that the IT director is becoming a prized target on more technology marketers agendas again. This takes IT director focused marketing from back in the 1980s and the early 2000s with a top-down c-suite focus including the IT director. This implies that established brands like Microsoft and IBM will do better than buzzier startups. It also means I am less likely to see adverts for Monday.com in my YouTube feed over time.
This doesn’t mean that the IT director won’t be disrupted in other parts of his role as machine learning facilitates process automation in ways that are continuing to evolve.
Brands plan for a quiet Pride Month | News | Campaign Asia – The hesitation around Pride may also be related to executives’ increasing reluctance to speak out on social issues more broadly. Wolff pointed to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which found that 87% of executives think taking a public stance on a social issue is riskier than staying silent. “Essentially, nine out of every 10 executives believe that the return on investment for their careers is not worth the support during this turbulent time,” said (Kate) Wolff. “This is clearly problematic for both the community and the progress we have made in recent years.”
Chinese Firms Are Investing Heavily in Whisky Market | Yicai Global – Although international liquor giants have developed the local whisky consumption market for many years, the market penetration rate of overseas spirits in China, including whisky, is only about 3 percent. This means domestic whisky producers will need to develop new consumption scenarios, Yang said. Whisky consumption in China centers mainly around nightclubs, gift-giving and tasting events held by affluent consumers, Yang noted, but in these scenarios, imported whisky brands with a long history tend to be more popularly accepted,, so it will be difficult for domestic rivals to compete. According to the latest report from alcohol market analysts IWSR, China’s whisky market was worth CNY5.5 billion (USD758 million) last year, having grown more than fourfold over the past 10 years. It is expected to reach CNY50 billion (USD6.9 billion) in the next five to 10 years.
Yoox Net-a-Porter exits China to focus on more profitable markets – Multi-brand luxury clothing sales platform Yoox Net-a-Porter is closing its China operations, this against a backdrop of other brands also pulling out of Chinese e-commerce including Marc Jacobs fragrances. The corporate line from Richemont was “in the context of a global Yoox Net-a-Porter plan aimed at focusing investments and resources on its core and more profitable geographies”.
Ignite the Scent: The Effectiveness of Implied Explosion in Perfume Ads | the Journal of Advertising Research – Scent is an important product attribute and an integral component of the consumption experience as consumers often want to perceive a product’s smell to make a well-informed purchase decision. It is difficult, however, to communicate the properties of a scent without the physical presence of odorants. Through five experiments conducted in a perfume-advertising context, our research shows that implied explosion, whether visually (e.g., a spritz blast) or semantically created, can increase perceived scent intensity, subsequently enhancing perceived scent persistence. It also found a positive effect of perceived scent persistence on purchase intention. In conclusion, the research suggests that implied explosion can be a powerful tool for advertisers to enhance scent perception, consequently boosting purchase intention.
Mat Baxter’s Huge turnaround job | Contagious – interesting perspective on his time at Huge. What I can’t square it all with is what we know about marketing science and declining effectiveness across digital media
On my LinkedIn, I couldn’t escape from the Cannes festival of advertising. Partly because one of the projects I had been involved in was a shortlisted entry. One of the most prominent films was Dramamine’s ‘The Last Barf Bag: A Tribute to a Cultural Icon’. It was notable because of its humour, which was part of this years theme across categories.
震災復興から生まれた刺し子プロジェクトをブランドに！ 15人のお母さんの挑戦！ – CAMPFIRE (キャンプファイヤー) – ancient Japanese craft – KUON and Sashiko Gals are part of a new generation of designers keeping the traditional Japanese technique of sashiko alive. And together, they are bringing the decorative style of stitching to our favorite sneakers (including techy Salomons!). Sashiko is a type of simple running stitch used in Japan for over a thousand years to reinforce fabrics. It’s typically done with a thick white thread on indigo fabric and made into intricate patterns.
Nationalism in Online Games During War by Eren Bilen, Nino Doghonadze, Robizon Khubulashvili, David Smerdon :: SSRN – We investigate how international conflicts impact the behavior of hostile nationals in online games. Utilizing data from the largest online chess platform, where players can see their opponents’ country flags, we observed behavioral responses based on the opponents’ nationality. Specifically, there is a notable decrease in the share of games played against hostile nationals, indicating a reluctance to engage. Additionally, players show different strategic adjustments: they opt for safer opening moves and exhibit higher persistence in games, evidenced by longer game durations and fewer resignations. This study provides unique insights into the impact of geopolitical conflicts on strategic interactions in an online setting, offering contributions to further understanding human behavior during international conflicts.
The West Coast’s Fanciest Stolen Bikes Are Getting Trafficked by One Mastermind in Jalisco, Mexico | WIRED – “Not so long ago, bike theft was a crime of opportunity—a snatch-and-grab, or someone applying a screwdriver to a flimsy lock. Those quaint days are over. Thieves now are more talented and brazen and prolific. They wield portable angle grinders and high-powered cordless screwdrivers. They scope neighborhoods in trucks equipped with ladders, to pluck fine bikes from second-story balconies. They’ll use your Strava feed to shadow you and your nice bike back to your home.” – not terribly surprising, you’ve seen the professionalisation and industrialisation in theft across sectors from shoplifting, car theft and watch thefts so this is continuing the trend.
OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game – The Atlantic – The Scarlett Johansson debacle is a microcosm of AI’s raw deal: It’s happening, and you can’t stop it. This is important not from a technology point of view, but from the mindset of systemic sociopathy that now pervades Silicon Valley.
Apple Intelligence is Right On Time – Stratechery by Ben Thompson – Apple’s orientation towards prioritizing users over developers aligns nicely with its brand promise of privacy and security: Apple would prefer to deliver new features in an integrated fashion as a matter of course; making AI not just compelling but societally acceptable may require exactly that, which means that Apple is arriving on the AI scene just in time.
‘Rare, vintage, Y2K’: Online thrifters are flipping fast fashion. How long can it last? | Vogue Business – as secondhand shopping becomes increasingly commonplace, this latest outburst brings to light the subjectivity of resale. What determines an item’s worth, especially in an age of viral micro-trends and heavy nostalgia? Is it ethically moral to set an item that’s the product of fast fashion — long criticised for not paying workers fairly — at such a steep upcharge, and making profit from it? If someone is willing to pay, does any of it matter?
Welcome to my May 2024 newsletter, I hope that you’re looking forward to the spring bank holiday, unfortunately if like me you’re in the UK – then that was the last public holiday before the end of August. This newsletter which marks my 10th issue. I wasn’t certain that I would get to a tenth edition of this newsletter.
The number ten has a high amount of cultural symbolism from the biblical ten commandments to the ten celestial (or heavenly) stems during the Shang dynasty that marked the days of their week. There were corresponding earthy branches based on 12 day groupings. While the stems are no longer used in calendars they still appear in feng shui, Chinese astrology, mathematical proofs instead of the roman alphabet, student grading systems and multiple choice questionnaires.
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.
I wrote a comment that struck a bit of a nerve about being asked to do a project ‘for my portfolio’.
Omakase and luxury futures. In the face of all the changes facing the luxury sector, is the answer learning from the Japanese tradition of omakase?
April marked the 20th anniversary of Dove’s campaign for real beauty. I took a slower approach than the LinkedIn hot takes to reflect on its legacy.
How behavioural science can help optimise the response to a coffee shop problem.
I saw clear parallels between car touchscreens and the changes that digital music instruments went through in terms of design and adoption.
I have had Alex Kassian’s cover version of the Manuel Göttsching classic E2 – E4 on heavy rotation. It was released just in time for the Ibiza season and has Mad Professor remixes dubbing out the balearic vibes for all the deep house shamans.
Books that I have read.
After Watches and Wonders 2024, I finally managed to get the time toreadRolex Wristwatches: An Unauthorized History by James M Dowling. Dowling is the person that the pre-owned watch market goes to for authentication of really old or unusual Rolex models. His history of the company, while unauthorised, had the collaboration of early Rolex staffers. What comes out is an interesting tale of adaption. Rolex started off as a UK reseller. The company innovated due to client needs and somewhere along the way because the luxury watch manufacturing giant we know today. What becomes apparent that their success was partly down to timing, circumstance and a belief that you change nothing, unless you’re making it better. The last point is something that product managers the world over could learn from.
David McCloskey’s Damascus Station came highly recommended as leisure reading. My taste in espionage fiction is more towards Mick Herron and John Le Carre rather than the more action orientated. This book had enough intellect and imperfection to make me put up with the James Bond factor.
I am at the time of writing working my way through Nixonland by Rick Perlstein – which I started before the student sit-ins against the conflict in the Gaza strip happened. More on this book once I have finished it.
I like watches, the design and quality of engineering that they represent and even the sound of them ticking away, but I generally don’t enjoy Hodinkee interviews. However, when they interviewed sneaker legend Ronnie Fieg I watched it. Fieg’s story around his watches is amazing, with each watch marking a milestone.
TML Partners and Accenture Song have done an interesting report on ‘the future of intelligent marketing performance‘ – basically CRM and e-commerce based on a impressive roundtable of marketers. What immediately struck me was how many of the problems would haven written about in a similar way a decade ago. We are constantly in a state of digital transformation, that is starting to feel more like ‘digital treading water’ now. It is due to relatively short organisation memory and lack of a ‘learning element’ in organisations.
Back when I worked in Hong Kong, I got to work on Colgate alongside other agencies. The work that I was doing was in association with the dedicated agency Red Fuse which was the umbrella for all WPP work. I was eventually shut down from working on it by APACseniormanagement from my own agency at the time; due to internal agency politics that I long gave up trying to understand.
While I was working on the project, I got to meet Jason Oke who is now in charge of global client relationships at Dentsu in New York. Jason appears on the Google Firestarters podcast discussing how to get great advertising ideas made. Some of the thoughts are timeless and echo the advice of Ogilvy on Advertising. It’s well worth listening to.
BBH Singapore Cultural Bleats newsletter
Every agency has some sort of email newsletter, but one that stands head-and-shoulders above other agencies is BBH Singapore’s Cultural Bleats. I promise you once you get past the name, it’s brilliant. The premise of the newsletter is that they put together interesting cultural things to act as useful provocations. This is exactly the kind of thinking, curation and sharing that planning and strategy teams should be doing if they aren’t over-committed on Workfront. A prime example of the kind of thing that Culture Bleats might pick up on is how rich people no longer appear to eat due to Ozempic and meal replacements like Huel.
Dow and Procter & Gamble announced an agreement to make a proprietary way to recycle mixed plastics. I am all for improving recycling of plastics, but having a proprietary method adds complexity into a recycling system that’s already unfit for purpose. I hope that once commercialisation happens P&G will follow the example of Unilever who freely licensed its more efficient aerosol cans to other manufacturers who were interested in the technology.
The Norwegian government published the results of its Mannsutvalgets or Men’s Equality Commission. The report goes into policies across several areas here (in Norwegian). It has some interesting findings that echo think tank thinking about the intersection of social class and opportunity outcomes.
Some of the content around health is particularly interesting Dagens Medisin covered some of these findings, you can see a translation of their article here. However some of the findings in health did make me wonder. It notes that men in Norway live shorter lives than women and considers this to be an equality challenge. Most writing I have seen around the gender mortality gap see it as a biological given rather than a ‘gap’. It felt like greater research was needed to support this reframe in science rather than a well-meaning aspiration.
The report calls on the Research Council in Norway to take up the challenge of improving the knowledge base on many of the issues tackled in the report. The commission acknowledged data-related challenges and wanted revised statistics / indicators for gender equality so that they reflect the equality challenges of boys and men than are currently available.
If you have semiconductor clients and haven’t been on Malcolm Penn’s Future Horizons semiconductor industry awareness workshop, you’re in look he’s running it again on June 18th. I started my agency career working on technology hardware, gadgets and semiconductors – the Future Horizons course helped no end. I went on to work for numerous technology clients including AMD, ARM and Qualcomm.
Finally this essay on human creativity provided a lot of fuel for thought. It pulls together a multi-variant model for why human creativity is on the wane.
Factors included:
A childhood lack of free time for play and imagination. Instead children have much more regimented structural lifestyles today.
Massive access to more cultural artefacts than we could possibly consume from around the world at the touch of our fingers. The unknown space is now limited and so there is less opportunity to be creative within it.
Science and technology innovation is connecting less disparate areas of knowledge in order to make a ‘thing’.
Stimulation is focused rather than a wide range of stuff, rather than washing over us.
Things I have watched.
I have found myself watching less Netflix over time. Then Netflix moved from getting paid through the Apple app store to wanting a direct payment and bumped the price up. So a mix of inertia and not wanting to watch a compelling show or two has meant that I have consciously uncoupled from Netflix for the time being. I will probably go back when I have a good enough reason. In the meantime, I am buying the odd Blu-Ray or DVD here and there instead. It seems that I am not the only one who has taken this approach.
Amazon Prime Video seems to have a bipolar personality between Apple TV+ level tentpole content and a wide range of trashy films, some of which deserve the moniker ‘cult cinema’. Red Queenfits into the former category rather than the latter. It is based a series of books by Juan Gómez-Jurado. I have just started reading the book Red Queen, but the TV series is compelling. I didn’t realise that I had managed to watch four episodes in one sitting.
I went back to watch the Alain Delon Traitement de choc aka Shock Treatment. Delon plays Dr Devilers, the proprietor of a clinic on the Brittany coast. The clinic focuses on rejuvenating tired wealthy clients with spa treatments, special diets and infusions. The middle-aged patients at the clinic are true believers and as their treatment happens they become more child-like as the rejuvenation happens. The dark side of the clinic is that the serum comes at a price. A new patient finds out what actually happens and what plays out is a French New Wave allegory that touches on similar ethical health concerns, rather like the film adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener.
My internet went down and I managed to work my way through The Street Fighter Trilogy starring Sonny Chiba and made famous by the Tony Scott-directed True Romance. The Street Fighter series was a key influence with Quentin Tarantino, who wrote in their role as a plot device in True Romance and had Sonny Chiba appear in his Kill Bill series. All of the films feel a bit hackneyed in a post-John Wick world, but the first instalment is hard-bitten. Given the torrent of films coming out of Hong Kong at the time, The Street Fighter films stood apart with their unflinching violence displayed on screen. They became the first film in the US to receive an X certificate for violence alone.
Along with the Shaw Brothers boxsets and Bruce Lee’s filmography, the Street Fighter trilogy, is essential viewing for both Asian cinema buffs and martial artist movie fanatics.
How do the sequel films stack up? The second and third film in the series have a bit more playfulness and off-kilter aspects to them similar to films of a similar age made as spaghetti westerns. Sonny Chiba’s 1974 trilogy typify the martial arts craze that swept western cinema in the early 1970s onwards. In the UK, The Street Fighter was called Kung Fu Street Fighter. The likely reasons were two-fold, a similarly named Charles Bronson film and the glut of Hong Kong martial arts films being shown.
The Source is a French police procedural series that shows the cat and mouse game between a French Moroccan crime family and the police tasked to catch them. I am in a few episodes and really enjoying the show so far.
Useful tools.
Email charter
My friend Marshall mentioned this email charter on LinkedIn. Share it with anyone you work with to improve the quality and volume of team communications. Much of it is about level setting expectations. More about the email charter here.
Martin
Martin is an app that integrates Claude-3, Deepgram’s Novo speech to text service and GPT-4 Turbo to interact with Google personal productivity software including Google Calendar and Gmail. Conceptually it’s a better Siri-type digital assistant. I have heard good things about it, but don’t rely heavily on Google services myself, so your mileage may vary. More details here.
Magnet
Magnet is a handy piece of software that keeps your desktop organised. It was recommended to me by a friend who codes software for a living. It is particularly handy for keeping ‘presence’ based channels (like Slack, Teams, Mail.app together on one screen as a ‘war room” type view and having creation on another screen. It even works if you use your screen in a vertical orientation.
PamPam
A service that allows you to create and share maps. You can import maps in various formats or describe it in text for PamPam to render it. Strangely useful.
Scribd downloader
I am not sure how Scribd managed to digest so many resources and hide them behind a paywall. But this might be the antedote if you have something specific that you need.
The sales pitch.
I have had a great time working on a project with GREY & Tank Worldwide. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements for a bit of time that I have in early to mid-June; or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Welcome to my April 2024 newsletter which marks my 9th issue. We managed to make it through the winter and the clocks moved forward allowing for lighter evenings in the northern hemisphere.
The number nine is full of symbolism in a good way. In Chinese culture it sounds similar to long-lasting. It was strongly associated with the mystical and powerful nature of the Chinese dragon. From the number of dragon types and children to the number of scales on the dragon – which were multiples of 9. You have nine channels in traditional Chinese medicine. In Norse mythology there are nine worlds and Odin the all-father hangs on the tree of life for 9 days to gain knowledge of the runes.
Social media-related cognitive dissonance
A couple of conversations with people, spurred me to write this next piece.
I know it’s obvious and common sense, but it needs to be said occasionally. This time last year, I was on a Zurich work trip, providing support to a teammate running a workshop for a client who viewed the agency as the least worst option. We did good work and built temporary rapport, we got insight about the wider client-side politics at play. It was the classic example of the complexities involved in agency life and Lord knows we already have enough internal politics in our own shops to deal with.
The photo I shared on Instagram at the time gave no clue to what was happening, serving as a reminder to consider the curated nature of social feeds when scrolling through.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
What my answers to Campaign’s a-list questions would look like.
Boutique e-tailers and why the multi-brand luxury retail sector has gone from boom to bust.
Very Ralph and other things – Ralph Lauren’s world building abilities and how others from a cancer patient or overseas migrant workers have bent the world to their needs, or made a new one.
Books that I have read.
There are a few books that I revisit and the March 1974 JWT London planning guide is one of them. In many respects it feels fresh and more articulate than more modern tomes.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. But if like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit. It is important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines. Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views. Given the recent changes in Hong Kong where she lives, we may not see as frank a book of its quality come out of Hong Kong academia again on this subject matter.
Van Horne and Riley’s Left of Bang was recommended by a friend who recently left military service. It codified and gave me a lexicon for describing observations of focus group dynamics and observation-based shopper marketing. Probably of bigger value to people more interested in the analytical side of behavioural science is the bibliography – which is extensive.
Things I have been inspired by.
Sustaining a sustainable brand
Kantar do a good webinar series called On Brand with Kantar. I got to watch one of them: Why consumers ignore brands’ sustainability efforts. Consumers are reticent to trust in brand’s sustainable efforts. Kantar’s recommendation is to stay the course and continue to demonstrate real sustainability. Kantar’s work complemented System 1’s Greenprint US-orientated sustainable advertising report. There is a UK-specific version as well with half a dozen ideas for marketers published in partnership with ITV.
Media platform trends
GWI released their 2024 Global Media trends report. GWI takes a survey based approach to understand consumer media behaviour.
Broadcast TV still commands the greatest share of total TV time, despite Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and a plethora of other streaming platforms from Criterion to Disney+.
Survival/horror players are most excited about gaming luxury collabs, whether or not luxury brands are equally excited about survival or horror gamers is a bigger question.
Games console ownership has halved in the past ten years. This surprised me given how many of my friends have a Switch or PlayStation 5. It probably explains why Microsoft is focusing on being a publisher rather than on platforms as well.
They focused exclusivity on internet advertising, which gives you a good idea on where they want the balance of media spend to go, rather than necessarily the right tool for the right job. Yes digital is very important, BUT, we live in a world were we are wrapped by and consume layers of digital and analogue media.
We can see from GWI data that this viewpoint is likely to be still excessively myopic in terms of media due to offline – online media linkages. This is likely to be even more so in Japan that still has a more robust traditional media industry.
Internet advertising reached a new high, despite being a couple of years after the Olympic games were hosted in Tokyo. (Media spend when a country hosts the olympics tends to be skewed that year upwards).
One thing I would flag is that this report is based on surveying people across the Japanese advertising industry and built on their responses. So there maybe some biases built into that process. Overall it’s a fascinating read.
Social media engagement benchmarks
RivalIQ published their 2024 Social Media Industry Engagement bench report, download it to get the full details. Three things that struck me straight away:
Macro-level decline across platforms on engagement rate, which matches the trends that Manson and Whatley outlined ten years ago in their Facebook Zero paper for Ogilvy Social.
If brands didn’t need enough reason already to reduce exposure to Twitter, the falling engagement rates on the platform add additional reasons. Overall video seemed to underperform on engagement compared to photos.
One thing leaped out to me in the industry verticals data, if you are looking to reach student age adults, why not consider collaborating with higher education institution social media accounts rather than influencers?
Shocking health outcomes
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | A Barrier to Innovation & Growth | Future Work – sparked a lot of discussion with its implications on workplace practices, particularly within the advertising sector. What was less discussed but more important was the implications of ageism related biases on healthcare treatment.
Under-treatment or Over-treatment: Older adults may receive less aggressive treatment options or are overtreated because of age-related biases, rather than based on individual health needs and preferences.
Dismissal of Concerns: Healthcare providers might dismiss older patients’ health issues as inevitable parts of ageing, potentially overlooking treatable conditions.
Age-Based Prioritisation: In some cases, age influences the allocation of healthcare resources, with younger individuals being prioritised over older ones, assuming they have more “life worth living.”
The Hidden Cost of Ageism | Future Work
MSNBC News in the US did a report on what it called a ‘Post-Roe underground’ echoing the underground railroads to free slaves in the Southern states and the Vietnam war era draft dodgers who escaped north to Canada. This time it is to help women access abortion pills or procedures in other states or Mexico.
MSNBC
My friend Parrus hosted a talk on World Health Day, more on that here, the key takeaway for me was not trying to replicate developed market solutions in developing markets. Instead think about how it could be reinvented. Thinking that could be extended beyond health care to consumer goods, telecoms and technology sectors as well.
Luxury market shake-up
Business of Fashion covered a US court case where two women brought a lawsuit against Hermès, alleging purchase of its sought-after Birkin bag is dependent on purchase of other products and is an “illegal tying arrangement” that violated US antitrust law.
Hermès is more vulnerable than other brands because it owns its retail stores. The case, if successful could have implications far beyond the luxury bag-maker. For instance, how Ford selected prospective owners for its GT-40 sports cars, or most Ferrari limited edition for that matter.
While we’re on the subject of luxury, LVMH are rerunning their INSIDE LVMH certificate which is invaluable for anyone who might work on a luxury brand now or in the future. More here.
Morizo
Toyota are on a tear at the moment. They correctly guessed that electric cars were too expensive at the moment and focused hybrids as a stepping stone to electric and hydrogen fuel cell production. They have also successfully use the passion for driving in their products and their marketing. The Toyota GR Yaris was a result of Chairman Akio Toyoda instructing engineers to make something sporty enough to win the World Rally Championship and affordable.
He also outed himself as a speed demon who went under the nom de plume of Morizo.
Quebec
For many English speakers one of the most dissonant experiences is being confronted by a language you can’t speak. It’s part of the reason why ireland managed to become the European base of companies like Alphabet and and Intel. So I was very impressed by this campaign by the Quebec government to attract visitors and inbound investment.
Things I have watched.
I watched Mr Inbetween series one in March and managed to work through series two and three this month. I couldn’t recommend them highly enough as a series. They just keep building on each other.
Over Easter, I revisited some old VHS tapes my parents still had and rediscovered the Christopher Walken science fiction horror film “Communion.” It epitomizes its era, with alien abduction narratives emerging during the Cold War and permeating popular culture from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “The X-Files,” tapering off after 9/11. “Communion” demonstrates how effective editing and minimal special effects can heighten tension and emotion. Despite the film’s incredulous premise, Walken delivers a fantastic performance.
“Modesty Blaise” is from a time when comic book adaptations were uncommon in cinemas. This 1966 adaptation of the 1960s comic strip shares stylistic similarities with “Barbarella” and stars a young Terence Stamp. I received a tape copy from a friend who was attending art college at the time. The depiction of the computer as a character with emotional reactions in the film feels contemporary, echoing the rise of virtual assistants like Siri and ChatGPT, despite being portrayed as a mainframe. It is interesting to contrast it with Spike Jonze’s movie Her made 50 years later.
Useful tools.
A lot of the tools this month have been inspired by my trusty Mac slowly dying and needing to get my new machine up and running before my old machine gave out.
Time Machine
Apple’s native backup software, Time Machine, serves as a personal sysadmin for home users. Regular backups are essential. If a crucial document disappears while you’re working on it, Time Machine, coupled with a Time Machine-enabled hard drive, allows you to retrieve earlier versions of the document, potentially saving your sanity in critical moments.
Microsoft Office
I prefer the one-off payment model over Office 365 services. I use Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps instead of Outlook. While Office is available for just £100, which is reasonable considering its features, I still prefer Keynote over PowerPoint for creating presentations.
Superlist
Many of you may recall Wunderlist, which Microsoft acquired, but much of its original charm was lost in the transition to Microsoft To Do. Superlist is a reboot of Wunderlist by the original team, this time without Microsoft’s involvement. It’s available on iOS, macOS, and the web, catering to both individual and team task management needs.
https://youtu.be/2MzzbRhYlSA?si=04eBXH-MqKLpX2bN
ESET Home Security Essential
I used to rely on Kaspersky, and while I generally like their products, I have concerns about the potential influence of the Russian government. Therefore, I switched providers. ESET has a strong reputation and offers better Mac support than F-Secure. I can recommend their ESET HOME Security Essential package.
Amazon Basics laptop sleeve
I use a various bags depending on my destination and activities. Over the years, I’ve found that Amazon Basics brand laptop sleeves work well for my machines. They’re often among the cheapest options available and tend to outlast the computers they protect.
Laptop camera cover
The photo of Mark Zuckerberg’s laptop with tape covering the camera raised awareness about privacy. Webcam privacy covers, such as a sliver of plastic that slides across, are ideal as they allow your laptop to close fully. A pro tip is to use a red LED torch to clearly locate your camera when applying the stick-on cover.
Protective case and keyboard cover
I’m a big fan of clip-on polycarbonate shells to protect my laptop, as they provide a better surface for the stickers that personalize my machine over time. You don’t necessarily need a big-name case. The one I have came with a keyboard cover that works well. Anything that prevented Red Bull, coffee, or croissant flakes from getting under my keys is worth doing.
Screen protector film
The screen protector film provides great protection and is easy to apply and clean, even for beginners like me. I’ll update you if my opinion changes.
The sales pitch.
I have enjoyed working on projects for PRECISIONeffect and am now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my April 2024 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the bank holiday.
Don’t forget to like, comment, share and subscribe!
Let me know if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
